Communicate What You Know - AND - How You Learned It

I often get asked the question, “What technology tool can I use to make presentations more interesting?  My students are bored with (insert common tech here, i.e. Slides, PowerPoint, Prezi, etc.).”

Yes, there are many online tools out there to help us create presentations.  However, I believe that the students aren’t bored because of the tool.  They are bored because all of the presentations give the same EXACT information they discovered on their own and put into their own presentation.  They are literally hearing the same information 5-20 different times.  Honestly, I’d be bored, too.  

And I was.  As I teacher, I used standard presentations in a lot of my group assignments.  I tasked my students with a learning objective and then, tagged on to the end of the assignment, they were asked to present what they learned.  Often this included a rubric where they were given what should be included in the presentation and even (ugh) the number of slides required.  Consequently I saw, essentially, the same presentation over and over.  And then I wondered why I wasn’t getting “better” presentations.

In my classroom, I had 3 objectives for the presentation:

1. Discover what the students learned in the project.
2. Ensure all students were exposed to each other’s learning to cover any gaps in their own project.
3. Develop student communication skills.

These are OK objectives and seemed to justify why presentations were included in most of my projects.  I usually achieved Objective 1, but I will admit that I could have done as good a job discovering that by reading their submitted project.  I thought I was achieving Objective 2, but as the boredom or disinterest set in, this benefit diminished.  And then there is Objective 3.  It seemed that, presentation after presentation, the students were not improving.  Just more of the same.

It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to watch presentations as a third party that the lightbulb went on.  I kept asking myself these new questions:

1. What if we didn’t save presentations for the end?  
2. What if we devoted an equal amount of class time (for me this was 2-3 class periods) to preparing presentations but sprinkled it throughout the project?  
3. What if the focus of the presentation wasn’t on the end result, but rather on the decision making parts of the project?  

OHHHH!  Every student or group goes through a different process in a project.  From the way they assign tasks to the decision to include/exclude information, they are all different.  It is in this process that learning happens.  It is also in this process that reflection can happen and deepen that learning.  I felt elated to discover a way to help students evaluate which assumptions or decisions led to their final conclusion.

The objectives for the presentation can still be the same.  However, we have a much better shot at actually achieving those objectives when the students are interested, the presentations are varied, and the focus is on their own process rather than on the outcome.  As a bonus, it doesn’t matter which tool we use.  The interesting part of the presentation isn’t the visual aid.  The interesting part is the presenter and his/her story.  And isn’t that where the focus should be, anyway?

Collaborate Like a Boss - Building Your PLN

I am the first to admit, I don’t have all the answers.  I have not experienced enough, seen enough, or done enough to know what and how to do all the “things” I want to do.  Because of this, I rely on a network of people to help me.  I take ideas, resources, and materials from other educators and education professionals.  

I feel enabled to use and edit work from my network because I am also willing to give back to the collective so that others can benefit.  It’s truly one of the most beautiful things about our digital age in education.  If I use something you created, you still have access to it.  You can still use it, but so can I.  Work can be replicated, improved, changed, and increased, all without losing access.  Gone are the days of file cabinets full of our best work.  In the “old days,” when you left a position or changed school districts, you either took your work and passion projects with you and left the new person with nothing, or you left it behind requiring you to start over.  

I was so fortunate to work with a group of passionate, visionary, and driven professionals.  They were steps away from me and I could turn to them in the moment and have instant collaboration.  This is the type of collaboration that we often teach in our classrooms.  Turn and talk, pair-share, elbow partners.  These are all instances of synchronous collaboration.  Work grows organically out of these types of discussions as one person often becomes the scribe of the ideas.

I have had the opportunity to replant myself in a new place, both geographically and professionally.  I no longer have physical access to my previous co-workers, but it does not mean this collaboration group has to end.  Because they shared in the idea of giving and taking, I was able to take copies of all our work product with me to my new position.  It wasn’t starting from scratch, but they were not left without that work either.  

My group has now entered into asynchronous collaboration.  Collaboration that happens without face-to-face time.  I work on projects and offer it back to the collective.  The other collaborators do the same.  I must clarify, this is not divided group work.  The work is not segmented, where the members of the group only contribute to their assigned section.  This must be the next level of collaboration that we promote to our students.

When I was in the classroom, students would often complain to me that they group work was breaking down because one or more members were not showing up to assigned group work sessions due to work or family conflicts.  I know now that I had done little to help them understand how and why they should engage in asynchronous collaboration.  I also know now that I was unprepared to help them with this because I had not engaged in it successfully myself.  As education professionals, it is difficult for us to teach these skills to our students unless we are proficient ourselves.

The acronym I included in the blog title was “PLN”.  What does that stand for?  It stands for a “Professional Learning Network.”  It is one of the best things educators can do for personal professional development.  MindShift has a great article on getting started with your PLN.  #learnbps and #innovateSPS are two fantastic Twitter hashtags for schools that are sharing innovative practices.

So please, find a safe space where you feel empowered to find and use resources that meet your educational needs.  Create your Twitter account, form a “virtual study group” at your school, join a Schoology discussion forum, start a blog.  Just do something to get yourself out there.  Your network will grow and you, too, can use and contribute.

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Collaboration - More than "Playing Nice"

Much like my post on Critical Thinking, collaboration is one of those words buzzing around education circles. Its meaning, its definition, and its impact on learning is as varied as the number of classrooms trying to embed it. However, unlike critical thinking, many of us believe we understand what collaboration is and what it looks like. 

When I work with a group of people who start discussing collaboration, I often hear that we already do group work in school. I also hear conversations about effectiveness of that group work being judged by how many conflicts arise and whether the task is accomplished. I absolutely agree that this is a beginning conversation on collaboration, but it cannot be the end. In his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum gave these first three points:

1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don't hit people.

I believe this is a pretty concise definition of cooperation. Cooperation is a first step on the way to collaboration. But remember, the root of collaboration is to “Co-Labor.” To work together. To accomplish more together than we could on our own. 

Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work, says, “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

For our students to create great work, we need to give them the opportunity to interact, to share, to experience, and to disagree with a wide variety of people, places, and ideas. We need to design these opportunities to collaborate beyond just getting along. Facilitating discussions, asking questions, and demanding that the sum of the work is greater than the contributions of the individual is our imperative as education professionals.

Sometimes cooperation-on-the-way-to-collaboration is a fantastic teacher tool that gets students to a learning objective faster. My kids recently discovered the wonderful world of Osmo. I was so excited to see them working together to solve a problem. It warmed my mother/teacher heart.

However, this is play. This is cooperation. They’ve been proficient at parallel play and cooperative play for a very long time. They worked together without fighting and solved a problem. Could they have solved this problem on their own? Absolutely. But they solved it faster by working together.

In school, this is where we get to turn fun into real learning. What do we do with that added time we get from successful cooperation? We get to deepen the learning! Ask those kiddos why they made the decisions they made and spark a conversation between them. Have them try to find a new solution to a problem they already solved and watch them build on their previous knowledge.