Note: This post is from 2019, but it may help other students and stakeholders to understand the efficacy of the course. The lesson outlined and explicated here was designed to showcase positive feedback from students, both to defend the space from its detractors and to encourage buy-in from students and other stakeholders.
On to the original post:
Scroll past the background to the first subheading (“Rising Tides”) to see the details of the lesson itself. We will be setting up on February 13, weather permitting, and sharing out our findings on February 14. And if you missed this on the main page of the site, here’s an essay about taking risks and getting engaged in our makerspace:
In brief, the lesson we’re running this week is about collecting and sharing feedback in order to increase student buy-in and agency. The makerspace embeds Brewster’s SCP and other “future-ready” methods, and specific student feedback, positive or negative, helps us improve that work.
That’s one of our makerspace walls, with notes on the Daily Check-In and its mindfulness component; the use of engineering “failsafes” to insure a common language; the connection between our work and Brewster’s SCP; and in the corner, a note on adaptability in the face of inevitable curricular dissonance.
Just like it is in our writing process, adaptability here is about a universal language that students can take with them1.
Consider what Gerald Graff and Steve Benton published about this in 2013:
[C]urricular dissonance also does much to widen the achievement gap. The high achievers manage to synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning from course to course, but the rest do not. For them, education is not a cumulative process, but a bizarre obstacle course in which students must virtually start from scratch every time they enter a new course. Who can blame them if they come away believing that education is just a cynical business of learning enough to get past one teacher and then setting aside those lessons to meet the unrelated or conflicting demands of the next one?
This matches what you see in a high school. Students move from class to class and year to year without a guarantee that things will stay the same. That “bizarre obstacle course” persists, even when progressive systems like Brewster develop ways to bring teachers together — and Brewster’s Strategic Coherence Plan really does give students universal languages for assessing their own learning.
The high achievers’ ability to navigate this is the key. That ability can be learned, and all students need to know how to “synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning,” as Graff and Benton put it. We need to teach deeper skills and develop persistent traits in students.
With that in mind, here are the prompts and instructions that were posted on January 28, with a soft deadline of February 4:
The prompts are carried over from the 2018 version of this survey. They are, in order:
- Reflect on our use of makerspace ideas and strategies — project-based learning, process-focused feedback, collaboration, etc — to promote student-centered work.
- Reflect on the extent to which the interstitial classroom’s flipped, multi-level instruction has changed how you access lessons and other important information.
- Reflect on the ways grade abatement’s use of profiles, skills, and traits has impacted your self-awareness, self-efficacy, and overall sense of success. Use this post as necessary: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2139.
- Reflect on how you use technology (e.g., smartphones, Chromebooks) in the makerspace to individualize and organize your learning.
- Reflect on our approach to writing, especially the focus on process over product and the use of radial and proxy feedback to empower and encourage students.
- Reflect on our approach to reading, especially the use of student choice in literature through the process outlined here: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2106.
- Reflect on the extent to which the course and classroom have impacted your social and emotional well-being, especially the use of a mindfulness-inspired daily check-in (http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2539).
- Reflect on our focus on empathy and collegiality as the “stuff of growth,” including the extent to which your work with others has helped you to accomplish your learning goals.
- Reflect on the big questions we consider as a Humanities makerspace — the problems we solve, individually and collectively, through creative and critical thinking.
- Reflect on the extent to which this course invites you to take risks, overcome obstacles, and forge connections between hard work and success.
- Reflect on the extent to which you are given clear goals and actionable feedback that help you adapt to academic and social/emotional challenges. See the posts on feedback as necessary: https://medium.com/@sisypheanhigh/a-better-form-of-feedback-b340032e3dd0
- Reflect on how this course instills in you the skills, traits, and attributes you believe are necessary for college and a 21st-century career.
- Reflect on the extent to which our universal skills and traits have helped you in other academic disciplines and assignments.
- Reflect on how this course is explicitly and implicitly preparing you for any and all high-stakes tests, including explicit test prep. Consider, too, our approach to quizzes: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2562
There is also a space on the form for additional reflections that don’t quite fit one of the other prompts.
Rising Tides
To set up student work on these responses, my co-teachers and I needed to
- take the unedited feedback from students and transfer it to a spreadsheet;
- post that spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/SSCP-19;
- print the responses and add some of the feedback from last year’s students;
- cut out each individual response; and then
- bag the responses by prompt.
Each class period gets a stack or two on one of the tables in the makerspace. Then, in groups, they sort the responses, putting positive feedback in one stack and negative feedback in another.
Remember, this is unedited feedback, except where we had to remove identifying details. That’s the point. Students will see overwhelmingly more positive feedback, and that positive feedback tends to be specific and clear. The focus on metacognition and self-efficacy creates that kind of clarity.
And what that does is to open up a discussion about why students are not successful, or at least about what those students report about their lack of success. No one is singled out or otherwise embarrassed, even through an individual conference, because our focus is on helping everyone improve their learning.
As the responses are sorted, each group talks about what they observe, with the ultimate goal of reporting out those findings in a discussion over the next period or two. Each group will also share ideas on how to move the less successful students into the much larger group of motivated, successful students.
We’ll repeat the lesson in each class, from 10th grade to AP, and then provide everyone a chance to codify their findings through website comments, posters in the classroom, and open letters to struggling students.
This is empathy-driven problem-solving, done anonymously so that struggling students in the room can listen and incorporate the feedback at their own comfort level. It’s also a reminder of how powerful the profiles we use can be. The GAP process covers this, of course, but we’ll also be using the first page of a handout on GAP anchors:
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F02%2FGAP-Anchors-WIP.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]
The fourth tier of profiles center around a GAP score of 8, which becomes a 95 — by any metric, then, a measure of outstanding work. And the key in a makerspace to that performance is improving the learning environment for others. The strongest students benefit as much as anyone from the protégé effect, especially because of what that hyperlinked article ends with:
Above all, it’s the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don’t know that word? I had to learn it myself: “Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment.”
Unmotivated or disengaged students are given a way to reenter the learning environment, not out of fear or through force, but because the path is clear, and high-achieving students are shown a path to even greater success.
And that brings us back to how we started the year.
The Stuff of Growth
The first thing we do in the makerspace is watch the animated version of Ken Robinson’s speech on educational paradigms:
The complete poster of this RSA Animate hangs on our wall, too. And while it’s all inspiring, the key is what he says toward the end:
Great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.
As high schools move toward teaching students how to learn, not just teaching content, this collaborative “stuff” will be the most important element. Students will need empathy and a sense of the greater good to teach each other.
Herd Immunity
The other side of Robinson’s coin is that we need students who are inoculated against misinformation, cynicism, and self-doubt. That takes herd immunity:
This makerspace is emblematic of the need to arm students with information, open-mindedness, and patience. I can address rumor-mongering directly, and I can clarify what we do repeatedly; it’s only through the testimonials of students, however, that the paradigm shift begins to find roots. If we want buy-in for any major change in education, it has to be sold on the words of students.
That’s the point of a lesson like this: For all the lengthy, hyperlinked instruction delivered through this a website, the real impact will be in class using the oldest tools we have. We’ll have paper, pens, and voices. We’ll have each other.
As always, the comment section below is for questions.
The next few paragraphs are lifted verbatim from that post on the writing process. This is really the focus of a Humanities makerspace, and I am getting used to the language as much as the idea. We are building substructural strength. As Neil Postman wrote, the most important thing students learn is always something about how they learn. ↩