Objectives:
Create and support a growth mindset classroom and/or school
Examine and choose motivation strategies to increase engagement to support and enhance learning
Primary Posts on Innovator's Mindset
As a cohort, we all read George Couros's book "Innovator's Mindset". The book looks at mindset, motivation, and processes that lead to student and staff empowerment in a school. This book set the tone for how we would think about and design our projects with empowerment at its core. I especially dug into the book and its content, creating deep reflections and engaging with peers in the online community. The two quotes below are pulled from the six full posts we wrote during the early weeks of the course. They showcase the depth of my engagement in the material and how I took it beyond the book and applied it to my own experiences. When viewing the text from Google+, the comment stream from members of the class shows how I engaged others and continued class dialogue.
1: Adapting what we have to improve the community: I connected the Future Problem Solving (FPS) process to a problem-first learning approach that Couros advocates. I think it offers a learnable method for applying this process without infinite trial and error. (June 4, 2016)
Chapter 2, Question 4: How do we take what we currently have, to create a better education system for our entire community?
On page 34, Couros quotes Thomas Friedman saying "The world only cares about -- and pays off on -- what you can do with what you know (and doesn't care how you learned it)." If applied skill is what matters most, then I think the most powerful shift we could make is to turn classrooms into problem solving teams. Imagine if the first day of class presented you not with a syllabus of content and skills to learn, but with problems to be addressed by the class. From there, the teacher may offer relevant skills and lenses for better understanding and taking on the problems, but would otherwise try to take as little time as possible from students who are actively addressing important issues.
Once students become well practiced in this approach to thinking and working, they could be given lots of flexibility and control over the learning process. Leading up to that time, teachers would need to model problem solving and create a structure to help students get started. One framework I used in an extra curricular activity in school (that I still use today on my own) is the Future Problem Solving Program International (FPSPI)'s 6-step process. Teams start by reading a one-page futuristic scenario, use divergent thinking to identify 16 potential challenges based on the scenario in different categories (such as business, environment, technology, recreation, psychological health...), and then use convergent thinking to write one underlying problem about the scenario. From there, the process repeats with novel solutions: the team write 16 solutions to the team's underlying problem in different categories, writes 5 criteria that are used to judge the solutions, scores the solutions in a grid, and then further develops the details of the winning solution. With time and practice, teachers can help students move beyond this kind of structure to practice with very open-ended future scenes (videos, novels, real places and people in the community), use a wide variety of idea-generation methods, explore more compound systems solutions, communicate the best solution with public technolgies, and iterate on the entire process in cycles to find more important problems and create better solutions over time.
The exciting part about something like this is that we wouldn't have to completely throw school as we know it overboard. Core disciplines like mathematics offer the tools needed for visualizing and comprehending known information, modeling patterns, and making reasonable predictions under given assumptions. The mindshift required for teachers is moving away from a desire to increase unit 3 proficiencies and towards increasing the students' proficiency using mathematical modeling to solve problems. Even if I built the best unit ever on functions, students would still not care about them. Trust me, I've tried throughout all of statistics. However, when you give them a problem worth solving, they suddenly become sponges for anything that helps them solve the problem, even if the lesson is mediocre, and a good lesson can inspire lots of creative solutions and things you didn't expect. From there, we can "embrace the idea that everyone in the classroom is a teacher and a learner" (Couros, page 40).
The other part that continues to resemble traditional classrooms is the need for structure, at least early on in the process. Students cannot be handed a hard problem and given no framework. The FPSPI model is incredibly structured, yet it allows for incredibly creative solutions (I competed with a team for 6 years using only that structure and stayed highly engaged and creative). As teachers, we teach both the working process in class and interject new ways of thinking through our disciplinary training. For example, when trying to identify problems within a modern civil rights issue and develop solutions, it will also be beneficial to explore the past, read literature, analyze statistics, discuss the effects of technologies and systems over time, and many of the things we already do now. The difference is that they become much more relevant in context of taking action. In many ways, this is the point of Project Based Learning (PBL), but I would say it is a problem-focused subset that pushes students to not just answer questions, but actually solve problems.
2: Empowerment >> engagement: Previous to the book, I hardly noticed a difference between these terms. Afterwards, I realized that empowerment takes a step beyond that relies on students taking ownership of the work. When further pushed by my teacher to reflect on a video interview of my students from two years earlier, I had a hard time distinguishing, but believed that the girls in the video really did feel empowered in what they were doing due to the creation of something awesome without specific mandates from me. (June 22, 2016)
Chapter 6, Question 1: How do we create learning opportunities and experiences for students and staff that focus on empowerment, as opposed to engagement?
Starting with my best stab at a definition, engagement is taking in new information and experiences in a way that entertains or helps you more directly feel connected to the content. It is often fun and connects with multiple senses, but is directed by a teacher. I think empowerment is when students are leading the learning process and taking action with purpose. In the example George shares from his health class, he put the learning targets in student-friendly language, divided them up, and put students in charge of bringing the learning to life. Though he didn't talk about it, I am sure this process involved a lot of small group discussions (with him) clarifying why these topics were important so students could buy-in and create meaningful learning experiences for peers.
Many times, I think educators jump to the "let students teach" solution as the way to empower. I did it with my game design class, structuring a few projects and rubrics at the start, pointing students to YouTube, and getting out of the way. In the end, I think many students did feel empowered, and in that sense it isn't a bad place to start. The tension comes from the painful time inefficiency of student-directed skill-building compared to traditional instruction directed by an expert teacher. Speaking from personal experience, an interested learner acquires new skills much faster with a structured lesson than bouncing around for online resources. And yet, as a high school math teacher coming from a subject known for nothing but skill-focused, teacher-directed lessons, I also know that student buy-in is hard to come by and that even the best lesson doesn't make sense when all of a student's energy is focused on not learning it.
My goal for the upcoming school year is to focus on empowerment of purpose very early in the course so that I can also offer students the time efficiency of a well designed skill-building lesson. In my Grand Challenge Design class, I will work hard and fast to sell the mission of "understanding the world's most important grand challenges so we can build appropriate solutions with new technologies". If students truly believe in this and its implications, they will be happy to sit through hours of video lessons on web server design that I create for them, as it will save time in the implementation of their real goal: designing an innovative solution to an interesting global problem of their choosing. In my Algebra course, the focus will be on changing the student's identities from people who fail math classes to people who curiously explore and extend patterns. From there, I want to find ways for students to start asking questions and wondering things about their world. I think if students are empowered to use math for its intended purpose, it will be much easier for me to layer in notation, multiple representations, and vocabulary. I don't know how this will happen yet, but reading the chapter and reflecting on what I am doing in my elective class is helping me think through more possibilities for a required math course.
Your Artifact Reflection
As a collective, the posts and comments I made as we read and discussed the Innovator's Mindset forced me to think more deeply about effective learning and empowered learners. The two posts above show that I both applied my current knowledge to the discussion and expanded my mind to understand new concepts. I engaged others to continue discussing the topics with me in the comment thread and asked hard questions of peers to provoke more discussions.
I believe that the book study led well into the Genius Hour project. I already knew that I wanted to work on something for my new course, but the book made me question how engaging and empowering the class would actually be. As a result, I created a project focused entirely on upping the engagement while maintaining the same learning objectives for that class. Strategies that came from the book included putting the problem first, not prescribing answers, providing opportunities to connect with people outside of the classroom, and providing real-time feedback on student actions.