The Deeper Learning Conversation: September 2017

Friday, September 29, 2017

Why Teaching Conversation Skills to Young People is More Important Than Ever

by Heather Peterson

Is technology is making our world more silent? Have young people become experts at escaping face-to-face communication? Have we lost the art of conversation in this generation?

I refused to let my fourteen year old son live in silence any longer and forced him to learn how to use his cell phone to call someone. This only came about because I demanded he use the phone feature if he wanted me to pick up his friend. He looked at me and simply said, “We don’t talk. We only text.” Now, let me be honest here. This kid knows how to talk. I get calls from teachers all the time about how much he talks in class. My question is, when do we give young people the chance to have conversations in class to build critical thinking skills? How are we equipping our young people to be college, career and life ready in proverbial silence?

We are indeed raising and teaching digital natives. Technology is a way of life. Literally. By the time a child has the dexterity to hold a phone, tablet or mouse that device morphs into another appendage.

Most young people today will always have tools to communicate digitally and in the classroom these tools can indeed help extend learning. Technology is also a tool that allows some young people to participate when often times they would not. The delicate balance is not letting the technology completely replace those face-to-face conversations.

Why is it important to engage young people in conversation?

Conversation helps young people express their thoughts, get what they need, resolve conflicts, ask for help, and learn from adults and from one another. Young people need many opportunities to talk—with each other, with adults, one-on-one, and in groups.

When planning the ways we want young people to learn we should start by thinking about the conversation we want them to be able to engage in, rather than making long lists of concepts and skills to be covered. Concepts and skills are important, but they are important because they support the conversations, not the other way around.

Paul Barnwell a high school educator and author asks the question: What if we focused on sharpening students’ ability to move back and forth between the digital and real world? An ironic benefit of technology is that we can leverage digital devices to capture and teach the art of conversation. All smart phones and tablets are recording devices; why not use those to record and assess students’ conversational skills? We can use technology to encourage students to strike a balance between digital literacies and interpersonal conversation.

We will have to take the lead as educators and teach the art of conversation. We often have students to turn and talk or work in groups without setting them up to be successful. Having conversation protocols or expectations sets the stage for success. Young people are depending on us to sharpen their verbal communication skills so they can master interviewing skills, collaborating in teams, and entering a diverse workforce with the ability to navigate the nuances of communication.

While the old adage my say, silence is golden. If we want young people that are effective communicators, collaborators, critical and creative thinkers that demonstrate positive citizenship then we better get the conversation started - most importantly we better include young people in these conversations.

Heather Peterson is the Climate & Culture Coordinator at Hampton City Schools. You can reach her at hpeterson@hampton.k12.va.us.

Monday, September 18, 2017

Stuff You Can't Google: Understandings

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

When he was four, my son and I arrived early at preschool one morning and decided to play the “Ask Google” game. I enabled the speech search for Google on my phone and he asked Google questions.

“When did T-Rex live?” came his first query. Google cheerfully chirped that T-Rex lived 65 to 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.

“What did triceratops eat?” was his next question, and Google answered back that triceratops was an herbivore.

Giggling and a bit punchdrunk on what he assumed was pure omniscience at his fingertips, he happily cried, “Why do I like dinosaurs?”

And Google was silent.

He looked at me. “Why isn’t it answering?” he asked. I tried to explain that Google can tell us facts, but it can’t always tell us bigger answers, inferences, or, well, life truths (like, “Because dinosaurs represent power as a four year old, that’s very appealing to you.”) It was a sobering lesson for him: there are still some things that Mom can teach him that Google can’t, and some things he’s just going to have to learn for himself.

And that’s one of the most important lessons that PreK-12 educators need to teach our young people today. Just because Google can answer lots of things, doesn’t mean that Google actually has all the answers. And furthermore, some great life truths are only going to be learned by exploring the content, asking ourselves essential questions, and wrestling through the answers.

In other words, young people today need us to help them grasp, explore, and work through Understandings--big, overarching inferences about the content, about why it’s important, and how it impacts our lives today. Also called “Enduring Understandings,” Wiggins & McTighe use both Understandings and Essential Questions in their framework Understanding by Design to help students truly absorb big concepts.

So, what are Understandings? According to Wiggins & McTighe: “An understanding is an important inference, stated as a specific and useful generalization. … An understanding refers to transferable, big ideas having enduring value beyond a specific topic” (p. 129). Understandings should be “broad and abstract, universal in application, generally timeless--carry through the ages, and represented by different examples” (p. 130).

In a future blog, we’ll talk more about how to use Understandings in the classroom. In the meantime, here is a collection of Understandings to get you started. Remember, the point is not to use every Understanding that you see here in your classroom; instead, you want to pick and choose the ones that get at the heart of why students are learning the content that you’re teaching. You want to come back to them throughout the course of the year, or between grade levels and courses, and use them to show connections between concepts.

Collaboration:

People create systems to manage conflict effectively.
Respect and trust are essential component in effective relationships.
Common language can create a common purpose; lack of a common language can impede a common purpose.
People work together to achieve common goals.
Groups are made of individuals with their own thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs.

Communication:

Language expresses thoughts and feelings.
Nonlinguistic representations can express thoughts and feelings.
How a message is communicated affects how it will be received.
What we think and feel about a concept informs the language we use to describe it; the language we use to describe a concept informs what we think and feel about it.
Communication is composed both of knowing how to effectively share and effectively receive information.
People make deliberate choices about what to share and what not to share with others.
There are multiple perspectives to every story/event.
Language is inherently changeable.
We use language to communicate, but cannot rely on it.

Critical Thinking:

Patterns help us make predictions.
A whole is made up of parts.
There are multiple ways to solve a problem.
The past impacts the present and the future.
Rules exist for breaking apart and combining numbers, letters/words, and information/facts.
Fluency with certain knowledge is important to solve problems.
In some circumstances, it is more useful and efficient to estimate an answer that to produce an exact answer.
Humans work to understand and describe the world around us through language, numbers, movement, and images.
We organize information based on relationships.

Creativity:

Conflict is common element in fiction.
Fantasy explores truths of human understanding and experiences.
Creating a work of art is both a reflection of the world and the self.
Inspiration is often found in the people, places, and events around us.
There are multiple ways to define creativity.
Art holds personal meaning both for the artist and the audience, and these personal meaning may or may not coincide.

Citizenship

The acts of one person can affect many people.
People create systems to establish and keep order.
There can be both positive and negative relationships between the good of the individual and the good of the group.
Citizens influence the government that rules them.

Other:

We depend on the Earth to meet our basic needs.
Progress is a type of change.

Have one you’d like to add? Email me or leave a comment here.

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools, Virginia. You can contact her at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.

The Stuff You Can't Google: Essential Questions

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

Jogging. Driving to work. Over dinner with loved ones. These are the times that our brains explore the questions that define who we are and who we want to become as human beings.

How do you know what is true? * Is war ever justified? * How do you know when you have enough?

If you’ve been exposed to the concept of Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, then you probably had some an immediate realizations while reading the above paragraphs: those are Essential Questions. And they are, in the biggest, most overarching senses of the concept.

Here are some more Essential Questions (and notice how one can lead to another):

What are the essential characteristics of humans that haven’t changed throughout our existence?

Subquestion A: How can one generation relate to the next?

Subquestion B: How can educators relate to their students?

Do you see where I’m going with this? The more I ponder the above Essential Questions, the more I keep coming back to this understanding: Asking questions and searching for answers is an essential part of the human experience.

In other words, even when students “talk” more through social media than they do through their mouths, even when they no longer have to memorize facts or read maps or anything else that the majority of educators did during our formative years: They’re still going to be wrestling with those same Essential Questions:

How do you know what is true? * Is war ever justified? * How do you know when you have enough?

And in this age, where there are so many competing sources for attention right at everyone’s fingertips, it’s more imperative than ever that we help students see the relevance of what we’re teaching. Their brains are purposefully setting up filters so that if something is immensely interesting or important, they focus their attention somewhere else. Essential Questions and Understandings are both interesting and important.

So, how do you know if a question is just a question, or if it’s an Essential Question? According to Wiggins and McTighe, there are seven characteristics of an Essential Question:

Is open-ended (no single, final, or correct answer)
Is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion or debate
Calls for higher-order thinking
Points toward important, transferable ideas
Raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry
Requires support and justification
Recurs over time; can and should be revisited again and again
Must be student-friendly! (ADDED BY HAMPTON CITY SCHOOLS)

Note that “Essential Question” doesn’t mean, “It’s essential that you know the answer in order to pass a test.” Some teachers define “essential questions” that way, and I always urge them to ask themselves, “But WHY does something think it’s important that your students know that information in the first place?” Because that’s probably where the actual Essential Question lies.

For instance, “What states seceded during the Civil War?” is NOT an essential question. It IS a question that you should ask during a lesson, and it can help you explore the Essential Question, but the actual Essential Question might be one that we looked at above: “Is war ever justified?” We can then look through the lens of both the Confederate and the Union states to determine why each side thought the war was justifiable, based on geographical factors, religion, economies, etc..

As a teacher, is it more important that you’re able to find good essential questions or write them yourself? My answer is: yes. You need to be able to do both. There are some amazing Essential Questions that already exist in PreK-12 lesson planning, and why reinvent the wheel? On the other hand, some that you find through a quick Google search may need tweaking to truly be an Essential Question, and sometimes you don’t find anything at all for what you teach.

To that end, here are some big, broad Essential Questions that can be used time and again throughout the PreK-12 curriculum. Note that some might need to be put into simpler language for our younger students. They’re loosely organized around the 5 Cs: Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Critical Thinking, and Citizenship, which are often the main goals of PreK-12 education.

See if you can relate one or more of these to YOUR content area.