Learning to Change

At the time of the podcast recording, COVID-19 is rocking our world. The world is practicing social distancing, many states have safe at home orders, and schools are shut down until further notice. I invited Peter Grey on the podcast before the world was turned upside down by COVID-19. I wanted him to discuss his book Free To Learn along with his recent article in Psychology Today, "School Refusal: A Crime, A Mental Health Disorder, or A Human Right." We get to those things later in the conversation, but we begin with discussing childhood, play, responsibility, and reassurance that despite COVID-19 rocking our schools to the core, our kids will learn.

Last week I wrote about the 3 Phases of Response to COVID-19, and if you haven't read it yet, it's worth a read. It is helping me to conceptualize the work, and it is helping me realize nothing is an emergency. The impact of COVID-19 on education will be experienced long after the virus is gone.

Change.School cohort 10 is just starting just around the corner. Sign up to be notified when dates are set.

Learning space design is the topic of the podcast today. I speak with Dr. Lennie Scott-Webber. She is a leading thinker on the evolution of what we know about learning, the learner, and the learning space. Dr. Lennie has pioneered research strategies addressing how the built environment impacts student engagement factors and learner success.

Dr. Lennie Scott-Webber has served as the Founding Director of Education Environments at Steelcase and as a Principle researcher for the DLR group and VS America.

This podcast will help you think about designing learning spaces from the inside out. As always we'll be continuing this conversation in Modern Learners Community. You're invited to sign in or sign up!

Last week I spoke to Tom VanderArk about Place Based Education. If you haven't listened yet, take in both shows now.

I'm excited to kick off our next Modern Learners Community theme "Places and Spaces" with today's interview with Tom Vander Ark. Tom is the CEO of Getting Smart and his brand new book Place Based Learning: Authentic Learning through Place-Based Education has just been released. He co-authored the book with Emily Liebag and Nate McClennen.

In the book, Vander Ark defines place-based learning as anytime, anywhere learning that leverages the power of place to personalize learning. Later the authors add the idea of connecting projects to community, delving into authentic problems, and encouraging public products which ultimately develop an ethic of contribution.

My Community is My Place Based Education

I live in a small, rural community along the Mississippi River. We have birds and wildlife galore, and a beautiful park maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Burlington Northern Railway runs along the river and the barges carry corn down the channel. Our community is also home to the National Brewery Museum. The museum illustrates the historical and economical impact of beer on our community and the nation. Recently the brewery opened a manufacturing facility to decrease the cost of distribution. I'd be remissed not to at least mention the agriculture that is so prevalent in our community. My hometown is also the setting for the infamous YouTube channel "How Farms Work." The students in my small, rural community have so many opportunities to learn, and with so much to learn it is difficult not to beam with pride and want to contribute.

As you listen to the show with Tom Vander Ark, I invite you to think about your local community. What learning opportunities are available there. Review the place based triangle. What is the ecology? What is the economy? What is the culture? I'd love to hear about your local community.  Please head over to Modernlearners.community and sign in or sign up! Once you're in, share your story!

Oh...and if you missed last week's show with Peter Liljedahl, you really need to go back and listen. His work on "thinking classrooms" is outstanding.

Last week, Dr. Nicki mentioned Peter Liljedahl's research on vertical, non-permanent spaces. That took me on a journey into Peter's work, and after reading all of Peter's work around Thinking Classrooms, I had to invite him to the Modern Learners podcast. Luckily, he made time in his busy schedule before we concluded our math theme.

Meet Peter Liljedahl

Peter Liljedahl is currently a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is also the President of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group and the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. He has an extensive body of work that he generously shares at Peterliljedahl.com.

Thinking Classrooms

Peter most prevalent work is his research on "Thinking Classrooms." In his forthcoming book, he writes, "a thinking classroom is a classroom that is not only conducive to thinking but also occasions thinking, a space that is inhabited by thinking individuals as well as individuals thinking collectively, learning together, and constructing knowledge and understanding through activity and discussion. It is a space wherein the teacher not only fosters thinking but also expects it, both implicitly and explicitly."

Initially, his research indicated nine principles, and the initial publication can be viewed here. However, in the interview, Peter explained that the research has evolved, and there are now 14 principles in the Thinking Classroom. In the podcast we discuss just three. First, we discuss at length collaboration and vertical, non-permanent surfaces. The two compliment and enhance one another. Peter concludes the interview with a brief mention of the random grouping principle. He says the evidence for what random grouping does for classroom community is vast.

The Bridge Between Math and Places and Spaces

This podcast episode is the perfect bridge between our MLC themes. We've spent time exploring math through our Modern Learners Lens, and now we're moving into Places and Spaces. Peter does an excellent job in this interview explaining the research behind vertical, non-permanent spaces. He even mentions that he's never seen a classroom not be able to find space or budget to create more vertical, non-permanent spaces once they experience the thinking those spaces naturally produce. The research is clear, and now we just need to make it happen.

I'm excited to bring you my conversation with Dr. Nicki Newton. Dr. Nicki is a renowned writer and education consultant who works with schools around the country on elementary math curriculum. She has authored over 20 books on a variety of math topics. She's most known for her work on guided math and math running records. In her math identity story, she shares that her books have been a glimpse at her own math learning journey. She leaned heavily on everything she learned in her literacy roles early in her career. Today we talk about equity in math classrooms, teacher training, and making math relevant with real problems in real communities. You can hear Dr. Nicki's passion and energy as she shares her love of learning and math.

Dr. Nicki's Math Mentions

A few things Dr. Nicki Newton mentions in our conversation:

Mathematical Dispositions Padlet

Mathematizing Your School

Strategic Teacher

Cyberpunk

Peter Liljedahl on Vertical, Erasable Spaces

Dr. Nicki on YouTube

Dr. Nicki also has a great YouTube channel. She mentioned after the podcast that she loves to make videos for YouTube, and she plans to grow her channel to support teachers in the months and years to come. She mentioned she's a huge fan of the beaded number line. Check out her video explaining all the benefits of the beaded number line.

 

Interested in hearing more about math on the podcast? Be sure to check out our episode with Eli Luberoff, founder of Desmos. We also interview Conrad Wolfram. You can listen to it here.

Today, we welcome Eli Luberoff, founder and CEO of Desmos to the podcast. His math identity began to take shape when he was just four years old, but it didn't help him stay engaged in the k-12 curriculum. To this day, he does not have a high school diploma. He does, however, have a degree from Yale. So how does a high school drop out graduate from Yale and create an ed tech tool that impacts hundreds of thousands of learners around the globe?

Accessible and Visible

He set out to make math accessible and visible. He wanted to provide a tool to do math that didn't require a separate, expensive technology when the tech in our pockets had all the necessary computing power. Desmos is most well known for being and online, graphing calculator, and it's free to use. I asked Eli about the business model behind Desmos. We also discussed the modern context of math, and it's impact on math instruction. It doesn't have to be a constant battle of relevance.

Desmos Teacher Fellow

Each year Desmos accepts applications for their teacher fellow program. The Desmos fellows gather for an intense weekend of learning face to face, and then the fellowship continues in asynchronous online learning opportunities throughout the year. Here is a link to the application.

And They Are Doing Curriculum Too?

Eli mentioned the middle school math curriculum they are piloting in the upcoming school year. I told him we'd invite him back to follow up on that work. Check it out here.

Did you miss last week's podcast with Conrad Wolfram? It's a good one! He really digs into the importance of computational thinking.

Be sure to come to Modernlearners.community and either sign up or sign in. We continue the conversation over there. It's 24/7 professional learning at a level that will push you just a bit further than you expect.

 

Today's show is the kickoff to our math theme in Modern Learners community. We'll be exploring our beliefs about math education. We'll look at what's working, what's not, and what's possible! Considering the impact that machine learning and AI are having on the world, it's important we start to consider how these fields will impact what our learners need to know and be able to do. In order to move our math classrooms forward in the next decade, we must consider our current practices and really question if they match our beliefs and serve our learners.

In just a second, I'll be replaying the podcast episode Bruce Dixon recorded with Conrad Wolfram. But before I play that for you, I want to share the stories of my math education that shape my math identity. Math identity is on of the concepts we'll explore in MLC. My math identity started to take shape in the first grade when I was the first one to slam down my pencil with thirteen seconds to spare for the mad minute worksheet. Later that day I won "Around the World" twice. I was a math person! That all changed in eighth grade when my math teacher recommended the Algebra A/B track instead of Algebra. I was not a math person. I've always been self-determined and a little "sassy by design", and I was going to stand for that. I'd just work harder in Algebra, but I definitely wasn't going the down the slow track. Fast forward a couple of years, and I was copying every assignment in my Saxon Algebra II math book. I wasn't the only one, and the answers to the odds were in the back! I wasn't a math person.

But why wasn't I a math person? What were the conditions in the environment that initiated and nurtured those thoughts? I'm also curious about the implication of those thoughts on my adult life...my parenting, my career choices and options, my finances? What opportunities have I missed out on because I'm not a math person? I really want to know what math classrooms around the world are doing to build every learners math identity. Truth be told, we are all math people. It's time we all work to understand and foster that!

Conrad Wolfram has been advocating for an overhaul to math curriculum for years. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram/Alfa and Mathamatica. He is particularly interested in how technology and computation can move our lives and economies forward and in turn how that affects education. He believes math in school is almost totally irrelevant from it's real-world application.

In this conversation with Bruce, Conrad says there are four parts to using math in real life. They are:

1. Define the problem

2. Turn it to symbolic representation if we can

3. Take questions to answer

4 Determine what this means and does it make sense

There is so much to digest after listening to the conversation. Please join us in Modern Learners Community to continue the discourse. Simply click here and sign up or sign in!

It’s hard to believe that we’re entering the holiday season already here in the US. It’s a couple of days before Thanksgiving and the real insanity is about to begin. And most of that insanity stems from the multi-billion dollar month-long war for capturing our attention. You don’t even have to turn on the television or go on Facebook to realize that the marketing beast here at the end of the second decade of the 21st Century is getting bolder, louder, and even more unending.

Couple that with the avalanche of media that’s heading our way as we gear up for an election next year and I’m feeling pretty tired already. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that 2020 may be the greatest and most complex test ever for the collective literacy of our nation. Deep fake videos and Russian interference and Super PAC ads ad god knows what other stuff we’re going to have to sort through and make sense of and divine truth from. No pressure right.

All of which makes this conversation on attention literacy with award-winning professor Alec Couros timely, relevant, and interesting. Alec teaches at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, and he teaches and writes extensively around the topic of understanding literacy in a connected world. In this discussion, we touch on how difficult the search for truth is these days, the idea of a literacy “curriculum,” and ways in which we use technologies to keep our attention focused. It’s a conversation that probably could have gone on for hours.

Some links discussed in the podcast:

The Attention Economy and the Net

Writeroom

Distraction Free YouTube

 Century of the Self  

"Epistemic Crisis"

Duck Duck Go

Ze Frank

 

 

Welcome to the fourth and final episode in my month-long exploration of "power" in schools. I don't know about you, but I found all of these conversations fascinating in terms of how much the power relationships we have in schools impact the experience that kids have, and the extent to which we are functionally unaware of the many ways in which power influences almost every decision you make.

But what I think I may have learned more than anything is the ways in which power is inherent in the system. The ways that we interact with one another happen in large measure because of the underlying structures and norms and expectations that are baked into a system that was created at a time that looks much different from today in terms of our individual power to learn and to create and connect.

And so in today's podcast, we dive into the power that the system holds over us with Dr. Özlem Sensoy, a professor of education at Simon Fraser University and the co-author of Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, now in its second edition. Dr. Sensoy, whose forthcoming book Why Take Media Seriously? comes out next year, talks powerfully about how we need to reflect deeply on how our actions are molded by the system, ways in which we can turn our classrooms and cultures into more equitable and more just environments, and how to work with colleagues and students to develop a greater sensitivity to the power of the system and ways to act to change it. I think it's an important conversation that I totally enjoyed.

This is our third podcast on the theme of power, and when you think about both the good and the bad aspects of technology and the Internet and social media over the last decade, it's hard not to conclude that like it or not, the individual has much more power in her hands today than ever before. We have unprecedented power to connect, to communicate, to create and to publish, and the reality is that many of our young adults and even younger children are beginning to take advantage of that in powerful ways for both good and bad. Look no further than the ways in which students at Stoneman Douglas have used technology to create a movement around gun control, or how Greta Thunburg has amassed millions of followers from around the world to take on climate change. There's no question that the potential of these technologies to empower every one of us to make change happen in the world is amazing. And it changes the way we think about power and success in the world today.

And that potential is an important context for the work we do in schools, right? It begs all sorts of questions about our responsibilities as educators in this moment in terms of how we should be preparing kids to use their newfound power well. Or about the literacies that we ourselves have to exhibit to help students understand these opportunities at a deep level. Or about the stories that we tell students about what a "successful" path forward looks like today.

Which is why I reached out to Dr. Craig Watkins to be my guest in this weeks podcast. Craig is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas in Austin, and he's the author of five books that explore young people's engagement with media and technology. He works with the Connected Learning Research Network, and is the founding director of the Institute for Media Innovation in the Moody college of Communication.

In this discussion we cover the changing nature of power in the world, how technologies are impacting the way we learn and interact with the world, how the concept of work is quickly changing, and much, much more. I think you're going to enjoy it.