The Plan – a Course of Action

I like making plans. Laying out the calendar and seeing what I have to do, where I have to go, and how much time I have in between is one of my favorite things to do. Maybe it is the geography nut in me, but mapping, and by that I mean good, effective planning, is at the heart of what educators do well.

Curriculum planning is no different. Scoping out how to attack a particular lesson or unit is fun! It is an adventure in time, foresight, and reflection. We rely on our own judgement based on our expertise and our students to lay out new course sequences. We sometimes even borrow sequences that others have done before us and adapt it to our classes.

One thing is certain though: Planning out things CAN be difficult.

There are always interruptions, changes, and edits that need to be made to the “plans” you create for yourself and your students. Even good plans turn to mush when setbacks occur. The best plans include ways to adapt and change course, while still getting the final destination.

Our folks spent last Friday planning out the collaborative project (version 2.0, as we have already scrapped version 1.0 – iterative process in motion) for the 7th grade students this semester. The day was spent on the nuts and bolts of how this was actually going to work, which, in the long run, may be the hardest part to plan for.

Just because you plan it doesn’t mean something can’t blow it up. Prepare for ANYTHING!

What is unique about this whole process is that there are no “playbooks” that we can pull from to help when planning something like this. Most of this is going to be brand new because of the amount of people we have involved (5 teachers), the types of classes we are exposing students to, the kinds of projects/problems we want the students to work on, and how they will continually show us their learning through multiple ways.

We can’t just Google “5 way innovation and collaboration project for middle school students using problem based learning, design thinking, and empathy.” We are forging our own plan. It’s a plan that builds in reflection and adaptation, because you never know when a snow day will hit!

The I.D.E.A.S. Team hard at work, always.

These folks are all “EP teachers or Exploratory Program teachers. Students have these teachers for a semester, or a half-year. Because of the schedule, they may only get two out of the 5 I.D.E.A.S. Wing EP’s. To help remedy this need, and to bolster our collaboration effort, the teachers have decided to take the second half of the first semester with 7th grade to embark on this new project.

Usually, the students would just spend the entire semester in the one course, focusing on projects and skills related to JUST that course. In our collaborative project, which right now is based on toy design, students will be put together in teams, one or two from each class, at the end of October. There, the students will be given the sample problem, scope of the project, and end goals. The students will need to come up with design TOGETHER.

During the next few weeks, the students will focus on different aspects of their design in each of their respective classes.

Every other week or so, the students will come back together as a team to check progress, make modifications, and set new courses of action. By doing this as a team, students from different classes will interact, plan, and support their fellow group mates in an interdisciplinary way. Also, during team prep and planning time, the groups can use all the teachers in the Wing as resources to help aid them in their project.

Getting down the Sequence of Events

You know it’s a good day of planning when everyone is up walking around the room and planning!

Ultimately, the project design will encompass the skills and spirit of each one of the five classes. During the entire project, students will be gearing up for an overall pitch presentation about their design. This will be the culmination to the project and to the semester. In the end, the students will have been exposed to all the classes in the Wing, worked with different students on a large-scale, problem based design, and collaboratively presented and pitched their idea.

Ideas are not just from one segment of our brains. By exposing students to this type of teaching and learning, we are teaching to the whole child. We are giving students academic standards to learn but also creative freedom to try out new ideas. The plans have been set in motion. We are always tweaking and revising other aspects but getting things down helps in managing other aspects of a project. 

This is just good, effective planning.

🙂

A Conversation with Laura Fleming

I recently had a phone conversation Laura Fleming, award-winning Media Specialist, Author, and MakerSpace expert (among other things). We spoke about many things but one thing in particular stuck out to me; it had to do with buying things and budgets. She said that it wasn’t about the “kinds of things you put into a room like this, it is about the needs of the students and their dreams, passions, and aspirations.”

If I needed to write a letter to all past, present, and future educators, leaders, and community stakeholders, I would just write the last part of the sentence in the body of the letter. Nothing else would be needed. I would even sign it at the bottom:

Yours Truly, 

Common Sense

Laura has been working with a group of K-5 Educators and myself to look at the Maker Mindset and creating your own MakerSpace. Her insights into how she created her own space, how she connects to all types of students, and how her space has evolved have been more than helpful. While these folks don’t need that letter above, there are some in education who do need this and a lesson on purchasing things for your space, school, or district.

Laura lays it out like this:

When she talks about what to get for your MakerSpace, she doesn’t just talk about getting the newest things or what every other school has. No, that is a sure-fire way to have your space backfire on you and your students. It is another reason why some school leaders and districts push back on this idea. They feel like they have been burned in the past with these “fads and trends” and do not want to sink money into them. Instead, Laura focuses on the MakerSpace Planning guide. This guide has been so valuable because it helps us focus on the bigger picture which are the students and their passions and the curriculum we teach them (or don’t teach them). By doing this, we are rooting what we are doing to address the gaps we have in our school.

What is a MakerSpace?

That resonates with me on so many levels. First, by refocusing our attention on our students, we are saying to them – “hey, you matter.” What you do outside of school matters. We want you to bring that same passion, love, and expertise here as well!

Second, it roots it in the curriculum, or the lack thereof. Does your curriculum have coding involved? No? Well that may be good for your space. Does it allow for electronic tinkering? No, add that to the space. We can fill in the gaps of our students educational careers by doing this.

Laura working with our K-5 Educators!

This also focuses the intention not on how much we spend in the room but how much time we spend figuring out what our students want, which is much more important.

Without the student voice, it is just a bunch of stuff in a room.  

Here are some questions we raised after working with Laura  – Are we giving students a real opportunity that they may otherwise not get in school? How can our space leverage this and our students passions to create a space that is unique to our kids for the long-term?

These are questions that are being answered right now by these and many more educators around the globe. In the I.D.E.A.S. Wing, we are asking the same questions.

Thank you, Laura, for your wisdom and insight!

A Blank Canvas

There are many things in life that can be inspiring. An ocean view, an addition to a family, a wonderfully woven poem (or anything else, wonderfully woven), a long hike up a trail. You get the picture. But there is one that is consistently more inspiring than anything else:

.

Nothing. You read that correct. Nothing.

Nothing speaks to people – it is the absence of something. I think of nothing as a blank canvas, so to speak.

What is your blank canvas?

When there is nothing, there are infinite possibilities. There are no constraints, no holds. Your imagination is limitless when there is nothing in front of you. Everything is on the table and can be put into play. There is nothing that is off-limits. This sounds existentialist, and maybe it is to a certain degree but there is “something to nothing,” that I am sure of.

Just recently, a room in the I.D.E.A.S. Wing became vacated. This room, which right now is being emptied,  is a blank canvas.  Housed inside of the wing, this room is centrally located for all students who have classes here with our teachers. It is also easily located for all students, parents, and visitors.

Currently, this is what the room looks like:

 

Jason Burr, the principal of John Witherspoon Middle School, vacated the room for one single, solitary purpose – imagination and innovation. (Connect with Jason here!) With his moving of mountains, there is now a blank canvas to draw on in this space. Besides a few tables (which can be moved and changed up as the settings desire), there is not a whole lot in there; that is what excites me. The possibilities are endless. This space could become a tinker space, a maker space, a design space, a fab lab, an innovation lab, TV studio, etc, etc. The room can serve as an extension of the current I.D.E.A.S. Wing classes.

We are doing innovative things with our curriculum. We need to balance that with innovative spaces were the mind can flourish and our students can be functioning at their highest levels.

But what else could this room become? That, I am unsure of.

What I am sure of are the partners in education that we can call upon to help facilitate innovative discussions and to help spark new ideas with us. Partners in this type of endeavor are important because of the insight they can give. Schools such as Scarsdale Public Schools in New York (which is from our Tri-State Consortium alliance), Malvern Preparatory School in Pennsylvania (a brilliant connection from our own Kelly Riely), and Northfield Community Middle School in New Jersey (I met Glenn a few years back, and boy, I am glad to call him a friend in education). These are only a few of the relationships we have. They will continue to grow and more will form as we move forward. More on each one of these in a future post.

What will this room become? How can we capture the spirit of the Wing? What will it look like? How can it become a place for all students to think, make, create, and inspire others?

Students and teachers can be innovative anywhere but in this wing, and in this room, how can we continually create a blank canvas for each and every one of them?

Share your thoughts with us below – what would you do with a blank canvas?

Where I.D.E.A.S. come from…

Live to Learn, Learn to Live. 

That is the Princeton Public Schools tagline. It is engraved on buildings, memos, agendas, heck, even book marks. When you visit the district website, it is right there for you to look at and conceptualize. The saying is a wonderful philosophical statement that harkens back to some of the best tag lines, slogans, and philosophies ever written. It is simple, yet deep. It has a sense of pride, purpose, and certainly, tradition. There is a richness to it.

But why should we live to learn? How can we learn to live? 

These are tough questions, for sure, but they are essential to what we do in education. All too often, we focus on the “what” as educators. What should I be teaching, what should I use as a classroom management strategy? What should I wear on my first day of school? It wasn’t until I read and watched Simon Sinek give his TED Talk on “Start With Why” (Please Watch) that I realized that we focus on the wrong things. Or more concretely, we focus on the wrong order of things. We need to focus on the why because if you get the WHY right, everything else falls into place much easier than the other way around.

When you get the why right, it becomes much easier to come back from failure. If you focus on the what without having a why (meaning, why are you doing what you are doing), and you fail at what you are doing, you have nothing to center yourself on. You start from scratch. Again and again and again.

If you have a solid why built before you start you fail, you won’t fail because you do not know what you are doing and why you are doing it but you will fail because you tried something it didn’t work. That is the iterative process that design thinkers use all the time. Created out of the d School at Stanford, the Design Thinking Process takes people through the creation of what you may be doing. It also focuses people on the idea that what you are doing may fail and that failure is just part of the overall process of getting it correct.

So what does this have to do with the tag line for the Princeton Public Schools? How can we ensure that the tag line is not only emphasized on our buildings, memos and book marks, but also on our staff, and more importantly, students?

Great ideas come from great necessity. At the John Witherspoon Middle School, five amazing educators are coming to together to create the I.D.E.A.S. Wing. The wing houses five classes currently:

Mr. Randy Casey – STEM Robotics
Mr. Lonny Robtison – STEM Coding and Digital Art
Ms. Claudia Luongo – Visual Arts
Mr. Paul Skalka – Tech Prep
Ms. Kelly Riely – Computers and Technology

The wing, which is an actual, physical wing of the building will be a space to explore, cultivate, and celebrate all ideas through:
Innovation
Design
Engineering
Arts
Science

We want to cultivate and help sustain curiosity in the students we serve. To us, it is not just about MakerSpaces, tinkering, coding, 2D Art, robotics, service-learning, Little Bits, Makey-Makeys, and the like, it is much more. It is about collaboration and innovation.

How we plan to do it and what we use will be chronicled here for all to see as we make our journey with this. Our story, how it came together, and more will all be here.

To start, we will share our WHY and why we do what we do:

The mission of I.D.E.A.S. is to harness creativity by encouraging and providing students and teachers with an opportunity to innovate in a judgement free place.  We will collaborate, design and produce solutions for real-world problems that promote creative and interdisciplinary thinking that is both theoretical and practical in design.