Our students are not robots (except when they are)

I have just finished teaching an intensive two and a half week course on Lego Robotics. I met with the same 13 students all day every day during that time, and we built and programmed Lego robots, completing increasingly complex (both for them to program and me to build) challenges. It was an amazing time, but I’m not going to miss either the incessant whir of the motors or the incessant calls of “Ms. K-M, Ms. K-M, Ms. K-M!”

The other constant refrain of the course was, “My robot’s not doing what I want it to do.” To which I would reply, “Your robot is doing exactly what you told it to do; what did you tell it to do?” We talked a lot about programming and free will—specifically, your robot does not have free will, and it will only do what you tell it to do. If you’re robot is not doing what you want, it means you didn’t tell it what you wanted to do. (I managed to thoroughly undermine this line of argument by showing them Short Circuit.)

After the 342^nd (give or take) time I had this conversation, I started to relate it to other conversations I’d had with colleagues, usually as they bring me their students’ final products (sometimes these are projects they’ve worked on with me, sometimes not), and they tell me, “This is not what I was expecting students to produce.” And then we look at the assignment and/or rubric, and I often end up thinking (and saying), “Well, based on this, your students gave you exactly what you said you wanted.” Sometimes it’s teachers who are disappointed their students didn’t elaborate and build on ideas—but the assignment clearly asks for a report, and makes no expectation of applying ideas and facts to new situations. Sometimes it’s teachers who are frustrated that students spent more time on bells and whistles and fancy colors (whether the product be a poster, a PowerPoint, or something else) and not as much time on content—but the rubric gives as much weight to color and visual appeal as it does to content.

If we don’t ask our students to engage in inquiry, or use critical thinking, or apply prior knowledge to new information, they won’t. Some will, sure. But most students need to be prompted, guided, and taught to do so. And that’s our job.

I’m often able to revisit these conversations the next time I start planning a project with a teacher, and we’re often able to design something that, from the outset, asks students to use critical thinking skills and demonstrate the application of those skills.

However, our students—unlike most robots—do remember the programs they’ve been told to run before. Even the bad ones. So even though we’ve created something new and different, many students will fall back into old habits.

This is a challenge I know I’m not alone in facing; I’ve talked about it with colleagues both at my school and in other schools. It is so frustrating. We want to make the shift to inquiry-driven, student-centered work that builds critical thinking ability. But we can’t make that shift all at once. But in order to make the small shifts, it seems like we have to overhaul the entire culture. But we can’t. . . you get the idea.

I don’t know the answer for this, but I am starting to think about the spring research season and how we can help students reprogram their own learning behaviors.

On helplessness, learned and taught

It is hard for me to write about this, because some of my frustrations are very, very specific, and this could easily become about venting rather than professional reflection. Not that I never vent about these frustrations (believe me, I do), but I prefer to vent a little less publicly.

I cringe (I try to keep it internal) every time I see a teacher model a learning behavior they would never accept from students. Saying, "I don't get technology," or "I can't figure this out, I'm not even going to try" or "Here, you do it, it never works for me." All things I've had teachers say to me in front of students.

It is really hard to keep that cringe internal, because when I hear teachers say these things in front of students it makes me angry. For a faculty that is very aware of the impact of learned helplessness, we don't always spend a lot of time reflecting on who taught that helplessness.

I can be guilty of teaching helplessness to my teachers, and I am working on recognizing and stopping that behavior. When someone asks me a question, I want to answer it; this is an instinct many teachers and librarians share, and I don't think it's always a bad one. But sometimes our drive to provide the answer can get in the way of teaching people how to find the answers themselves.

For example, a teacher recently e-mailed me to ask if a certain book was available via Bookshare. My first instinct was to look it up for her; but, I'd spent a lot of time this summer creating Bookshare logins for all my teachers so they could look up books and download them for students at the point and time of need (part of a larger effort to make assistive tech a little more seamless). It would have been much, much faster for me to just give her the answer. But I didn't. I replied with the URL to the site, reminded her how to login, and pointed her to page on the library website with details for how to download a book. Yes, that took much longer (especially since I looked the book up anyway just to be sure), but I'm hoping for a long-term payoff.

We are piloting a 1:1 iPad program with our freshmen and sophomores this year. Some teachers are struggling with being comfortable with the iPad and learning new apps. I struggled with a lot of it too, at first. But now teachers will seem amazed when I know how to do something, and ask how I learned it. To which I always reply, "I pressed something, and saw what happened. And then I pressed something else. There is no self-destruct app for the iPad." But still every once in a while a teacher will say, "I'll never figure this out." When they do (and as long as there are no students around), I've tried to get better at asking, "Would you allow a student in your class to say that?" It can make the conversation kind of uncomfortable. But that's kind of my goal.

One of the things we as teachers need to model is that it's okay to fail. It's okay to get something wrong. Getting something wrong is often an important part of the process. But that idea makes many teachers nervous.

It can be scary to admit you don't know something. To admit it in front of a room of teenagers who already think they know more than you do can be downright terrifying.

But we have to be willing to model not just that it's okay to not know something, but how to ask for help learning how to do something. To say, "the kids are better with technology, I'll never keep up," and use that as an excuse not to learn? Inexcusable. When you say that in front of a student, what's to prevent them from thinking, "everyone else is better at history/math/reading/writing, I'll never keep up"? Is that the attitude towards learning something new we want to model for our students? I hope not.

We need to model the right attitude towards learning--not, "I don't know how to do this, you do it for me," but, "I don't know how to do this, can you show me how?"

If what we're teaching by our model is helplessness, we can't be surprised when that's what our students have learned.

But if instead we model that it's okay not to know, but not okay to not want to know, we create an environment in which all kinds of learning are possible.

An open letter to academic librarians

Right around this time of year is when I start getting messages from last year's seniors. Each one is a little bit different, but in many many ways they all say the same thing: "I'm in college, and I'm doing research, and I need help." And the subtext is, always, "And I'm too scared to ask the librarians here, so can you help me?"


I'm not writing you to ask you to help my students; I know you will help my students. And that's what I tell them every time--that the best way I can help them is to direct them to all of you so you can show them all the resources (far beyond what I was able to show them) you have available.

But I have to admit, I am nervous, too. I am worried that you will judge my students for what I failed to teach them.

I did my best, I really did. But so many of my students come to me having been--for lack of a better term--abused by the educational system. They have been made to believe that they are stupid, that a failure is a reflection on them as people, not on the inherently messy process of learning. Many of them did not think college was in their future.

We did everything we could to teach them about who they are as learners, to give them the skills they need to engage with new material, to inquire, to understand both their strengths and their weaknesses, and to engage with the world while understanding that what matters is not the mistakes you make, but how you respond to them.

There is a lot they don't know about the nuts and bolts of research, but that is my fault, not theirs. Please do not hold them responsible for my shortcomings. I wanted them to see libraries as welcoming places, and librarians as welcoming people. I knew that I could never teach them everything they needed to know, so my hope was to foster the attitudes necessary to continue learning long after they left.

I know I am putting them in good hands. I know you will help them. And I thank you for teaching them the things I didn't.

It’s not about what we do, it’s about who we are

At the end of one of the sessions I went to at ISTE (yes, this is me finally writing my ISTE reflection) I had an interesting conversation with two English teachers about perceptions of librarians. They were definitely pro librarian, and both expressed sympathy about how school librarians were getting “beat up” lately, and asked me why I thought that was happening. One mentioned that she had been to a session about finding research, and said that “library/librarian” was put near the bottom of the list of resources for finding good research sources (it wasn’t clear to me whether that list had been generated by the presenters or the audience, but either way--ouch). She wondered why so many people still didn’t “get it.”

I don’t really have an answer for that--well, actually, I have lots of answers for that, but no “one size fits all” answer. But one of the core issues is, I believe, about relationships.

One of the issues that this teacher raised was that so many students seem to gravitate towards sites that they often KNOW contains less-than-scholarly information, which is something I’ve seen as well.
I told her that one of my theories about why students like Yahoo!Answers (and other similar sites) is because they feel like they’re getting the info from a person--even if that person is demonstrably crazy. They want to know that they’re getting information from a person--they want a connection to the information source.

This echoed an idea that had come up in the session we’d just sat through (The “Yeah, Buts”: Answering the Top 10 arguments against change)--an idea that I thought was one of the most important and relevant ideas I’d heard discussed during the entire conference:

Successful change is not just built on rational arguments; it requires an emotional investment and response.

This was an idea I’d been looking to hear more of after Buffy Hamilton’s amazing, beautiful talk about enchantment (a video of Buffy’s talk, as well as her slidedeck, is available on her blog, and you should all go watch it if you haven’t already).

So often we get excited about new tools and new ideas, but neglect to build the relationships that will help us bring other teachers along on our journey. And sometimes our immersion in technology can, frankly, lead to a kind of arrogance. Every time I hear a librarian say something along the lines of “librarians are the ONLY ones in schools who know about X” with X being anything from emerging technologies, to reading, to (in an article I read recently) knowledge production and consumption, I cringe. Really? How off-putting. That assertion is often accompanied by some thinly-veiled resentment that their expertise is not more widely recognized or valued. Obviously I know that there are many librarians who don’t do this, but I’ve seen it happen enough that it seems to be a trend.

If I were a teacher working in a school with one of these librarians I would not feel like my own perspective and expertise were valued or welcome--whether I were new to these technologies and ideas and just trying them out, or had developed my own knowledge and was putting it to use in my classroom. When someone else in my building says they’re the “only” one who knows how to do something, I don’t feel like they’re going to be receptive to what I may have learned and discovered.

Assertions of our own expertise--insistence on our own rightness--cuts off conversation and limits the possibilities that can develop when we take the time and effort to build relationships. It may mean having to answer what we think of as obvious questions (though I’ve found that answering “obvious” questions helps me refine my own thinking), and it may mean admitting that we don’t something. But that means learning something new. We shouldn’t just be collaborating with teachers in order to improve student learning--we need to collaborate with teachers in order to improve our own learning.

Because, to get back to my earlier point, we learn best when we learn from other people. We want to feel a connection to the people we’re learning from. I can be interested in an idea I read about and stumble across, but when I get to discuss (or hear someone talk about) how they actually made that idea happen in their school--that’s when I get excited about trying something new. Likewise, I get more excited about a new idea of my own when I’m able to share it with others.

This is, for me, one of the most valuable things about conferences--spending several days sharing space with 13,000 other people who are also excited about new ideas and learning, and making real connections with those people

And this is the feeling we need to bring to our students and teachers. If all we talk about is the STUFF we do or have, we are never going to get as many people on board that we would if we focused on WHO we are. We need to sell not what we do, but who we are. All libraries have different resources to offer, but the one thing that should be consistent across all libraries is that there is value added by the personal interactions you have with the librarian--whether that’s a personal reference interview or the value that’s added by organizing and building a collection in order to meet the unique needs of that school.

We all know students and teachers who insist they don’t need the library because “everything is on Google.” We know we have more to offer, but unless we focus on building those relationships, no one else will.

Think, Create, Share, Grow at your school library

Tomorrow morning, pre- crack of dawn, I leave for New Orleans for ALA and for the culmination of my Emerging Leader experience. It's been an amazing six months, and I've been lucky to work with a group of other smart, passionate, and creative librarians. It's been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

We were given the task of creating some promotional materials for Learning4Life and AASL's Standards for the 21st Century Learner. We decided pretty quickly that the best way to promote the standards was to highlight the incredible work school librarians are doing all over the country. So we wrote and distributed a survey using a GoogleDocs Form, and used the responses we got as the raw material for all of our projects.

I created an Animoto using some images that school librarians shared, and included some examples of the standards in action:


Melissa Corey created a Storybird, which I just love:
Think, Create, Share, Grow at Your Library by melissacorey on Storybird

as well as a great GoAnimate video:
GoAnimate.com: Think, Create, Share, Grow in Your Library by melissacorey

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Alicia Blowers made this great Xtranormal video:


and Kim Ha made one too:


Kim also made several great Google Search Story videos (seriously, making those things is so much fun):


And I would be seriously remiss if I didn't mention our other team member, Leah Ayers, who did a wonderful job compiling all of our results and getting things ready for our poster session.

Which reminds me--if you're going to be at ALA we'll be presenting our projects during the Emerging Leader poster session Friday afternoon at 3:00 in room 271-273 in the Convention Center and in the Exhibit Hall at 1:30 and 4:00 on Saturday.

You can also find our projects at our Diigo group, Emerging Leaders Group A, all of which have been tagged ateamproject. Also in the Diigo group are links to work that school librarians shared with us--there's some awesome stuff in there, and plenty of ideas I plan on stealing.

I am not the expert

I’ve been trying to catch up on my GoogleReader and Instapaper links (still to tackle--my Diigo Unread items. I love that technology has created a variety of ways for me to keep track of what I’m missing), so if you’ve been staying current these stories might be old to you (and, full disclosure, I started writing this post almost a week ago. You don’t even want to see how behind I am on doing my dishes).

There have been a few posts I’ve read that have really resonated with me as I try and keep my head above water in the craziness of spring research season

The first is Seth Godin’s post Moving beyond teachers and bosses:

If you view the people you work with as coaches, and your job as a platform, it can transform what you do each day, starting right now.

I have a friend and colleague who I talk with a lot about the idea of coaching, particularly when it comes to working with students with executive functioning issues; she is way better versed in these topics than I am, and I’ve been working on incorporating her ideas into what I do.

A lot of students--and not just those with executive functioning challenges--see the teacher as the “gatekeeper,” the person who says “stop” or “go” (sidenote: every time I use the word “gatekeeper” I think of the movie Ghostbusters. Just FYI). I sometimes get frustrated with students who won’t or can’t take the next step in an assignment without first getting clearance from someone else, but then I remember that a lot of schooling trains students to not trust their own judgment about what’s right, what’s wrong, and what comes next. It’s a hard habit to break. So even though I know “what comes next” I try to make that a collaborative discussion with the student, to have the answer come from them. You would be amazed (or not) at how much resistance students put up to the idea that they might be in charge of the next step of the process. We (and by “we” I probably don’t mean “you”) train students to believe that they can’t make decisions about their learning, and then get frustrated when they refuse to take charge of their own learning. Why they aren’t more annoyed with us I don’t know.

Next I read Doug Johnson’s excellent response to Godin’s post; the reactions in comments about content expertise are also very interesting, but I think focusing on defining who the content expert is kind of misses the point.

It’s not about who the content expert is. No ONE is the content expert. EVERYONE is the content expert.

Learning communities are wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. It doesn’t matter how much you know unless you have someone to share it with--someone who wants to know, and will ask you questions, and will push you farther in your own learning.

It’s not about the information, it’s about what you can DO with the information. Knowing a lot of facts does not make you an expert. If all you have to offer your students is a list of facts, you are not a teacher. You are an encyclopedia set. Probably an outdated one.

My professional goal is to make myself obsolete. Okay, not really, but kind of. If I, as the librarian, am seen as “the only one” who knows about finding sources, evaluating information, creating citations, creative commons and fair use (and so on) then not only am I overwhelmed with trying to teach everything to every student on my own (and not having it reinforced in the classroom), but then students see it as a specialized, localized skill--something you only have to do in the library or when Ms. K-M asks. But if it’s something that’s happening in all classes all the time and being practiced and reinforced by teachers, then it’s a “real” skill.

One of the reasons I love being a librarian so much is because I teach skills, not content. And the skills I need to know and be able to teach are always changing (which is why I don’t think I’ll ever really be obsolete). I learn from colleagues in other libraries (through blogs, and Twitter, and professional journals, and conference presentations and you get the idea), and share with colleagues in my school, who share with their students, who share with each other. . . and who sometimes discover something new to share with me. And then I share that with my learning community. If I didn’t think it would delay this post even longer, I would draw some sort of diagram to illustrate this idea.

The structure that Godin alludes to (and that I think many picture when they picture schools or workplaces) is strictly hierarchical, with the “expert” at the top. But expertise is, I believe, more of an iterative process; if you believe you’re the expert, at the top of the hierarchy, you cut yourself off from the opportunity to learn from others. An expert is not someone who has learned a lot, but someone who is always learning.

I love that moment when something clicks for a student--when they figure out how to do something, whether it’s navigate an advanced search, organize resources, or create a way to showcase a new understanding of a topic. And often these are things I know how to do and could easily have shown them, but if I simply lead through the steps all they’ve learned is that I, their teacher, knows how to do something. When we give students the opportunity--and responsibility--to develop their own expertise, we are making them active participants in their learning.

Reflections on Research

We're nearing the end of the first go round with the collaborative research unit I talked about a while back. And as I mentioned in that post, we're on a modular schedule, which means we'll be starting the same project from the beginning. Which, of course, means revamping based on our experiences this first time around.

In talking with teachers about revamping things, they have sometimes lamented that it's unfortunate that this first group had to act as guinea pigs--but I point out that usually all students have to act as guinea pigs, and we have to wait an entire year in order to test our new ideas again. I'm excited about being able to re-do this unit so soon, and get more ideas for how to make it better.

And boy do I have ideas for how to make it better. I love this project, and I think many things worked well the first time, but there are definite areas for improvement. One big change will be where in the process we explicitly introduce the writing of the thesis statement (speaking of which, have I mentioned how very, very much I love Tom March's Online Thesis Generator? 'Cause I really, really do). We talked with students from the beginning about the need to form an argument and write a thesis, but we didn't do much direct instruction until late in the process of finding sources--and many students discovered that the sources they had were not helpful to their thesis, which was very frustrating for many students.

For our next go round, we'll be asking students to find a certain number of sources on their topic in order to establish their background knowledge and get an overview of their topic. Then write the thesis, then find additional sources in order to specifically address the subtopics of their thesis. This is one of those ideas I have that makes me feel kind of foolish for not having thought of it the first time around.

As frustrating as citation has been, I'm nerdily excited about deploying my citation map to its full effect. And I have to remind myself that I no longer see Works Cited pages that simply list "www.google.com", so progress is being made. There have been some interesting mistakes, and I think understanding those will help me help students avoid them in the future (for example, one student entered a magazine article from a database as a radio broadcast, because he'd used the database's built-in text-to-speech feature (which, by the way, much UDL love there) to listen to the article). (Did I just do a parenthetical aside within a parenthetical aside? I think I have a problem. . .) And inspired by Buffy Hamilton (a statement which could be true of about half the things I do), I'm going to work on some citation guidesheets to help my students move through the process from finding a source to creating an accurate citation. While I love NoodleTools (and eventually many of my students come around), many of my students struggle with identifying what type of source they have and how to answer the questions in NoodleTools. I want to help them get things right at the beginning, in order to limit future frustrations.

And after reading Kristin Fontichiaro's recent post about reflection it occurred to me in that "why didn't this occur to me before?" kind of way that while I regularly checked in with students on their progress and got a good sense of what they were struggling with and what was going well, it would be good to ask students to reflect in a more formal way on their own process. So I created a form asking students to reflect on each part of the research process--from topic selection to citations, and which parts were easiest and most difficult for them. This will help in adjustments for the next go round with this project, but I'm hoping that it will also help students realize how much they've managed to accomplish.

There are also lots of little tweaks, and I'm sure after the next time I'll have even more ideas for how to adjust. I don't know if I've ever taught the same unit the same way twice, and I think it will be a long time before I do. If I ever do. Which is just the way I want it to be.

The World of Citation

I was going to start this post by saying, "Citation is one of the hardest things I teach" but then I thought about it and realized that there's nothing I teach where I think, "Hey, no problem, everyone understands that immediately." But citation is definitely one of the most frustrating things I teach, because it can be such an abstract idea for students. Why, they want to know, do they have to include all those details? And why would anyone care what order the information was in? Can't they just throw in a title and a URL and be done with it already?

Students do seem to have a sense of why it's important to give credit to their sources, and I do use (and love) NoodleTools to help them with the citation process, but I was still getting a lot of push back on the "why" of the details citation. I was struggling to come up with good way to make it click for my students ("just because" wasn't cutting it, explanation-wise, and for good reason).

I love teaching with analogies, and I had managed to develop several good analogies to explain different parts of the search process (most of them involve food. I know my audience), but a citation analogy eluded me. Until, out of nowhere (probably while processing books, which is when I do some of my best thinking), it came to me.

A citation is like the source's address.

Of course! I put together a quick presentation for students the next day--after all, I was convinced the idea was brilliant, but it might fall flat with students. I started by putting up the school's address, but all jumbled up, and asked if they could tell me what it was. They knew it was the school's address, of course, but also recognized it wasn't in the right format. No big deal, of course--unless someone tried to send them a care package to the messed up address, and it never got here because the post office couldn't figure out what was going on.

I then put up a jumbled address from somewhere in New York City. It was easy to tell it was a New York address; then I revealed it was the address of the LEGO store in Rockefeller Center. If you were able to decipher the address, you'd be able to get somewhere awesome.

It seemed to be clicking with students, and I've been working on the analogy since. Most kids have seemed to connect with it, and it's provided a good way to frame discussions about what needs to be in a citation.

Why do they need to include the year of publication? Because it's part of the address.
Why don't they copy and paste the URL from a database source? Because it's bad directions.
Why do we need in-text citations? They're a sign post for your reader.

Then I hit up my Social Studies department for a spare map (I was too impatient to order one). I was hoping for a US map; they only had a world map, but I think it worked out even better. I also had some giant thumbtacks I'd gotten for Christmas, which makes the display 3-D (sort of). The slides below are a more refined version of my presentation, including pictures of my World of Citation display.

World of citation

(This is, for the record, also the first time I've used SlideShare.)

This is, in my humble opinion, the most awesome citation-themed bulletin board ever. It's also getting lots of attention and questions from students, which is really cool. Who ever thought a display about citation could be a conversation starter?

On the Internet, no one knows you're a Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

A colleague recently posted a story titled 'Tree octopus' is latest evidence the Internet is making kids dumb, says group on the CASL listserv. You should go read it, too, particularly because it's much more reasonable and balanced than the title would lead you to believe.

The researchers concluded that the fact that students fell for the tree octopus site meant that students weren't prepared to critically evaluate information they found online. Which is likely true, but that, I don't think, is the real takeaway lesson from this. What struck me is that the students' biggest mistake was not in trusting the information they found on the tree octopus site--it was in trusting that the researchers had steered them in the right direction.

Around the same time I read that article, I saw this one from the New York Times, about the proliferation of Q&A sites on the Internet. As more and more information is available, the harder it is to sift through it all on our own; we rely on other people to either help us sift through it or to answer our actual questions, not the ones that the SEO spam that is creeping more and more into Google search results thinks we're asking.

Wanting to know and trust that there is a person behind the answer--no matter how qualified or unqualified that person might be--is, I believe, part of why sites like Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswesrs (and Wikipedia itself) are so popular. As much as we love having so much information at our fingertips, we don't trust information. We trust people. When people get starry-eyed talking about how the Internet has changed things, they seem much more likely to be talking about how it makes it possible to connect to people, not to connect to more information.

The students in this study fell prey to the most natural instincts of all learners--when you're learning something new, you turn to an expert. When I'm trying to learn something new, I don't start from scratch--I see if any of my colleagues have experience or expertise to offer. I search for what other librarians have done. I consult professional journals and listservs. As a very last resort I'll try random Googling, but if it comes to that I know I'm in for a long road ahead.

This, too, is what I try to teach my students about searching. If you want to make life easier on yourself, use the pathfinder I've created for your class, use the library catalog to find websites, and above all, ask for help. While I hope my students develop a bag of tricks for doing research in high school and beyond, more than anything I hope they develop the ability and the confidence to know when to ask for help--and who to trust when they ask for that help.

A Whole New Research Project

Every year the sophomores do a major research paper in their history class. And every year it is a disaster.

Okay, okay, disaster is too strong a word. Let’s just say that my vision of how the process will go and the way the process actually goes have less in common than I would like them to.

But every year it is a disaster in a slightly different way, and every year we tweak it and change it and try to make it better. Having done this several times, we’ve been able to really hone in on the areas our students really struggle with:

• Most of the time students are learning the PROCESS of research at the same time they’re learning new CONTENT for their class. Trying to master (or even manage) both is overwhelming. Trying to synthesize everything into an essay? Oy.
• Students are often so focused (and stressed) about the end product, that they want to rush past the process and right into writing the paper (they do a lot of the things I mentioned in my post about why I want to teach a stand alone class).
• We usually require students to find and evaluate X number of sources; students then find X (or sometimes less than X) number of sources, enter them all in NoodleTools, read 1 source, and get all their information from that one source
• Thesis statements? *sigh* Well-integrated evidence from their research to support that thesis complete with appropriate citation? *sigh times a million*

I realize, of course, that none of these issues are unique to me or my situation, which is some comfort.

However, this year we have a whole new schedule which is going to allow us to do something entirely different, and I’m really, really excited about it.

We’re on a modular schedule this year. Our year is divided into 8 mods; students take classes A-D during mods 1, 3, 5, 7 and classes E-H during mods 2, 4, 6, 8. Classes are 75 minutes long, as well, which I love (in years past students took 7 classes--all of which met all year long--and classes were only 40 minutes long; with that schedule it was hard to both introduce a skill and have students get meaningful practice with it). Also, this year all sophomore are taking Thinking & Writing, a class which I think pairs very naturally with teaching the research process.

Today, I met with the chairs of both the Thinking & Writing and History departments, as well as the other teacher of sophomore Thinking & Writing, about collaborating across all three departments on the research project. We wanted to make sure students we’re able to grapple with the whole process of research from topic selection to finished project, while also hitting all the steps in between.

So. In the 5th/6th mod (depending on individual schedules) students will, in their Thinking & Writing class select a topic for their History research paper, develop research questions, find and evaluate sources and then create an annotated bibliography of all their sources (this bibliography will also include a sentence about how they found and selected each source). We’re doing this to emphasize to students that gathering information from multiple sources and viewpoints is a crucial part of the research process. By the end of the mod, having done this initial research, they will develop a working thesis for their paper.

Then, in the 7th/8th mod in their History class, students will, building upon the research and thesis from their Thinking & Writing class, refine their thesis, find additional sources as needed, outline, and write their paper. Students will be able to focus on taking the information from sources and integrating it into their paper in order to support their thesis, using information to build a well-supported argument. Students will also create a presentation about their research findings (we talked briefly about doing some work on avoiding death by PowerPoint).

Time devoted to process, and time to devoted to content, honoring all parts of the research paper writing experience. I think this will help, too, students better understand that the habits of mind involved in the research process are not isolated to one project or one class; they really exist and are applicable across disciplines.

We’d been playing with and talking about this idea from the start of the year, but things really crystallized today and we were EXCITED. I came to the meeting prepared to try and coerce these teachers in to doing things the way I wanted, but they brought even better ideas to the table. I’ve been working with the History chair on this project all four years I’ve been here and I feel like I am reaping the benefits of having really invested time in building that collaborative relationship; I honestly believe that I could not have made this project happen two years ago.

Also out of this discussion came the idea (also from the teacher) that we should develop a research paper rubric to be used across all classes in the History/Social Studies department, with increasing levels of complexity in grades 10-12, and with separate areas for the content area teachers to assess and for me to assess. This is something I’ve been wanting to move to for a while, and to have the idea come out of someone’s mouth besides my own feels like a major victory.

I’m either starting from scratch or totally revamping everything for this project, but I think it will provide a great way to try out some of my ideas for the class I’m teaching next year. It’s going to be a lot of work, but after years of trying to shape the research process to look more like this, it’s exciting to see it really take that shape.

Every Brain is Different

photo © 2009 Janine | more info (via: Wylio)One of the most common misconceptions I encounter about learning disabilities is that they all affect everyone the same way--every student with dyslexia is the same, every students with ADD is the same, every student with executive functioning issues is the same, every student with X is like Y. And oh if it were that way, education (and life) would be so much easier. But every student with dyslexia/ADD/whatever is very, very different. These are big umbrella diagnoses, and there's a lot that fits under them.

Think of it like being diagnosed with allergies--everyone who has allergies is allergic to different things, reacts in different ways, and is best treated by different methods. There's overlap, sure, but it's still a highly individualized diagnosis. So it is with learning disabilities--there's overlap, sure, but what works for Dyslexic Student A is by no means guaranteed to work for Dyslexic Student B.

Which is why I find the research reported on in the article Dyslexia: Brain scans predict reading skills so fascinating and so, so important. Not only does it give us a better understanding of what is going on in the brain, it could help us fine-tune how we work with individual students.

These are the two paragraphs that resonated with me the most:

In contrast, the battery of standardized, paper-and-pencil tests typically used by reading specialists did not aid in predicting which of the children with dyslexia would go on to improve their reading ability years later.

“Our findings add to a body of studies looking at a wide range of conditions that suggest brain imaging can help determine when a treatment is likely to be effective or which patients are most susceptible to risks,” says study leader Fumiko Hoeft, associate director of neuroimaging applications at Stanford University.

Paper and pencil tests (or any standardized test, really) will do a good job of telling us what a student doesn't know or can't do--but they fail miserably at telling us why. And the why could be any number of things, depending on the student--even a student who we think fits in a particular box because they have a particular diagnosis. I think we're a LONG ways away from having up-to-date brain scans on every student (and I'm not sure about how I would feel about that, though my initial reaction is ew), but research like this will, hopefully, lead to discussions about the fact that there ARE differences in why and how students struggle with information, even if they're struggling with the same information.

If I haven't already recommended Maryanne Wolf's absolutely amazing Proust and the Squid a million times, I am severely negligent. You will come away with a new-found amazement at the sheer complexity of process of reading, and learning to read (and it's the most accessibly written book about neuroscience you'll ever read). Of particular resonance for me was the final section, on the dyslexic brain and how it doesn't learn to read--but does learn to do many other things. Wolf raises an excellent (but currently unanswerable) question about whether the over-development in certain areas of the dyslexic brain is a cause of or effect of struggles with reading--and also asks us to think about the talents that many dyslexics have that those of us with "normal" brains couldn't conceive of. If you're interested in this topic at all, you should go read it, like, right now. I'll wait.

We owe it to all our students--diagnosed, undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, undiagnosable--to do our best to understand and believe that having dyslexia, or ADD, or dyscalculia does not put them in a particular box. The same goes for "smart" kids--the ones who typically do well in school. If we tell them (through words or actions) that we think they can/will only learn a particular way, imagine the crushing defeat when that way just doesn't work for them. For resilient kids, or the ones for whom school usually "works", chances are they'll find or ask for another way. But LD kids generally won't--because, sadly, they've gotten the message that they just can't "do" school so many times that one more failure doesn't seem noteworthy. So it's up to us to notice, and adapt, and change, and work with them to find the how and why that DOES work.

Even if we don't have an fMRI in every classroom.

"Whatever you are, be a good one"

I will potentially catch flack from my mother, several friends, and a number of colleagues for sharing a blog post with this title and agreeing with most of what is said, but I'm going to do it anyway (I live life on the edge, clearly):

My Job is Not What I Do, It Is Who I Am

During my first year as a librarian I remember a colleague asking me how things were going, and when would I be done and able to take some down time. And I remember saying, "There's no point at which I'm 'done.' There's just a point at the end of every day when I say 'enough for today' and I stop."

That is, I think, the nature of working in education (and in a lot of other fields, I know; it's just that most of my experience is in education). I get frustrated with colleagues who want to do something "like we did it last year." Even if a project went perfectly (ha!), I always want to try something new, make something better. And every year we're working with new students who bring different strengths and weaknesses to the table. No matter how good a lesson or unit is, it never feels "done" to me.

Which is not to say I never drag my feet through a day, or want to do something that's just "good enough" or get frustrated or feel like work has consumed my entire life to the exclusion of the possibility of social interaction. 'Cause I do. But 9 times out of 10 a positive interaction with a student (whether that's working with a kid on a major project or someone just stopping in to say hi and ask for a book recommendation) will bring me back to where I need to be.

This is, I think, part of how I'm wired. Even when I worked in, um, let's just call them "jobs not crucial to the future of our nation" I often spent too much time at work or thinking about work. I'm not very good at just leaving half-done things aside at 5:00 and not thinking about it till the next day. And I took any feedback on my work--good or bad--to heart. Often too much so. So I suppose it's a good thing I'm in education, as leaving half-done things aside at 5:00 is never really an option, and taking critiques of your work--good and bad--to heart is incredibly important.

Like the quote that is the title of this blog post (attributed to Abraham Lincoln, who I think it's fair to say took his own advice to heart), whatever it is I do, I think it's important to be--or try to be--good at it. But I've come to realize, too, that being good at what I do also means taking time away from work; it's important to create balance, and perspective. Spending all my time immersed in and consumed by my work creates a kind of myopia that is counter-productive when it comes to actually improving.

My job is who I am; there is no way I could feel as passionate about my work, or unbegrudgingly give over so much of my life to it if it didn't speak to something deep within me. But it's not ALL of who I am.

Going it alone

When I first started as a school librarian I was, if not 100% opposed to the idea of doing a stand-alone information literacy class, at least 93% opposed. I believed, in the way only someone fresh from a grad school program can believe, that the only really, truly effective way to teach information literacy skills was through collaboration with classroom teachers.

And I still believe that that is a GREAT way to teach information literacy. I just no longer believe it is the only way, and in my particular case I'm no longer convinced it is the best way.

I'm going to say what's obvious to any librarian working alone without a clerk--trying to collaborate with 40 different teachers in multiple subjects with various levels of expertise and interest is hard. Finding the time to really plan collaboratively is challenging, and doing that planning is difficult when the teacher you're working with isn't familiar with the skills/concepts you're trying to teach. And yes, I want my teachers to know and understand what I do, but when we only have an hour to plan it's hard to decide between teaching the teacher and planning the unit.

The other time difficulty is in scheduling classes; if Ms. X wants to bring in her A-block class during the first week of November, great. Well, until Mr. Y also wants to bring his A-block class during the first week of November. We're on a modular schedule this year, which I love for lots of reasons, but it makes shifting projects a week here or there very difficult, if not impossible. Shifting a project means shortening the time allotted to it, which means radically altering the project--and often short-changing the process.

And let's not even get into the issue of trying to make sure you're reaching all students using this approach. Depending on class schedules and teachers and courses of study, it's not uncommon for a student to either miss a skill completely, or get a double (or triple) dose of it. And while I suppose it's not awful for students to be taught the same skill twice, it's frustrating for them, and it makes it hard to hold their attention and focus (even when I try and give them more advanced skills to practice, they have a hard time differentiating those skills from the ones they see their classmates doing, and when I'm working one-on-one with students practicing these skills for the first time it's hard to find the time to get over to the student who may have been in the library learning this just last week. And they often know enough to be bored, but not enough to be able to help their peers. Frustrating). What I'm concerned about is students who somehow never get these lessons. The senior who claims they've never done in-text citation before. The junior whose website evaluation consists entirely of the words "it looks legit." The student who has never used a database for research. The student who "knows" never to use Wikipedia because "anyone can edit it" who then cites Yahoo! Answers in their research paper. Everyone's moving at a different pace and in a million different directions, and there is no way for me to keep track of it.

And then there's what is, really the biggest issue for me. Much like the "everything in one book" syndrome, it's the "everything in one project" syndrome. Students need to develop search strategies, find and evaluate information, organize, take notes, cite AND often learn new information related to their core course, synthesize it and create a paper/presentation. It's a lot to ask of one project. It's too much.

Many students are so overwhelmed by the idea of the final product of a research paper that they can't properly focus on the process. The product is, for them, what matters, and the process is what's standing in between them and that product. And while I offer to (and beg and plead with) teachers to grade different components of the research process, not many take me up on it, and ultimately I have no say over how different parts of the process are weighted and graded.

In one of the latest projects I worked on with a class, I asked a student to close her laptop while I was giving a brief overview of the resources that would be helpful for this project. She scoffed, "I'm writing the paper." For an assignment that had been given the day before, and on which she'd done no research. I asked another student how he was doing with finding and citing sources, as I'd noticed that he hadn't entered any information into NoodleTools. He told me that he was going to do what he always did--write the paper (on a fairly nuanced and detailed topic) and then find some sources that he could plug in. For those students--and many others--the product was the point; the process was an afterthought (at best).

And so, all that (which was was way more than I intended) being said, I have gone to the powers that be at my school with a proposal to teach a stand-alone information literacy course. And gotten a very enthusiastic response. It's very early in the process, but I'm excited about the possibilities. You'll definitely be hearing more about this as planning moves forward.

Do any of you school librarians out there teach a stand-alone information literacy class? What do you love/like/hate about it? Things I should keep in mind as I start planning?

In the news

In completely unsurprising news, I am, in a word, exhausted. The start of the year has been very, very busy. Mostly in good ways, but not in ways that have provided a lot of time that would naturally suit itself to sitting down and reflecting and blogging. I feel like I'm constantly playing catch-up; I tell myself if I can just catch up, I'll be able to make time to write. But in the midst of getting caught up, a whole other list of things to do is created, and it begins again. Which, I am aware, is not exactly a novel observation.

In expected news, the new schedule--and figuring out how I fit in it--is a big part of this "caught in a whirlwind" feeling. I LOVE having long blocks in which to work with students, but it does mean redesigning all my lessons. And I'm also getting a bit more assertive in terms of "this is how these skills need to be taught, and this is the time I need to do it." All the teachers I'm working with are very receptive, but it also means more reconfiguring of things. But I'm very happy with the new lessons I'm designing, and feel like I'm getting a better handle on the big picture in terms of curriculum writing.

In exciting news, I've been selected for ALA's Emerging Leaders Class of 2011! You can find more about the program (but not my name. . . yet), at this link. And if you're one of my Facebook friends or follow me on Twitter, you'll be sure to know when my name is there. I'm also being sponsored by AASL, which is pretty cool. I'm not always crazy about how ALA functions (for reasons that look a lot like this), but in another not exactly novel observation, I don't think they're unique in being a large organization that is often weighted down by bureaucracy. I debated a long time before deciding to apply, but a good friend helped me figure realize that I can't really just sit on the sidelines and wait for the organization to change; I need to be an active part of making that happen. And given that I'm already involved via CASL and being a part of AASL Affiliate Assembly, I should go ahead and jump in with both feet. So I'll be headed to San Diego in January (don't feel too bad for me) to get started with the program.

In completely unrelated news, I did have an experience the other day in which I had to teach, explicitly, the steps necessary to e-mail a link. In the very basic, "copy/paste/send" sense of the word. Which has me thinking, as I often do, about how carelessly we throw around the idea of "digital natives", and the students who get left out/left behind when we make those assumptions. One of my goals for the year has been to write something and submit it for publication, and I think this might be that something. So I'm going to work on that. When it doesn't get published, I'll be sure to share it here. (My goal is to submit something; the publishing decision is in someone else's hands, so I'm not thinking about it.)

And finally, in other news, Amazon recently recommended The Boxer and the Spy to me, which I would like to offer as conclusive evidence that our computer overlords are not yet all knowing. Amazon also thought I might be interested in men's skinny jeans, which I offer as evidence that we don't need to be that worried about how soon our computer overlords will be all knowing.