Building empathy through history

Lately I have been working with a team of social studies teachers who all teach a course called World History. As this curriculum evolves from a western traditions course to one with a global focus, it is vital to curate resources that invite students to explore a range of perspectives and experiences. Our most recent challenge was re-visioning the approach to studying imperialism.

The Set-Up

We started with a QFT process so that each student could develop a guiding question that would govern his/her/their examination of the content. They measured their best question as one that requires multiple perspectives be understood in order to arrive at a meaningful answer.

Enter Geography

After a couple of days of instruction by the classroom teacher I returned to facilitate a geography exercise. We divided the class into groups and used Google Classroom to push a map rendered in Google Draw to each group. In fact, I created three different maps. Each was the same land mass with different information provided. One map showed land forms, another showed natural resources, and another showed patterns of ethnic settlement.

We explained that the map was of a continent; they could see from the lines of latitude and longitude how expansive it was and what climate zones it occupies. Their first direction was to work on their own to divide the continent into countries. And they did, without asking any questions.

After a few minutes of independent work we asked them to share with their small group (all of whom had the same map) how they divided the land mass and why they made those choices. Then, as a group they had to create one map which they agreed was a reasonable compromise between their ideas about what was best for the continent. And they did, without asking any questions.

Each group submitted their collaborative map to Classroom so we could project them. We started with the land forms map, and the group that created the map talked about why they divided the land as they did and then we asked the rest of the class to decide what the priorities were that informed those decisions. For example, when the land forms group presented, they might have said that they used natural borders like rivers and made sure that every country had access to the coastline. Then, the class might decide that open trade routes were the priority that underscored those decisions.

Next we projected the natural resources map and followed the same procedure. Some classes tried to give each country a resource. Some tried to give each country some of each resource. And other groups consciously created resource-rich and resource-poor countries. After they presented we downloaded the Google Drawings as .png files so they had transparent backgrounds and layered the resource map over the land forms and asked them how the combination of information might impact their decisions. One thing they always noticed was that the large oil reserve in the southern portion of the continent was now beneath the mountains minimizing any chance that the country located there could access it. And so it became a resource-poor country and changed the economic balance of power on the continent.

The third map we showed was the ethnic map. These groups struggled. Generally, upon first review of the map, they said, "we don't have anything to do. It's already divided." Then they wondered, squeamishly, if they could move groups around so people of the same ethnic group were together. And that caused debate. They referenced past forced removals of people as historical precedent and as justification for not moving anyone. Then they questioned whether a multi-ethnic country is more or less stable than an ethnically homogeneous country which led to a discussion of civil war vs. international war. When we presented these maps we began by saying this is the hardest map to talk about it, because these are people. Overwhelmingly, their priority was continental harmony and when we combined the land forms map with the resource map and the ethnic map they became very frustrated. And that is when the class began to question why they were imposing their priorities on this place.

Their final reflection was about the choices they made and how the accumulating information complicated their decision-making. In each class, they realized that they fell into familiar historical patterns. That none of the fictitious groups on the ethnic map were a part of the process and they started to ask about the people and their history.

Primary Source Artifacts

Ultimately, the students used their guiding question from the QFT process to examine an instance of imperialism and create a museum exhibit in response to their question. Our goal was not to teach museum curation but some practice telling stories with artifacts was necessary.

The class was again divided into groups and each group was given a collection of 5 objects. They were told to arrange the objects to tell a story. All the object groupings were selected because they came from a fairy tale the students would know. Now some groups caught on quickly to the "real story" of their artifacts and others composed elaborate tales to explain the connections between the objects they had been given. Then the class discussed how accurately the artifacts told the story and the difference between an artifact that was of the character (like straw for The Three Little Pigs) and an artifact that was about a character (a scientific diagram of a wolf). This time they caught on quickly to the notion that a meaningfully selected artifact, at least for this purpose, was not filtered through someone else's lens or experience.

Building empathy is a challenge and a necessity. This is a description of how we tried to embed that practice into content examination. I would love to hear from you about how you do this work with your students!

New semester and courses start with a design sprint

I am mid-way through my second year at my current school and have begun a new collaborative partnership with a colleague with whom I haven't yet had an opportunity to work. She teaches two sections of Sociology. The students in the classes are all seniors and the semester is a bit abbreviated since they will be going on internships for the last month of school. We have met a couple of times to discuss the challenges she is confronting:

• second semester seniors can be an engagement challenge
• contentious civic climate means some of the course topics are challenging to discuss
• teaching the same course for the sixth semester in a row means she is challenged to keep it fresh and relevant

This partnership is going to be exciting. My colleague is my pedagogical soul mate. She thinks 10X about any curricular idea. She is a model of risk-taking in the classroom. Failure is always forward so it isn't really failure at all. Given these habits of mind, we started with a blank slate and this question:

How might we disrupt senior-itis and

ignite students' passion for working on solutions to social issues?

Where do we start when we have a blank slate?

We began with our general musings about how to personalize this study, how to help students wrap their heads around the macro and micro views of sociology. Addiction is an issue that lends itself to sociological study on a macro level and juuling at our school is a micro view. Gender is a macro topic; professional training of our teachers around issues of gender identity in the classroom is more micro. The more we talked, the more it became clear that the students are going to have autonomy over their focus for the semester and their purpose was going to be to apply their skills to solving a community problem. The question was: How?

Embracing the principles of Universal Design for Learning we considered how to remove barriers to:

• student engagement
• content access
• expressions of learning

We discussed how to promote divergent and convergent thinking processes to encourage students to think of societal issues in both macro and micro ways and invite them to see connections between the different topics.

We continued brainstorming. What if we present them with an artifact (inspired by the Q-focus from the Right Question Institute's QFT protocol documented in Make Just One Change) and have them list on one side of the artifact all of the macro issues related to it, and on the other side list all the micro issues indicated by it. Then we thought about showing them these two videos for the purpose of macro-micro comparisons:

Dove's ad about beauty standards and young girls:

Greenpeace's response:

Enter Design Thinking

But here's the rub. These students don't have experience really owning their learning. They have had choice, as in make this product or that product, but they haven't had complete autonomy. Realizing that we were already flexing our design thinking muscles trying to empathize with this group of students and design an approach to the course that would meet their needs, we decided that we needed to guide them through this same process so each student could meaningfully chart his/her/their own path through the curriculum.

To figure out what this would look like, we turned to the Future Design School app which has a Design Thinking for High School Students curriculum. Everything my colleague needs to confidently facilitate her classes adopting the mindset of innovators and successfully navigate this personalized experience is included. They will identify macro societal problems, focus them to the micro school or community level, and then engage in the necessary work of empathizing with their peers and fellow community members to research, design, test and iterate the best possible solution to these shared problems.

The Design Sprint

Because we were concerned about student buy-in we thought it would help the students if they knew where this was all going, as in what does "the design process" mean soup-to-nuts? what are we in for? To that end, we decided to do a design sprint with them: the whole process in 45 minutes. Drawing on my experience at the Google Certified Innovator Academy, we decided to have one class design a chair and the other design a wallet. In each class, I was the stakeholder; the students were all designing to meet my needs. In each class I stood in the center of the room and told a story. To one class I told the story of traveling 10 years ago and being pick-pocketed and needing to replace my wallet. Now that wallet was wearing out, and my wallet needs had changed dramatically. The class began peppering me with questions about my shopping habits, about my phone, about my acceptance of or aversion to change (the state of being, not the coins -- we had to clarify), about my likes and dislikes, about how my life has changed over the last ten years. In the other class I told a tale of whoa about aging, body breakdown and injuries and the impact all that has on sitting. Again they questioned me and asked about reading and computer habits and other lifestyle habits.

After these intense Q&A sessions, the students were each given the following materials:

• one piece of 8.5x11 scrap paper
• one piece (roughly the same size) of aluminum foil
• a single pipe cleaner
• a piece of wire-edged ribbon about six inches long

They were given five minutes to build the perfect wallet or chair to suit my needs. At the end of five minutes each student paired with a student across the room. They were each given 30 seconds to pitch their design to their partner. At the end of a minute, they chose which of their two designs was best, set the other aside and became a team pitching the winning chair to another newly-formed team. We continued the process of pitch, choose, set aside, merge and re-pitch until they were down to two designs. They then pitched to me. I critiqued each design and then chose the one that best met my needs.

Reflection on the Sprint

My colleague and I then guided a reflective discussion about the process. The students acknowledged some important elements of the design process.

Empathy: they all realized that they were intently focused on me the whole time. When they pitched it was about being best at meeting my needs. They never judged me or disregarded something I said and they never presumed to know me better than I know myself and my needs.

Collaboration: each time they re-grouped their pitch improved when new voices helped explain the product. And when I was critiquing prototypes at the end, they realized that most of the features I wanted were in some design somewhere in the room. If they worked together they could have combined those features into the best possible design.

Iteration: without either of us saying anything, both classes said they could make a new design where they could combine their best ideas into one chair (or wallet), maybe use better materials and test it again. And they also realized that talking to me with a prototype in their hand elicited important insight into my needs and how to satisfy them. They wanted more information. They were designing with me.

Going Forward

We are excited about the next steps: helping students identify a societal issue that authentically concerns and engages them and begin the process of defining that problem and finding the stakeholders who experience it. Design thinking as pedagogy is the most empowering approach I have experienced in 26 years teaching.

A Service Learning Program Proposal

by johnhain courtesy of pixabay.com

I am enrolled in the EdTechTeam Teacher Leader 2 course. The first unit for this course is service learning. After studying the work of  Cathryn Berger Kaye and engaging in dialogue with other members of the cohort about their schools, I have undertaken writing a high school-based service learning plan. I envision a program for 9th graders that will set the tone for how they approach learning for the rest of their time in high school. In my grand vision all rising 9th graders would participate in a full quarter (if not semester) of “boot camp” for lack of a better term. It could be kicked off during freshmen orientation. The boot camp experience would be a deep dive into design thinking, problem solving, and service. The normal bell schedule and daily routine would not apply to 9th graders during this marking period. The program would provide 9th grade students guidance developing what we know are critical life (not just learning) skills: critical thinking, empathy, collaboration, problem solving, communication, creativity, flexible thinking and comfort with ambiguity. There is also room for computational thinking and entrepreneurship. All of this can lead to global mindfulness and an innovator’s mindset. Emerging from this experience students would be well prepared to engage in two years of problem-based learning curricula and transition into an internship and continual service-oriented senior year.

Imagine if all teachers of 9th graders from all disciplines as well as the guidance counselors and library media faculty participated in design thinking professional learning as well as orientation to service learning. Then they could rotate through the program facilitating the work of the students, lending their expertise and support to projects that align with their areas of interest and skill set. Ultimately this would be an eight week, full day program which would then carry into the advisory groups of the students throughout the duration of the year.

The type of service in which each student engages will be determined by the student. As they undertake an examination of the needs of the school, the community, and the wider world, students will choose the focus of their service and design an approach that marries their skills and resources with the needs of the group they choose to serve. Ultimately, I imagine students would engage in multiple forms of service and will collaborate on combined interests to maximize the services offered and the impact of their work.

Students might address the prevalence of juuling in their school in the interest of promoting community wellness. They might tackle intersectionality which is a particularly potent topic where I live in the wake of a proposal in our state general assembly that a mostly white and affluent district be merged with a neighboring district that has a multi-ethnic population and significant funding challenges in its schools. There are so many possible ways students can work to improve their school, their community, and the wider world and the skills they learn in the process will be essential to the rest of their education and life beyond school.

As part of their experience, students will create a social media campaign through which they can document and publicize their research and service in order to inform the community of their work and recruit participation in order to sustain and even scale up their projects. These networks and means of telling their stories, which can also include student blogs and school newsletters, will allow for ongoing reflection on the work they are doing and the value of service as well as provide a channel of communication which can also facilitate the development of empathy among the various members of the community.

As facilitators of the boot camp, all teachers of 9th grade will be able to integrate the students service learning into the curriculum throughout the year. Advisory and other student groups and clubs will also serve as a means of continuing the reflective dialogue about the importance of service in learning and beyond.

Disrupting Gen Z

Earlier this week one of my students said something that stopped me in my tracks. He remarked:

"I want to be able to learn how to drive myself someday."

It was more a lament than a remark.

My daughter learning to drive stick.
Yes, we drive old-school in our house!

Let me put his lament in context. In his class, Digital Literacy, we have been doing a lot of design thinking work focused on solving the problems of social media (discussed in three parts starting here). As we await feedback on our prototypes, we engaged in an Applied Digital Skills exercise from Google focused on the role of technology in current events. This student chose to focus his study on self-driving cars and the impact they will have on teenage drivers.

He examined issues of driving safety including distracted and impaired driving as well as the implications of self-driving cars on the insurance industry. Then he stopped what he was doing when, out loud, he wondered: "Will we even need to get our license anymore?" And after a pause, came his lament; something he has aspired to do, a suburban teenage rite of passage, may someday (someday soon?) become a thing of the past, no longer something to which he and his peers will aspire. The class was a little sad at that prospect. And I was a little giddy.

Why? Because there it was, the perfect example of technological innovation as a disruptive force and it was an example that resonated deeply with my students. And, as a disruption that hasn't yet occurred but is one they can anticipate, they feel the tug of resentment over how technology will change their lives. For that moment, we understood each other across the gap of a generation.

This student's epiphany prompted a very interesting and organic dialogue. We talked about the difference between the manual transmission cars that I learned to drive -- and still drive today -- and automatic transmissions. About why a driver might prefer one or the other. About how an automatic was a luxury when I was learning to drive. And designers have continued to improve on the automatic design with the development of the continuously variable transmission. Only the student who is a fan of race car driving even knew what a manual transmission is. Some students shared the self-driving features of their parents cars like warnings when drifting out of lane, alarms that indicate another car in the driver's blind spot, auto parallel parking features, etc. And talked about whether they trust that technology and how it feels when it is operating.

As excited as they got talking about the coolness factor of these features that are becoming standard on new cars, my self-driving car researcher said again: "I still really want to get my license." And they all got quiet again.

Today he presented his research, and having come to the realization that the self-driving car will not be ubiquitous before he is of driving age, his mind was put at ease and the discussion he facilitated for the class focused more on how the auto insurance industry and legislation will have to respond to this automotive innovation. His presentation was followed by another student whose research focused on robotic disruption in the labor force. Given their brief engagement with the potential loss of licensing privileges, the class embarked on a discussion during that presentation that had more potency than it might have otherwise. It was definitely an unanticipated way in which a student found the personal relevance of his learning and it helped the class develop empathy with people that they otherwise might not have considered as carefully.

Mind over Matter: Overcoming Learning Obstacles by Building Habits of Mind

creative commons; john hain on Pixabay

Educators and students all bring particular habits of mind with them when they enter their schools and classrooms. And under the pressure of data crunching and competition for high scores, some of those habits -- developed over an educational lifetime -- become self-sabotaging. As a public high school Social Studies teacher, I had long recognized patterns in student behavior that were concerning: self-put downs, approval-seeking, and excuse making, to name a few. It was not until I read the work of Art Costa and Bena Kallick about Habits of Mind, that I began to understand those expressions and behaviors as being the manifestation of patterns of thinking. What I was observing was the consequence of counterproductive (even destructive) habits of mind. So I let go of content and set out to improve the ways my students thought about and understood learning, each other, and themselves.

Now, I realized that I was facing institutional and cultural and even legislative obstacles. And it was clear that my students were invested in extrinsic measures of achievement, satisfaction, and even happiness. So I adopted a two-prong approach:

1. Remove, as much as was possible, the extrinsic measurements; and
2. Provide daily practice and reinforcement of new ways of thinking about learning, each other, and ourselves until those ways of thinking became new habits of mind.

Then, I predicted, the external metrics could be returned with minimized deleterious impact because students would have a new paradigm for understanding achievement, and this focus on continued growth would translate into improved scores when compared to those external metrics.

Step one: I stopped giving grades (for as long as was institutionally possible).

We just stopped using the word. When students stop using that word and learn to substitute so many more specific and meaningful terms and phrases, conversations about teaching and learning become so much more honest and effective. Instead of: “Why did I get this grade?” students began asking, “How can I write better quotation blends?” Even better, was when they started turning to each other and asking for feedback on what they were trying to do and understand! 

Step two: We focused on habits of mind, not patterns of behavior.

To do this, we needed new vocabulary and ways of connecting that vocabulary to our work and our interactions. As a framework for learning and applying this new vocabulary, I built this rubric based on the sixteen habits of mind. Note that the headings of each column have song titles, not points or edu-speak like “Exceeds Standard”. Anywhere an external or summative metric could be removed or replaced it was. Student focus was continually directed to an examination of their habits of mind. When the rubric was introduced at the start of the school year, students were assigned to groups and each group was given a chapter from Denise Clark Pope's Doing School. Working together, the groups examined the habits of mind of the student they were assigned and decided where the student about whom they read would be starting on the rubric. They had to use specific evidence from the students words, actions, and interactions to justify their assessment. My high achieving students from relatively privileged backgrounds were reading about other high-achieving students and identifying with their stresses and learned behaviors for surviving their school experiences.

Now that they had practice with the new vocabulary and had applied it in a safe way to other students, it was time for my students to self-examine and decide where they were starting. For this step they journaled about their past school experiences and talked with other members of the class they thought knew them well. Once they had identified their origin on the rubric, each student wrote a goal and a specific action plan for the first marking period. Together, we reviewed their goals and plans and I offered feedback. The action plan was very hard for most of the students to write. They struggled to get past statements like: I will try harder, I will get my work done on time, etc. A huge point of growth was when they could see that one vague goal statement is not the action plan for achieving another goal. Eventually they learned to write action plans that included steps like: I will visit the humanities help center each Monday to review my primary source annotations, I will reserve 8-8:30PM as reading time every weeknight, I will complete essay drafts one day before the due date in order to have a partner give me feedback before I submit it, I will not speak in a group conversation until the quietest member of the group has contributed, etc.

Just as they did with the student they examined in Pope’s book, the students had to curate evidence of their own growth and achievement. At the mid-quarter we met to review progress and the accumulated evidence and revise their goals and strategies as necessary. And this was key, I didn’t want students setting goals they knew they could achieve. That’s not a goal, it’s a given. It was also important to acknowledge when a strategy wasn’t working or a goal was not going to be obtainable… yet. At the end of the quarter, students wrote self-evaluations and had to present three pieces of evidence to justify each claim they made about their habits of mind development. All of this thinking about thinking and learning and the evidence was accumulated in a web portfolio.

We repeated this process each quarter and then met one-on-one at the end of the year when it was time to restore the external metrics of grades. To prepare for this conversation, each student converted their web portfolio into an exploration of their growth that we reviewed together in our meeting. What did we find? Because students continued to:

1. set goals;
2. reflect and evaluate their work and habits;
3. set new goals and modify their work, habits and effort accordingly;

they all realized increasing success and achievement throughout the year. In other words, all assessments were formative. Thus, when it came to determining grades, rather than penalizing a student who began the year as “a believer” on the rubric and ended the year with “nothing compared to him/her” by averaging a lower earlier grade with a later higher one, the students were evaluated according to mastery and achievement and their grade was an authentic reflection of their progress made and growth consistently demonstrated. Best of all, they carried these new, positive, practiced and ingrained habits of into all of their other work and relationships. Constructive habits of mind are essential to overcoming obstacles, making progress, and being fulfilled by the process regardless of the product.

Costa, Arthur L and Bena Kallick. Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind: 16 Essential Characteristics for Success, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2008.

VR Big Takeaway? Empathy!

When I think about Google, I tend to really be focusing on Google for Education. Last year I learned about a different team, Google’s Trust & Safety group. First, I was struck by the seriousness with which Google considers the online conduct and interaction of all of its users. Consider the comments section in a YouTube video, the Trust & Safety group works on policies and technical mechanisms for trying to maintain civil and constructive dialogue within that platform. They may not use the term digital citizenship to describe their focus, yet, in essence, that is their mission: supporting positive and productive digital interaction, globally. And I thought just trying to do it in my school was a daunting mission!

Last year, the Trust & Safety group brought their work to schools in the form of a virtual reality anti-cyberbullying curriculum. Partnering with the media production group, Harmony Labs, researcher Dr. Dorothy Espelage, and others, the team unpacked some important research:

Furthermore, they learned that more than half of bullying incidents stop when a peer intervenes which lead them to the curricular objective of empowering bystanders to intervene in bullying situations. And, they chose virtual reality as the means of delivering the program they developed because VR provides a private, immersive experience. Participants do not have to be concerned about how they are being perceived by their peers which results in sincere and thoughtful engagement in the content.

With that introduction to the program I jumped onboard with a class of ninth grade students. With a little advanced planning, implementation was easy! I do not have access to a class set of Daydream viewers and Pixel 2 devices so we substituted our Google cardboards and the students’ smartphones. I asked (and reminded) them to bring their own headphones so they each could listen to the videos without disturbing each other. The curriculum guide that Google provides is easy to follow with thorough teacher directions and talking points. I could easily modify it to meet the experience level of my students. Here is a quick schedule of what we did:

Day 1: I posted this Google Classroom announcement: For the next week you will need daily access to smartphone and headphones. Please let me know if you would like me to provide you a device. (For those students I had iPods in our library they could borrow). If you do not already have it, please install the YouTube app.

Day 2: I made this in class announcement and posted it as a Google Classroom reminder: please bring your phones and headphones to class tomorrow with the YouTube app already installed.

Day 3: The lessons began with a quick discussion of “what is virtual reality?” Then we followed the instructions in the curriculum guide for the first video lesson which included immersing in the 360° video experience. Students watched the 8 minute long video twice. The first time, the students watched on their own. The second time, I divided the class into three groups and assigned each group a character or group of characters on which to focus as they watched. Then we dove into a deeper conversation about the content.

Full disclosure: I was nervous. I was so concerned that this would just be one more forced conversation on a topic they didn’t want to discuss where a couple of students say what the teacher wants to hear just to get the lesson over with while the rest of the class stares into space and disengages entirely. Spoiler alert: the exact opposite is what happened, and I was amazed!

In small groups the students engaged with each other in a thoughtful discussion of what they had experienced, virtually. They discussed whether they thought the scenario was realistic, they considered the authenticity of the characters, they commented on identifying with certain characters based on their past experiences. When we reconvened as a whole class to talk some more they started to share experiences and talk to each other about how those real situations unfolded and what they could be doing about it. One student said, “It doesn’t end like that. We aren’t going to be friends in the end. We can’t be. When something like this happens, your friend group shifts. I want these programs to help us with that.” Lots of students added their agreement to that comment. Another student said, “Just like Kacie in the VR, sometimes you are bullied because of something you have done. And if I did what she did, and was bullied, I’m not going to tell an adult what I did so I’m not going to get help. I need someone else I can talk to for help.” Finally, another golden comment from a student: “I once did exactly what this told us to do: I told a safe adult and that person didn’t help me. So I’m not going to tell an adult again.”

Whoa. On the surface, this may sound like the experience missed the mark, but it didn’t at all. Look at all of the important information it exposed: Students want us to understand (empathize with) their experience so we can help them accurately. Students want and need peer support, so we need to train peers to help peers. And, students want us to be equipped to help them and many of us might need training to do that well.

Days 4 and 5: We continued with the two remaining VR experiences following the curriculum guide outline. Then I asked students to compare the VR lessons with other digital citizenship and bullying lessons they have experienced. They were in 100% agreement that this experience was different in a meaningful way. Here is how one student explained it: “We were there. I mean, you couldn’t avoid what was happening because we were in the scene. I had to admit what was happening was real.” When I pushed them to comment on why that mattered, another student said, “I felt bad about what was happening to someone so I wanted it to stop.” And that is the magic of this experience: it helps build empathy. VR is more than bells and whistles when it is used to quite literally help students walk in someone else’s shoes!

Days 6 and 7: I am fortunate to have a 360° camera so the final exercise for the students was to create their own VR video which we loaded to our library YouTube channel. Just as with the curricular videos, the student-created ones can be launched in the YouTube app and watched with a Google cardboard for an immersive experience. I gave students one day to examine how a 360° video is different from a traditional one and plan their script for a one minute video. The next day, five student groups each filmed their videos. This might be the fastest video project I have ever facilitated!

Day 8: We took out the cardboards, phones, and headphones one more time so they could watch each others videos and provide feedback. The students were able, in their own voices, to explore what cyberbullying looks and feels like in their own peer groups and begin the process of starting a conversation in our school.

Of course this curriculum is not a one-stop, surefire solution to a problem we all face in our schools and communities. It did start a conversation among my students that had more depth and buy-in than anything else I have experienced with students on this topic. And it all comes back to how the virtual reality helped them develop empathy.

Solving the Problems of Social Media, Part 1

This week we began a new unit in the Digital Literacy class that I am teaching; I called the unit, "Social: the new media". I curated a playlist of videos on YouTube for creating flipped lessons and giving students opportunities to explore sub-topics of interest to them. I consulted the lessons and ideas published by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), Google's Applied Digital Skills, and the Sift from the News Literacy Project. Clearly I had lots of stuff I could ask the students to do, but I was owning it and that didn't feel right.

So I put everything to the side, cleared off my desk, and got blank paper and some sharpies. I started to think about problems with social media. Not because I want to make a case for my students that social media is rotting their brains and they need to do something healthier with their time. Frankly, that would be quite hypocritical of me! Instead, we are setting out to solve the problems. To the right is my lesson plan for the first two days.

Here is how it worked in practice.

First, I covered tables with paper, piled a bunch of sharpies and markers in the middle, and let each student claim a spot as s/he arrived. In the center of each table I had written this:

The lesson on the first day unfolded in four phases.

Phase 1: Defining

Round 1: write your definition of social media on the table where you are sitting.

Round 2: rotate clockwise, read what you find, and add to or amend it. Do not cross out or cover anything you find.

Phase 2: Pros

Round 3: rotate again, read what you find, make a list of the "pros" of social media. What are the benefits?

Round 4a: rotate, and, once again, read what you find and add to the list without covering or removing anything you find already there.

Phase 3: Cons

Round 4b: now start a list of "cons" when you think about social media. What are the drawbacks or detriments?

Round 5: rotate one last time, and now you are back where you started. Read what you find. Add anything you want. And then, circle the pro that matters most to you and the con that most bothers you.

Before moving to the next phase we discussed the process we had just used and how it mimics social media posting and commenting. We considered why I asked them to only respond to previous comments and be sure to not write over or cross any out. We also talked about how or whether they filtered what they wrote because it was on the table where I could see it and it felt "permanent" doing it with Sharpies. A little nod to digital citizenship.

Phase 4: How Might We

Round 6: Write your "how might we" question. How might we preserve (your pro) while fixing (your con)?

Here is what a table looked like at the end of the lesson:

And here are some of their How Might We questions:

• HMW preserve a way to connect and share ideas while fixing a false sense of success?
• HMW preserve the connection between others while fixing the distribution of hate?
• HMW preserve the freedom of being able to share what we want and being able to connect with others while fixing the consumption of time it takes?
• HMW preserve social media's ability to connect us with varied communities while fixing the way it encourages dangerous comparisons?
• HMW preserve connecting with friends while fixing the spreading of hate and false information?

Day 2 was all about growing empathy with social media users other than ourselves. The students started this process by thinking about someone they know who has experienced the social media problem they are addressing. They listed all they know about that person: what they do, what they say about themselves and about social media, etc. Then, they wrote three open-ended questions they could ask that person to learn more about that person's experiences with social media. And then they conducted interviews. Some students called people on the phone and discussed their topic that way while taking notes on what their subject said. Others went to other parts of the school to find people. Others sent emails.

At the end of the class, they all came back to our classroom to review their interview notes. They highlighted anything that their subject(s) said that was interesting, enlightening or new information that they didn't already know about the person.

Later this week, they will refine their HMW questions to more accurately reflect the needs of the people they interviewed and we will begin the ideation process. Stay tuned to learn about the brainstorming techniques we use and the ideas that the students will begin to prototype.

Remember all of the resources that I collected in preparation for teaching this unit? They now will become relevant as the students begin to research possible solutions to the problem they are tackling and they will have a vested interest in reading, watching, and unpacking the resources I curated for them. This learning process, over which the students have agency, is much more meaningful and empowering than any teacher-directed instruction I could have created. I can't wait to see what they create!

Here is Part 2: Ideation

Off-to-college packing list

In the spirit of the content of this post, I am attempting to author it entirely from my pixel 2 phone! And because I struggle to type on a phone, I'm using voice tools.

My daughter will be leaving for her freshman year in college in about 10 days. Needless to say, we have been busy preparing everything she might need to bring with her. As we have been perusing the back-to-school shelves in various stores, something dawned on me. Most of what I packed to take with me to my freshman year in college back in 1986, has been replaced for my daughter, in 2018, by her smartphone.

Some of these things that she does not need to pack are obvious. She doesn't need a touch-tone landline. Nor does she need a flashlight, or an address book, or envelopes and stamps. Some of the things she doesn't need are a bit nostalgic. For instance, she doesn't need a push pin cork board or a white board to hang on her dorm door. Who will stop by to write a message on her door when they can just send her a Snapchat?

The more I thought about what she didn't need, the list became more and more interesting. Is there really any use any longer in your dorm room for a television or a calculator? She has never owned a stereo so she won't bring that. And her headphones no longer keep her tethered to her music source. She doesn't need a checkbook or even a physical credit card or debit card. Ostensibly, she could Google pay or Apple pay her way through any necessary transactions. She certainly doesn't need a printer. Go paperless. And, I can imagine the day when she wouldn't even need a laptop.

Now the question arises, what does she need that I would never have thought of bringing with me because, in all likelihood, it didn't even exist? Likely, a bunch of portable chargers. And a complement of cords and different adapters to be sure that all of her devices can charge on the fly. It is on those devices that she will access the services to which the she subscribes and the databases her university provides, because she won't have magazines delivered to her mailbox and will have less need (any need?) for textbooks. Do college students even have mailboxes anymore?

So the question that I am now asking not just as a parent but as an educator is this: how are her professors and her university prepared to engage with her in this learning journey because she is not, and really never has, lived in an analog world? And when we engage with our K-12 students, how are we preparing them for their unknown future? How will we nurture the habits of mind of innovation, problem solving, entrepreneurship? How will we contribute to the development of empathetic, global citizens? How will we encourage and cultivate the flexible thinking necessary to adapt to and thrive in this rapidly changing world? (Please share your thoughts in response to these questions in the comments!)

What started as a proposal to present at a conference became this blog post

Print tabloid journalism was one-way information distribution. No matter how much the headlines yelled at passersby from the newsstand, they couldn’t yell back. Standing in the grocery checkout line, all you can do is scan the all-caps headlines yelling at you from the pages and passively receive their messages. To dispute the claim that Elvis fathered an alien love child, required that you purchase the journal, write a letter, stuff it in an envelope, find the address in the journal, address and stamp the letter, deliver it to a mailbox… Right. It wasn’t going to happen because it likely wasn't worth it. Digital delivery of and access to information happens at an ever accelerating pace, and we can and do respond, instantly, from anywhere, at any time. The limits of time, place, and access imposed on us by in-real-life civic participation sometimes also serve to temper our contributions to these discussions. So how do we foster productive, thoughtful, effective engagement in digital communities?

Perhaps we could debate the notion that digital citizenship (not the behaviors, but the state of being connected) is a choice. After all, being born (as I was) in the United States by default conferred citizenship status upon me. But digital citizenry required me to make a choice to join a community (actual, multiple communities) and agree to their standards of conduct. Even though I periodically self-impose a digital citizenry hiatus upon myself, I can’t imagine this as a permanent state of being. Whether we distinguish ourselves from our children, our students, or a younger generation as digital immigrants vs. digital natives, joining a digital citizenry is, to some extent and at least at some point, a choice. If we choose to be and to educate digital citizens we must hone a new and complex skill set. We must:

• Develop graphicacy: the ability to unpack images that blend data, text, and iconography
• Think like fact-checkers: triangulate the information we consume to verify its origin, purpose, and accuracy
• Understand our own bias: know when our bias prevents us from critically seeing someone else’s and inclines us to confuse opinion with evidence
• Empathize: understanding and accepting the hopes, fears, and other motivating factors in another person’s life is essential to building constructive dialogue
• Employ emotional intelligence: recognize when an emotional response to something is suppressing our ability to speak or write with measure. 

Consider Dylan Marron starting a podcast of phone calls with the people who leave hate comments on his videos. Marron’s conversations help him and his detractors build empathy with one another. Marron invites people who posted rather hateful comments to and about him to discuss their opinions with him. He doesn't seek to convert, only to understand them. In return, they reflexively dial down their vitriol in favor of a reasonable exchange of ideas. Proving that agreeing to disagree can be an acceptable and productive outcome to dialogue.

We could make Dylan Marron's life a little easier (although that might rob him of an incredible podcast) because it is possible to teach our students to engage in effective digital dialogue. Empathy and emotional intelligence, combined with media literacy are the keys to healthy digital citizens and productive digital community interactions. Kristin Mattson writes convincingly and authoritatively about how to foster a networker's mindset and build students' effective digital communication skills through guided practice unpacking digital conversations that scaffolds to the ultimate goal: positive and productive digital agency.

A couple of months ago I was fortunate to work with a group of students at my school piloting the anti-cyberbullying curriculum designed by the Trust and Safety group at Google in partnership with media production company, Harmony Labs. The key to the effectiveness of this curriculum is that all the material is delivered via virtual reality. By immersing themselves in the scenarios they are going to discuss, actually becoming a part of the scene, students are drawn to certain characters in the video they are watching. They are likely also put off by or dislike characters. And they can be guided to watch and follow a certain character as a story unfolds seeing the action as that person sees it. Again, it's all about empathy. All of the videos are accessible on YouTube via the phones students carry in their pockets and the virtual reality experience is made possible with a Google Cardboard. I like the symmetry of using the power of media access provided by their phones to teach them to use their phones (and all they can access via them) to conduct themselves wisely.

This experience with the anti-cyberbullying curriculum reminded me of Anna Deavere Smith's TED performance: Four American Characters. When I was a history teacher I used her talk in my US History classes to show students why primary sources mattered to understanding history. "Look what she is doing," I used to say to my students, "spending so much time with a person that she can become that person. That is what primary sources do for you. If you can wrestle with them and unpack them, they return you to a place a in time to live a moment the way a real person experienced it." After I discovered this 2005 TED talk, I started building living tableaux with my students. I would present them with an iconic historical photograph and let them work in teams to pose one another in order to replicate the action of the photo. Then, they worked together to unpack the image we had reconstructed in order to understand the motivations of the people depicted. We would consider how the image we were examining was distributed, what voice the subjects of the image had in its making and distribution, and what we need to keep in mind as viewers of this snapshot of a moment in time composed by someone else with his/her/their own purpose or agenda. Finally, we compared the historical image to a very current one to illustrate the challenge in applying these skills to media that incites a visceral response and inclines viewers to unsavory, hateful, or otherwise nonconstructive posts. Or inhibits viewers from engaging in dialogue about posts that are hateful, discriminatory, or in some way offensive. (For more on this methodology, see this post.)

That's empathy.What Deavere did, what Marron does, what we must do as educators, is provide our students as many ways as we can, to develop empathy with the subjects of their studies, with the authors of the information they consume; so that they can compose their reactions (whether those reactions are research papers or social media comments and posts) from a place of insight into the motives and experiences of the original author and self-awareness about what their digital relationship with that person is and can be.

So, given that this started as a conference proposal, would you attend this workshop?

Living Tableaux: kinesthetic lessons in empathy and digital citizenship

Whether you are a library media specialist, a teacher of social studies or art history or ELA or any other discipline that incorporates art and photography as a teaching tool or element of content, building living tableaux -- people posing to replicate a 2D image -- is a classroom exercise that has so many learning benefits for students! It is a kinesthetic experience that challenges students to develop empathy with the figures being depicted and even fosters conversations about digital citizenship.

Kinesthetic

To form a tableau, I allow students time to scan the painting, then ask them to choose a person on whom they want to focus. Alternately, you can group the students and assign each group one character from the painting to consider. Then I ask students to stare at just that person and to think and wonder about that person while looking at him/her. I give them a moment to jot down what thoughts, feelings, and questions they have before moving to the next step. For this exercise, let’s imagine that we are studying Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright.

Once students have collected their thoughts, I ask for a student from each group to volunteer to become the person s/he scrutinized from the painting. These students then assemble themselves in the middle of the classroom in a re-creation of the painting. Once they are set, the rest of the class can adjust “the posers” by re-positioning them for accuracy, directing their body language and facial expressions. They may apply props from the classroom to enhance the living replication of the original. 

Empathetic

Students will have to break the tableau to participate in the discussion so, if possible, take a picture of the students in their arrangement and post it for them to see alongside the image of the original work. When analyzing and discussing paintings, I always remind my students that every element of a painting is the conscious choice of the artist. Even happy accidents that remain in the final work do so because the artist decided they should stay. Every color, brushstroke, facial expression, object is there by choice and design. Therefore, as viewers of the painting, in order to fully engage in the artist’s message, purpose or intent, we must ask “Why?”

Before discussing, I ask students to engage in some reflective writing. I give them a few minutes to collect their thoughts about what their person: thinks, feels, wonders, fears, hopes, sees, believes. I prompt students to consider gender and gender identity, age, attire, body language, facial expression, relationship to the group, etc. as they collect their thoughts. Before we discuss the painting as a class, the students share these reflections with their small group.

I transition to whole class discussion by asking those students who posed in the tableau to share how it felt to be the person? What were they thinking about as they held the facial expression and posture of their person?

Then, I ask other students to share their observations of the person they examined. Once they have explored the figures individually, I prompt them to consider the relationships between the people in the painting and finally, I ask what they think this painting is about. For an artwork like Joseph Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, I prompt them to push past the literal… it is a painting about an experiment (which it is), because it is also a painting of risk-taking, of questioning or inquiry, of seeking answers, of fear. In fact, I have used this painting as an introduction to a unit on the Enlightenment and students have come to the conclusion that this is a painting of the moment of becoming Enlightened. At that point, I draw their attention the man in red. Why is he (and the bird) the only person looking at us, the viewer? What is our role in the experiment? Why did the artist make us complicit in the secret proceedings?

Once you know something, you can never un-know it. Once people start to question and seek answers and learn new realities, the world can never be the same. Welcome to the Enlightenment!

Citizenship

This exercise can be applied to a photo as well as a painting or other work of art. Consider photos that capture emotionally dramatic events like the iconic 1957 image of Elizabeth Eckford, pursued by Hazel Bryan, as she navigates the mob on her way to Central High School in Little Rock. Begin by selecting two students to reproduce the central figures, Eckford and Bryan. Then slowly add class members to the composition one at a time.

Ask students to closely consider the facial expressions of each person. What does the expression tell us about the emotions the person is experiencing in the moment this photograph was made? Push students to consider feelings beyond “mad” or “angry”. Ask them to consider what is motivating the emotions they think they see.

Ask students to discuss how well they think they think understand the people whose faces are not showing a lot of emotion. How can we understand people we can not visually read? Why are some people stoic and others agitated? How does someone maintain composure in such a circumstance?

Finally, ask students to consider who these people are today. Could they ever in their lives be recognized as anything other than who they were at this moment? No one in this photo posed for its making, yet the widespread and ongoing distribution of this photo has defined these people for generations. Ask the students: “How are you defining yourself and being defined by others in social media and other contexts?”

Big Takeaway

Visual texts in any media are powerful primary sources. Exercises like this equip students to examine and unpack these sources when they are doing independent research and help students build the reflective capacity for understanding their own image creation and distribution.

Big Takeaways from #AASL17

I have returned from three days communing with my library peeps and tweeps at the AASL conference in Phoenix carrying a (way too pricey) book of the new AASL standards, a little schwag, some signed picture books, a couple of Google docs of notes, lots of links to presentations, and a timeline of tweets highlighting the sessions I attended.

On Saturday I had an opportunity for a lengthy conversation with my friend and colleague Michelle Luhtala about news literacy. If you are an attendee of Michelle's edWeb webinars then you know this is an important topic to us both that we frequently discuss on and off the air! This private conversation was a warm-up to our presentation, delivered along with our other friends and colleagues Joyce Valenza and Shannon Miller, about helping students develop the research skills that are critical in the digital information age. You can access our slides and join our padlet community to continue the conversation and research curation around this topic.

We arrived in Phoenix on Thursday with a presentation outline ready to be delivered on Saturday. In the interim, we spent some intense time both in and out of conference sessions examining the newly released and much anticipated standards. This release necessitated a revisiting of our presentation which we were pleased to discover aligned with the shared foundations. Given our focus on research, we emphasized "Inquiry" and "Curate," and, as happens with most standards, found that the others (Include, Collaborate, Explore and Engage) were infused throughout our conversation because of the natural interweaving through the domains (Think, Create, Share, Grow). I took this coincidence as validation of both the development of solid inquiry models in our respective districts and thoughtfully developed standards that reflect the needs of learners and educators striving to be critical thinkers in the digital information age.

The Inquiry Model that informs my instruction has five phases. Each phase is a step in the process from topic selection to final product, and each step is infused with opportunities for students to collaborate and reflect.

Step 1: Wonder - Topic Identification & Question Formulation

What do I...

• wonder about? (curiosity)
• wish I could change? (problem solve)
• wish I understood better? (critical thinking)

How can I...

• generate possible questions?
• provide innovative solutions to authentic problems?
• pose a clear, well-developed research question?

Question Generation Protocols

• Question Stems
• Question Formulation Technique (QFT) - good visuals for Q-Focus from Retronaut
• Solving a public problem (Social Studies C3)
• Asking Questions and Defining Problems (NGSS)

Collaboration

• Have I solicited feedback from other people about the scope of my questions?
• Have I discussed or brainstormed about my topic or the problem I am trying to solve with other people studying a similar or related topic?

Reflection and Metacognition

• Regarding Time Management
• Have I planned backwards from the due date to give myself progress check points along the way?
• How do I schedule my homework?
• How can I fit regular work sessions into my plan?
• Would work days in class be helpful to me or are they not productive time?
• How can I capitalize on meeting, conferencing, and collaboration in order to get the input or inspiration that will help me?

Step 2: Curate: Locate All Relevant Media

Where will I:

• gather background information and begin my investigation?
• locate information from multiple and differentiated quality sources?

How can I:

• “tweak” my search terms as needed?
• find a range of sources in various types of media to be sure I am including a wide range of perspectives?

Finding What You Need

Accumulate Good Search Terms

• Start with Wikipedia
• Imagine your dream source: what words would be in it?
• Already found a good source? What new keywords does it contain for you?
• What are synonyms for the keywords you already have?

School and Local Resources

• Destiny
• Our Databases
• ResearchITCT
• Interlibrary Loan
• Wilton Library Association

Make Google Do Your Heavy Lifting

• Site searching
• Search by Filetype
• Go back in time
• Use Advanced search for truncation, wildcard, and Boolean operators
• Google Scholar
• Google Books

Extending Your Search

• Move past reference sources into scholarly and primary using Advanced search functions
• Mine the citations from a good source you have already found
• Search by author; who is an authority on your subject? Who is the author of good sources you have already consulted?
• Stop searching… can you interview an expert?
• HASHTAGS! What advocacy organizations, interest groups, think tanks or other agencies address your topic? What hashtags are associated with the topic? Start trolling social media!

Collaboration

• If I am trying to solve a problem through my research, have I identified and interviewed stakeholders who represent a range of perspectives on or experiences with the problem I am addressing?
• Have I asked someone to challenge my conclusions and help me expose how my own biases might interfere with my research?

Reflection and Metacognition

• About Reading & Note Making Strategies:
• How is the content reading going?
• Have I learned anything (content or process) from my secondary source reading and primary document examinations?
• How have my presuppositions been challenged?
• Am I allowing my preconceptions to be challenged?
• Are my views changing?
• When I read HOW did I read?
• Do I print out the documents or read them on line?
• What did I do to prepare to read them? how did I know what to look for or focus on?
• If I printed them out, did I have paper to make notes one while and after I read?
• If I read them on line, did I copy them into a file where I could annotate such as Google Docs?
• If I highlight is it just to keep my eyes focused on the page? How do I know what to highlight?
• What do I write down? what questions do I ask? what do I write about when I finish reading?
• If the document is long, do I read it in sections? What do I do at the end of each section?

Step 3: Explore the Information Superhighway: Evaluating Sources

How can I:

• assess the authority, accuracy, relevance and purpose of my sources?
• organize my notes and know that my consideration of perspectives is thorough?
• include multiple and informed perspectives?

The Information Superhighway

• School Library Journal: A News Literacy Toolkit for a “Post-truth” World
• NPR: Fake or Real?  How to Self-check the News and Get the Facts
• EasyBib’s Web evaluation tool
• CRAAP Test
• ESCAPE from Newseum

Thinking Like a Fact-Checker

• First Draft News
• Snopes
• TruthOrFiction
• Urban Legends (About.com)
• Hoax-Slayer
• 7 vital browser plugins for news-gathering and verification

Reverse Image Searching

• 13 online tools that help to verify the authenticity of a photo (StopFake.org)
• How to verify images like a pro with Google Earth (First Draft News)
• Breaking News Consumer's Handbook (WNYC)
• Educator’s Guide: Types of Online Fakes (Verification Handbook)

Citing Your Sources

• Noodletools
• OWL Purdue

Collaboration

• What changes have I made in response to feedback from other people? How did I undertake those changes? How did they improve my work?
• Is there any perspective I have yet to consult? Who can help me access this point-of-view?

Reflection Questions about Critical Thinking:

• What are the major content/critical thinking/writing issues that I have been confronted with in this project?
• How well do I understand the content/substance of what I have been thinking about for this project?
• What is my plan or strategy to address issues I am encountering with this project? Is this plan similar to the plans I have used in the past? How, and why, did I know these steps would work? Is my plan working?
• What do I think my main goals should be as a thinker given what you have experienced so far in this class? Why are these my goals?
• What is my criteria for quality work? What areas of the rubrics are still unclear to me? How am I attempting to reach clarity about these areas?
• What was the most important thing I have learned about yourself as a thinker so far?

Step 4: Create an Argument: Applying Learning

How can I:

• select and effectively use tools to organize myself?
• synthesize what I have learned from my research?
• create an arguable thesis?

Tools & Techniques:

For Your Thesis:

• Thesis Generator: Ashford University
• Thesis creator
• Thesis builder

For Citations, Note Organizing and Outlining:

• Noodletools

For Outlining, Webbing & Other Planning Strategies:

• Storyboarding
• Storybird
• Adobe Spark
• Google Draw
• Canva
• Sketchnoting
• Mind-mapping
• Mindomo

Collaboration:

• From whom did I solicit feedback on my thesis and/or my outline? Why?
• What feedback did I incorporate? How did it improve my plan?

Reflection:

• How might my opinions have had an impact on whether or not I stayed open to conflicting information?
• How did I check myself to be sure I held my bias loosely?

Step 5: Communicate, Share & Grow

When deciding how to share what I have learned, how will I consider my:

• audience?
• message?
• purpose?

And create a product that meets all of these needs?

How can I take informed action?

Things to Consider:

• Whom am I trying to reach (who is my audience)?
• How do those people most frequently access information? Why?
• What is the best media for conveying my evidence and conclusions? Consider:
• Do I need photographs or other artist renderings?
• Do I need data visualization?
• Are voices, music, or other auditory files important to understanding my message?
• Is there a need for video footage?
• How much text do I have? Does it require hyperlinks or interactivity?
• How will my product reach my audience?
• Will it live on a website?
• Post to a video sharing forum like YouTube?
• Be delivered via email?
• Exist in printed form?
• Be performed or delivered to a live audience?
• Something else?
• How will the talents of my team combine to create a successful product or presentation?

 Frankly, as much as the announcement of the new AASL standards validated and encouraged this research process as a model for working with high school students, the keynote address by Google Education Evangelist from Hell's Kitchen, Jamie Casap, inspired the bulk of my tweets as well as the metacognitive food for thought that nourished me through lots of sessions and late nights in Phoenix.

I work with high school students so I don't think I have ever asked a student what s/he wants to be when s/he grows up. But, I have certainly asked, "what will you do after graduation?" or "what do you want to study?" Still, Jamie's question: "what problem do you want to solve?" not only by-passes the issue that we have no idea what jobs will even be possible for our students when they "grow up;" it also infuses students with empathy and agency. I know if there are two qualities I hope my teenagers have or develop it is empathy and agency!

And so, I return to our inquiry model and ask: at every stage, are students developing empathy and agency? Will they graduate from four years working with these protocols prepared to engage with other people's point of views, able to gather (with fidelity) the insight and opinions of stakeholders, and apply themselves to solving the problems in their communities in the interest of improving the educational, socioeconomic, political or environmental  conditions of their day?

As long as I can keep answering yes to those questions, then I know I am on the right path.