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A Road Trip Redesigned
November 18, 2014
0
who is at the d school

 

lifebeginsattheendofyourcomfortzone

This past month has been an exciting one, filled with diverse learning experiences, and it’s reminded me of the importance of challenging oneself by leaving one’s physical and mental space. The month began with a trip I took with my colleagues at Magen David Yeshivah High School, Associate Principal, Ms. Sabrina Maleh, and Director of Educational Technology, Rabbi Michael Bitton. Sabrina, Michael, and I traveled to Silicon Valley where we met up with Stanford University doctoral candidate and JEDLABian Matt Williams [You can also catch Matt on the Summer Sandbox videos; he facilitated this year’s Sandbox and led workshops on culture change on Day 3].

Matt generously set up tours and meetings for Sabrina, Michael, and me, giving us insight into the many facets of workplace culture, Design Thinking, Maker Spaces, Fab Labs, and project-based learning that we were setting out to explore.

Day 1

Google

On Monday, November 3, after a hearty breakfast at Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels, Matt, Sabrina, Michael, and I set out for a tour of Google headquarters.

Sabrina Michael and I at Google

Matt and I at Google

Among many other things, Matt Williams arranged our tour of Google

Google interested us because we wanted a look at its workplace culture, and we weren’t disappointed. As you can see from the entry point we posed in front of, the place has a Disneyland-for-adults feel that is echoed throughout the complex. Though I’m not sure if Google employees think it’s the happiest place on earth, the company does aim to keep its workers content, a fact that’s apparent from the Adirondack chairs scattered in casual groupings in outside spaces to the volleyball court set up near the employee-run herb garden. A mobile barber shop was parked in one parking lot, and a laundry room enabled employees to do their wash throughout the day. Of course the fitness room was state-of-the-art, but the biggest talking point — one that I heard repeated often — was the fact that Google has a rule that no employee is allowed to walk more than 150 feet without encountering (free) food. Yes, a Weight Watchers branch had to open onsite, mostly for first-year employees who hadn’t yet learned how to ration.

My one question as we left Google was whether the company was catering to employees in order to create whole-person well-being or because workers needed so many amenities because they didn’t have a home life. . . . I don’t have the answer yet, but here are some of the things I enjoyed hearing and seeing about the most:

Michael at Google Earth

Yes, that’s Michael Bitton at the helm of a giant Google Earth, honing in on various parts of the world, including Israel and NY

Magen David

7801 Bay Parkway, Brooklyn, NY lights up as Michael hones in on Magen David Yeshivah HS

Google herb garden

An employee-run herb garden is only one of the many passion-based “hive communities” that have popped up at Google. All are self-run, with their own listservs and protocols.

town hall

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, conduct weekly town hall meetings, where they share news and let employees voice ideas and opinions. Yes, the color scheme is consistent throughout the complex. You will find no purple at Google, and you’ll find company bikes that are painted in the famous Google palette.

Google was exactly what I thought it would be — though with a larger gift shop that carried a broader range of goods than I had anticipated. Still, hearing about Google’s famous culture and seeing it up close were two different things, and I was grateful for the trip into one of the epicenters of innovation. I have to remain positive: remember, everything I’m typing right now is being picked up by one of these:

Google car

Professor Lee Shulman

After Google, our next stop was a meeting with Dr. Lee Shulman, educational psychologist, professor emeritus at Stanford University, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and past president of the American Educational Research Association (yes, this is all one person). Professor Shulman also happens to be a warm and witty man who graciously shared his wisdom and advice with us. Speaking with us for well over an hour, he told us to tackle culture change by looking at obstacles as opportunities. We’ve been using Lee’s growth mindset language ever since we left his office. You can get to know Professor Shulman and gain from his positive, humorous, Jewish, and cold-cut-filled take on life through his writings, some of which are more insouciant than others.

Stanford University’s d. School

After leaving Professor Shulman, we then headed to Stanford University’s d. School. Let me give this place some context: I have been slightly obsessed with the d. School ever since I saw David Kelley’s TED Talk, ” How to Build Your Creative Confidence.” Seeing that Talk led me to investigate all things IDEO, Kelley’s firm which employs Design Thinking, and that led me to the d. School, the Design Thinking school Kelley started at Stanford, with Steve Jobs’ blessing (Kelley and his firm designed products for Jobs for over 20 years. Apple’s first mouse? Designed by IDEO).

Design Thinking

Here’s a brief explanation of what Design Thinking is:


And here’s the d. School manifesto, on a napkin.

napkin-full

Know, too, that Maya Bernstein of Upstart Bay Area has been working with the Jewish Education Project in NY to bring Design Thinking to Jewish education. We’ve been talking Design Thinking on JEDLAB lately as well, so join the conversation there.

Seeing the d. School in person did not disappoint. It was every bit as sharp, fun, and packed with post-it notes as the videos and websites make it out to be, and the fact that it now has a Maker Space only makes it that much more appealing. I also enjoyed seeing a prototyping cart with all sorts of random objects on it that reminded me of the seemingly useless items now filling the shelves of my office but which I am confident will one day be used in creatively cutting edge ways by Magen David teachers and students. Here’s a glimpse of the d. School, with its emphasis on ideation, prototyping — in both analog and digital form — and failing fast to fail forward:

Make d school

who is at the d school

design school

pretotyping manifesto d school

I love this: can you see the bottom? It says, “Maker sure you are building the right it before you build it right.”

experience prototyping
elmo loves iteration

d school iteration on making

so many stickies at d school

Eco-friendly Silicon Valley makes way for the stickie-note-obsessed d. School!

prototyping cart

A prototyping cart

d school maker space

The d. School Maker Space, complete with a retro-looking 3-D printer

d school maker space tools 1

Stanford’s Fab Lab

From the d. School, it was just a hop, skip, and jump away to Stanford’s Fab Lab. The difference between a Maker Space and Fab Lab? Not much. There were a lot of cool toys lying around both spaces — things a do-it-yourself-er might like to tinker with — such as 3-D printers, laser cutters, tools, and other widgets. This interest in Making as Learning that’s grabbed hold of educators is no doubt the result of more equitable access to formerly high-priced items such as 3-D printers. Dale Dougherty, founder of the Maker Movement, discusses in the following video how Making is making its way into education. I showed this video at the Yavneh Academy Board of Education meeting that took place as soon as I returned from my trip. It got us all thinking about ways we might include Making in the curriculum:

Stanford’s Fab Lab:

invent to learn fab lab

Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager’s book has become a sort of Bible in the Maker Movement

dinosaurs fab lab

Cool things you can make with a laser cutter!

fab lab playfulness

The Fab Lab had the same sort of playfulness we encountered at the d. School. “Who says work can’t be fun?” was a recurring theme throughout the day — from Google to our meeting with Lee to the d. School and Fab Lab

fab lab tools

Day 2

Professor Ari Kelman

It’s hard to believe all that I just wrote happened on one day, but that’s what camp — I mean, a serious business trip — is like. Day 2 was just as much of a learning experience. Matt, Sabrina, Michael, and I began the day with Professor Ari Kelman, the Jim Joseph Chair in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Just reading the book titles in Professor Kelman’s office was an education, but Ari, like Lee, also generously shared his wisdom with us. Ari — and Matt — study the Jewish ecosystem, so hearing the opinions of those studying the field of Jewish education from 30,000 feet high was important: those of us who are busy with managing what on some days feel like tiny twigs can sometimes lose sight of the forest.

The Los Altos School District

One place that is busy tending a very well-run forest is the Los Altos school district, our last stop before we headed on to our next adventures — more about those in another blog post. Visiting Los Altos brought our trip all together: the district engaged in Design Thinking to create its teacher training program. In fact, the teachers’ professional development rooms looked exactly like the d. School.

The district also had created an exciting STEM program, decorating its STEM classrooms in inviting ways that inspired students to create and innovate. We peeked in on a group of 8-year-olds who had been given the challenge to balance a LEGO house on no more than 10 index cards without being able to use scissors or glue. The first girl who completed the task did so in about ten minutes, but the truth is that all the students who entered this self-selected class began ideating and iterating from the moment they walked into it. Their motivation reminded us that when students never stop being curious and always look at work as play, then what results is the kind of joyful learning that takes place in kindergarten — and places such as the d. School and Stanford’s Fab Lab.

los altos passion learning

Passion-driven learning creates high levels of engagement — in students in the Los Altos school district as well as in employees at Google who have their passion-driven hive communities within the company

los altos what would happen

Creating an inquiry-based classroom begins with posting thought-provoking questions . . .

los altos einstein

. . . and quotations. This one, of course, underscores the fail forward mentality we also saw at the d. School and the Stanford Fab Lab

los altos teacher challenge

Teacher Katie Farley instructs her students on what to do for their LEGO Challenge, a task the students are willingly undertaking during their lunch period. Katie, by the way, taught at Maimonides day school in Los Angeles!

los altos student ideating

los altos lego

Sabrina, Michael, and my trip to Northern California, as I said, came full circle in many, many ways. Here’s a dot which connected our first and last two stops: did you know Google’s first servers were on . . . LEGO?

los altos ilearn

The teacher training rooms at the Los Altos school district were designed by the d. School’s K-12 Teaching Team

los altos pail

Shades of the Summer Sandbox: the pail as pen holder! And note the d. School-mandated post-it notes.

Takeaways

I’ve been thinking about learning as play for quite a few years now, but it’s a very different thing to think about it than it is to see it in one of the country’s top universities and enacted on a district-wide level in one of the most innovative school districts in the country.

If you’ve been toying with how to begin playing, innovating, making, or designing in your school or classroom, but have been afraid to, perhaps you’ll be inspired by what’s going on in Northern California. And also remember how we began this post — by reminding ourselves to get out of our comfort zones. The Los Altos schools make sure their teachers do so by posting these tenets from the rules of Improv, an art form that demands that players remain open to what their partners throw at them. In other words, Improv requires a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed one, something the curriculum planners at Los Altos told us was at the heart of their professional development plan. We hope it will be at the heart of yours too:

los altos improv

The Maker Movement in Jewish Education
October 6, 2014
2
photo (1)

 

Maker-Faire

September 21 saw a group of Jewish educators — and students — attend the NYC Maker Faire. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Maker Movement, here’s a good definition from techopedia.com:

Definition - What does Maker Movement mean?

The maker movement is a trend in which individuals or groups of individuals create and market products that are recreated and assembled using unused, discarded or broken electronic, plastic, silicon or virtually any raw material and/or product from a computer-related device.

The maker movement has led to the creation of a number of technology products and solutions by typical individuals working without supportive infrastructure. This is facilitated by the increasing amount of information available to individuals and the decreasing cost of electronic components.

Techopedia explains Maker Movement

The maker movement is primarily the name given to the increasing number of people employing do-it-yourself (DIY) and do-it-with-others ( DIWO) techniques and processes to develop unique technology products. Generally, DIY and DIWO enables individuals to create sophisticated devices and gadgets, such as printers, robotics and electronic devices, using diagrammed, textual and or video demonstration. With all the resources now available over the Internet, virtually anyone can create simple devices, which in some cases are widely adopted by users. For example, MintyBoost, a popular DIY USB charger kit built using an Altoids tin, batteries and a few connectors, can easily be created using instructions online, or purchased from other makers who sell their devices.

Most of the products created under the maker movement are open source, as anyone can access and create them using available documentation and manuals.

However, the maker movement also incorporates creations and inventions that never existed before and were developed by individuals in their homes, garages or a place with limited manufacturing resources.

And here’s founder of Make magazine and Maker Faire Dale Dougherty explaining his vision for the Maker Movement in education (think Maker Spaces merging with libraries!):

DIY, STEM, and PBL

Since Project-Based Learning (PBL) emphasizes student interests and passions and because Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) is such a focus in schools now, it’s no wonder that the do-it-yourself joy of making is seeping into schools.

A lot of times. though, we’ve seen the rush in education to play with the latest gadget (OK, pun slightly intended) without an initial, thoughtfully laid-out plan about how to use our new toys. Of course, at the very essence of the Maker Movement is a kind of spontaneous tinkering, but because class time is so precious, educators want to know how the Maker Movement contributes to a school’s — and in the case of Jewish education — to a Jewish school’s primary goals and concerns.

Jewish educators who attended the Maker Faire asked themselves just those questions, but it wasn’t just Jewish educators who got to voice their opinions. Students as well contributed to the discussion:

photo 1 (2)

I had a great time at the Maker Faire with Oren Mendelow, video and tech whiz of Kushner Academy; Ari Mendelow, a Rutger’s engineering student; and Ronit Langer, a Frisch School senior interested in a career in STEM. Amitai Cohen, another Frisch senior who has been a techie for years, joined us later in the day

photo 4 (1)

We bumped into Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky (@TechRav), Frisch’s Director of Educational Technology, at the Maker Faire!

What Did We See?

What exactly happens at a Maker Faire? Well, you get to see a lot of cool gadgetry; think Inspector Gadget meets LEGO meets 3-D printing meets the Green Movement:

photo 1 (4)

Yes, that's a crocodile being pedaled by humans!

Yes, that’s a crocodile being pedaled by humans!

photo 2 (2)

This eco-friendly sculpture is made from recycled plastic bottles and bottlecaps and is something Mrs. Ahuva Mantell, Frisch’s art teacher who attended the Maker Faire and who runs the school’s Environmental Club, no doubt enjoyed seeing

photo 4 (2)

The bottle sculpture was next to a stand discussing the drink of the future, a mood-altering beverage that sounded as if it were something right out of The Jetsons — or Brave New World

Other highlights from the Maker Faire were 3-D printing demos — here, there, and everywhere — , arduino boards and Raspberry Pis up the wazoo, lifestyle cars, and all things LEGO. Check out this Apple store made out of the legendary building blocks. The “store” was next to a booth about E-nabling the Future, a network that uses cheap 3-D printing materials to create prosthetics for children who cannot afford expensive ones. Especially because children are always growing, they need prosthetics they can easily replace.

photo 3 (5)

One of the things that’s fun about the Maker Faire is the juxtaposition of the very serious and socially responsible with the whimsical and weird. In fact, here are some products that would enable both, wood shop “printers” and home builders:

photo 2 (3)

photo 1 (5)

photo 4 (3)

You don’t need serious tools or expensive shop-bots to build, though. Simply take apart old electronic devices and see what you can create. Mrs. Mantell taught me that a couple of years ago; she’s been re-purposing all sorts of materials for years!

Another thing I liked about the Maker Faire was the opportunity it offered girls interested in STEM. From 3-D printed dolls and dresses to wearable technologies that caused clothing to change color when the weather altered, the displays and demonstrations showed me, Ronit Langer, and Magen David faculty member Naomi Weiss what was possible for girls who had gender-traditional interests as well as a technological bent:

photo (2)

A 3-D printed dress

photo 5 (1)

A demonstration on wearable technologies

Post-Maker Faire Party

After the Maker Faire, Ronit Langer, Naomi Weiss, and I headed to the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, which hosted dinner for anyone interested in discussing what we had seen during the day. Thanks to Head of School Shira Leibowitz and Director of Educational Technology Rebecca Penina Simon for helping me plan the event and for graciously letting us have it at SSSQ. Rebecca is running the school’s Maker Space, so I was especially eager to hear what she had taken away from the day. We were joined by Janine Lalander, SSSQ lower school Science teacher, Yavneh Academy’s Director of Technology Chani Lichtiger,Technology Coach Claire Hirschhorn, and fifth-grade teacher Sharon Sherman, as well as Montessori School advocate Daniel Petter-Lipstein and his daughter Liora.

Over a delicious dinner from Carlos and Gabby’s, we discussed:

Where to fit a Maker Space into a curriculum:

Rebecca and Shira shared how they did it: they created 8th-grade electives, and those students interested in Making signed up for Rebecca’s class. Rebecca used her Twitter PLN and training and guidance from Maker State to prepare for the course, which you can read more about in her informative and exciting blog post.

SSSQ’s Maker Space is filled with self-selected students, so we also asked ourselves what we might gain from introducing all kids to Making at a young age, giving them exposure to it in the same way we give them exposure to the arts and a wide range of disciplines.

Why have a Maker Space:

Though a Maker Space is obviously a great way to teach students STEM, we all concluded that an equally important by-product of Making is that it produces joyful, active learning and promotes creativity. It also shows students that they can have a self-generated idea that they can bring to fruition.

In addition, our group discussed the pro’s and con’s of keeping a Maker Space separate from course curriculum, keeping Making in its own discrete space, or, alternatively, combining it with course content. What if students were to learn about dinosaur fossils and then have to 3-D print them? Or study urban design and then light up a model city?

Or how would Magen David Talmud teacher Rabbi Joseph Esses — who also attended the Maker Faire — change his Sukkah-building project if he had ShopBot?

photo 1 (6)

Though we didn’t come to any set conclusions over our meal, we all agreed that the Maker Movement was something we wanted our students to be a part of, and we left feeling committed not only to ensuring that happened but to helping each other along the way.

photo (1)

The Maker Faire post-party helped us sort out our thoughts on Making and Tinkering! Consensus: we’re in!

Is This on the Test?: Establishing a Real Need to Know
October 5, 2014
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wonder wall

The Need to Know

So far, Eliezer Jones and I have introduced the basic components of PBL and discussed how it includes significant content. This post will explore the Need to Know that is a crucial part of setting up a successful PBL unit. To review, let’s consider the component, described by the Buck Institute of Education (BIE):

Students see the need to gain knowledge, understand concepts, and apply skills in order to understand the Driving Question and create project products, beginning with an Entry Event that generates curiosity and interest.

We’ll explore the Driving Question in greater depth in a later post, but for those who need an explanation of it, it’s the question that drives the learning and that connects it to a real-world problem or application. For a quick peek at Driving Questions, check out this blog post from edutopia, one of our favorite sites for PBL.

Is This Going to Be on the Test?

As educators, we all know that unfortunately often the driving question for students is: Is this going to be on the test? We’re greedy, though. We want students to be curious and engaged, and we don’t want them to just be “doing school”; we want them to love learning and be lifelong learners. This is why the Need to Know is such an important component of PBL: it arranges and arrays the learning in such a way that it becomes vital for the student to know it.

Creating the Need

What, then, creates the Need to Know?

heptagon_red

Looking at the BIE’s image of PBL components, I find it significant that the Need to Know is flanked by the Driving Question and Voice and Choice. A fascinating Driving Question will certainly spark in students a desire to know, but these questions must be appealing to students, not teachers. Teachers may have a Need to Know how force and velocity work, why World War I began, or what Hamlet’s problem really is, but students may not be particularly interested in those ideas. Instead, educators have to think about where students are and bring the Need to Know to their page. I might consider the following Driving Questions:

How might an understanding of force and velocity help me design athletic gear that will improve athlete performance?

How can an understanding of the way countries go to war help me understand how to fight terror today or improve relationships in my life?

Is Hamlet a teenager with a lot of angst or something more? How does understanding Hamlet help me understand myself and the difficult transitions I’m going through as an adolescent?

According to the BIE, once you’ve decided on a Driving Question (DQ) that will engage students, your next step is an exciting Entry Event that introduces the DQ and the project as a whole. More about that below.

I also think, though, that resonant driving questions suppose that students are interested in ideas that relate to them in some way, an assumption that the PBL component of Voice and Choice also makes. In fact, it’s a logical and healthy assumption that not only honors students’ inner lives but also all of our own. Learning takes on an added dimension when a student and teacher feel personally invested in it. Therefore, another way to get students to address a Need to Know is to give them Voice and Choice in class and find out what about the topic interests them.

Wonder Walls

wonder wall

A lot of teachers are creating Wonder Walls in their classrooms, asking students to write down what they want to know — either in general or about a specific topic in a course syllabus. Teachers can decide what they want to do with that information. For example, using Google’s 80/20 model, teachers can devote class time to allowing students to explore a topic of interest on their own. The passion for learning the Google model elicits can spill over into the rest of the course. Or, teachers can use students’ interests as a springboard for the learning in their class, building students’ interests into the course material.

An Example

J hist

It’s up to you as an educator to decide what to do when your students tell you they’re interested in the 80’s (poster on the left) or Elvis in the 60’s (poster on the right)

For example, a Jewish history teacher at Magen David HS, Ms. Frieda Cattan, is covering Classical Judaism this year, and she began the course by asking her students what period of history they’re most interested in. Students then had to use props and other art supplies to bring that time to life on a poster board. Since Ms. Cattan’s Driving Question for the year is How Did We Jews Get Here Today?, she can use the students’ interests in a particular time period to help them wonder how we got from the Classical world to their favored period. Ms. Cattan can also have her students compare their favorite era with the Classical world, and since Ms. Cattan asked students to imagine a role for themselves in their preferred period, she can now also ask them to trace what that role looks like going back in time to the Classical world. In fact, endless opportunities pop up to connect the course syllabus to student interest, now that Ms. Cattan knows what those interests are.

Make the Time

One of the biggest concerns teachers have expressed when given these suggestions is how to make them work in a course where time is never sufficient: a course may have an important standardized test at its culmination or a particularly content-rich syllabus. We believe, though, that learning becomes easier when student passions are engaged, when the classroom is alive with the vitality of those interested in what is going on there. The truth is that the Need to Know has always existed in the classroom, but PBL, with its student-centered focus, places the onus of responsibility on the teacher to discover what might make his/her students not just interested in learning but truly compelled to discover what a course is all about.

Additional Resources

Entry Event into a Unit on the Human Body

An engaging Entry Event, which enables teachers to spark excitement and interest about a learning unit, is a good way to establish a Need to Know. We love this teacher-made video which, as an entry event into a unit on the human body, got kids thinking about why an understanding of the body is vital to their lives. Note how the teachers incorporated their own passions into the entry event video. Passion-based learning always adds a personal dimension to class that everyone — teacher and student — benefits from:

Suzie Boss on Project Launches

Here is PBL guru Suzie Boss on how to do project launches in an exciting manner.

Getting Started with PBL and Creativity
September 17, 2014
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photo 4

Creativity and Professional Development

One of the hardest things to do for a school is keep the momentum of professional development (PD) going. At Magen David Yeshivah High School (MDY), the administrators worked throughout August to prepare three opening days of PD that connected to the ways in which the school wants to grow.

On the first day of PD, faculty got to unleash their creativity with an opening icebreaker. Faculty were divided into ten groups and went to sit at tables with different fruits, art supplies, props, costumes, and sport-related objects (a kite, paddle ball, plastic ball):

creativity tables

For five minutes, each table brainstormed an answer to the question, “What if Jewish education were more like . . . ?” JEDLAB and participants of the Summer Sandbox had tackled that question over the summer, giving rise to answers such as a gym, a candy shop, and an outdoor adventure. Magen David faculty came up with the following answers, which they posted to the poster below: 1) a survival hike, 2) an orchard, 3) a fitness center, 4) a desert oasis, 5) a do-it-yourself theme park, 6) Disney World!, 7) K _ _ _ _ _ _ _, 8) an English fantasy football league, 9) a tour, and 10) freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

RealSchool-er Ari Mendelow created the poster on which we posted the faculty's answers!

RealSchool-er Ari Mendelow created the poster on which we posted the faculty’s answers!

Faculty then had to create visual representations of their ideas. Here’s one table of teachers and administrators bringing to life their vision for Jewish education — in 15 minutes!

photo 4

This group saw Magen David as a Do-It-Yourself Theme Park, where students could go on a “BOLD-er Coaster,” that is, take blended learning classes, and climb the to college rock wall (the notched nerf ball)

In the High Tech schools in San Diego, CA, all the teachers have to complete the projects they assign, so they feel what it’s like to undertake their own assignments. Not only do the teachers gain empathy, experiencing school from a student’s point of view, but they can also troubleshoot before the project is even assigned. Magen David felt it was important for teachers to experience the power of making and being creative, if the school was going to stress its importance throughout the coming year.

PBL in Professional Development

Later on the first day of PD, we had a workshop focused solely on PBL, with the goal being that each department would formulate a driving question based on the content of a course in their subject area. Here are the teachers’ driving questions, some of which tackle a real-world problem and some of which focus on the social, emotional, and religious development of the students, something that as a yeshivah, we are particularly concerned with.

MDY Driving Questions:

Art:

How did Post-Impressionists change the course of modern art?

Biology:

How does human population growth affect Earth’s ecosystem?

English:

How does multi-cultural literature help us learn about ourselves?

Halakha [Jewish Law]:

How can condo vacationers make their kitchens kosher?

Hebrew Language:

How is Israel related to my identity?

History:

Can an international community exist, and can that community solve international crises?

Math:

How do we use linear and quadratic equations to help describe the real world?

Navi (Prophets):

How are events and ideas in Navi related to us today?

Physical Education:

How does physical education affect various aspects of your life?

Talmud:

What makes a lulav kosher?

Unlocking the Block

One of the ways Magen David has shown a serious commitment to employing PBL is by using block scheduling for its core secular studies classes. A double period allows learners to engage fully and deeply in a project that involves longer periods of planning and execution time. On the third day of PD, secular studies teachers were given time to model block scheduling lessons. Roxanne Maleh, an English teacher at MDY, prepared this dynamic and fun lesson that not only taught how to employ PBL but how to infuse the classroom with play and games:

Block Schedule Lesson for PD Day

Another way MDY has shown its commitment to PBL is by creating a project-based learning schedule for the school year. Each month, a Judaic Studies subject and a secular studies one have committed to using PBL, so on the PD days, you could hear departments hashing out what content in which courses they wanted to use for a project-based learning unit. Here’s Magen David’s PBL schedule for the year, and note that not every grade in a particular subject is employing PBL. We want to make starting with the pedagogy as manageable and feasible as possible:

Magen David HS PBL Schedule for 2014 to 15 School Year (1)

Keeping the Momentum Going

As we said, starting a PD initiative may be hard, but keeping it going is even harder. MDY has committed time and resources to making sure teachers have what they need to implement PBL and generate creativity in their classrooms. Faculty are part of the I.D.E.A. Schools Network; have a coaching and mentoring system with experts in PBL and student-centered learning; and an office where they can easily access art supplies and other tools they can use for creative learning.

How’s it going so far? Here’s a gallery of some of the things the MDY faculty is doing already:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/83447659@N04/sets/72157647296186247/

Next Steps

We’ll keep you posted about how PBL progresses at Magen David. Adopting the pedagogy requires commitment and planning, but the rewards are well worth it: students become engaged, active learners who are proud of their work and are able to think deeply about what they study. As Naomi Weiss, MDY’s instructional coach, says, “Learning becomes about uncovering content, not about covering it.”

Cross-posted on welovemagendavidhs.blogspot.com.

An Introduction to PBL
September 3, 2014
4
heptagon_red

So you want to get started with Project-Based Learning?

We think that’s an awesome idea, and we want to provide a path to success. One of the first things we have to do when discussing PBL is explain why it’s important in today’s world. After all, PBL has been around since the early twentieth century when John Dewey advocated that students needed to learn by having experiences in the real world and not by memorizing packaged content. Go here to learn more about Dewey’s philosophy. The truth is that Dewey’s approach wasn’t really new either. The idea that people learn by doing and that learning should have practical value is obviously at the heart of the apprenticeship system, but in the last couple of centuries, emphasis on academic knowledge sidelined educational opportunities that focused on student-centered, immersive learning experiences. For more on this theme, check out Ken Robinson’s amazing RSA Animate video (Sir Ken’s TED Talk is also pretty paradigm shifting.)

What accounts for the adaptation of Dewey’s pedagogy, almost a century after he lived? Technology, we think, plays a large role. Today, students — anyone — can access information in a way that is unprecedented in human history, and they can also create using digital media in a way that is unique to the world. In fact, it’s often students who know more about technology than their teachers do, so for the first time a younger generation is more knowledgeable about something than their elders. We think that calls for a radical re-shifting of how learning takes place. And we’re not alone. Check out David Thornburg’s take on what school should look like:

Tony Wagner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is also an education change agent. Here’s what he says in his book Creating Innovators:

“Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. . . . A handful of high schools, colleges and graduate schools are teaching young people these skills—places like High Tech High in San Diego, the New Tech high schools (a network of 86 schools in 16 states), Olin College in Massachusetts, the Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. The culture of learning in these programs is radically at odds with the culture of schooling in most classrooms.”

So we see that there is a serious need for PBL and the kind of thinking and learning it fosters. We’re ready then to get into some PBL basics. The Buck Institute of Education, dedicated to all things PBL, has a good definition of it, as well as a clear breakdown of its components:

heptagon_red

Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, problem, or challenge. Essential Elements of PBL include:

  • Significant Content - At its core, the project is focused on teaching students important knowledge and skills, derived from standards and key concepts at the heart of academic subjects.
  • 21st century competencies - Students build competencies valuable for today’s world, such as problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity/innovation, which are explicitly taught and assessed.
  • In-Depth Inquiry - Students are engaged in an extended, rigorous process of asking questions, using resources, and developing answers.
  • Driving Question - Project work is focused by an open-ended question that students understand and find intriguing, which captures their task or frames their exploration.
  • Need to Know - Students see the need to gain knowledge, understand concepts, and apply skills in order to answer the Driving Question and create project products, beginning with an Entry Event that generates interest and curiosity.
  • Voice and Choice - Students are allowed to make some choices about the products to be created, how they work, and how they use their time, guided by the teacher and depending on age level and PBL experience.
  • Critique and Revision - The project includes processes for students to give and receive feedback on the quality of their work, leading them to make revisions or conduct further inquiry.
  • Public Audience - Students present their work to other people, beyond their classmates and teacher.

We also like this brief overview of PBL, again provided by BIE:

You can find all you need for PBL not only on BIE’s site but also through edutopia, which identifies PBL as one of its core strategies.

Another question that often comes up during a discussion of PBL is: what’s the difference between projects and project-based learning? We think this chart provides a good answer:

PBL vs Projects

Take the time to truly examine the chart. You’ll find that PBL has some key features that we think are essential for deep and true learning:

student-centered learning

context for learning

built-in assessment (the project is the learning and doesn’t come after the learning)

emphasis on acquisition of skills as well as content

a public audience (think of how much more meaningful work can be for students when they know it will be seen by the world)

One final resource:

This past July, at the Summer Sandbox, our professional development workshop, educators got to experience PBL and create their own project-based learning units. This short video of the Sandbox can add to your understanding of the pedagogy:

Now that you’ve gotten an introduction of project-based learning, you can start thinking about how you’re going to marry your course content to the pedagogy.

Culture Change at the Sandbox
August 21, 2014
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sandsandbox

We know you’re busy preparing for the opening of school. One of the topics we discussed at the Sandbox and in conversations with educators in a variety of schools is how to start and sustain culture change. We know change is hard, and it involves the commitment of many, many stakeholders at an institution. One of the things Eliezer and I will be doing in the I.D.E.A. Schools Network is chronicling the process of change in the schools in which we’re based, Eliezer at Valley Torah High School in Los Angeles, CA, and me at Magen David High School in Brooklyn, NY. In the meantime, we’ve had several requests from individuals for Matt Williams’ Culture Change workshops from Day Three of the Sandbox. Here’s the Sandbox video about Day Three:

And here are Matt’s workshops, which were fun, engaging, and thought-provoking. Thanks, Matt, for traveling from Stanford University

Workshop One:

The Ten Billion Dollar Game

The Jewish communal infrastructure is, as the Forward has pointed out, about as large as CBS. The industry of Jewish education alone probably costs in the neighborhood of ten billion dollars annually. Thinking from 30,000 feet and taking seriously the Jewish journeys of all its students, children and adults, how would you allocate these funds? How much would we decide camps should get? Schools? Birthright? Programs for the elderly? How do we even begin to make that decision?

This thought experiment is a sobering process that requires difficult decisions and ruthless analyses. But it is also an empowering opportunity to reconsider your place within the Jewish education eco-system and your capacity to be a value-added change agent in your particular location in the interconnected network.

Below are Sandbox participants describing how they would allocate their hypothetical 10 billion dollars. One fascinating finding from the exercise was how important attendees felt Birthright is for the Jewish ecosystem. There was definite consensus that the program is doing something good and vital for Jewish life today. Another great idea to emerge from the workshop was from Kaylee Frager, an educator from JCDS Northern California: she said Matt’s exercise made her wonder about giving her students the course syllabus and the number of hours they meet over the year and then tasking them with allocating hours to each topic. We love opportunities like that for student voice to be heard.

Rabbi Knapp presents Rabbi Gralla presents

Workshop Two:

How to Build the Perfect School

big picture sample

Sandbox participants imagine their ideal schools

In 17th century Amsterdam, the members of what was known as the Portuguese Nation (Portuguese refugees from the Expulsion) set out to build the perfect Jewish day school. What makes their story so fascinating and so salient is that, for starters, each family controlled a significant amount of the country’s capital. They were a filthy rich community. And I don’t mean Jewish American wealthy, I mean like Russian tycoon wealthy. They even were committed to educating the relatively poor members of their community. Their schools often had leftover scholarship money; think about that for a second… Also, conversely or perhaps relatedly, the system is famous or infamous for producing one of the greatest philosophers of all time, the man considered by many to be the first modern thinkers in history - Benedict Spinoza.

This parable, for all of the reasons implied, serves as a useful platform for a thought experiment. Stepping back, if resources weren’t a problem, what would your school look like? And would you be happy with Spinoza as the outcome?

Aliza's school

Apps for every discipline, a bus that takes students anywhere they want to go, creativity and Fab labs, quiet learning environments, communal learning environments, guest lecturers: the ideal schools participants dreamed up had it all!

Visiting the Mecca of PBL: The High Tech Schools
July 4, 2014
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Eliezer-and-I

The Road Trip

Last week, Eliezer Jones and I [Tikvah Wiener] had the great privilege of visiting the High Tech charter schools in San Diego, CA. Founded by Larry Rosenstock in 2000, these K-12 schools fully employ project-based learning and emphasize beautiful work and deep learning. Larry Rosenstock, who has a background in carpentry, is an advocate of connecting hand and head and has built into his culture a deep respect for building and creating. I’ve been a fan of High Tech High ever since I began my journey into project-based learning (PBL) and have learned a lot about the methodology from watching videos about the school.

Here’s a short video that captures what’s going on at High Tech High:

And here’s a longer video about the school:

It was with great anticipation that, finding myself in LA this summer, I embarked on a road trip to the mecca of PBL with my wonderful colleague Eliezer Jones, a long-time employee of Yeshiva University and now Valley Torah High School’s General Studies principal.
Getting caffeinated at 5:45 AM for the 2 1/2-hour drive from LA to San Diego!

The High Tech schools did not disappoint. From the moment we walked onto the campus and entered one of the buildings on the High Tech complex, we saw in person the beautiful student work that the videos showed.

You could argue that it hardly seems to matter what kind of learning
takes place on a campus this gorgeous in a place that has great weather
all year round; so the fact that the High Tech schools are so good is all the more impressive
Sometimes visiting a hyped-up place in person is disappointing;
not so with High Tech High. Here’s an artwork — not pictured in any
of the videos we had previously seen — that greets you as you enter the high school.

The Tour

Our contact, Laura McBain, who runs High Tech’s professional development programs, took us on a tour of the campus. She explained that Larry had had the ceilings of all the buildings removed, so the students could see the bones of the schools and thereby be encouraged to think and ask, How is this building made? How are things put together?

Here you can see some of the artwork that hangs from one of the school’s ceilings
as well as the exposed beams of the building,
which not only make for an inquiry-driven environment
but also open up the space.
Thoughtful building and classroom design is a key element of the High Tech experience.
Artwork isn’t only beautiful; it also teaches.
Here’s a periodic table.
This culture of inquiry is so important in project-based learning, as can be seen in this video of David Thornburg, another proponent of PBL who runs an inquiry-driven, PBL school in Brazil:

The Bicycle Project

The school is filled with exceptional artwork that also is often
science- or math-based. This work is about force and friction —
and also just looks really cool!

 

One of Eliezer’s goals for the day was to view the bicycle project that’s shown in one of the High Tech High videos. When we saw it, I immediately tried rotating the wheels, but ended up working the machinery incorrectly. A student in one of the school’s many glass-walled classrooms — classrooms have glass walls so students can see each other working and again be encouraged to think and ask questions based on their peers’ activities — rushed up to me, Laura, and Eliezer, and politely correcting me, showed me what to do.

Meeting a HTH Student

Eliezer and I took the opportunity to chat with the High Tech High student. Davianas, a rising senior, was articulate and comfortable around us and showed she was a clear product of the special culture of her school. She told us she was planning to apply to a small college in Los Angeles, one where she knew she could not only study biology, a love of hers, but also continue pursuing the arts. She also mentioned that a small school would provide her with the chance to really get to know her professors, form relationships with them, and be part of a school community. All the parts of what makes the High Tech schools so unique, in my mind, were clearly important to Davianas. With the school’s emphasis on relevant, engaging learning and arts integration, students have learned to recognize their own interests and have the drive to pursue them, all while being part of a tight-knit and close community.
In this assignment, students researched the ideologies of
the “red” and “blue” states and then were asked to reflect on their learning.
Their photos were a gallery of suggestions about how to overcome partisanship.

HTH and College Admissions

Many people wonder if PBL can be as rigorous as traditional learning, and in my last blog post, I began to address that issue. One of the things about High Tech High that had piqued my interest — and spoke to my sense of whimsy -was the fact that it had an Emperor of Rigor (check out the longer video, where the school’s Emperor of Rigor makes an appearance) and that all of its students go on to college. For a public school to have 100% college acceptance is remarkable; furthermore, in the week before my visit, I’d had the chance to spend three days of professional development at Frisch and at Magen David High School, with two instructors from one of High Tech’s middle schools. Azul Terronez, a Litertaure and Humanities teacher, and Marc Shulman, a STEM teacher, team teach a sixth-grade class together. They mentioned that not only do High Tech’s students get into college, but a higher percentage of them as compared with their public school peers have the grit necessary to stay.
No doubt it’s constant positive messages like these that play a part
in High Tech’s students’ developing the confidence to pursue a college degree
A student drew the logos of the colleges HTH’s students will be attending.
Chalkboard paint is a clever way the school converts walls into
spaces that allow for constant exhibition rotation.
Students get accepted into all types of colleges, including Ivy League ones.
HTH educator Marc Shulman pointed out that even MIT and Harvard are now
asking students not about what they know, but about what they’ve done.
In a PBL school — where learning is constantly connected to a real world problem —
students do A LOT.

Marc and Azul’s Classroom

Laura was running a professional development seminar, so she left us after awhile; we then looked around on our own and eventually located Marc Shulman, who was in a middle school building teaching summer school. After having been in Marc’s workshops the week before, I was glad to be able to see him in his own space and introduce him to Eliezer. He showed me and Eliezer the sliding door — that’s covered in whiteboard — that connects his and Azul’s rooms. He told us the door is open most of the time, so that the almost 60 students they share can work together. He loves team teaching, not only because he gets, as he says, “to hang out all the time with my best friend,” but also because when he and Azul interact, it’s a way to model correct adult behavior for the kids. Because PBL also emphasizes collaboration so much, the fact that Azul and Marc collaborate on their projects shows they authentically believe in the process and isn’t just something they’re forcing their students to do.
Azul used Design Thinking to have his students redesign their classroom
in a way that optimized their learning. The result: a project bar.
Marc’s classroom is filled with woodworking tools, since Marc
is passionate about woodworking. The High Tech culture
is big on allowing teachers to bring their passions
into the classroom.
Laura had told me and Eliezer that all the teachers have to do their projects themselves first, in order to really feel what the students will be going through, to face the kinds of problems and obstacles their students will be facing, so they can better address those problems as they arise and be more empathetic as the project unfolds. Modeling the kind of behavior and learning that the adults expect the kids to engage in is another important part of the High Tech culture.

HTH, PBL, and Jewish Education

Being in the High Tech schools, surrounded by incredible artwork that clearly demonstrates not only students’ cognitive connection to learning, but also their social and emotional ties to it, confirmed that PBL has an educational power and punch that are hard to match. What are the implications for Jewish education? I think they are deep.
First, at its core, Jewish education is about having students make social and emotional connections to their learning. Ask a Judaic studies teacher what their most important goals are, and no doubt the answer will be for students to connect with their Judaism, be inspired by it and want to be part of the Jewish people. With PBL, which aims for students to develop rich and meaningful personal connections to learning, those core Jewish educational goals can be realized.
The High Tech schools have also forced me to re-examine the very notion of what class looks like. Azul and Marc told us that for most of their day, about five hours, they spend their time together, having their classes do integrated projects. Sometimes the teachers separate, and Azul teaches LitHum and Marc, math or science, but most of the time the classes aren’t learning English, history, science or math; they’re simply . . . learning. The kids are making Hovercrafts that commemorate an important person in American history; or writing textbooks about the flora and fauna of the Bay Area (with a foreword by Jane Goodall); or discovering ways to organize a local Salvation Army’s goods; or . . . making vending machines that dispense art:
Azul told me at one point during his visit to the East Coast two weeks ago that if he told his students they had to build a plane that carried one person across a specific body of water, they wouldn’t say to him, “No, we can’t do that. That’s too hard.” They’d say: “OK, what materials do you think we’d need to start with?”
So I think the charge for Jewish education interested in PBL is this: how might we de-silo our subjects, so our students aren’t learning English, history, math, science, Tanakh, Talmud, etc., but like in High Tech High, are simply . . . learning. Integrating subjects not only can give rise to the type of deep and fearless learning Azul and Marc describe, but also to the whole-person learning we as Jewish educators aim for.
When Azul and Marc were at The Frisch School two weeks ago, I worked with my colleagues on the following task:
Azul and Marc had all the teachers write down their passions and then circle the one we couldn’t live without. Then we had to connect with other teachers and create a lesson based on our passions. I’m from LA, so mine was going to the beach. I worked with three other teachers, whose passions were hiking in the forest, playing music, and playing football, and we came up with this assignment:
We were going to have our students study the brain at rest and reading, on the beach and then in the forest. [Marc told us we had an unlimited budget, so it’d be no problem to get MRI’s onto the sand and up a mountain.] Then we were going to study the brain in both of those locations as our subjects played music and then football. The students would record their findings and move on to study the sociological and cultural habits of societies that form in those geographic locations. They’d then read literature aas well as texts from Tanakh that contain characters from those habitats. After their learning, they’d design a product that benefited people in those locales, using design concepts from the works they had read. They could then market and sell the product.
One of my Frisch colleagues. Rabbi Joshua Wald, turned to Marc at one point while we were working and said, “I usually take what I want to teach and then think about how to make that interesting, but you’re saying I should take what’s interesting and then find a way to plug in what I want to teach.” What a great way to express that!
Furthermore, David Thornburg in the Big Thinkers video above says that now that technology offers us unlimited information, we can have our students ponder engaging questions that have much more resonance than “In what year did Columbus sail to America?” If we employ that methodology across the board — through Judaic and General Studies — we get learners who are caught up in answering tough and thought-provoking questions about the world today, about how it came to be and where we want it to go — and who are accustomed to looking at those problems not only through the lens of secular studies but as whole people, as Jewish people.
Visiting the High Tech schools confirmed for me how much Jewish education has to learn from this model of learning and how much more rich and resonant our schools might be if we employed it. And Eliezer, I know you were scared I was going to get us into an accident, so maybe next time when we visit, you’ll drive!

One last thing . . .

High Tech’s professional development has taken the school’s instructors to many places around the world, including Israel. Check this out:
Cross-posted on YUEducate.com.
Rigor and Creative Learning in an English Class
May 26, 2014
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Rigor in PBL

One thing I [Tikvah Wiener] keep getting asked as I employ project-based learning (PBL) in my classes is this:

But do the students write enough? Are they doing enough essays? Is PBL in general rigorous enough?

I understand where the concern comes from, and believe me, I’m on it. The students in my tenth and eleventh grade English classes have just finished a flurry of writing activity, a lot of it very traditional and as academically rigorous as any you’d expect in any English course.

A Doll’s House

Example: in my tenth grade English class, students just finished revising a short piece analyzing A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen and then comparing it with The Merchant of Venice, which we read earlier this year. Here’s a sample, a particularly good essay that Julia wrote:

A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, is a play about a woman, Nora, who slowly realizes that her husband, Helmer, doesn’t treat her with respect. In A Doll’s House, several quotes show how a woman is considered lower than a man. In the play, Ibsen is socially critical of this view.
            In Act One, Nora is worried about the dress she is going to buy for a dance. When she tentatively asks Helmer if he would help her pick one out, he says to Nora, “Aha! So my obstinate little woman is obliged to get someone to come to her rescue?” (26). There are a few things about this quote that show how Helmer has no respect for Nora. First, there is the way he addresses her as “my obstinate little woman.” To him, Nora is a little, stubborn pet that belongs to him. There is also the way that he says “Aha,” as if he was expecting that Nora would need something from him eventually. Lastly, there is the overall sentence and the stereotype in which Helmer casts Nora, which is as a damsel in distress. He right away recognizes that Nora needs his help and escalates it to “rescue.” To Helmer, Nora’s requests are childish and small, so his responses back to her are mocking.
            In Act Two, Nora makes a work-related suggestion to Helmer. This time, Helmer is more aggressive in his belittling of Nora. He exclaims, “Is it to get about now that the new manager has changed his mind at his wife’s bidding?” (35). He implies how ridiculous it would be for a simple housewife to give input on a work matter. Helmer is also concerned with what people would think of Nora helping him. This proves that society as a whole viewed the idea of a woman doing more than household jobs as embarrassing and foolish.
            In Act Three, Nora finally rises above what society thinks of her and doesn’t let it define her. She answers Helmer, who told her she didn’t understand the world’s conditions, by saying, “I am going to see if I can make out who is right, the world or I” (69). She understands the way that society perceives women, but she no longer wants to abide by it. Rather than being the perfect wife and mother who would never abandon her family, she walks out the door to become independent. It is possible it will be difficult for her to adjust to her new freedom and that society will look down upon her, but Nora takes a big step by realizing she wanted the freedom in the first place. Though one could view her statement as her being unsure who is right, it could really be viewed as Nora knowing that she is right but wondering if the world can accept it also, or if she must rise above society totally on her own.

            In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare is also socially critical. Portia, the play’s heroine, must disguise herself as a man in order to become a lawyer, since women couldn’t have such jobs in Elizabethan times. In A Doll’s House, Nora disguises herself the opposite way Portia does. Rather than being her true self, Nora takes on the identity of the perfect woman society wants her to be. On the other hand, Portia pretends to be everything society doesn’t want her to be. At the end of The Merchant of Venice, Portia doesn’t need to disguise herself. She is sly and holds all the power over the men of the play. At the end of A Doll’s House, Nora takes off her mask and joins Portia in going against society’s stereotypes and becoming the independent woman she wants to be.

Sonnet Explication

Also in my sophomore English class, students are in the process of writing a 2-3 page essay on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The students must include in their analysis at least two sources of literary criticism, one by Helen Vendler, who is, some would say, the foremost poetry critic in the US today. She teaches at Harvard and has written a comprehensive, Formalist analysis of the Bard’s sonnets. Here is a student work-in-progress. In this version of the paper, Zach has written a short analysis of the sonnet he is studying and has included Vendler’s take on the poem, though he hasn’t cited her work yet. Recently, in edmodo, I posted a link to the OWL Purdue Writing Lab, which explains exactly how to cite according to MLA Standards.

Here is Zach’s work:

The main theme in Sonnet 30 is recollection of the past. Throughout the sonnet, Shakespeare expresses the grief he feels as he “summon[s] up remembrance of things past” (2). One very prominent literary device the sonneteer employs in this sonnet is imagery. Shakespeare uses words such as “sessions” (1), “summon up” (2), “cancelled” (7), “expense” (8), and many others in order to make it seem as if his recollection experience is like a court case, and that he is ‘judging’ his past. Shakespeare divides the time frame of the sonnet into two groups. The first is the present, and the second is the past, which is subdivided into four more parts. While in the present Shakespeare stresses the fact that the grief he feels is new, regardless of the fact that he had already once grieved over the same grievances. He demonstrates this by contrasting old and new, (“with old woes new wail” [4]), as well as switching from locutions in which the second use of a verb or noun positively intensifies the first one (i.e. “grieve at grievances” [9]), to negatively (i.e. “new pay as if not paid” [12]). The four time frames of the past are the original neutral time pre-happiness, the happy time, the times of loss, and the time of stoicism where Shakespeare’s soul hardened, and he did not cry.

The concept that Shakespeare’s thoughts are successive and overlap is also demonstrated through the sonnet itself. The repetition in quatrain 3 of “grieve at grievances foregone” (9), “fore-bemoaned moan” (11), and “new pay as if not paid before” (12), coupled with the multiple phonetic concentrations of “thought-strings” (such as sessions, sweet, silent, summon, sigh, sought, sight, since, and sad) that are dispersed through all the ‘time periods’ of his life, both demonstrate Shakespeare’s constant overlapping thought process. Shakespeare even takes it a step further and portrays an increasing psychological involvement as the quatrains progress. The grievances go from general (“many a thing” [3]), to specific (“precious friends” [6]), to intensified (“grieve-grievances” [9]). These successive phases of feeling overlap because of the similarity in their lexical and syntactic concatenations as if they were all one long process each causing the next. This fluidity among time periods, thought processes, and feelings all relate back to the mentality of man, where Shakespeare is trying to show how man’s thoughts are constantly overlapping and build off of each other.

To illustrate how deep the learning goes — and the material the kids are studying here is pretty traditional fare — I’ll share a conversation another student — Jonah — and I had as we worked on his sonnet together. Jonah is dissecting Sonnet 143, a mock epic which has Shakespeare comparing himself to a baby chasing after his mother who is chasing after a chicken. The farcical situation reflects a love triangle in which the poet finds himself in the “infantile” (get it?) position of not giving up on his crush, even though she clearly doesn’t want him:

Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feather’d creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay;
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent;
So runn’st thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind;
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind;
So will I pray that thou mayst have thy ‘Will’,

If thou turn back and my loud crying still.

After Jonah and I had noted Shakespeare’s allusions to epic poetry and Chaucer as well as Vendler’s comments on the repetition of words such as runs, catch, cries, and flies, Jonah remarked, as we dissected the simile, that just as Shakespeare feels excluded by his beloved, so he excludes himself from the sonnet, instead making most of the sonnet about the simile and not about himself. That’s an AWESOME close reading, Jonah! Well done!

But Wait, There’s More . . .

In a PBL class, however, there is more to learning than simply writing essays. Understanding the literature and showing mastery of the material in an essay is simply the first step towards a larger goal: creation of new content. For example, once students are finished writing their essays on A Doll’s House, they have to post it on the Shakespeare website we created earlier in the year. Here is Zach’s page which features his essay comparing how Ibsen and Shakespeare depict wealth and honor in their plays. And here is Sam’s page which discusses law and mercy in A Doll’s House and then compares how the ideas are developed in Ibsen’s play and The Merchant of Venice.

Not only are students in my class motivated to revise their work for a better grade — an opportunity I often offer them — but I correct the essays with a different eye, knowing they can be seen in a visible place. Feel free to explore the bardofparamus website, where my fellow English teacher Rabbi Dan Rosen is also currently having his students post their work on The Merchant of Venice and where another Frisch colleague, Mrs. Meryl Feldblum, also had her students work.

Because the students organize their work around topics — in the case of the Shakespeare website, for example, the topics connected with major themes of the plays and sonnets — they become familiar with those ideas and spiral around them for the rest of the year, drilling deep into them as they see how they apply to all the works they read. Therefore, rigor ensues not only from essay writing but from using digital media to juxtapose works in surprising ways that attract the students’ attention.

Final-ly

Last year, after a year of “un-schooling” my course, I wrote about the Twitter final that was a result of the class’ desire to undertake a non-traditional assessment. This year, a year that was even more PBL-ed than last, my class felt strongly that they wanted to be creators of a final, not simply consumers of one. We’ve been working for the last two weeks on a collaborative project: a script for a video that will be a satirical look at our year in English, satire being a genre we studied repeatedly. We also focused on narrative frames consistently, so the students agreed to create one together and then break off into smaller groups to tackle various concepts we’d studied throughout the year (Take a look here at the syllabus, which did see some changes as the course unfolded organically). Since my daughter is in the class, the narrative frame became this:
My daughter Lila — who is now married to a classmate — and I are heading to a family reunion. We keep having flashbacks to her tenth grade year, with my remembering the serious study we did of texts and genres and her remembering what really went on in class!

The process of deciding what our final would be!
We chose topics and then applied the texts we studied to those concepts

I can’t tell you how excited the students are to work on this project. They feel empowered about being creators and enthusiastic about their learning.

This group is focusing on stock characters and plot devices in works
throughout the year, even including Shakespearean sonnets in their script.
You can see the rubric for the final on the desk. As David said when he
saw the rubric, “The script really has to show learning, then.” Yes, it does!
This group is satirizing the idea of how literature gives voice to the voiceless,
a topic we discussed at length over the course of The Frisch Africa Encounter.
Some ideas bandied about for their satire: Obama and the Nigerian president
call Frisch to thank us for our incredible and revolutionary work!
Also in the works: a song to “Under the Sea” discussing women’s
traditionally having no voice in his-story.

In order to make sure real learning would occur, I created a rubric for the project, which you can view below. I love hearing the different groups discuss how to get their sequence into the 9-10 brackets. #gamifyingclass

I get asked a lot about rigor in PBL: as I said in my Google Hangout with Ken Gordon and Lisa Colton, when we spoke about passion-based learning in education, whoever thinks PBL can’t be rigorous hasn’t found the right resources. My go-to places are edutopia and Buck Institute of Education, and of course I’ve been deeply inspired by High Tech High in San Diego, CA. It’s not a simple or easy thing to transform a course into one that uses PBL, but I guarantee, when you see students discover how deeply they can think about an idea or the power in being creators, that it’s completely worth it.

Rubric for Final

The Power of Questions
April 17, 2014
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question
Generate questions!

Project-based learning (PBL) and inquiry-based learning (IBL) begin with a driving question, one that hopefully excites students and gets them started on their path to learning. The driving question is the first part of the PBL/IBL process to create important needs: a need to gather information that will answer the question and a need to develop skills necessary to produce a beautiful product that both exhibits that knowledge and has impact in the world.

Passover, which Jews are in the midst of celebrating now, is a holiday in which we highlight questions. The Seder gets a big, inquiry-based start with the four questions, the mah nishtana. The Seder is all about engaging children in the story of the Exodus narrative and getting them to participate in the drama and experience of the departure from Egypt and the redemption of the Israelite people. The Haggadah is set up so that the children’s engagement begins with asking questions.

The Four Questions page from Arthur Syzk’s
famous Haggadah from the early 20th century, Poland

The truth is that throughout history, the Jewish people have understood that asking questions creates curiosity and a desire to learn. Jewish exegetes left no angle of the Biblical texts unquestioned, and the Talmudic approach to learning is to ask questions; often answers aren’t as important as the discussions that questions engender, and a Beit Midrash — a Jewish place of study — is filled with discourse, dissent, and disparate approaches to text and Jewish law. Inquiry leads to vigorous exploration of text and law, true, but also ultimately what it means to be Jewish.

We’ve been thinking more deeply about the role questions play in education because recently — and especially over Passover — , we’ve been reading A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. See the book trailer below:

The book shows the power that asking questions can have in changing the status quo and getting us to think differently about . . . well, just about everything.

Before Passover vacation, we had a chance to ask students in a sophomore English class who had read A Doll’s House to look at the play and connect it to another work they’d studied this year. The sophomores then had to ask a big question about their connection. Here are two student responses that made us realize how powerful it can be to get students formulating questions.

We like the way Jonah connected his learning to Passover and the notion of freedom:

In comparison to _Little Bee_, _A Doll’s House_ also has the theme of freedom. Both women, in the novel and play, quest for freedom. Little Bee, of the eponymous novel, left her troubles behind in Nigeria to seek out refuge and freedom in England. Nora, of _A Doll’s House_ , searched for freedom as well. Initially, her freedom was thought to be achieved by paying off her debt. However, after the event of Krogstad’s blackmail, she reconsiderd her personal notion of freedom and happiness in the house of Torvald. In light of the quickly approaching Passover, as well as the two works of literature that we read, what does freedom really mean to you?

Batsheva asks a great question about the sacrifices one might be forced to make in pursuing a grand ideal:

Throughout the year we have discussed giving voice to the voiceless. In Little Bee, Sarah and Little Bee gave a voice to the African children at the price of Little Bee’s life. In the play, A Doll’s House, Nora stands up for herself and all the objectified women of her time at the expense of her children.

At the end of the play, Nora realizes that her husband is a selfish, hypocritical man who has been treating her like a child and a doll, rather than as an equal. “It was tonight, when the miracle didn’t happen. It was then that [she] saw that [he] was not the man [she] thought [he] was” (115). Nora finally stood up for herself and all the objectified women of her time.


Even though Nora is a fictional character, her rebellion taught women of the time to fight for their beliefs. Women would never have been granted the right to vote or to be independent without having to risk everything. Nora gave up her children so she could be independent. To accomplish something worthy, sacrifice and radical transformation is necessary.

Is it worth losing your loved ones to embark on a personal quest?

To use the terminology Warren Berger introduces readers to: how might we make questioning a more important and frequent component of education — and our own lives?

Additional Resources

Want to see how these math, science, and engineering teachers work with a PBL coach to create a driving question on wing efficiency in planes?
The Importance of Reflection
February 17, 2014
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Reflection is one of the key components of PBL and for good reason. One of the things PBL affords students is the chance to understand why they’re learning what they’re learning. Students shouldn’t be sitting in class wondering how their course work relates to them or their world. Reflection gives students a way to contemplate the relevance and importance of their learning, and it also lets teachers know that the students are grasping the material in a deep and significant way. The feedback loop in PBL keeps students and teachers aligned in their learning goals.

Following is an example of student work that displays the kind of deep learning that can take place with PBL. The assignment — which offered students voice and choice, another key component of PBL — asked a class of juniors to discuss how they saw the American dream, after seeing it from a myriad of perspectives over the first semester of an American literature course. Students had read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot over the summer; during the first semester, they also read The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible and had become familiar with Romanticism and the Romantic hero.

PBL also makes sure that student work has authentic purpose. In this class, students chose a type of injustice in America today and investigated it in groups, sharing their findings with the class; they also had to read one article from a New York Times series about American children living in poverty. Finally, the class planned and executed an Acts of Kindness Day on December 26, in honor of the 26 victims of Newtown and as a way to begin addressing unfair treatment in American society.

Here is Liat’s wonderful assessment of the semester. We particularly like the personal details she includes in the essay, discussing her great-grandfather’s experience with the American dream:

Reflections on the Semester
Had I been asked four months ago to define the “American Dream,” I would have answered with a laugh and resorted to cliche.  “To live the American Dream is to raise a family with 2.5 perfect children, and to own a large, spotless house-complete with a white picket fence and a dog (probably a Golden Retriever).” Had you asked me the same question one month ago, however, I would have hemmed and hawed and been forced to deliberate my answer-finally declaring that based on my discussions in English class, there is no concrete definition of the notion of the “American Dream.” But ask me today and you’ll find my answer is far more long-winded (five and a half pages, to be exact). To me, the American Dream was not, is not, and cannot ever be a static idea, but rather is one that is constantly changing and is reflective of our history.  But however one defines the American Dream at a particular point in our nation’s timeline, the concept of “opportunity” is a central theme throughout its course.

In the early 1600’s, the Pilgrims fled Europe for the New World.  In their version of the American Dream, America was not a place where individuals could practice religion as they saw fit; but rather, America was a haven from religious persecution, where the pilgrims could enjoy the liberty of starting their very own theocracy. The Dream underwent a transformation when the Bill of Rights was signed into law in 1791. It promised certain, inalienable protections to each and every resident of the U.S.A., including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.  A citizen living the American Dream could voice open expression of his ideas and be whomever he chose to be.  Following the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, an essential part of the American Dream’s new identity became the new freedoms the United States offered to minorities and people of color.  With the advent of feminism in the seventies, the American Dream morphed into one of equality of the sexes.  A woman could now own the American Dream in the same way as a man, expecting the same freedoms and opportunities which he enjoyed.

Alongside all of these versions of the American Dream, there has existed a parallel text of the American Dream.  In the late 18th century, enterprising opportunists first sought to buy huge tracts of farmland. In the 19th century, young men journeyed west in the Gold Rush.  In the early 20th century, Jewish immigrants left their homes and communities to reach the “Goldene Medina.” This trend continues through today, as America has been known as the land for great personal financial growth. There is, however, a huge flaw in the American Dream that I’ve witnessed throughout this semester’s class, and that is that individual Americans often fail to live up to these evolving expectations.

In the literary works that we have read so far this year, the American Dream has proved elusive to many characters-both fictional and nonfictional. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester, a true romantic hero, journeys to America knowing full well that she will be living in a Puritan theocracy. Despite this prior knowledge, Hester still feels trapped by the confines of her community, and seeks refuge in the forest or by the sea. As my group came to understand, through a deep analysis of the symbols of town, forest and sea, Hester cannot truly escape the “town,” which represents societal and religious ideals, into the uncontained “forest” and “sea,” both of which represent the ability to make different choices and the capacity for human growth and change. At the conclusion of the story, Hester’s daughter decides not to follow her mother back to America.  I would suggest that both she and her mother have been disillusioned by the scope of the American Dream, and that the narrow freedoms it offers are still too restrictive.

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible can be read on an allegorical level as the story of the failure of the American Dream.  In the fifties, McCarthy began to point fingers at his political enemies, igniting a frenzy that was akin to the Salem witchcraft hunt of the 17th century.   Miller himself was blacklisted and, I believe, this experience taught him that the freedoms of individual expression are tenuous and not guaranteed, despite the promises of the First Amendment.  

In Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, the author relates fictional stories of soldiers during the Vietnam War. During the war, young men were forcibly drafted into the army and into a war that they did not support, believe in or even understand.  I think that O’Brien is presenting a highly critical picture of the callousness of our leaders in sending these young men off to die, and is calling the government out on its failure to protect the rights of the individual.

In Rebecca Skloot’s, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Henrietta and her family are wronged by the American scientific community on multiple levels.  Henrietta’s personal freedoms were violated when the doctors failed to get informed consent on the use of her cells.  Though there was no active cover-up in the successive two decades, during which the civil rights movement was taking hold, I believe that her descendants were failed by silence-by the passive acceptance of those involved that there was no need to acknowledge Henrietta’s pivotal role.

At the beginning of the semester, when we were asked to write a Declaration of Independence, I declared myself independent from “The Patriarchy that is 21st Century American Society.”  I recognized a series of blatant strikes against the Dream as I wrote about male-centered language, male privilege, slut shaming, indecent media portrayal of women in the media, unequal job opportunity, and unfair wage gaps. I can only hope that I will not be disappointed in adulthood when it is my turn to transform my Dream into a reality, and that I will find the true equality of men and women that it promises.

As I sit here reflecting on this semester (or rather half reflecting and half lamenting the end of shiriyah!), I envision the possibility of success and am not convinced that all American Dream stories need to end in failure or disillusionment, though it makes for good reading and discussion.  Over Thanksgiving weekend, my grandmother shared some fascinating family history with me.   As it turns out, my great-grandfather, Grandpa Sam z”l, was a hobo during the Great Depression. As an 18 year-old, he was without employment for over a year.  He rode the rails from coast to coast looking for day work, earning a pittance in order to keep from starving.  He received occasional handouts from the Salvation Army and benefited from meals in their soup kitchens.  But, years later, he managed to become an insurance salesman, marry my great-grandmother, buy a house, raise a family and send his two daughters off to college. This is the quintessential story of the American Dream!  Given the opportunity, a man pulls himself up by his bootstraps, forges ahead with will and passion, and achieves success–familial, professional and financial.

Last year, The New York Times published a series of articles called The Invisible Child, detailing the life of Dasani, a homeless girl living in New York City.  At the conclusion of the series, Dasani and her family are transferred out of the decaying, moldy, unsafe shelter they had been living in, into their own three-bedroom apartment with a kitchen. They settle in and they are ecstatic to finally have their own place; in their minds, they are living the American Dream. Their transition to a new home is due entirely to the work of the department of social services.  I wonder if this one small act will change the course of Dasani’s life for the better (and I look forward to reading any follow-up articles!)

Concluding the semester with “Twenty-Six Acts of Kindness Day” was incredibly meaningful for me. On that first Wednesday in December, as I sat down to listen to Ms. Schroff [Laura Schroff, author of An Invisible Thread, came to speak to the students and returned to share our Acts of Kindness day with Frisch], I knew that this would be a very different kind of program than I had experienced in the past. The manner in which Ms. Schroff spoke was so genuine that I became convinced that the notion that “one small act of kindness can change a life” had some legitimacy to it.  In the week after, as we prepared for “Twenty-Six Acts of Kindness Day,” I became more and more enamored by the idea and enjoyed thinking up acts that seemed like doable and realistic goals for students.  I felt a surge of pride as I stood at the sign-up table and saw the numbers for myself: 193 people in the Frisch community participated, and we accomplished a total of 233 acts of kindness! Sure, we had sponsored chessed [acts of kindness[ days before, but juxtaposed to Ms. Schroff’s and Maurice’s talks, and with the backdrop of honoring the 26 victims of the Newton Massacre, it felt more meaningful.

Grandpa Sam, Maurice, and Dasani serve as proof that the American Dream can be realized, though so many great writers choose to acknowledge its failure.  But perhaps we would not recognize the American Dream successes without being able to contrast them to the failures.  As I wrote in my Thanksgiving piece earlier this semester, one can only understand light when it is held up against the dark.  With drive and perhaps a little bit of goodwill from others, we can all take advantage of the opportunities living in America affords.  Light can emerge from the darkness.