Category: Space Explainers

No comments

Level Design: In-Class Focus

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

There are levels here. The first level is the post you are now reading, which offers a simple mandate:

Treat your class time as the rare resource it is, and advocate for yourself early and often.

That’s the surface level. The next level asks you to read just under 300 words on in-class focus. It does not take long.

Leveling Up: Level 1-1

Leveling Up: Level 1-1

Then we get to a level that covers the same material in a little over 800 words.

Leveling Up: Level 2

Leveling Up: Level 2

Finally, you get to a complete unit of study. It clocks in at over 2800 words and incorporates a considerable amount of ramiform reading. It teaches you much more than you think, too.

Leveling Up: Boss Level

Leveling Up: Boss Level

This is done to help you. You need self-discipline, self-awareness, self-control — and if you ever doubt the reasons why, you could look at another set of leveled lectures:

There are levels. Get as far as you can.

No comments

66 Minutes

  By 2020-2021, Distance Learning, Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

If you were to look at all the categories assigned to this post, you’d see it covers everything from grade abatement to feedback to triage. Looking through those categories isn’t the point today, though; the links are there to emphasize that the post you are reading is important. Very, very important. Use-an-empty-adverb-and-italicize-it important.

The central concept here is that you must maximize your work for the 66 minutes of class time allotted this year. You’ll have breaks built in, including breaks you can schedule yourself; the rest of the time must be fully focused on our work.

You’ll have a flexible set of guidelines for this, which you can load below:

That schedule is printed and posted in the classroom, too. This post provides context. You will start with a list of instructional posts that have something in common.

You do not need to read these, because they are assigned when needed; several of them, in fact, have been sent in concert with the post you are reading now.

Again and again, these posts circle back, like so many falcons in the widening gyre, to in-class focus and feedback. Those are the keys.

The feedback in question is more than the feedback you receive on work. It’s the instructional feedback chain that you need to learn and to grow. You cannot be successful without sustained in-class focus and a habit of reading — closely reading — every instructional post, guide, letter, and comment.

This year, 2020-2021, you are physically present for our course only once a week. The odd Wednesday you attend will be dedicated to the Pareto Project. This is a strange schedule for a strange year.

Here are multiple versions of the full scope and sequence of the year:

What this exhaustive planning drives home for me is also what it should drive home for you:

  1. We spend the first four months of the year practicing and hopefully mastering the skills, traits, and processes of authentic learning.
  2. Only if you have built those foundations can you use the final five months to create extraordinary work.
  3. You cannot build anything in this space without serious in-class focus, especially on interstitial feedback and instruction.

In other words, if you do not make the most of your in-class focus, and if you do not invest fully in the instructional framework of this course, you cannot be successful.

Each week, you meet for just 66 minutes in person for a period of intense focus. This will include conferences, in-person workshops, presentations, lectures, and class discussions. You must make active, thoughtful choices.

There will be just 33 minutes additionally of at-home focus. This will include synchronous activities like discussions, lectures, and peer presentations. Distance learners can extend this beyond the required 33 minutes. You must make the best of the situation.

Again, you have access to a schedule for this:

Wednesdays will always be set aside for “genius hour” passion projects. Students who are on the schedule will workshop their projects, in person or remotely; the other students have the option of asynchronous feedback through Drive, Docs, or a meeting during office hours.

Overall, there is a limited amount of time for the critical in-person work on writing, reading, and the other Humanities skills and traits. You must, therefore, direct yourself outside of class time to prepare for in-person feedback and workshops.

If you do nothing else, you must treat the 66 minutes of in-person time as sacrosanct: You must do good, authentic Humanities work while you are in the classroom.

This is possible. 66 minutes is just 0.65% of your entire week. If you happen to be in person on Wednesday, too, that percentage doubles to just 1.3% of your life over seven days.

You can dedicate a single percentage of your time each week to this space. And a strange thing will happen, when you do: You will find it easier to dedicate more time outside of this space to this work. You will find the work more meaningful. It will be easier.

This is the trick of it: The more you invest in the class, the more you benefit; the more you benefit, the more you will want to invest in the class, and the easier it will be to do so. Authenticity and understanding stack.

Once more, here is the post that breaks down your 66-minute periods for 2020-2021:

  1. This is the text that you’ll find reprinted below, almost verbatim. ↩

No comments

2020: In-Person/Remote Schedules

  By 2020-2021, Distance Learning, Space Explainers

Read these posts first:

2020 In-Person/Remote Class Schedules

The single-sheet schedules posted separately to Google Classroom are available by period in this folder:

Note that these schedules are designed to give us structure and predictability; we will follow them closely, but they will not be rigidly enforced. There is built-in flexibility.

See below for nonspecific versions of the in-person and remote schedules. See the folder above for your specific period’s times.

In-Person Learners

Use the first three minutes to set up your workspace and to complete the Daily Record: Self-Report form.

The next 15 minutes are dedicated to direction instruction. Take notes, ask questions, and otherwise interact with in-person instruction, which will include lectures, assignment adjustments, and general feedback. This will be delivered synchronously to remote learners.

After direct instruction, you will have 15 minutes, sometimes more, to ask questions, to receive individualized help, or to begin the day’s task. This also applies to remote learners, who will interact with the teacher via chat.

You will then take a five-minute break. This happens exactly 33 minutes into the period. During this break, remote learners will log off, so the teacher will answer their last-minute questions over chat. You can take off your mask, have a snack or drink, etc, as long as you remember not to talk to each other while unmasked.

Note: As long as it is not during direct instruction, you can schedule your own breaks throughout the period by using e-hallpass. You may leave to get a drink of water, to go to the bathroom, or to take a quick walk.

The next 25 minutes of the period are dedicated to in-person work. This includes individual conferences, small-group instruction, and class discussions. Students will help set the agenda.

With three minutes left in the period, you should pack up your workspace. Leave the space as clean as you found it. Ask any last-minute questions.

Remote Learners

Use the first three minutes to set up your at-home workspace and to complete the Daily Record: Self-Report form. Most importantly, log into Google Meet.

Note: You must write in the chat window of Google Meet that you are present. Chats are archived.

The next 15 minutes are dedicated to direction instruction. This is delivered synchronously to in-person learners, so you should follow those guidelines: Take notes, ask questions, and otherwise interact with in-person instruction, which will include lectures, assignment adjustments, and general feedback.

Note: The camera will initially show the teacher speaking at the front of the room; after that, materials will be presented directly to your device.

After direct instruction, you will have 15 minutes, sometimes more, to ask questions, to receive individualized help, or to begin the day’s task. Use the chat function for this. You must also monitor the chat for any additional comments from the teacher.

Note: You may choose to keep your camera on or off during remote learning. Keep the mic off. You must write in the chat at the beginning and end of your session. The classroom mic will remain on for direct instruction and radial feedback.

When you reach the 33-minute mark of the period, you may choose to log off. You may also stay for the entire 66-minute period, or for any portion of it.

Note: You must write in the chat that you have no further questions before logging off. Chats are archived.

The next 25 minutes of the period are dedicated to in-person work. You may stay logged into Google Meet for the rest of the period. When you log off, you must still write in that chat that you are doing so.

With three minutes left in the period, you must log out of Google Meet to allow the teacher to archive the chat.

No comments

Terms and Conditions

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

Dima Yarovinsky, “I Agree” (2018)

Meeting the Course on Its Own Terms

Every instructional post, however long or short, has a thesis1. The thesis of the post you are now reading:

You must meet this course on its own terms.

But it’s not just that you must meet the course on its own terms; you must also stop yourself from substituting your own terms and using your own assumptions.

This is true for every stakeholder, not just students. Innovation requires a good-faith investment from parents, administrators, interested teachers, and anyone else who cares about student learning. There is too much bad faith out there already.

You can start with this quotation:

The challenge is to set up systems that allow students to follow their interests. People tend to dichotomize approaches in education: The teacher is either telling students what to do, or standing back and letting them figure it out. I think that’s a false choice: The issue is not structure versus no structure, but rather creating a different structure. Students need to be exposed to new ideas and learn how to persist. They also need support.
~Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators

This course uses just such a unique structure.

For the first part of the year, students learn how to learn. They are exposed to new ideas and helped to master important skills and traits. They explore the expected reading and writing of ELA as they learn universal tools and processes.

During the first part of the year, individual feedback is given alongside a framework of instructional, interstitial writing. Students are assessed through a unique, profile-based system based on universal skills and traits.

For the second part of the year, students put their skills and traits to work on a series of projects in the Humanities: reading and responding to literature; writing research-driven essays; public speaking and letter-writing; and the student-driven “genius hour” projects that can be tied into the final exam.

I would usually fill paragraphs like those last three with hyperlinks to demonstrate that each element of this structure supports the rest in improving student learning. That is what you’ll see everywhere else in this post, as well as everywhere else on this site.

In this case, however, the lack of links is there to emphasize the thesis we’re working with: You must meet this course on its own terms, and you cannot replace those terms and conditions with your own.

In Good Faith

You can always look to the testimonials and history of the course to dispel any misinformation or disinformation. If you act in good faith, honestly looking to understand what we do, you can avoid low-information sepsis.

Even when you are informed, you must still face down your assumptions. If you’re a student, some of those assumptions are that you will be spoon-fed information; that you will be asked to regurgitate facts and insight on tests; and that the teacher should perform in front of you, Keating-style, to hold your attention.

In this course, the teacher interacts with students constantly and responsively through writing. This is part and parcel of the course. We meet in person regularly; there is constant, feedback on student work; and every period is designed as a workshop in which students collaborate with the teacher and peers. The use of the written word, however, is paramount: Writing is the most essential act in the Humanities.

This is also about teaching in a new way instead of capitulating to outdated assumptions about learning. I’m thinking specifically about “Teaching as an Amusing Activity,” the tenth chapter in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which gives us the following quotation:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

That is embedded on the homepage, in the course syllabus, and throughout the course. It is the essential philosophy of effective education: a focus on the process, not just the product.

Postman goes on in that chapter to explain that performative, entertainment-based education is like watching television — a passive act that mostly teaches you how to watch, not learn. If you’re a student, your learning cannot passive, because it is most importantly about you. You must be an active agent in the process of creating those “enduring attitudes.”

This course rejects the “rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic image,” as Postman predicted decades ago, and embraces instead “the slow-moving printed word.” The computer screen is just the medium for the written word.

Look at our guide to writing, especially at the quotations that are used to illustrate each universal component:

The first quotation is in Latin and elevated to the top of the guide. It is the philosophy of a Humanities makerspace: Verba volant, scripta manent. Spoken words fly away, while written words remain.

And that brings us back to one of the most ineluctable terms and conditions of the course:

You must read what is written.

This isn’t unique to a makerspace, of course. Textbooks must be read, lectures must be heard, videos must be watched, etc. Whatever a teacher uses for instruction must be honored in good faith.

The difference here is what this kind of interstitial instruction requires — and what it does to help students.

The first advantage of this kind of carefully constructed instruction is that it teaches students how to write and how to read. This is Dewey’s idea of enduring habits and self-efficacy: It is more important to build skills and traits than to internalize knowledge.

So the instruction is not just informational. It adds more to student learning than other forms of flipped instruction.

The post you are reading right now is an example: It is designed to model effective writing and to strengthen close reading. It repeatedly invites students to learn more about philosophy. It defines new vocabulary. It varies style and rhetoric to invite emulation.

The second advantage is that the work stacks. The more students read this kind of writing, the faster their writing and reading improves. Paul Graham puts it this way: “[T]he more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto — which means you accumulate knowledge at what’s colloquially called an exponential rate.”

These posts are meant to build habits, not simply impart facts and directions. This is the key.

Contrasting Space

A contrast is found on the whiteboards used regularly in the physical classroom. (You can take a tour of that space online.) Whiteboard writing is temporary by design, unlike everything else written to students.

Here is an example of the whiteboards in Room 210, taken from the week of September 21, 2020 (and presented with all the glares and discoloration you’d expect):

The first whiteboard allows us to talk in person, early in the year, about how feedback works. It is a visual reference for me to use during discussions and individual conferences, too.

The phrase “feedback chain” is a reference to a post: The Feedback Chain. That post is essential reading.

The metaphor on the whiteboard is “[c]loning the teacher and instruction,” with a note that this is done “via flipped and interstitial writing, video, and audio.” This is a summary of how this site and most other feedback works: It effectively clones the teacher, freeing up class time for more individual and small-group discussion.

The second whiteboard is an overview of current course work, circa 9/23/20. Since this is also from early in the year, it contains significant emphasis on the backbone of the course — which is, again, the way a student interacts with letters, posts, guides, and other teacher-written materials.

That metaphor — a fairly clichéd “backbone” metaphor — is also found in the letter given to students at the start of school in 2020:

Letters like that work on multiple levels. One is, again, to teach writing and reading through exposure; another is to emphasize the terms of the course in order to invite more reading, thinking, and writing. Here are the first three paragraphs of that letter, reprinted because they evoke Neil Postman’s prescient analysis of education:

This letter will be read to you in class. It is available online, too, to illustrate its central argument, which is that reading letters like this is the most critical skill in our course and the most important element of your growth in the skills and traits that matter most.

The backbone of this course is its instructional method, which is based in reading and taking notes on what you read. The difference between students who benefit tremendously from this space and students who struggle is their investment in this instructional method.

You also have access to face-to-face meetings, of course, plus scheduled visits to office hours, virtual meetings in class, and just about any form of written back-and-forth you can think of. The online instructional method does not exist in a vacuum, and there are dozens of ways to make it work for you or to supplement it with additional instruction.

The bolded clause is another condition of the course: If you invest in reading the posts, letters, guides, and so on, you will improve the skills and traits that matter most. For students, this is the backbone of learning. You’ll gain the information you need, but you’ll more importantly deepen your ability to learn.

In other words, it’s not just about becoming a better reader and write, but improving in all the skills and traits that matter.

2020 also featured the first attempt at an FAQ driven by student questions early in the year:

Each response models effective writing, and the interlocking links and references promote close reading. The length of the FAQ requires students to organize their time, and the new ideas and insights require critical thinking.

The FAQ is, therefore, designed not just to answer questions but to teach students more about how they learn.

Contrast this with more forms of flipped instruction, especially most video-based instruction, which transmits information and insight that is independent of the medium used. The medium isn’t the message; the goal of a video lecture, for instance, is not to help students create their own video lectures.

Here, the medium is the message: Every written post, guide, FAQ response, etc, is constructed to model effective writing for students. Each one is written specifically to invite emulation. Each is also written with meta-commentary to identify what students should be learning.

That’s why a post might link to the definition of terms a student might not know2. It’s why the use of rhetorical strategies is made transparent, with definitions or examples provided through meta-commentary. It’s a different kind of writing.

The Conclusion

The conclusion is a proven one:

The more students read the instructional writing of this course, the more they will improve as students.

For non-student stakeholders, the conclusion would be that delving into the course writings will erase every concern and illuminate every success. A good-faith effort to learn about what we do will reward that faith with ironclad data and evidence; a bad-faith dismissal of what we do reinforces ignorance and resistance.

If you are a student, each and every letter, post, guide, and comment is designed to expose you to effective writing so you can learn from it. It’s not just about embracing the slow pace of the written word or deepening your thinking; it’s about the oldest form of learning, which is to copy what you see.

This is the age of the essay, as people like Paul Graham noted 15 years ago. It is the age of online discourse. In here, you read that kind of writing as part of each assignment, which builds the skills and traits you need. You read what you are later asked to write.

The reading must be pervasive, too. It needs to be part of every day. That is why the term for this is interstitial. You can access the course at any time, from any device that can get onto the Web.

Look up the literal definition of the term interstitial and apply it to your learning. You can read a post, FAQ, or letter whenever you have a chunk of time. You can read the text in sections, jump from one section to another, or linger over one section until it is clear. You can ask questions privately or publicly. You can read answers on your own time, too.

That means that you do not need to be physically present in a classroom to benefit from the instruction. You do not always need to consume the instructional materials in one sitting, either. You can be anywhere, and as long as you have a device with an Internet connection, you can practice close reading, absorb strategies for effective writing, and deepen your knowledge in the Humanities.

Along with that interstitial instructional model, we have grade abatement and makerspace-based projects to weather almost any storm. These are our building blocks. They work in concert. It all rests on the writing, however.

I think the best way to understand this is to read what students gain from this approach. This, too, emphasizes writing as central. Another of Neil Postman’s insights is that writing, because of its permanence, gets us closer to the truth; for students, their own writing is the vehicle for truth.

That said, it is also important to highlight what students stand to lose, especially now:

A Glass Case Full of Lost Treasures and Fossils

  1. The two linked examples also demonstrate the way instruction is explicitly differentiated. Students can access the course at a level that is appropriate for them. If there is a lengthier, more detailed version of an instructional post, it is for stronger or more invested students. The depth is responsive to student needs and interest. ↩

  2. In this “Terms and Conditions” post, for instance, you’ve gotten prescient and ineluctable. Vocabulary is about encountering words in context, as one of the FAQ responses details; an instructional text, however, might link directly to the definition. ↩

No comments

On Reflection & Metacognition

  By Grade Abatement, Skill-Building, Space Explainers

Note: This is adapted from two posts written way back in 2011-2012. The focus on grades is the most obvious difference.

Making a Distinction

While we often use them this way, the words metacognition and reflection are not exactly interchangeable. In brief:

  1. Metacognition is thinking about thinking.
  2. Self-reflection is a more general (and somewhat existential) kind of introspection.

The most important habits of mind are reflection and metacognition, and you should engage in both after every task. The reason is simple: To become a better reader, writer, and thinker requires an understanding of how one reads, writes, and thinks; and to inculcate that reflex takes significant time in and out of class.

An immediate example of metacognition would be to assess your reaction to the hyperlink in that last paragraph. Clicking on inculcate defines the term for you. Did you notice the word? Did you click on it? Reflecting on the action you took invites metacognition about your approach to reading. You should also recognize, as you think about that link, that this kind of interactive self-awareness is now part of the way you must learn to read:

Well, Why Read?

Again, pay attention to how you respond to an embedded post like that. Do you open it? Do you set it aside for later? Have you seen it before, and if so, to what extent do you pause to remember what it says? Now consider what you do with this:

This video, which is one level of a lesson on self-control taught in this space, may be more accessible to you. Why? If you watch the video, how do you process its message? Toward the end, for instance, you’ll hear a reference to “capable psychonauts” and see this:

These are universal skills, and your habits around them will determine a lot of your future success. More immediately, of course, reflection and metacognition are useful in all English work, from literature to project-based learning. You may have a weekly requirement, for instance, and that may even be a graded requirement (since abatement isn’t total, and no one can change a system entirely).

Start with our universal writing process. It requires metacognitive self-awareness to function, because the feedback loop built into does not rely on grades. See the last few sections for details:

(The instructional post on the writing process delves even more into the art of writing.)

Here is an excerpt from the end of that writing guide:

In the Humanities makerspace, we use unique systems to generate radial, proxy, and direct feedback, as seen here: tinyurl.com/210feedback.

We focus on process and growth. We avoid scores and rubrics outside of test prep.

Feedback comes from reflection and metacognition throughout and at the end of the process. Consider, as an example: sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=1059.

Feedback also comes from an audience found beyond the walls of the classroom. There are many options for writers now. Medium is one. It takes moments to register and to set up a reading list of essays on subjects you choose by writers not much different from you.

Then you can write and publish, embracing a hypertextual and interstitial environment, as seen here: tinyurl.com/210interstitial.

It’s another idea from Paul Graham: “Who are you to write about x? You are what you write.” There is no barrier to publishing for a wide and diverse audience.

Your search for an authentic audience helps us to discuss metacognition and reflection. Again, we can focus on essays while recognizing that all Humanities work benefits from the same level of self-analysis.

Effective reflection and metacognition is both a key and a blueprint for you and your collaborators. You can unlock better feedback, and you can design the best final product.

You want to avoid this:

After reading it over, I noticed that it was a little rough around the edges and could easily be improved quite a bit.  Another factor of my essay that should be touched upon as well would be my overall incorporation of the documents into my essential question.  My analysis of the documents themselves was weak, and I found that I didn’t use them to my full advantage to help prove my argument. (Total length of reflection: ≈200 words)

And this:

I thought my essay was great, and I handed it in disappointed in my score as has been the routine in this class. When I went back into my essay for revision, I didn’t really change anything major, but I edited a number of errors I found in the grammatical bowels of the language, and changed some words and phrases here and there that I thought were lost in meaning. (Total length of reflection: ≈300 words)

Instead, you want to reflect and be metacognitive like this:

The first error to correct was the reference to “bumps in the road”.  From this reference I immediately jumped into a scenario with a zombie apocalypse, making the connection weak and illogical to the reader.  So, I reworded the third sentence and then added in another sentence to build the degree of trouble from a small obstacle to total destruction.  Also, I added in another sentence after introducing the idea of a zombie apocalypse to better preface the Braunbeck quote.  Finally, I fixed the penultimate sentence in the first paragraph in order to clarify my ideas. (Total length of reflection: ≈1500 words)

Or this:

I decided to revisit the topic of appearance-changing technology that I touched upon in the introduction, and have the new paragraph focus on how appearance is important in society, sometimes more so than the mind is. This may seem silly, but I wanted to hear other’s ideas so I asked my essential question at dinner to see what my family thought. My mom instantly brought up appearance and my dad said that recent presidents have been consistently taller than their competitive candidates during their elections. I gathered that I was on the right track as my ideas matched up with others, and also decided to research the pattern my dad had discussed. Then the question came up as to if I should cite statistical information that I find on the internet. Should I? (Total length of reflection: ≈900 words)

The weaker examples could be about any paper and any prompt. They require collaborators to dig up the original draft, to read it again, and then to compare each sentence to the equivalent sentence in the revision.

More importantly, weak reflection and metacognition does not help you, the writer, to improve. It is perfunctory. In our makerspace, there is no benefit to perfunctory self-analysis, as you can see in the step-by-step guide to grade abatement: tinyurl.com/step-by-step-gap.

What you want, instead, is actionable insight into how you learn. You want to learn something about how you learn that improves you, or that deepens a strength, or that cuts out a weakness.

You should note that this focus on metacognition is as old as education itself, and that one of the quotations on the front page of this site emphasizes this:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

No comments

Opening-Day Questionnaire

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

“Exactly so! I am a humbug.”

Illustration by W.W. Denslow, as archived here. Full illustrated e-text of L. Frank Baum’s novel here.

Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

The following questionnaire (or one very much like it) is given to students at the start of their time in the Humanities makerspace:

This is the start of a feedback chain — a connection between the students and the various innovations of the course. The answers to these questions will help to build a better form of feedback.

Most of the time, I would stick to exactly that sort of self-effacing setup: a focus on the course, not the teacher; the use of the passive voice to the point where it’s a bit stilted; and substantial hyperlinks, like the ones in that last paragraph, that emphasize the course philosophy.

This self-effacing approach has led to testimonials that talk more often about the course and the students themselves than the teacher. Any adult can jump on a desk and poorly interpret Robert Frost; it always seemed more important to push against the myth that it’s all about the teacher. Students benefit more from approaches that instill autonomy and agency.

The pendulum swings, though, and it’s important to confront mistakes and misconceptions. I started out against technology, for instance. Things change.

Over the years, I’ve tried less self-effacement. First, it was subtle, like structuring instructional posts to include references to my family; by 2019, there was an actual “About Me” page, which is now part of the introductory texts for the makerspace.

The questionnaire is there to generate the right kind of focus and feedback, but it’s also a chance to connect. Below are my answers to the same questions asked of students.

What does your writing life look like?

My writing life consists, during the school year, almost entirely of writing for students. There’s a reason for that:

Well, Why Read?

That is both an example of the kind of interstitial instruction I use and an explanation of it. It also tackles the subject of reading in a contemporary, non-academic sense.

I believe that students need the training outlined in that post, which is training in online discourse. It is a skill needed in almost every job and walk of life.

Most of what I write, however, isn’t in these posts; most of it is feedback in the form of direct comments on student work. This commentary is an overhaul of the traditional kind of feedback, which is why, as far back as 2017, I’ve had to gently rebuke rumors and ignorance about how it works. (The section on “The Hydra” addresses feedback in a makerspace.)

I also write and rewrite the foundational pieces of the course. That’s why the syllabus on the testimonial/showcase website is slightly different from this universal one, which is itself an update to the 2019 version. Grade abatement is updated whenever there is a need. There is an ongoing internal discussion of what works.

It’s an iterative process, but the basic innovations and shifts seem to be universal and adaptable. The updates to the course explained in 2016 still make sense years later.

One process note: To save time, I dictate most of this writing and feedback while commuting to and from work. It’s not as fun as listening to podcasts or music, but it became necessary when I had children of my own. Dictation is one way for you to deal with reluctance or difficulty in writing, too.

What else do you like to create?

I play and write music whenever I have time to do so. I’m teaching my own kids the basics of playing the piano and music theory.

I studied poetry and creative writing throughout college and grad school, too.

What does your reading life look like?

I read constantly. During the school year, I read student writing more than anything else; there are daily check-ins, feedback forms, full essays, smaller writing assignments, and more.

I read the news every morning and night, including as many longer non-fiction articles and essays as I can. To take breaks from all that, I read novels and other literature. In the last few years, I’ve expanded what I read to include atypical fiction, too — manga, comic books, light novels, that sort of thing.

I read along with my kids, even as they get older. We usually start and end the day by reading together.

What other media do you enjoy?

Like most parents of young kids, I know more than I ever expected to know about Paw Patrol. When I am able to put non-children’s programming on the TV, it tends to be background for school work or other responsibilities. I like horror movies quite a bit.

I value having a wide-ranging interest in almost all music and art. Here are a few I’d share with you randomly:

What is the story, so far, of your educational experience?

I was at the top of my class in high school and went to UVA on a scholarship. I got another scholarship to study education at Wake Forest, and then I got certified to teach in New York. Fewer than five years into teaching, I was interviewed in Harper’s and then won the first Milken Award in New York .

It all sounds impressive, but it’s not really important. The important story, for me, is that I was a perfectionist who struggled mightily with the impact of that perfectionism (and a host of other issues) for a long, long time.

So the story I choose to tell is this: I overhauled my own teaching because the awards and accolades didn’t matter. Grade abatement, for instance, comes from my own relationship with grades, filtered through the experience of getting older and starting my own family.

The story, for me, is that education has to change, even if the change is disruptive to the status quo. We have to change for the individual student.

Where do you plan, hope, or expect to be next year?

I’d like to see a discussion that is critical and constructive about, as Ken Robinson puts it, the habitats and habits of educational institutions. During the COVID-19 crisis, we got a series of post-mortem analyses of America:

We’re now trying to go back to normal. Innovation is giving way to the status quo. But if we value education, we all need to find our critical voices. There is such a thing as toxic positivity.

What else, if anything, would you like to write here?

I’ll embed an essay that is a useful way of conceptualizing this makerspace and its underlying shifts:

View at Medium.com

 

No comments

Leveling Up: Level 1-1

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

When you are working in a makerspace, whether on complicated work like second-semester projects or simpler work like the purpose of literature, you must be especially vigilant about how you spend your class periods. The established feedback chain will take care of the feedback you need, if you stay on task. You must follow these three rules:

  1. You must set a daily goal, and it must be clear and specific.
  2. You must steadily collect evidence, perhaps nightly, so that you can self-assess when asked.
  3. Above all else, you must, per the terms of the course, read the instructions and instructional posts completely and repeatedly.

There are always multiple levels to those instructional elements, ranging from simplest to most in-depth, for you to access.

This post is simplified. It’s the digital equivalent of an in-class whiteboard:

This is most useful as a reference point for in-class discussion. It exists to prompt further reading.

Here are two more levels of interstitial instruction for this post:

The simple version is this:

  1. You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
  2. If you are off-task or unfocused, you trigger negative consequences.
  3. If you are on-task and focused during class, you will be successful.

The idea of a hand tally, as discussed here, is more conceptual than literal, but it can be literalized:

See the instructional posts above for what happens, good and bad, as you make your daily decisions, and read the following instructional excerpt for information about “faking it” until it clicks into place:

No comments

Leveling Up: Level 2

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

Grade abatement tracks your learning through profiles, which contain predictable and consistent language about universal skills, traits, and knowledge. Every three weeks, a profile score delivers an evaluation and a blueprint for improvement, and this is part of a much more robust and embedded form of feedback.

Each of those hyperlinks demonstrates the depth of the system. There are levels to this. The more invested you are, the more rewarding the learning is, as if a second course was contained within the first one.

That first course sometimes requires old approaches. It sometimes becomes necessary to track the value each of you adds to or subtracts from the learning environment on a moment-by-moment basis, and we will do this through the gamification of in-class choices.

TL;DR, or the gist of this shift:

  1. You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
  2. If you are off-task or unfocused, you trigger negative consequences.
  3. If you are on-task and focused during class, you will be successful.

This is your space, and you are old enough not to blame others for how it functions. Learning to own your choices is part of the curriculum. You can read the full version of this post to understand more:

Each day, you should go out of your way to appear focused. If you actually are focused, you don’t have anything to worry about. The work is robust and responsive enough to take care of your learning. Otherwise, you might want to fake it, as the second excerpt in this handout explains:

You have been given the tools to be productive — or, at least, to fake productivity long enough for a few positive benefits. Log into your school-issued Chromebooks, for instance, and know that the school’s 1984-inspired Securly software will monitor your focus. These reports can be run at any time to identify if you’re treating the space as a study hall.

That’s the digital trail. You can also use the physical space effectively by choosing a different seat at the start of class or by organizing your workspace deliberately to minimize distractions.

You must focus, in other words, and be obvious and even ostentatious about focusing. If it looks like you’re focused, you are. If it looks like you’re not focused, then you’re not.

For more on why “focus” is an essential skill for all citizens, read below:

When we track your choices, good and bad, any mention of tally marks is conceptual or metaphorical. If it helps to literalize it, however, you can:

Positive contributions correspond to upper-tier profiles: galvanizing actions, creative collaboration, insightful self-assessment, that sort of thing. Doing more than just what’s required boosts your learning, the learning of others, and the products of the space.

Here is a partial list of what triggers a metaphorical red mark:

  • Inability to sustain focus
  • Inability to think critically
  • Inability to self-direct
  • Inability to self-assess

We could also pull a representative list from the essay excerpt on Occam’s razor and faking it. Those metaphorical tally marks indicate

  • watching sports highlights;
  • scrolling through social media;
  • completing a Social Studies presentation;
  • researching prom dresses;
  • looking up dirt bikes;
  • playing a game on your phone; or
  • having an in-depth but off-task conversation.

As you rack up poor choices, you’ll eventually tip the scales. You’ll go go from non-heap to heap, and then there are repercussions. These have already been established as separate from GAP scores. Some repercussions happen in class:

  • Assigned seat
  • Restricted access to technology
  • Additional daily check-in
  • Individual work contract

But if you’re wasting time in the workspace, you must pay back that time. You’ve cost yourself. Again, the TL;DR or gist of this shift:

  1. You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
  2. If you are off-task or unfocused for a significant percentage of class time, you trigger negative consequences.
  3. If you are on-task and focused during class, you will be successful.

You have to make up the time you waste, not just to insure you’re getting the work done, and not just to insure that you are ready for the future, but because you owe the space that time. This, too, is mostly metaphorical, but it can become literal. In that case, you may have to pay back the time wasted.

Again, this is all designed to promote your learning. Here is a partial list of what can happen:

  • Interventions or meetings with Guidance
  • Interventions or meetings with administration
  • Mandated one-on-one conferences before or after school
  • Schedule change: SSH → Study Hall
  • Schedule change: SSH → tutoring in Learning Center

You don’t need hundreds of metaphorical tally marks for us to justify helping you; you need only to have demonstrated that you are struggling with the skills and traits required in a learning environment.

No comments

Leveling Up: Boss Level

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible — and no one can keep you from this.
–Marcus Aurelius

The unit on akrasia is a staple of any course taught in the makerspace. It is defined as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment, and we study it empathetically and preventatively — although the central metaphor of that unit (a guillotine) isn’t exactly subtle.

Yet it truly is an empathetic lesson, in the end, which is why the readings are about overcoming our human failings. The excerpt from You Are Not So Smart, for instance, is about treating procrastination as a battle with a natural part of your brain. You have to outwit a part of yourself.

That doesn’t mean you should just accept bad choices, of course. You should accept only that there is a part of you that you must understand in order to overcome it — a human part that makes poor choices from time to time. Your job, as a student, is to master that part while realizing this:

That’s another article dealing with akrasia, even if the word itself is never used, and it’s a good article, in that it never pretends expertise, yet offers plenty of guidance and insight. It has a simple, memorable hook borrowed from an advertising slogan, but it’s more memorable for the way it attacks different excuses for inaction, one by one, in order to suggest that even the simplest steps to improve can bring clarity.

In a Humanities makerspace, the simplest steps are what matter. You are building a version of yourself through your choices. You are quite literally rebuilding your brain. If the most important thing we learn is always something about how we learn, then your personal blueprint is always evolving.

With that in mind, this lecture takes aim at two elements of the learning environment: first, how your individual choices are tracked; second, what happens after those choices are tallied (metaphorically, in most cases). This post also serves to explore some of the fundamental issues of motivation and action in our space.

TL;DR, or the gist of this shift:

  1. You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
  2. If you are off-task or unfocused for a significant percentage of class time — a percentage you do not dictate, by the way — you will trigger negative consequences.
  3. If you are on-task and focused during class, however, you will be successful.

See Leveling Up: Level 1-2 for a shorter version of this. There is also an even shorter version here.

There are also related lectures on the need for greater focus as you get older:

Let’s review the space and its approach to learning:

You have unprecedented freedom and flexibility. The terms of your learning are clear, and your menu of choices is constantly updated. From the syllabus through our study of literature to the second semester’s provisional setup, you are given projects you design and pursue at your own pace. This includes the college essay in the fall, your required Senior Talk in the spring, and even the required English 12 research paper.

You can take risks, as always, because you’re evaluated on skills and traits that encourage risk and growth. There are no immutable deadlines. Feedback is built into every lesson.

The beginnings of the course prepare you for this project-based work — not just by honing the skills of writing and reading, but through a broader study of skills like organization. We even study why you sometimes make bad choices to give you the skills to self-monitor and self-direct.

Whether you are at the start of this process or about to finish it, one requirement remains the same: You must spend close to 100% of every class period focused and productive. Given your options, this should be easy. You aren’t imprisoned with a chain gang, staring down a day of hard labor in the rock quarry. This is authentic, project-based learning. It’s inspired by the best research and innovation we have access to.

In fact, it’s truly brain-boggling that any student would look at this Humanities makerspace, at its extraordinary flexibility, at the heaps of evidence about how it connects to the future, and then say, “This just doesn’t work for me.” That’s more than a gap in knowledge. It’s got to be caused by more than the usual half-lidded rumor-mongering.

This course can always adjust to provide what an individual student needs, and it can almost always do that through what a student wants. Each element, from the profiles for assessment to the universal process for essay-writing, promotes individualization.

Once you realize what that sort of makerspace-inspired, project-based learning means and what the Humanities actually do (versus how they’ve been crippled by historical accident), the possibilities are about as endless as they get in a public high school.

One of 2020’s graduating seniors, for example, spent the end of the year meeting the goals of their project-based work through a more traditional setup: an online, automated, book-driven course of study that could have been lifted from a 1995 English classroom. That’s what was best for him, so that’s what we did.

One of his peers, meanwhile, studied video game lore and posted his writing process to Reddit for authentic, crowd-sourced feedback. He went on to analyze how video game narratives might meet the criteria for literary merit, and his Reddit-inspired work led directly to a robust, real-world research paper.

Still another peer spent time analyzing the drum tracks of heavy metal songs as part of a research project into autodidactic musicianship — teaching himself to drum like the best, in other words. He was inspired, in part, by a classmate who used Genius.com to analyze contemporary hip-hop in order to produce his own rap lyrics.

We are able to do this kind of atypical work because the systems of the course are so meticulously designed, because the instructions and resources are fully front-loaded, and because the assessment is profile-based. The building blocks are there. The work can be as traditional or experimental as we want it to be.

And if a student can’t figure out on their own how to navigate this course, somebody on our team of teachers and counselors will do it. We will review, discuss, and individualize every element of the learning environment until it works. Again, the building blocks of the course give us that kind of modular flexibility.

Which brings us back to the choices you make during each class period:

  1. You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
  2. If you are off-task or unfocused, bad things are going to happen.
  3. If you are on-task and focused during class, good things are going to happen.

When you put in the required time and effort, this space works. It does what it says on the tin. It prepares you for college or a career, guides you through a study of the Humanities, and invites you to learn more about yourself.

Your choices are, of course, still yours to make, so we’ll also work on advocacy over blaming others. Blame is just as self-destructive as Brené Brown thinks. As she says, it’s an expression of frustration and discomfort, and it kills relationships and empathy.

In here, blaming others does even more damage. It encourages you to avoid any uncomfortable feedback about your performance, which means rejecting the opportunity to improve yourself. Instead of growth, you face stagnation.

Or worse: You can only continue down that path for so long before you become this guy, who fought so hard against evidence and logic that he turned the backfire effect into a literal explosion.

The goal, therefore, is to make every student invest in the class period, because that investment will pay off. Here is an older essay that discusses the importance of in-class focus when you have just 40 minutes (give or take) each day:

The class period is the crux of your learning. In our high school, during most years, those periods are approximately 40 minutes long. During the insanity of the coronavirus pandemic, we had to overhaul the in-person schedule and overall calendars dramatically, leading to entire posts just about the 66 minutes available to us.

Ultimately, the exact number of minutes we spend together is irrelevant to this post. All of this expansive online material is there to enable more time for face-to-face instruction and feedback, and if you read what you’re asked to read when you’re asked to read it, we can shift easily into the mentality of the makerspace.

That’s why flipped instruction was developed, in fact, and why it was further developed in this space into “interstitial” learning. A letter on the subject starts off each year.

You should be prepping outside of class, scheduling the instructional posts around your schedule, and then using the classroom as a workshop. It helps to meet every day. We could make it work once a week, however, or around any other schedule.

Read this excerpt from a longer essay on the makerspace:

Those two excerpts are part of the grade abatement process, as well. In this post, they highlight how straightforward the choice is to use your time wisely, how it connects directly to your growth and success, and how you should fake it, if you have to.

The first excerpt, “Occam’s Razor(s),” discusses the choices you make each day. It’s about the “slow, steady concatenation of evidence,” where concatenation refers to almost every action you take. In the end, however, you are one type of student or another, and some choices weigh more than others.

The second excerpt, “Faking It,” is about tricking your brain into remembering that it loves to learn, loves to create, loves feedback, etc. The hook is there; sometimes you just have to force yourself to listen. If you fake it long enough, you will build good habits.

It may help to note that school is performative by design. Performance-based assessment is a net positive, for instance, and when the assessment model is driven by in-class making, like ours, you can manufacture a lot of the necessary momentum.

You can also default to the basics, if that makes more sense to you. You could choose to do literary criticism and to write an MLA-formatted essay straight out of that 1995 classroom. That’s fine. You can write five-paragraph essays, read the canonical books most seniors read, and churn out literary and rhetorical analysis. All that teaches many useful skills, and it will get you, for lack of a better term, credit.

You could, on the other hand, do contemporary research into cults, like one student did in 2019, and then connect that research to a novel about the world of Far Cry 5. You could explore the connections between video game narratives and canonical storytelling. You could research interactive storytelling.

That Far Cry example is much more authentic and interesting, yet it remains completely immersed in a love of stories and the power of reading. It also gets at the essential questions that matter: How do people fall into cults? What does that tell us about ourselves? Questions like that drive your learning.

If this extraordinary amount of agency and unequaled level of choice fail you, that is a shame. It means you are in shambles, and those shambles have a particular look:

When you hit that shambolic state, it’s a matter of forcing you to use class time effectively until the course works for you. We have to electrify the Skinner box to get you out of it.

From a certain point of view, those mechanisms offer a balance to the project-based learning and individualized attention of the rest of the curriculum. The latter is based on the real world and speaks to autonomy, self-awareness, self-direction. The Skinner box is the necessary evil: a real-time reward or penalty for certain choices.

Grade abatement profiles reward the choice to fight your akratic instinct, but they reward it over time. In the moment, gamification may work. You can research the concept (perhaps as part of a research-driven essay, or as the subject of a river essay), or you can read this quick overview of it.

In here, the gamified element is the tally of your choices in real time. We measure the value added and the value subtracted by your actions. This does not need to be literal.

As the next section explains, the value of your actions is the same as it ever was, and you’ve been told since you were very young what is appropriate and what isn’t in a classroom. You’ll learn how our gamification works through practice, too, which is a bit like what happens when you fire up a video game like Super Mario Bros. on the NES.

You learn to focus as you make choices. Does it hurt you to play a game on your phone with 60 seconds left in class? Probably not, but we’ll see when you try it. Does it boost your performance to volunteer to share your progress with the class? Definitely, and you’ll know that when you receive positive feedback.

Here is what that tally would look like if it were literal:

Again, you’ll learn by doing, and you already know, after a decade in this public-school Skinner box, what is expected of you. There shouldn’t be a need to scratch out tally marks to motivate you. This is much better used conceptually.

Black tally marks reflect choices that correspond to those upper-tier profiles: galvanizing actions, creative collaboration, insightful self-assessment, that sort of thing. Doing more than just what’s required will be noted, for instance.

As for what triggers one of those metaphorical, red tally marks? Here is a list from a post on this sort of thing:

  • Inability to sustain focus
  • Inability to think critically
  • Inability to self-direct
  • Inability to self-assess

Or you could work off of the not-at-all comprehensive list in the excerpt you read earlier:

  • Watching sports highlights
  • Scrolling through social media
  • Completing a Social Studies presentation
  • Researching prom dresses
  • Looking up dirt bikes
  • Playing a game on your phone
  • Having an in-depth conversation about music

First, an important note on all of these choices: They could theoretically be folded into your project-based work. That’s how flexible this approach is. It would take foresight, front-loading, and discussion, but you could explore almost any interest you have through this classroom.

Otherwise, your akratic choices add up. You’ll eventually tip the scales, go from non-heap to heap, and then there are repercussions. You’re already familiar with what can happen. Some repercussions happen in class:

  • Assigned seat
  • Restricted access to technology
  • Additional daily check-in
  • Individual work contract

But if you’re wasting time in class, you have to make up that time. You will fall behind, otherwise. Back to the gist of this focus:

  1. You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
  2. If you are off-task or unfocused enough, bad things happen.
  3. If you are on-task and focused during class, good things happen.

You have to put in the time, and not just to insure you’re getting the work done. It’s also that you owe this space 36–40 minutes of your time. When something has been this painstakingly built to provide you what you need, you owe it the bare minimum you owe every class, which is something approaching 40 minutes. Gratitude is good for you, too.

The repercussions you’ll face when you level up enough akratic choices will mostly be implemented through your Senior Study Halls, which can be repurposed for any of the following:

  • Interventions or meetings with Guidance
  • Interventions or meetings with administration
  • Mandated one-on-one conferences before or after school
  • Schedule change: SSH → Study Hall
  • Schedule change: SSH → tutoring in Learning Center

You don’t need hundreds of metaphorical tally marks for us to justify helping you; you need only to have demonstrated that you are struggling with the skills and traits required in a learning environment.

Each day, you should go out of your way to appear focused. If you actually are focused, you don’t have anything to worry about. The work is robust and responsive enough to take care of your learning. Otherwise, you might want to fake it, as the second excerpt in this handout explains:

You have been given the tools to be productive — or, at least, to fake productivity long enough for a few positive benefits. Log into your school-issued Chromebooks, for instance, and know that the school’s 1984-inspired Securly software will monitor your focus. These reports can be run at any time, by parents or faculty, and quickly identify if you’re treating the space as a workshop:

Or a study hall:

That’s the digital trail. You can also use the physical space effectively by choosing a different seat at the start of class or by organizing your workspace deliberately to minimize distractions.

Focus, in other words, and be obvious and even ostentatious about focusing. If it looks like you’re focused, you are. If it looks like you’re not focused, then you’re not.

No comments

Static GAP Score Feedback

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

A grade abatement profile or GAP score can be further unpacked through this Static GAP Score Feedback post, which is adapted from the Step-By-Step Guide to Grade Abatement and the GAP Process post.

The basic components are the grade abatement profiles and set of universal skills and traits. All other guides and clarifications, like this post that clarifies grade abatement, further elaborate on those basics. The entire process is evidentiary.

Continue reading