How to assess creativity in the classroom?
Emphasize the production, not the consumption, of information/data/work/dances/movies (rather than ability to recall memorized and “objective” info via filled-in bubbles or multiple choice questions)…
Creativity, indeed, is a very practical thing.
I’m steadily falling more and more in love with CloudApp on my Mac/iPhone and this new feature provides a killer solution to a problem I’ve been having…
CloudApp Clipboard Secret: “We’ve introduce a secret preference with the latest CloudApp update (1.5.1).
Enabling it will automatically copy all uploads to your CloudApp account to your
clipboard.When we say _all_ uploads we do mean all uploads. Try publishing a drop with
Cloud2go or any other mobile CloudApp client and check your Mac’s clipboard.”
Being invested in Apple products so much means I almost seamlessly shift between my iPhone, Mac and iPad to the point of device ADD (or amnesia). Being able to rely on CloudApp as a interface agent for moving around links, data or pics is handy to say the least.
I’ve been trying to use solutions like Pastebot for this (great program, btw), but it requires a little more manual awareness. I need something that *just* works in the background. So until Apple comes out with a Notes feature that is cloud-based, it look like I’m using CloudApp for a while.
This statement pretty much summarizes the general American education system (public and private) for first decade of the 21st Century…
Report slams heavy focus on school testing – Washington Times: “The system has ‘improved student test-taking’ but little else, he said.”
Let’s do things differently in this second decade.
We had our major end-of-the-year Middle School Faculty meeting today where a number of important (and non-important) issues are discussed and extrapolated to all sorts of Euclidean extremes.
I’m excited to be a teacher in 2011 for many reasons. Of course the chance to work with bright and curious 13-15 year olds on a daily basis for 3/4 of the year is phenomenally fun. Even though it’s “summer” (or Training Season as we teachers like to think of it), I still ask to run camps for 5-9th graders so I can keep my blade sharp. I cannot wait for my Robotics, Mythbusters and iOS development camps this summer. I wish I were doing 30 of them instead of just those three.
However, the bigger reason why I’m excited to be a teacher right here right now (whatever happened to those guys??) is that we’re, cliches aside, on the cliff of a revolution in realizing how young people learn, become leaders and become critical thinkers. That possibility of taping into the brains of each of my students (or better… co-learners) to help me make more insightful inferences about the nature of the universe is literally breath-taking and mind-bending.
I wonder where next year will take our little school? Are we headed for some magical Coltrane-esque sequence of mini-apocalypses with each new day? Or are we trying to make our way back to some ordinary world that is comfortable and easy for us teachers and not-all-that-challenging for our students (I hope not)?
So the question is, do we look ahead or look back (hence the video above… I wasn’t an Obama supporter until I saw this speech in person that night and I realized he was a leader that I’d be proud to call my president.)? “Don’t tell me change isn’t possible…”
The fierce urgency of now is more than just political rhetoric. I believe in that sentiment and it burns in my soul as it has for so many people willing to stand up for what they believe in and be crazy enough to change the world. For me, that means not settling for the way we’ve always “done” school. We can make things better. We have to. Yes we can.
In a lengthy meeting with my headmaster over whether or not I was going to be back for another year at my school, he reminded me that patience is not one of my virtues. He had a good point. It’s not something I do very well, and I know that over time the hairs on my head will continue to become gray and my temperament will become more… tempered. However, I will never lose this burning passion to work for my students and make things better, whatever the cost and in the face of whatever tradition or assumptions we think are essential for how school is done.
Is patience a virtue? Probably so. I need more of it. I’m working on that. However, there are many things my 8th graders need to have authentic individualized learning experiences and I’m willing to push hard for that while my hair gets more and more white and while my time on this pale blue dot grows increasingly and exponentially shorter.
From the always astute Alfie Kohn:
But let’s face it: It’s easier to concern yourself with teaching than with learning, just as it’s more convenient to say the fault lies with people other than you when things go wrong. It’s tempting, when students are given some kind of assessment, to assume the results primarily reveal how much progress each kid is, or isn’t, making – rather than noticing that the quality of the teaching is also being assessed.
May is coming to a close and our official school year here at Spartanburg Day is in its last week. Our students are at home sleeping late while we are still here in this post-rapture building packing and grading and packing and writing comments.
However, one of the big takeaways from my experience with our Class of 2015 Griffins is that I’m done with grading my students in the traditional manner. That scheme doesn’t hold water anymore and ended up consuming precious classroom time both literally and metaphorically. I can honestly say that as the year progressed and I became more assured that the real measure of the learning we were doing in our classroom had nothing to do with the marks I was recording in our gradebook. Instead, when grades were forgotten during the launch of our SpaceCam or deployment of Newton Racers, I had a quiet revolution inside of my head that gave me the extended realization that my students were actually taking risks and learning in ways that could never be captured by filled in bubbles or even well written essays.
During the Fall semester I tried a hybrid model of 10 labs/tests that I had used previously and it was a comfortable fit for the students. In the Spring, I narrowed that to the choice of 5 labs (out of a possible ten), but I still didn’t feel comfortable with that form of overall assessment of student learning. Instead, I realize now that in a post-grade classroom, challenges are as valued as “easy A” quizzes by the students and the threat of the grade-carrot only makes the stick of student learning that much more difficult to comfortably hold.
I’m spending a good deal of the summer preparing myself for a post-grade classroom. Narrative and individual attention (rather than across-the-grade blanket objective measures) to real progress of development of the skills and literacies I hope my students gain in our shared time will be the underpinnings of student (and teaching) assessment in my classroom this Fall.
Love these things.
Eye Exam Palooza ’11
One of my favorite part of our end-of-year ritual as faculty members of Spartanburg Day School…
Fascinating how much hasn’t changed about the Apple Store in the last decade despite the vast changes to personal and pro computing.
YouTube – Apple – Steve Jobs introduces the first Apple Store Retail 2001
There’s something to be said about selling an experience that is cutting edge but familiar all at the same time.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year…
