The Daily Texture of Progressive Education

Posted on September 21, 2015 by pollybrown2013

My Year to Think It Over took almost two years, actually. Every week or so I looked through my overflowing boxes of teaching souvenirs, revisited twenty-five years of life in an extraordinary learning community, and returned to these questions:

What did I learn, over time, about collaborating with young adolescents?
What learning adventures were particularly memorable, and what seems to have helped them work?
What am I still learning from the comments of past students, now adults?
What can I give back, out of the gift of all that time doing what I loved best?

When I started the blog, I had stopped teaching. Finally I could write more: savor wonderful moments, and reflect on them; give credit to people who deserved it; give voice to ideas and practices that had guided me; honor students whose descriptions of their experience had transformed mine.

I began writing posts one by one without any realistic schedule–I really thought a year would do it!–and without any overall plan. Very soon threads of continuity began to emerge, willy-nilly, and those stretch across the screen up at the top, below the butterfly.

If you click on those headings, you’ll find an introduction to each strand, with links to posts exploring that strand. You can also click on the topic headings below.

Power in Literacy I worked mostly with kids who were 11 or 12 years old. Often, in our mixed-age class, I spent two years with students. Across any time we had, students developed real and flexible fluency as readers and writers. With increasing confidence, they used reading and writing to explore the world and their own emerging identities. This heading title includes the word power, because that’s what I saw: I watched kids–in a world and at an age in which they can so easily feel powerless–taking up the effectively magical powers of literacy with contagious pleasure.

Being Human Within an interdisciplinary approach, we could draw on both science and social studies–and anything else–to explore our human evolution and the voyage leading to who we are. We could grapple with issues our species still struggles to work out, about how to live together. Eventually, students often dragging me along, we arrived at questions this basic: “Can we come to see each other, all over the world, as cousins? Over time, could that change the way we view the notion of race? Or the costs of war? Or the goals of economies and governments and communities?” If you give them the chance, young adolescents will tackle amazing things.

A Sense of Place What do we mean by “a sense of place” or “place-based education”? What can kids gain from exploring and coming to know the places they call home, and the places they share with others, including school? How far can a vivid sense of place reach, and what skills support that reaching? How can we respect and honor–and take responsibility for–the places that nourish us? These posts explore the teaching and learning of geography in its largest meanings.

Serious Playfulness Here I gathered posts about our explorations of mathematics, various branches of science, and some related matters. Obviously “serious playfulness” is my own wacky term, but it means what it says: we were serious in our goals, but the ways we pursued them were playful oftener than not. Playful didn’t mean games based on television quiz shows. It meant true inquiry; open-ended questions; working together, taking risks, and getting dirty; discovery and surprise.

Together This overview gathers posts that explore social and emotional learning: learning to care for each other, learning skills for working in a group, learning both kindness and resiliency. This strand also includes a series of posts about not using grades, because, in our experience, other kinds of assessment worked better to support authentic collaboration and community.

When I first began this blog, and composed the About page, I wrote out of that clarity that can come from life in the trenches. “The world is full and busy and loud with ideologies about what works in education. I want to revisit some real experiences that worked for real live students, and think about why and how.”

It would be thrilling if my school’s approaches became–soon!–the norm not only in published research results, but also in mainstream practice. None of us should hold our breath. In the uphill battles we still face, I’m going to keep these posts available as long as they seem to be useful. Rereading, I’m deeply grateful for both experiences: to have lived that richly challenging and rewarding teaching life, and to have taken the time to “think it over” afterwards. I’m grateful to everyone who felt that this was an important thing for me to do, and said, “You can do it.” (Alex Brown, you’re at the top of that list.)

Through this writing, things I’d learned from teaching reached forward into my present. Attending writing workshops at UMass Boston’s William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences, I felt again how overwhelming and exhilarating learning can be for the learner. Visiting my dad as he slipped further into dementia and spoke much less, I watched him learn to play a game oriented around spatial relationships. My math teacher self talked to my daughter self, helping her.

Am I done here? I’m not sure. I haven’t explored some topics, or told some stories that feel important. But at this point I am more involved in other adventures.

Meanwhile, however you’ve found this blog, I’m glad. I feel like the host of a fabulous potluck feast. In effect, I’ve spent years working with wonderful cooks. Enjoy! Be emboldened! You can reach me, if you want, at the most obvious email address for someone named Polly Brown. I don’t like to write it out, because robots search for such things–but you’re very unlikely to guess wrong. Or you can share a comment.

From my new adventures, I wish you well in whatever you may be exploring or daring to try, in your own learning life.

Accountability and Projects Time

Posted on October 23, 2014 by pollybrown2013

This post is the second in a series about Projects Time. Here’s a link to the first.

Unless people saw it in action, Projects Time could be hard to explain.

Colleagues at my own school understood, pretty much. They had given my students years of similar experience in younger classes, that helped them be ready to make longer-term choices, and choose on the basis of activity more than work-partner. They sent me students proficient in physical problem solving, making things work and getting a kick out of the effort. They sent me students with their natural curiosity and creativity still very much intact, full of the energy and momentum for inquiry. (Museum teachers–here at the Tsongas Center in Lowell–always marveled at the hands-on cleverness and persistence of our students.)

My colleagues also sent me students who knew a lot about working with each other. By the time they reached me, most students already knew how to exercise individual creativity in the service of a group effort—contributing ideas, but not needing to have them adopted by the group every time, and increasingly able to listen to each other.

In Projects Time, kids could show leadership in many ways. For one thing, they could help to support collaborative working skills for their classmates who needed more time to develop that particular skill set. (After all, nobody has an aptitude for everything.) Year after year, I could count on finding at least one child who would be especially helpful to students brand new to the school–who didn’t know everybody yet, of course, and typically had had fewer opportunities to practice both group skills and hands-on problem-solving.

I loved watching what could happen with minimal adult intervention. I could exercise my care mostly in the background, choosing the groups at the beginning of the year with particular mindfulness, providing appropriately-leveled background reading, giving the most inexperienced students the comfort of a group of two.

In these small interventions, I followed the example of the colleagues from whom I had learned how to teach. Projects Time used and stretched skills the teachers of younger classes had been building for years, in both kids and adults. So they understood it—teachers and students both.

To the left, a group of students have been exploring construction techniques, ways of supporting weight for example, by creating miniature buildings with natural materials from the slope near our deck.

Still, people who didn’t see it in action found Projects Time perplexing. Parents new to the school sometimes expressed bafflement, until they had an opportunity to join us–or until talkative kids came home bubbling over. If new administrators never came to observe, they might be reassured by the testimonials of other staff, or by reading my parent letters–or they might not.

Most challenging of all, though, for me and for them: teachers from other schools might never have observed projects learning, let alone our situation of groups working parallel on different activities. When I talked with them at conferences and workshops–or family reunions, train rides, all those informal workshops teachers create for themselves—they said, “Wait– if kids are working away from you, in a small group by themselves or with another adult, how can you be sure what they’re learning? If they’re not all following the same activities, how can you control what’s happening? What do you put on tests?”

In the early years, faced with questions like these, I had to work hard not to get defensive. (It didn’t help that I had no idea how to explain serious playfulness. I just knew it felt right, and worked.) Then, as I developed more and more confidence in my students, I struggled to suppress anger at what I saw as lack of respect for kids.

Eventually, though, I felt sympathetic. As years went by, I increasingly wanted to do one of two things.

I wanted to wave a magic wand and give these other teachers my opportunities for knowing students well. My class size, for starters—never more than 18, and more typically 15. Also, my self-contained class, together and with me for most of the day, except for specials and in some cases math. We shared a continuity, richness, and intimacy of group experience increasingly uncommon in the school lives of ten-to-twelve-year-olds. I could know both individuals and the chemistry of a group—know them really well—and that let me sense the ways I could trust them, and then build on that.
Sometimes I just wanted to loan out my inquiry-proficient students to these other teachers, as an example. You have to watch kids who are accustomed to belonging to themselves (like Mister Dog in the wonderful Little Golden Book by Margaret Wise Brown) in order to realize what they can do—what challenges you can give them, and what motivation they will bring to open-ended opportunities.

We did have in place a number of routines to keep me informed about how things were going, for groups as a whole, and for individual kids, and for the other adults in the situation.

Whenever possible, I built in freedom for myself to move from group to group, for at least some part of every time block, taking both notes and photographs as I went. (Otherwise, would I have this treasured shot of Lucy Candib and her group digging a hole under the deck, in which to bury various materials, which next year’s class would dig up again, in an ongoing year-after-year investigation called What Rots?)
I asked assistants and volunteers to fill out a quick question sheet at the end of each session, to help keep me informed. (They had time to do this while I led the final wrap-up.)
Students took notes and made sketches during Projects Time, and then wrote more afterward, summarizing what they’d learned, making additional drawings, listing questions. Sometimes I saw this writing over their shoulders, as groups shared at the beginning of the next session. Sometimes I collected students’ writing, to look for growth and for areas of confusion that needed support. When Sally Kent told me about lab notebooks with carbon sheets that could be torn out, we began using those, and kids could keep the original in their notebook for future reference, and give me the copies.

Still, our ways of observing and guiding students were premised on trust, meant to help us support students in their learning, not grade them on it. (Here’s more about that.)

Looking back, in the light of the current obsession with accountability, I realize that skeptical questioners were asking, ‟How do you keep the kids accountable?”

We worry about holding people accountable when we don’t think they’re likely to stick to their side of a bargain, or approach their part of a task conscientiously, or own some effort. We worry about accountability when we think people are likely to cheat—and people cheat when they don’t feel ownership of the results. Many things can lead to that lack of ownership—some of them outside a teacher’s power to intervene. People cheat when they’re depressed, when they’re overtired, when they lack confidence in what they can really do. There’s a lot to understand in that vicious circle, but demands for accountability don’t change it in any useful way. Or that’s how it looks to me.

Recently, I reread an essay in The Atlantic about why it’s so hard for American educators to understand the success of Finnish education. The article, by Anu Partanen, quotes Pasi Sahlberg, speaking to an audience at Teacher’s College in New York City in 2011. ‟Accountability,” he said, ‟is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

I keep mulling that over. I still have questions about Projects Time, and plenty of ideas for changes I’ll make and new things I’ll try if time travel ever becomes available. Still, Sahlberg’s statement helps me understand why Projects Time worked so well almost all the time; why my structures and routines for staying informed were secondary, in fact, to the most important part of the dynamic.

In Projects Time, students were genuinely responsible to each other. They were mutually responsible for the thoroughness and spirit, the seriousness playfulness, of their own groups’ inquiries, obviously. Beyond that, because they so often carried out different inquiries, in parallel, they were learning on each others’ behalf. They put creative thought and boundless energy into the ways they would demonstrate their methods and summarize their outcomes. For example, often they set up stations for other students to try out. To the right, a skit created by a group who’d been researching transportation access issues for people with physical disabilities.

And then there were the puppet shows about water power, or future careers in transportation planning, or…

So there it is: Irony Alert. The same five-ring circus, the same level of complication that stretched the adults’ ability to be everywhere at once, meant that we didn’t have to.

We didn’t have to hold them all accountable, minute to minute. We held them responsible, instead, and they rose to that, for themselves and for each other.

And, as Robert Frost would say, ‟that has made all the difference.”

For this post, I’ve scanned in some older photographs I found when I went hunting for artifacts from the early years of Projects Time. These kids are now very grown-up grown-ups–finishing med school, having babies, beginning careers in agricultural engineering, as many stories as people. I look at the photographs and grin, and feel–for the millionth time–how incredibly lucky I was to know them when they were prototypes of the energetic, engaged adults they’ve become. So, all of you, thank you again.

Projects Time

Posted on October 17, 2014 by pollybrown2013

As an incubator for serious playfulness, nothing worked better than Projects Time.

Teaching “big kids”–young adolescents waking up to the world in new ways–I wanted to give them the choices, hands-on experiences, and purposeful collaboration in small groups that would keep them engaged and alert and cooking. Projects Time evolved as a way to frame all that.

It also grew out of adult behavior that can’t ever be taken for granted:

Adults made choices about the guidance they offered based on what worked for each particular group of kids, in their individual and group uniqueness–by listening carefully, with a sense of learning targets in our minds, but with the reality of the present always uppermost.
Adults dove into hands-on, messy, authentic experience (almost always potentially risky to our dignity.)
Adults worked together, as teachers and assistants and committed volunteers, and got a visible kick out of our own collaboration.

Put all together, Projects Time was a bit of a miracle–a twice-weekly, home-grown miracle.

As we got better and better at running this, we could see the effectiveness of having different small groups working simultaneously on different projects, and then sharing with each other. For example, in the photograph above, a group who’d been investigating sound set up instructions for other students in an end-of-sequence “energy fair”, and two students are trying out the set-up.

Below, in a sharing session at the end of one day’s Projects Time, a group uses their own bodies to demonstrate the arrangement of the states in New England.

A little more about logistics

Students and adults came together for Projects Time in two fairly long time blocks—a total of almost three hours every week. Tamara, the teacher who moonlighted as the school’s scheduling wizard, knew that I would accept any other strangeness in my class schedule, in order to preserve those long Tuesday and Thursday afternoon time blocks.

A series of inspired part-time assistants joined us for Projects Time, even when we had no other aide time assigned for the class. Each year’s volunteer parent coordinator helped me recruit and schedule parents, often well in advance.

Within the nourishing nest of those pre-arranged rich conditions, the students and I could choose our challenges. To begin each sequence, we brainstormed a list of ideas for projects which would make use of various materials and opportunities in and outside of the classroom–and would meet various learning goals.

Some activities, typically, related to our current whole class theme. In the fall and spring, we planned for as many activities as possible to happen outdoors. (For example, in the photograph below, a group discusses a redesign of a water feature in the garden below our deck, taking into account the way water travels downhill.)

A particular week’s list often repeated some of the topics or activities from the previous sequence, because kids wanted to try things they’d seen other students do. “That thing building electric circuits looked like fun–can that be on the list again?”

After we had settled on a menu of possible projects for the next round, each student wrote three or four choices on a sticky note, ranked them, and gave the note to me. (Thinking all this over, it always seems important to me that students were choosing activities, not work partners.) Choosing is hard for some kids, and I let them write down “anything” if they really meant it, but encouraged them to think it through, and predict how different activities would work for them.

Later, I arranged and rearranged the sticky notes to form groups. Usually I started by seeing what would happen if I gave all the students their first choices–and sometimes the groups made themselves immediately, just as easy as that. More often, I needed to give some students their second choices, in order to provide for variety in work-partners and types of activity, both of which felt important to all of us, kids included.

Students’ choices committed them to at least the two blocks of a single week, and sometimes a third block, or even a fourth, in response to popular demand. Longer sequences allowed more time for exploration and follow-through, and students found that rewarding.

With very few exceptions, everyone who took part in Projects Time for any length of time felt that it worked, in a unique and exhilarating way.

Students experimented and observed and simulated and dramatized, and also had a great time. They took concepts they’d learned from reading and applied them. In the follow-up writing, they speculated about what had happened and why, and what else they might want to try.

There were social benefits, also. Working together in small groups, students got to know each other better. They became deeply involved in inspired arguments. For example, in the photograph below, students conducting a simulation of the effects of transportation argue about a proposed trade.

I’m going to use the next few posts to explore some particularly memorable Projects Time sequences, including the activities Kate Keller designed for our Transportation Choices unit, and some work on A Field Guide to Touchstone.

I also want to share some questions I’m still mulling over. One involves the perennial conflict between coverage of material and effectiveness of student learning experience. Obviously, the Projects Time model isn’t necessarily the best model for covering every detail of content on a long list of state or federal or Common Core standards.

Another persistent and possibly related question involves accountability, a big buzzword in American educational policy right now. Again, it’s obvious that Projects Time wasn’t designed to maximize accountability.

I’ll come back to all that. For now, having given you some snapshots of individual projects, I want to take you on a fantasy helicopter ride, to get a sense of how everything was happening at once.

From our point of view, hovering above the school grounds, we can see a group with a dissecting microscope, at a picnic table behind the main building. (Hooray for extension cords.) The students not currently using the microscope are looking for things in a nearby garden, including creepy crawlers from the compost, to examine when they get a turn. One student sits at the picnic table making a detailed sketch of a flower she found, using a jeweler’s loupe to get a good view of the structure.

Out in front of the school, some kids are measuring the temperatures on top of stones in the wall along the road, comparing with the temperatures they found in the wall spaces underneath those same stones, thinking about the idea of very micro microclimates.

Another group, working under the portico to take advantage of a long bench, uses a stopwatch to time their latest marble chute run. They’re trying to maximize the length of the run by maximizing friction, without letting the marble come to a full stop.

Meanwhile, another group is up on the deck outside our classroom, working on a puppet show about water power, in which a dragonfly puppet has become an authority on the differences between overshot and undershot water wheels, and models have been made to demonstrate them.

Somewhere down there, a lucky teacher moves from group to group, carrying her clipboard, with its note-taking sheets about individual students, and its list of stuff to track down for next time. She also carries the camera she wishes she’d used even more.

Although, really, what it needed was video, to capture kids saying, “What if…?” and “Let’s try it again…” and “That is wicked cool…”

In Praise of Spare Grown-ups

Posted on August 19, 2014 by pollybrown2013

Decades ago, I was the one and only parent driver for a field trip from central Massachusetts to the Museum of Fine Arts in New York City. The class consisted of four girls–Touchstone Community School’s first graduating class. My daughter Sarah was one of those pioneers. We rode the subway, explored the Temple of Dendur, ate Korean food, and had a blast.

A few years later, inspired by that experience and others, I began work toward a masters in Middle School Education–and almost immediately found myself teaching at Touchstone. Full of wild ideas, brave intentions, and ardent admiration for the teachers I’d been observing and helping, I entered my mid-adulthood virgin experience as a classroom teacher, feeling exhilarated, terrified–and immensely grateful to have Kate Keller as co-conspirator in those first years.

Not all our ideas and intentions could bear fruit. But here’s one that stuck: we knew from the beginning that we wanted to welcome parent volunteers and other visitors into our classroom, as often and as thoroughly as possible.

Good things happen when kids get to know their classmates’ parents and grandparents as fellow learners. I figured that the adults should know their children’s class volunteers helping Sam sew mates that same way. But I knew how tricky this could be in a school drawing its population from a whole region, not just a neighborhood. We needed to build the neighborhood feeling at school, every chance we could get. To the left, Amy Bouman works with one of her daughter’s classmates, Sam Winalski, to create special clothing for that year’s Alhambra Banquet.

Below, a visiting grandmother helps students observe and classify macroinvertebrates in compost from the school’s compost bins.

Here, kids clown around with some of the parents who joined a day-long adventure learning about transportation. We aimed to use as many types of public transportation as possible–commuter rail, subway, harbor ferry, and bus–and got to observe others, such as taxis. We talked with people who challenged us to think about transportation’s effect on the environment. Our T-shirts helped spread our message (“learning to make good transportation choices”), and made it easier to keep track of each other in the unfamiliar density of Boston.

In another fall when we used transportation as a way to focus on economics, the environment, and individual choices, Beckley Gaudette volunteered to set up a Sunday afternoon family bike ride, on a section of the Blackstone River Bikeway. Here, a mother, her student in the class, and a younger sister look at the remnants of the Blackstone Canal. This is a great example of the way parents can help to deepen and enrich place-based education, by contributing their knowledge of local resources, and by contributing their own zest for knowing more about the place where they live.

On field trips, but also in the ordinary work of the classroom, parents and grandparents and other community adults shared the students’ learning, modeling enthusiasm and curiosity and flexible ways to organize information and approach problems. Beyond that, visiting and volunteer adults often took on significant teaching roles that were especially valuable in a self-contained class.

In self-contained classrooms, one or two teachers share all the core curriculum: reading, writing, math, history, geography, science–everything but arts and physical education and foreign languages. This has many benefits. Teachers serve individuals and the whole group more effectively when they know students in all their strengths and challenges, subject to subject. Rich interdisciplinary experiences are easier to schedule and develop, and ring truer to life itself, which doesn’t have subject boundaries.

Still, young adolescents need meaningful contact with lots of other adults besides those one or two steady teachers. They need lots of chances to be seen and known by different kinds of people, and lots of ways to imagine themselves as grown-ups. In the photographs above and to the left, Phil Iantosca, the father of a student in another class, explains scuba gear and the nitty gritty of underwater engineering, to students who’ve been learning about the role of scuba in underwater archaeology.

Across cultures and across the centuries, people have known that young adolescents are most engaged when working with their hands, or even better their whole bodies. If there’s a small group pursuing a real challenge, so much the better. For the kinds of learning-through-engagement that evolved in my classroom, parent volunteers were worth their weight in gold. Below, Rick Mlcak, Violet’s dad, guides kids in acting out the different states of matter, by way of thinking about water as a liquid, solid, or gas.Readers who are teachers themselves, and friends who know that I have to work extra hard to manage and organize inspiration, will suspect that I could never organize all these spare grown-up contributions on my own. It’s true! Every year I recruited a parent volunteer coordinator, beginning with Cathy Rao, very long ago, who helped me figure out the coordinator role. Some parents, like Cathy, were able to serve as coordinator and also come into the classroom as steady volunteers themselves. Some served as coordinators through multiple years with the same child in the class, and some kept going, or came back, with younger children. (If I ever get to award sainthood, there are several candidates, including Terry Lunt, who probably logged more hours in my room than any other parent over the years.)

Below, Lisa Hennin, coordinator and volunteer, works with her own son, Seth, and his small group, to create food for the Alhambra Banquet. I’ve lost count of how many parent volunteers, over the years, followed my own path and wound up becoming teachers themselves.

Jacqui Goodman–teacher-in-charge riding shotgun with me on the way to New York City–gave me a priceless gift when she invited me into the class to teach, not just watch or drive. Grateful to her, and to others of my own kids’ teachers, when I became a teacher I wanted to share the wealth. I wanted as many adults as possible to be exposed to this other version of school, and help to build it.

In fact, of course, I wanted the revolution, one classroom at a time. Still do.

I have to say we’re not quite there. Every time we empower the defensiveness of legislators and administrators over the direct experience and earned wisdom of teachers–every time we do anything that creates us-them tension between parents and teachers–every time we make the stakes of one-shot tests more lethal to kids’ long-term thriving–we make it more dangerous, and less likely, for teachers to give parents significant roles in the classroom.

That’s assuming any parents are available. The increasingly crazy demands on workers everywhere, and at every level, leave fewer and fewer parents time to be a part of their child’s school experience. Even several decades ago, I knew that some parents could only show up once for a special visit and demonstration, and that I should welcome and honor them. Some needed to give their support behind the scenes, making phone calls or cooking fabulous food. I was grateful, beyond words, to all of them.

A few words of advice to teachers: Make it real. Get to know what you can expect from individual parents or grandparents. Trust them, as soon and as often as you can, with real responsibility for sharing meaningful content. Find ways to help volunteer adults celebrate and support variation among students’ learning styles and approaches. Welcome the stories volunteers can tell you about learning moments or interactions you missed. Empower parents to say, “Please stop elbowing [or whatever] until I can check with the teacher what’s okay.” (Or, even better, to ask a group, “What are your rules about that?”) Thank and praise parents, grandparents, and any other helpful people who wander in. Help students understand how unfair it is to take advantage of a grown-up who has come out of the goodness of his or her heart, in order to offer more freedom, more choice, more interesting possibilities to the whole class. It really helps for students to grasp what’s happening.

Speaking of other adults wandering in: here’s another photo of Marjorie Weed, retired high school art teacher and astonishingly persistent and brilliant volunteer arts teacher at Touchstone, after a session making gelatin prints with my class.

Some advice to parents: know that you’re in a privileged position. Be cautious about judging unfamiliar children or a teacher having a rough day. Ask questions when you’re confused. Expect to do a lot of learning, no matter how much you may have available to teach. Bottom line: the world is a fascinating place, and nothing is more fun than sharing that with kids. If you have the opportunity, rejoice and enjoy!

Circles come round. Years later, my daughter, pioneer Touchstone graduate, gladdens my heart when she makes a special effort to get into her children’s classrooms, or gives huge priority to conversations with their teachers. Cheering her on, I feel hope that our education systems, no matter what philosophy they follow, will find more and more ways to share the joy of children’s learning with other adults in their lives–and reap the benefits.

Mimi Reports

Posted on August 7, 2014 by pollybrown2013

One of my students from way back, Liz Chesebrough, makes quilts. Recently she posted a photograph on Facebook, showing a possible layout for a striking quilt-in-process. The bright colors and hypnotic geometry (inspired by Aztec designs) worked like the magical object in a time travel novel. They took me back–whoosh!–to one of Liz’s Mimi reports, for which she studied Maya hieroglyphs, and made brilliant drawings of some of the glyphs.

One way or another, I think regularly about specific reports, and about the ways I saw students grow–by leaps and bounds!–as they explored and wrote and revised and illustrated and summarized.

We called them Mimi reports because they sprouted from the inspiration of The Voyage of the Mimi and The Second Voyage of the Mimi.

Mimi was a boat, a two-masted 73 foot sailing vessel. The Wikipedia entry now includes a full history of Mimi herself, full of twists and turns, some lucky breaks, and a sad ending.

The video stories–fictional, but realistic–followed the expeditions of scientists who chartered Mimi to conduct research. In the first voyage, an oceanographer and a marine biologist travel on Mimi to follow and study humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine.

Mimi second voyage book cover

In the second voyage, Captain Granville has come to the Yucatan Peninsula, where archaeologists charter Mimi in order to conduct underwater research into offshore trading routes of the ancient Maya.

In both voyages, the captain’s grandson and other young story characters served as our surrogates, and we learned along with them. The young actors also hosted brief documentaries following each story episode, focused on real-life scientists. Learning games for the computer, along with a computer laboratory with probes for charting real-time data, expanded the experience even further.

Make a web. Put one of the Voyage stories in the middle, with all its fields of science and kinds of scientists radiating out from that. In a third ring you could put the topics of the Mimi reports, jumping out to related or tangent topics–from the ecology of a square yard of pond frontage, or the behavior of river otters, to the recent findings of archaeological investigations at Stonehenge, or the history of humans’ use of fire.

You can read about the way we began our report-writing process, using something called a Skimathon, here and here. You can also read about our version of the writing, revising and sharing of long individual reports, and the role of that process in our class life, here.

Recently I found some photographs, lucky souvenirs from just one typical, wonderful year, and that’s what I want to share in this post. Most were taken at Mimi Night, the special evening celebration for which we invited families and close friends.

For this round, in the spring of 2010, we had been following the first Voyage, focused on the bodies and behaviors of humpback whales. Following that inspiration, all the students had chosen animals to study, and visited nearby locations where they could observe first-hand the behaviors about which they were reading. Then they’d written about it all in reports organized and bound as books.

Each student’s Mimi Night display consisted of two copies of the bound report, a 3D object made to illustrate some behavior they’d observed, and a poster using material from the report to provide a quick overview.

For their posters, students selected illustrations from those they’d created for their reports. All the illustrations and 3D objects were created by the students themselves. Kids could use the illustrations in published books for inspiration. They could use photographs they or their parents had taken–but not photographs from magazines or online sources. Of course, some found this more difficult than others, and received extra support from teachers and classmates.

Students explored a variety of illustration techniques including drawing, watercolor, cut-paper collage, and photographs. The classroom collection of previous years’ reports gave kids ideas and helped them set realistic goals. We weren’t looking for what adult artists could do–we were looking for the real and true and informative illustrations they could make, as kid artists who had spent a lot of time observing and studying their subject animals.

Some students made dioramas, small 3D scenes showing animals engaged in typical behaviors, like the one below showing river otters.

Although Caroline is standing next to her display in the photo above, at Mimi Night the displays were meant to stand on their own, without live explanations–so that students could move around the room along with our visitors. Students, friends, and old-enough siblings, all used a class list page to take notes, writing down something learned from each report.

Year after year, parents and grandparents won my everlasting gratitude by responding to the achievements and contributions of the whole class–not just their own kids. This helped students feel that they were the local experts on these animal species, and that their reports had real purpose.

Of course, some adult schmoozing happened, too. To the right, that year’s Head of School chats with two parents. In the background, another parent talks with one of her son’s classmates.

Some years–including this one–small groups of students thought together about types of behavior particularly important or interesting for the species they studied, and made group posters. Here, for example, a group focused on behaviors making use of various senses, such as sight or taste.

Another group thought about the tremendous variation in parenting behaviors (or their absence) among the various vertebrate classes.

Each group’s individual displays were clustered together, and the group poster was hung above them.

In the other end of the gym, we set up some samples of our computer data-gathering activities

A few years before, a parent had given us a set of bones found on the school property, which she had boiled and scrubbed to make them safe as a sort of skeleton puzzle. That led to animated arguments about form, function, and just what critter the bones had once supported.

The day after Mimi Night we opened up the Mimi Museum. Other classes came to visit, and parents from other classes were welcome to stroll through.

Above, Anwyn serves as her group’s tour guide for visitors from the Older Student Program. She’s describing Caroline’s report, pointing to the illustration on the cover of the report itself.

Below, Nate has worked his way across his group’s cluster, and he’s about to tell about his own display.

I love this photograph of Max holding up one of the copies of his report, with one of his illustrations of snake locomotion also visible, on the poster.

Here’s a paragraph grabbed from something I wrote a while ago:

The magic consists of kids paying attention to both the content–the wonder of the world–and to each other. In portfolio conferences, when a student and her parents and I are all looking at a year’s work together, students often hold up their Mimi reports. Their parents have seen the reports already, of course; kids know that. Still they want to focus our attention on that work again. I’m always delighted as kids point to things they’ve gotten help with from others: “Emily (the arts teacher) helped me make the drum again a different way,” or “When we made the timeline with Kate, I realized how long ago this was,” or “Joe (a partner) helped me figure out a way to draw a harbor seal.” The physical copy of the report has become, itself, an artifact: a vessel that holds the memory of many shared meanings.

Aside from the memories of specific kids and their work, the photos trigger several things for me.

For one thing, I’m grateful for all the ways my own intellectual life has been nourished by the learning I did in order to keep up with my students, and the things they themselves taught me.

Meanwhile, though, they were all giving me an immersion learning experience about what can happen in a classroom when the learning is purposeful and real and unbound from testing or grading. In fact, my convictions about what can happen in a classroom were largely shaped by what happened when we were voyaging on the Mimi, and then taking our own individual voyages into the world and each others’ learning, through the Mimi reports.

What Students Need

Posted on February 19, 2014 by pollybrown2013

I’ve written before about Marjorie Weed, at the end of the post “In Praise of Colleagues.” But now I’ve got a photograph.

When Mrs. Weed retired from teaching art to high school students, one of her alums–having become a Touchstone parent–recruited her to come to Touchstone as a volunteer. Marjorie agreed to try teaching younger kids, on the condition that the classroom teachers would stay with their classes during their art sessions. She didn’t want to have to fuss over behavior.

Oh happy condition! My students didn’t need much fuss at all, so I almost always did the project of the day along with them.

I learned a lot about art and the making of art, much more than I can summarize here.

I also learned about my students, watching them explore Mrs. Weed’s suggestions. Here’s a favorite memory: Harry, painting, saying things like, “Oh! I didn’t know that would happen! That’s so cool! What if I try… This is terrific…” With a burbling stream of running commentary, he cheered himself on. In years to come, faced with one of those kids who kept running down his own efforts, I would attempt little imitations of Harry, making it clear that Harry was way cool, a model anyone could be proud to imitate. (You can definitely try this at home.)

Meanwhile, I also learned about myself. Visually I’m too conscious; the best assignments for me thwarted that, pulled the rug out from under me, made accurate representations impossible. When Mrs. Weed said, “Watch for happy accidents!” she was talking to me along with the kids.

I can also get carried away with the fun of making something, and not know when to stop. In a terrible memory from second grade, we were finger painting, and I just kept adding color, more and more glorious color. It all turned to mud, of course, and the teacher threw out my paper. By contrast, Mrs. Weed would sidle up to me and say, “Don’t do another thing! You’re done!”

I thought she was a genius, and tended to obey. This was interesting for my students to observe.

So I’m thrilled to have unearthed a photo of Mrs. Weed. In this view, we’ve been wrapping plaster-soaked mesh around each others’ hands, and Mrs. Weed is getting ready to help remove one of the finished casts. (Maybe somebody else can remember what we did next, inspired by the photo.)

Marjorie Weed no longer teaches nine or ten classes a week, but she still shows up at school for guest appearances. Watching her in the last few years, I’ve tried to put into words, just for myself, her sense of what students need–but it isn’t about words. Her teaching behavior appears to be shaped by her sense that students need, more than anything verbal–and as quickly as possible–direct physical interaction with the materials of art: the heat of curing plaster, the textures of paper and paint and clay, the various ways of hitching two objects together.

In the private videos of my memory, instead of telling kids how to create a targeted product, Marjorie tended to set them loose in the exploration of a process. “Get messy!” she’d say. “Pay attention!”

But she didn’t mean “Pay attention to me!” She meant, “Pay attention to the stuff in your hands, and what it’s doing.”

Thinking about Marjorie Weed’s sense of what kids need, I went back into my notebooks, to find something I wrote before the start of school, in one of my earliest years of teaching. I wrote the original by hand, in a hotel room in Montreal, on a late summer trip with my family. Later, I kept photocopying the handwritten version to put it into each new year’s notebook. Here I’ve chosen to type it in italics, to show that I’m quoting that long ago person who was me.

Like any student work sample, this is a moment in time, in which I tried to distill what I was learning–from incredible colleagues, and from the incredible luck of working in a place where teachers could really learn from observing the kids themselves. Just a moment–but one of those moments to which I found it useful to return, again and again.

Thinking about the first weeks: What do the kids need–and what do I need–from those first days?

1. They need a sense of WHO the class is, and who in the class will be friends for them, and how urgently they’ll need particular friends–whether the class as a whole will feel friendly, whether they’ll feel marginal or included, what patterns and formats there will be for interaction with each other and me. They need a sense, each one, that I’m going to like and appreciate and notice and understand them.

2. They need a sense of WHERE–a sense of the room and what’s in it and what’s possible there, given the room as a micro-version of the world. How does the room interpret the world for them? They need to begin to know where to find things, begin to make their desks their own. [Later that became crates, when desks were replaced with tables.] They need to figure out traffic patterns, to carry an image of the room in their minds, if that matters to them.

3. They need a sense of WHEN things will happen, especially because the schedule is different this year. [One way or another, it was different almost every year.] In the situations in which the sequence of their activities isn’t under their control, they need some sense of my reasoning and my own constraints. Where they do have control, they need to know the parameters and alternatives, and begin to sense their own priorities. They need to begin to feel the rhythm of the day so they can be in synch with it, and many of them need this in a visceral, unconscious, nonverbal way.

4. At some point in each day, each of them needs:

the experience of contributing to the group, helping the group happen and being recognized for that;
an “aha!” experience, an experience of discovery, an encounter with something new;
an experience of personal “academic” competence and control.

They need a sense of WHAT we’re going to do together and HOW they’re going to grow, a sense of our collective purposes.

Rereading that from my current distance, I’m struck by the intensity of the responsibility I perceived and accepted–and by the ways I already understood that the classroom community would share that responsibility, and grow in the process.

I’m also struck by the ways I had come to trust the nonverbal arrangements of the room and the schedule, the where and when, to support us.

From De Feustal I had learned to support kids through structure in space, the arrangement of the room. I tried to provide areas with more and less freedom of movement, more and less visibility to the rest of the room.

From Ginny Scherer I had learned to support kids through structure in time, to plan the schedule as a rhythm, with changes that would support kids’ energy–times to take the world in, times to be expressive; times to move, times to be still.

I had watched De and Ginny use these nonverbal cues brilliantly, minimizing the need to intervene verbally in working with their five to seven-year-olds. Day by day and year by year, I was figuring out how to apply that with my ten and eleven and twelve-year-olds.

So, this post could also be titled In Praise of Colleagues: the Sequel. It could have a very long title: what a verbal person, a talker and writer, learned about how to use nonverbal cues more effectively while teaching, and how grateful she was for her teachers. (And how she could teach for another 25 years and still be learning those lessons.)

Five More Thoughts About Grading

Posted on January 11, 2014 by pollybrown2013

The story so far: If the product of a learning experience takes the form of a grade, other possible products and outcomes have less reality and less power for the learner.

Voices speaking out against grades want to shift the focus of learners and teachers, to give priority to those other products and outcomes. I’m going to focus on just a few.

# 1 Teacher support, and student goal-setting, guided by targeted, individualized, meaningful assessments

Focused effort matters, and thoughtful assessment can support that. Very briefly, here are some of the kinds of feedback individual kids could come to expect in my classroom, in place of grades:

one-on-one working conferences to look at pieces of writing, reading comprehension progress, math quiz outcomes, etc.;
group mini-lessons based on common confusions or not-quite-there efforts or emerging possibilities or spontaneous break-throughs, acknowledging and moving forward from all those;
quick skills checks in the form of miniboard warm-ups;
written responses to specific assignments;
long narrative progress reports twice a year;
conversations in preparation for portfolio sharing, and the portfolio conferences themselves;
feedback from classmates, students in the wider school community, parents, and other adult audiences.

The previous post has examples of some of these. The feedback for students in younger classes varied from this in developmentally appropriate ways, but always with the same goals: not judgment, but celebration and support.

Each of these activities provided an opportunity for student and teacher to observe patterns in comprehension and skill, or difficulty, and to set goals both short-term and long-term. At the same time, each of these assessment activities was an opportunity to revisit, share, and reconsider the important questions inherent in our content.

#2 Learners who belong to themselves

I remember a conversation with the high-school-aged daughter of a friend. She told me about her classes for that year by telling me her grades. She couldn’t tell me what was interesting to her; couldn’t say what she wanted to learn next; couldn’t describe anything about her learning process. Her grades were high overall, and she assumed that the subject in which she was getting the highest grades should be her major in college.

This young woman didn’t belong to herself as a learner; she belonged to her grades, and to the people who were giving her those grades–even the people who were celebrating those grades.

Especially once we were able to keep students until they were ready for high school, people observing the graduates of my school have been struck by the way graduating 14-year-old kids belong to themselves–how clearly they know and understand and respect themselves as learners.

Instead of pinning their student identities on their GPA, students in ungraded situations learn how to work with their real identities as learners. They learn how to choose meaningful and sustainable challenges for themselves. They know how to manage their own attention, and what to do to sharpen their memories. There may be passages through which they struggle, but a lot of the time they’re having a blast. Above all, they know, for themselves, why it matters. To the left, checking and graphing temperatures.

#3 Authentic and rewarding group learning

Teamwork flourishes best when grades are out of the picture. When I’ve talked about the amount of group work happening in my class, people have often asked, “Don’t kids get distracted by working together? How can you tell who did what?”

I’d have to be crazy to deny that distraction happens sometimes, or that timid students can become dependent on others. Still, young adolescents are ready and eager to learn how to be teams.

At Tsongas Industrial History Center, these girls are constructing a working canal system model. As usual, museum educators commented on how well students worked together–incorporating everyone’s ideas, sharing the dirty work on the floor.

At any age, effective group work doesn’t happen automatically. In order to get the huge benefits of several minds focused on the same task, complementing and helping and challenging each other, kids have to learn how to be task-focused and team-focused both at once; how to do the social work, the intellectual work, the creative work, and the procedural work all woven together.

Kids exposed to plenty of group projects in an ungraded situation get a terrific head start. Without grading to tell them they’re competing instead of collaborating, they learn how to stay balanced within the group process, and how to help the group stay balanced so it keeps on working for everyone.

If you want an argument against grades, focused on future success, you could start with that.

Above: Working with a parent volunteer, students help each other figure out which direction the rivers are flowing on topographic maps.

Meanwhile, freed from generating grades, I could put time into helping groups design and choose tasks that would engage them, with topics and audiences that mattered to them. The resulting energy helped their bicycle built for two (or three or four) keep momentum.

Often, when sharing work in a portfolio conference, students mentioned their partners and teammates, and told about what each of them had contributed, as I set off quiet internal fireworks of celebration. Yes!

# 4 Deep meanings held in community

As humans, we seem to have evolved to construct meaning, and experience meaning, collectively.

Many groups of students have been inspired by the collective power of the communities that built Stonehenge, and archaeologists’ ideas about the community events held there.

Archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists have found evidence of the power and importance of community life and community understanding, deep in the past history of our species–and even for the other hominin species before us.

Young adolescents work hard to begin to understand huge things: life and death, economic reality as they observe it, the concept of scale, the notion of one image symbolizing whole realms of experience. Whenever I asked groups of students what they’d like to understand better about the world, I was astonished anew at the ambition of their questions, knowing this at the same time: the really heavy lifting they can’t do alone, any more than adults can.

In my own most emblematic image of this, a group of learners listens to a challenging novel read aloud. As I write, I realize that I’m thinking particularly of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, a novel about racial prejudice in early 20th century New England, beautifully written by Gary Schmidt. Sharing a novel like this, the students build understanding together through their various comments and questions. Sometimes I sense their collective bravery in their silence for a tricky passage, or just after.

If somebody out there knows a way to assign grades to the quality of a shared group silence, let me know.

Now hold that in contrast to this: When individual achievement is the only test of an experience; when shared learning is considered cheating; when it’s constrained by the “level-playing-field” concept that requires teachers to do exactly the same things for every student; when teachers face such large classes that they have no way of knowing who’s doing what without completely isolated graded assessment–the deepest and truest parts of learning are hobbled, compromised, or outright lost.

It’s not impossible to nurture community, and the deep meanings community can hold, in the presence of a grading system–just harder. In fact, in my experience, over-emphasis on individual outcomes in any form–either grades or some supposedly benign substitute–works against the development of community, and the construction of shared meaning.

#5 Powerful connections with content

When grades aren’t the focus, content itself–the world!–gets more attention. The world is alarming to young adolescents–and to all of us–but also fascinating. Grades wind up being a smokescreen in the way of that fascination.

That’s what broke my heart about my friend’s daughter, mentioned earlier. She was experiencing very little actual engagement with the world and how it works and what we make of it. Her grades were like junk food, no fit substitute for actual encounters with the depth of time, or the mysteries of prime numbers, or the relationship between surface area and heat loss, or the way human history offers such contradictory evidence of both altruism and cruelty.

I think of a student long ago who wanted to read novels about the Holocaust. She had no assignment. She just kept coming back to me for more books, and talking about them to her classmates and parents. She was choosing her own path to a deeper understanding of the world.

Or I think of a student, now grown to a man, who used his sketchbook, during morning sketching time (which was completely open, unassigned), to make a very long narrative map, which continued from one two-page spread to the next, and the next, for months. The map as a whole incorporated everything that kid was noticing about the world through which he traveled: about geography, transportation, and the designs of buildings and other systems; about humor; about continuity and discontinuity.

Looking back, I remember now that this student’s family had just gone through an unusually messy divorce. His rehearsal of continuity in the built and natural worlds, page by turned-over page, feels tremendously poignant to me now. At the time, I was focused on his thinking and processing and creativity. But it seems likely, now, that the mapping was working for him on levels I couldn’t even guess. He gave himself the assignment that let him live in his intellectual strengths, and use those strengths to help him live through his family’s troubles.

Although he made me copies of some of the pages, I have no idea where they are. Hooray for memory so vivid and dear that it doesn’t need props. Hooray for learning so rich that no grade could encompass it. Hooray for the safe haven, also a highly effective launching pad, in which such work could happen.

I have a feeling I’m still not done with this topic…

Progress Report

Posted on October 31, 2013 by pollybrown2013

My most recent post was the fifteenth on this blog. That felt to me like time to think over my “time to think it over,” and as usual I did that by watching mental videos: my newest grandson, the river of students I’ve taught, and myself, as blogger.

Zen Meditation

During the months in which I’ve been writing these posts, and figuring out what comes next in my life, I’ve also spent a happy amount of time with Zen, who is about to be four months old.

Lately, I’ve been inspired by watching him discover his hands, which are very small.

At first, when Zen was set down on one of those mats with soft bright toys suspended on long crossing wands, he waved his arms and legs with huge pleasure, but not much control. When one of his wild waves connected, his eyes opened wide, and he made a reflective comment in Zen language. Increasingly, he tried to bat those toys around his small heaven.

Once he developed a little more control, he would hold his right fist at the length of his outstretched arm, intently focusing. He seemed to be figuring out that since he could use that hand, it must belong to him. I thought—and said, since he’s incredibly easy to talk to, and doesn’t yet roll his eyes when I come out with teacher talk: Yes, it’s amazing! We have these perfect tools built in!

I watched Zen work consciously, painstakingly, to practice opening his hand, before closing it on something he wanted to grasp. He got hold of my sleeve as I was changing his diaper, and I laughed. His look was a combination of who, me? and yes, I’m cool.

Now, sitting in his swing, Zen can grasp his favorite model of the cosmos in both hands.

When he’s lying on the play mat, he has all sorts of ambidextrous fun. His left hand plays the crackly wings of the parrot; his right hand tickles a couple of giraffe feet. One evening his parents watched him manage to include the monkey, a three-ring circus. Yesterday, he pulled so hard on all these fabric friends, trying to get them into his mouth, that the entire superstructure seemed to be undergoing an earthquake, with crackly-parrot-wing sound effects. Total mayhem! Produced by a four-month-old! Whoever designs these baby toys is doing a great job.

A river of students

So that’s Zen, learning up a storm. Meanwhile, back in my own part of the state, I’m still sorting through the evidence of my past students.

I’ve reduced a large number of boxes full of records and work samples–I won’t tell how many–to four binders, with one clear plastic sleeve for each student, all in alphabetical order: three Aarons, so far; five Bens. Etc. I’m maybe half done with that part of the overall job I’ve set myself.

Meanwhile, in my mind, for those past students who are grown to adulthood, I’m holding those layers of evidence next to who they’ve turned out to be. They travel through Nepal; they figure out the evolutionary history of squirrels; they teach kindergarten, or help middle-school city kids make videos, or become involved in their kids’ preschools; they solve problems for internet start-ups; they help cities plan evacuation routes or plant trees; they run campus businesses and theater productions; they move expensive paintings–Picasso!–from one city to another; they tackle contact improvisation classes in Italy. I love it all, and keep finding out more.

What about my more recent students? I’ve just been to the Halloween parade and community meeting, with its traditional skits. Those kids, too, when I look back and forth, now / then, have simultaneously changed and stayed the same–the same unique and vivid selves, learning learning learning.

So I’ve stepped back from the day-to-day teaching of one group of students, who tended to absorb almost all my waking energy, to look at the flow of students through all these years, like a river. Thanks to my inability to throw things away, it’s a river that shimmers with detail.

Watching myself as blogger

Writing this blog, focusing on one small chosen view after another in the landscape of school life as I have been lucky to know it, I’ve been moved again and again by the sheer power of human learning—not just at the early adolescent ages I taught, but in the strength and stretch and increasing individualization of every year that comes after.

In addition, writing this blog is a lot like watching an infant. In fact, I am the four-month-old, and way slower than Zen. But persistent.

I started working on the blog just about when he was born, at the beginning of July. I had five posts at least partly written before I took any of them public. (There are familiar patterns here. I learned to walk by holding onto the furniture for quite a while.)

Figuring out how to add photographs as illustrations took me days. No–I’m still getting the hang of it, so call that months. Figuring out how to scan Justin McCarthy’s hummanacraft design took over a week, even with the help of my perennial backstage helper and cheerleader, the wonderful wizard with the mustache, Alex Brown.

So far, writing has been easier than I feared it might be, because I already knew, most days, how to take risks and have fun in a first draft, how to let it lead me, and then how to throw out whatever didn’t work for me or couldn’t fit. I already knew how to revise and revise and revise. (My record, so far, is 23 separately saved drafts.) I love all the second and sixth and nineteenth chances of revision. I’d rather exercise that particular freedom than eat, or get up to put on another layer of fleece when the house cools down.

On the other hand, I still go into a steep decline immediately after hitting the publish button. Every time. Obviously, somehow I’ve felt like I had honed each paragraph as long and as well as I could in a mortal world, when I get to that point. But I hit that publish button and suddenly I’m convinced it’s all hogwash.

This isn’t just about the blog, and isn’t new. John Hodgen once described Polly Brown, poet, being extracted from a street mailbox by public safety officials using the jaws of life.

I am really good at second thoughts. On the other hand, I keep risking it all again.

This past week, I wrote to Alex Dunn. His blogs, at thedailybirdnewengland.blogspot.com and at mooglegaps.blogspot.com, have given me important inspiration. In each of his blogs, Alex is building up a body of perspective on some aspect of the world, piece by piece. He believes in the details, the tiny things that make each type of bird distinctive, and in the overall perspective. Like me, he’s obsessed with maps, which offer ways to view both.

In his return email, Alex thanked me for letting him know he’d had an impact. He said, ‟It is a strange thing sending writing out into the void and never really knowing what comes of it.” Yes. Like sending out poems, and feeling like they might as well have gone to Mars. It’s never been likely that someone would stop me in the drugstore and say, “Here’s what your poem (or your post) made me think about…”

But that’s what I want to know about each of these posts: Not is it good or bad? But what did it make you think about? So I’ve loved the comments some of you have written—adding your own memories of Dana’s death, or your own experience of a watershed far away from me, or your experience with teaching.

On the other hand, some of the blog’s regular readers (I’m pretty sure I can count at least five) say that you’re not sure how to comment. I can’t figure out how to control whether there’s a comment box showing, where I want it, at the bottom of every post. Sometimes, it seems, you have to click on the little blue dialog icon up near the title.

Should I say that at the end of every post? Should I keep giving people prompts for ways they might jump in? Should I just tell you, here and now, that I am most interested in what resonates, in your own story, whatever my story made you think of? Just a few of my current questions.

Although some of my nearest and dearest supporters think it’s a mistake, I do check the stats and maps available behind the scenes. I had a private cheering moment when I passed the landmark of 1000 views.

Discovering I’d had a hit from someone going online in Nepal—and guessing who it was!—absolutely made my day. My week!

I try to ignore the intimidating statistics on other blogs, in the thousands every day. Is that what I want?

Right now, the most personal success–again, so much like writing poems–comes with this: putting life in words helps me cherish it. I am cherishing that life I led as a teacher, and everyone who led it with me. I’m glad that many of my readers are people who shared that with me, directly or indirectly, near or far. I feel, often, like I’m writing, and celebrating, on behalf of us all.

I do have wider, more public intentions, also, and hope to have a gradually increasing public audience. Mostly, I want to encourage people to think about authentic learning, because it’s endangered in the world around us. In some small way, I want to contribute to collective, sensible, committed mindfulness about what learning really looks like and means and needs and produces, so different from the loudest mainstream trends. I want to do that without arguing, actually, just by showing what can work, because I know it has.

So—in sum, as my attorney daughter would say—I am very glad, these days, to have the freedom to drive out the turnpike, across all those rivers, and spend some hours with Zen. Grateful that my older grandchildren are only a day’s train ride away. Grateful for more phone and email contact with the rest of my far-flung family. All of us are learning, moving from one version of ourselves to another, and I’m paying better attention now.

I’m also more aware than ever before that I was lucky-and-a-half to stumble into teaching, to teach for so long in a rare and wonderful place, and to have known so many young learners one by one by one, within the communities we built together.

Finally, I am grateful—in every word I type and then change and then change back again—for every bit of encouragement you’ve given me, one way or another, to try this and keep trying.

I hold you in the light, whether I know you or not, as I send you off to watch and cheer and cherish whatever learning is happening in your own life’s neighborhood.

Taking Temperatures

Posted on October 25, 2013 by pollybrown2013

Someone, in a long proud parade of projects time parent volunteers, knew she would be doing temperature experiments with her small group, and arrived carrying these perfectly designed mitts.

(If you know where the credit should be assigned, please comment!)

The mitts are made of plastic baggies, filled with puffy stuff for insulation. For the plastic peanuts and the fleece, there are two bags, one inside another, flipped edge to edge so they could zip together and contain, between them, a consistent depth of insulation.

Into the baggies, kids inserted a Vernier temperature probe, a specially designed thermometer with a line to attach it to a computer interface. Measuring the temperatures of small buckets of ice or heated water, they examined the data on real-time graphs, which were created by Vernier software on the computer. Students could see the curve as the temperature rose or fell. The mitts let them compare the effectiveness of various kinds of insulation.

Without a live demonstration of the use of real-time graphing using probes of this sort, I find it difficult to convey the dramatic POW! of the experience. The whole activity of graphing suddenly makes more sense. Kids see clearly the relationship between the x axis (usually time) and the y axis (measurements of temperature, light, force, gas pressure, sound, proximity…or any of a number of attributes for which probes have been designed.)

Here’s a graph of a very simple trial, in which a student held the temperature probe directly in her hand. The graph rises gradually to a peak, then falls off quickly—but not instantly—when the person’s hand is removed.

Sometimes we compared: which hand was warmer, right or left? Did that correlate with the person’s handedness in any way? Could we be sure of the correlation, or were there too many other variables, not controlled?

(In many programs, it’s possible to graph several trials on the same screen, using different colors. For example, we could graph the data from the right hand in red and the data from the left hand in green, or graph multiple trials for each hand in assigned colors. The software also provides a full table of the data, and instant statistics including the range and the mean.)

We did experiments of this sort before we had computer probes, of course, just using regular thermometers. In the very earliest years of using The Voyage of the Mimi, thinking about whales and the insulating effect of blubber, we found ways to test the effectiveness of insulation, and these mitts would have been perfect.

More recently, working with the occasional use of a small classroom set of iPads, we used a Vernier temperature probe along with a interface called a LabQuest2, to let us gather and graph temperatures outside, streaming the graphs, as they were drawn, on multiple iPads.

Here’s a group who’ve come inside to debrief. (You can see the temperature probe in Abi’s hand.) They were playing a game called Microclimate Tic-tac-toe, and looking at the tic-tac-toe grid on the small whiteboard in Patty’s hand, to review what they’d found. For now, it’s enough to say that they were searching for microclimates: localized, specialized conditions of temperature, light, and moisture.

This group has found very hot temperatures on a large black tire on the playground. They can feel the high temps even with their fingers.

Another student uses a second iPad to watch the graph as it’s drawn from the probe data.

Meanwhile, there’s a much cooler place nearby, in the shadowed, moist soil next to the tire.

The very compact LabQuest2 device is just visible in the lower left corner of the photo. It communicates with the iPads using one of the school’s WiFi networks.

Here are members of another group working inside, finding the coolest and warmest temperatures they could locate in the classroom.

What did we want the kids to get from all this data collection? We wanted students to join the admirable horde of humans who’ve started out understanding the world by figuring out how to measure it. We wanted students to feel comfortable describing the world in quantitative terms, in numbers with a unit of measurement attached.

In this case, measuring temperature, we wanted students to become flexible about using either Fahrenheit or Celsius, and we wanted them to operate at an intersection between data collected with appropriate measurement tools, and the testimony of their own senses, so that the numbers acquired sensory meaning.

I’m working on this post on a perfect day for searching for microclimates outside: a chilly wind, bright sun. In conditions like these, kids could easily find temperatures varying by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit, often within a few feet of each other.

And if students were hungry for something really dramatic, we’d send them off to check the hood of a black car in the parking lot. They might never look at a black car on a sunny day in quite the same way again.

Hummanacrafts and the spirit of invention

Posted on August 30, 2013 by pollybrown2013

It’s not some fictitious contraption. The drawing below, made by Justin McCarthy sometime in the fall of 1990, advertises something real. It represents a retooling, a chopping and channeling, of a small paperboard tray, the kind in which take-out french fries used to be served. It’s a design for a hummanacraft, a vehicle that could hover gracefully, thrillingly, along the updraft from our classroom air vent.

That classroom’s air intake occupied a shallow metal box under the windows along the outer wall, like an over-sized radiator. The grated vent on the top, about 6 inches wide and 6 feet long, worked perfectly for hummanacrafts.

What gave the hummanacrafts direction along the vent? What kept them from just getting blown off?

Justin now lives in California and works as an engineer, a developer of ideas. If you knew him in his hummanacraft phase, you are not surprised. Colby Brown, another hummanacrafter, grew up to be a transportation planning technologist—obviously as a result of this early influence. Recently, Colby heard the word “hummanacrafts” and had a lot to say.

We’d cut one of the short flaps of the little tray, and bend it up or remove it. The air flowing out that end, the back, propelled the craft forward. The front end just barely touched the top surface of the vent, and that provided stability.

Colby went on to remind me that this particular class had operated as a design workshop for years. For example, several years before the hummanacraft phase (and before organized paper recycling) members of the class had engineered long cardboard chutes to carry crumpled waste paper to the wastebasket.

That group of students were entrepreneurs, also, with a thriving economy on the playground, buying and selling real estate, using all sorts of natural objects as currency. (Kate and I had to ban the indoor stockpiling of pine cone currency in paper bags under desks, because they got buggy.)

Not everything these kids made involved a cash exchange. Colby made and gave as gifts a whole series of ducks carrying marbles. (Nobody remembers why.)

The hummanacrafts fit into a proud tradition.

I’m pretty sure the kids first invented hummanacrafts with Kate, in the mornings. She would have been the one to ask, ‟What if you make the vent flap smaller?” Or ‟What if you add some weight?”

Justin and Colby were both talkers. Some of their classmates weren’t, at least not in the same way. Watching the evolution of the hummanacrafts in all their hands, listening to their explanations, triggered my first deep awareness that some kids make a lot more sense in motion. I’d read Howard Gardner. I knew, from the experience of my own family, that there are many kinds of intelligence. But hummanacrafts, crazy little paperboard crafts for imaginary drivers the size of mice, convinced me, to the soles of my feet and the outer margins of my plan book, that kids could be smart in ways that had nothing to do with my own.

In fact, some of my students, I saw, would do their best work only if I arranged (or permitted) the sort of learning experience that might have terrified me, or at least intimidated me, when I was a student myself.

And that was the beginning of many stories.

Hooray for hummanacrafts! Hooray for their engineers and operators! Hooray for many things slightly illegal, happening off on the edges of classrooms; things that can teach the teacher, if she’s lucky. (And I was.)

I’m going to try again to get other people to commit themselves in writing. (It’s free, after all, and it can be really short.) (Or long, too.) Did you ever invent or create something on the edges of classroom culture? What was it? And–I always want to know this: then what happened?

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a year to think it over