Teamwork and Target Audience

Several weeks back Charles Riddle, Mark Liu and Simon Nicholls from the Media Arts Department at Wintec (our local Media Arts School, and a strong supporter of this project) spent a Friday afternoon with us sharing some insights from their experiences working on similar projects (including Village on the Hill and The Waikato Independent).

Here's a short video with a couple of excerpts from their talk.



(Please excuse the less than ideal audio! A good interview mic that works with DSLR video is on my list of things to buy for the project. If you have any suggestion of a good brand and model for this, please leave a comment)

Structure, interviews and being transparent

In several ways it's been a challenging week for the project! We seem to have got over the initial novelty of the new programme and working with new people, and the reality of how much work there is to do is settling in. The following are a few observations/reflections on the process thus far:

Structure -
Finding a balance of structure and flexibility that works for each individual is quite a challenge. During a couple of 'family meetings' that have erupted spontaneously (and I suspect are becoming part of the culture of our project) students have indicated that they are finding the lack of directed 'whole class' structure a challenge. Not having set times to do 'English' or 'Art' and the like, and being able to take a break and make a coffee whenever they want, while initially sounding like a great idea is actually quite hard to deal with. Comments like "It's too easy to keep putting off completing a task because you've got all day. Then it's the end of the day and you still haven't done it" have been made more than once. This has made me question how much structure I, as the project leader, should have built into the project. Did we under-plan? Or are we moving through a period of learning how to be better self-managers, in what will ultimately prove to be a really productive development?

We're currently experimenting with students blogging their daily goals first-up each morning, and then reflecting on their progress three times a day in an attempt to help establish more structure for each individual. So far this has helped to bring a bit more accountability, but I suspect it is taking more time than is necessarily beneficial, and that a daily goal and reflection is probably more than enough. Based on one of the students setting her daily goal as "get the IT man to block Blogger so we don't have to blog each day" I may not be the only one who thinks this! You can read their blogs by following the links on the lower right hand side of this page.

Interviews - 
The main tasks our students have been working on over the past couple of weeks have been researching background information on the artists they hope to interview for the articles they will write, and making contact with those artists to set up interviews. As someone who is a rather word-based person the idea of doing this really appeals, to me but I know for a number of the students it has become quite a hard slog - reading and reading and reading, and coming across the same information in slightly different forms as they visit various gallery websites.

However, in the last few days, as artists have begun to reply to the students and emailed interviews have got underway there seems to have been a renewed vigor in the work. When you're about to speak to someone about their work in person there is a real pressure to make sure you know what you're talking about, and you're not asking silly questions!

Being transparent - 
Interwoven into the development of the Curriculum Integration Project (and in particular through this blog) is a philosophy of making the process transparent: sharing our failures as well as our successes and making explicit the thinking behind the actions we're taking. As I've been thinking about what to write for this blog update I've found that a bit of a challenge. Sharing your adventure when it's in the planning and imagining stages can be inspirational and exciting. Sharing it when some of the students are less than thrilled about their day to day activities, and you're feeling like the project running a week or two behind schedule is a different story!

Still, I remind myself that it'll be great to be able to look back and accurately recall the process we went through, and that for others who are planning similar projects it could be encouraging to see that our path hasn't all been rainbows and roses!

The unexpected curriculum

I think it's interesting how as a teacher you can plan a series of lessons or learning experiences for students, and then when they're put into action a whole lot of other learning also takes place?

Last week's key focus was going to be how we could apply design thinking and some creativity to turning a traditional classroom space into something that would better enable teams to carry out project based work, and that would be interesting and inspiring to spend time in. We achieved this, to a reasonable extent, although there are still many parts of this project to complete (chief among them being getting rid of the world's ugliest curtains and replacing them with a window treatment that allows us to vary light levels, and reduces heat from the sun).

However, there was other, less fully anticipated, but ultimately more important learning that took (and will continue to take) place:

• How do you work with people who have a different work ethic and work output to you?
• Working with the same people all day is quite different to the usual secondary school scenario. How do you get the best out of this?
• What additional skills and contacts do we each bring to a project such as this, and how can we utilise them to achieve the greatest value for the project?
• When helping students to develop their problem solving skills, what is the balance between making it too easy for them by giving them my answers, and making it too hard for them by leaving them completely to their own devices?
• How do you use a belt sander? How much paint will hessian board absorb before it stops looking patchy?
• People who may not have been entirely excited about a project when you describe it to them can have a much more positive response when they see it in the flesh, and see the learning that is taking place.
• Support staff are incredible - in our case two of the ground staff put their other work on hold for most of two days to help us out

Some of this learning was relatively easy and pleasant. Other learning was, and will continue to be, challenging. Some of the learning was experienced by the students. Much of the learning was experienced by their teacher.

Classroom makeover

The planning had been done, and it was time to get our hands dirty and make some physical changes to the classroom.

Learning@Schools and Co-construction

 CORE Education's Learning@Schools conference, two full days of challenging and extending my thinking and connecting with inspiring educators, finished on Friday. Here are some reflections on my learning from the conference.

Co-construction is a nice education-y word, and one that I thought I understood pretty well and was a reasonable practitioner of. However, several discussions during the conference seem to have conspired to blow apart my understanding of it somewhat. Following our meeting via Twitter (@samcunnane and @christianlong) and on this blog, my colleague Lorena Strother and I attended Christian's presentation on designing 21st C learning spaces. Our post-presentation discussion about the curriculum integration project was wide ranging and inspirational. One of the more immediately applicable outcomes was a decision to begin the project by letting the students design the arrangement of their learning space from the bare room upwards. This isn't the most obvious epiphany (!), but it feels like began to crystallise a significant shift in my thinking about how I teach.

Maybe it's better explained like this: I have a increasingly clear vision of what I want students at Fraser to learn or become: people who know what they're passionate about, and who are learning how to develop the skills to make a life in that area of the world and society. For those of you who are teachers, think of that as our ultimate 'learning objective'. Previously I've assumed that the best way to get to that 'point', or at least to head students in the right direction, was to set up a series of activities that would step them along the journey. I might co-construct how these activities would be done with the students, but essentially I expected them to take their direction from me. I assumed that essentially I knew the best way for them to get from A to B. What if (and being introduced to the concept of 'desire paths' during DK's session on the future of school design advanced my thinking in this area) my role is not to lay out the path, but to help the learners (myself included) find their way from wherever they are now in the direction of point B (recognising that where I thought point B was may well not be where they need to go anyway!). 

The upshot of this all is a move towards developing a point of connection, an intersection, between a whole lot of creatives (some of whom are Fraser students, and others whom are practicing members of the various creative communities), instead of just producing a magazine. So, if we assume that encultrating students into local and global communities of creative production is the end goal (and part of me now questions if even this is something I can assume, but for now we'll say it is), our new challenge becomes identifying within this what the 'problems' are that need solving so that our students become part of those communities. That makes the first weeks of school a bit different to the traditional "We'll be covering these standards, so get learning the answers"!

I suspect this post reads somewhat like a combination of jumbled ideas. Oh well! Check out the following for some additional (and more coherent) thoughts on the issue:

Teach your students to fail better, by Christian Long on ISTE

College Readiness: Learning Collaboratively, by Ben Johnson on Edutopia 

Ewan McIntosh at TEDxLondon, September 2011

The Third Teacher (on less than a shoestring)

I dropped by school this afternoon, and our classroom is 'ready' to start being transformed into the studio of a student driven visual culture hipster publication. As you can see, there's going to be a bit of work required to take it from where it is to a space that rivals Google's office environments.

However, as innovators, and not ones to be disheartened by the lack of a personal architect and a building team, we'll be transforming the space over the next three weeks into an environment that is at the very least conducive of a range of collaborative and individual learning opportunities. Our main ideas are based on flexible and interchangeable spaces for talking and working in various sized groups, spaces to socialize and recharge (couches and kai) and spaces for making work.

We'll be taking inspiration from The Third Teacher (a project I first met via the book, which my principal promptly stole off me when I showed it to her!). We're pretty excited about having Christian Long (from Cannon Design, home of The Third Teacher) speaking at the Learning@School conference right here in Hamilton later this month.

John Seely Brown: the architectural studio as a model of the classroom

Isn't it affirming when you find reminders that what you've been thinking a out and trying to achieve fits in with what a whole lot of other people have been thinking about and doing too? Over the last couple of days (and likely for the next few too) I've been doing a fair bit of wandering across the web following up interesting links, and it looks like the next few posts I make will be less of my own thinking and more of a collection of ideas our project aligns with and connects to.

This 2008 talk by Jorhn Seely Brown, which I came across in Fast Company's Co.Design post 4 lessons the classroom can learn from the design studio (which is definitely worth reading) seems to sum up and expand on many of the ideas we've based the development of our Curriculum Integration Project on.

Sir Ken Robinson on why alternative education approaches need to become mainstream

In this video from the closing session of TEDx London Sir Ken Robinson comments on how many of the principles of alternative education - high engagement levels for students, strong connections between teachers and students - should be the principles of mainstream education.

A transcript can be downloaded here, thanks to the inSync21 website.