Robots, Information Delivery, and Dictators

The estimable Bjorn Paige drew my attention to this article from the Atlantic in March. Michael Godsey, veteran high-school English teacher, is concerned that technology will take over his role as provider of knowledge to his students.

I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation’s most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The "virtual class" will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country’s best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record.

From 1958, via Paleofuture

This is a view of students who are remarkably passive. They're all listening and learning at the same pace, on the same topic, at the same time. It's a strikingly un-imaginative vision, in which education is structured in exactly the same way as it has been for the last 60 years, only with computers!

Godsey's article is rife with concern about the loss of content delivery by teachers:

I recalled a veteran teacher who recently said with anguish, "we used to be appreciated as experts in our field."...

I don’t remember the last time I’ve attended, or even heard of, any professional-development training focused on my specific subject matter. Instead, these experiences concentrate on incorporating technology in the classroom, utilizing assessment data, or new ways of becoming a school facilitator....

At a seminar about project-based learning, I told the presenter with an increasing sense of desperation, "You know, some of us English teachers still believe that teaching literature is still our primary job." He smirked and put his pointer finger near his thumb and said, "A very little part of your job."...

The relatively recent emergence of the Internet, and the ever-increasing ease of access to web, has unmistakably usurped the teacher from the former role as dictator of subject content. These days, teachers are expected to concentrate on the "facilitation" of factual knowledge that is suddenly widely accessible. [emphasis mine]

I'm fascinated by the use of the word "dictator". It is a particularly strong word to use here, but as Godsey is an English teacher, I cannot believe it was an accidental choice. I take the intended meaning in this context to be "one who decides the course or path". A secondary meaning is, of course, political: "one who has absolute control and power". That's pretty revealing, but not nearly as revealing as a third meaning: "one who speaks". Are the students taking dictation?

If so, they shouldn't be. 21st-century education must be about students doing, not simply students listening. Students taking dictation, sitting passively, listening as a group, and proceeding all at the same pace is a vision that is just as outdated as the illustration above. Part of a new vision for education is a new role for the adult in the room. That adult needs to be much better at incorporating technology, utilizing assessment data, and becoming a school facilitator. Skill at delivering content to students is not nearly as important as it used to be. Neither is skill at cleaning a slate.

Godsey recognizes this, and laments it. Paige recognizes this, and argues that teachers' humanity can never be replaced:

The inspiration that comes from a teacher, and the interaction between a student and a teacher, is unique. It happens in classrooms and art studios and science labs. It happens in the gym and the theater and the auto shop. It happens in those thousand human moments that make up a school.

I recognize this, and I celebrate it. A variety of student-centered learning models are in use around the country, preparing students to take control of their own learning throughout their lives. Godsey doesn't like this, either:

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise.

If the teacher's only expertise is "delivering factual knowledge", then this statement is true. For actual teachers (as opposed to lecturers), this statement is ridiculous on its face. Teacher-centered lecturing is the easiest thing to do in the classroom. Student-centered learning, including all the "trends" that Godsey dismisses, is incredibly difficult to do well. Far from marginalizing the teacher's expertise, these methods will place the teacher's expertise (or lack of it) smack in the center of the classroom experience.

Godsey's vision for flipped learning is in line with the rest of his vision of teaching:

[I]f I think my lesson plans or video tutorials rival some of the best on the Internet (for now), shouldn’t I be trying to make six figures on the open marketplace at teacherspayteachers.com or as a curriculum designer for a private company?

If your idea of effective teaching is writing lesson plans or making video tutorials, then you probably should be working as a curriculum designer rather than as a classroom teacher.

There's a lot more in this article to disagree with, but here's the key paragraph:

There is a profound difference between a local expert teacher using the Internet and all its resources to supplement and improve his or her lessons, and a teacher facilitating the educational plans of massive organizations. Why isn’t this line being publicly and sharply delineated, or even generally discussed? This line should be rigorously guarded by those who want to keep education professionals in the center of each classroom. Those calling for teachers to "transform their roles," regardless of motive or intentionality, are quietly erasing this line—effectively deconstructing the role of the teacher as it’s always been known.

Godsey has completely missed the de-centralized sharing community that has emerged in social networks, instead focusing on large organizations like Microsoft, Activate Instruction, or Edmodo. We could quibble with his choices of targets, but in general, I agree with Godsey's caution about teachers simply implementing lesson plans from corporations. But he's completely wrong that this problem is not being publicly discussed: he's just missed the discussions.

As for the claim that those of us calling for a transformation in teacher roles are "deconstructing the role of the teacher as it's always been known", I plead guilty as charged. It can't happen fast enough.

Speaking Clearly and Edu-speaking: In Reply to Liz Willen

Liz Willen, editor of the Hechinger Report, doesn't like educational jargon. Neither do I, nor most people I know. My colleagues and I are some of the first to laugh and roll our eyes at the newest acronyms that get added to the alphabet soup we have to remember as educators. So it may seem that Willen's righteous rant against "the school establishment's 'edu-speak'" (as reprinted in the Washington Post) would resonate with me, but in fact it doesn't. Willen has painted education with too broad a brush, in the process diminishing the expertise and professionalism of educators.

Every profession has their jargon, their acronyms, their vacuous buzzwords. In the worst cases, these are linguistic signifiers, separating the "in-group" from the "out-group". I have no doubt that there are education professionals who use the language of education in that way. However...

I was taking notes during one of those tedious but important school board meetings rookie reporters are assigned to cover when I realized I had no idea what was going on. Board members and various school officials spouted an inaccessible language of acronyms. The board members spent hours talking to and over one another, using terms that must have baffled audience members. I later learned they were discussing raising property taxes to boost the school budget, a critical issue local voters and parents needed to understand.

The inability of a rookie reporter to understand the professional language of any group as they are working should not be taken as a problem with the working group. Is there any doubt that if Willen had been covering a meeting of financial executives, or NASA scientists, or NFL coaches, that there would have been jargon, abbreviations, and shorthand that she was not familiar with? Part of the responsibility of reporters is to translate from specific professional language into readable explanations for the general public, whether covering education or any other field.

Willen asks "Why do we need terms like 'value-added' or 'formative assessments?' Ugh." Well, because a formative assessment is an educational strategy that (1) research has shown is one of the most effective strategies to increase student achievement, and that (2) many teachers don't know how to use well. It's a thing in education. Asking educators not to use the term "formative assessment" is like asking a scientist not to use the term "electromagnetic field." Just because it's a semi-complicated phrase doesn't make it jargon. Derek Zoolander should not be our model for educational language.

"And what of charter-school movement lingo, replete with 'restorative practices' and 'growth mindsets?'" I wasn't aware that these were specifically charter-school terms. Our district has been working with teachers and administrators on restorative practices for several years now. And using the term "growth mindset" is shorthand within the education community for a complex and multi-faceted debate around student self-motivation and how teachers can best model for and encourage struggling learners. To dismiss the term "growth mindset" as simple edu-speak ("Har, har, kids grow!") is to miss the point entirely.

Willen seems to want educators to speak clearly. Nobody I know wants otherwise. But for professionals speaking to each other, using the terminology of the field is how they speak clearly. Asking them to speak to each other the same way they would to someone outside education is to denigrate the professionalism of the field. Willen writes:

Just try to decipher this recent press release about a new study proving“rubric-based assessment can be taken to scale and can produce valid findings with credible and actionable information about student learning that can be used to improve curricular and assignment designs and to increase effectiveness of programs and classes in advancing the most important learning outcomes of college.”

Actually, to educators conversant with their profession, that's pretty clear.

I spent several days at a conference recently with a group of fascinating educators, advocates and policy-makers, all deeply knowledgeable and committed to improving education. In one-on-one chats over a beer or breakfast, they spoke clearly about problems and solutions. And they kept the tone entirely conversational when discussing our children’s classrooms and college choices.
But everything fell apart the minute we broke up into “enabling environments” to revise “cluster logic models” and “establish comprehensive assessment systems.”

Lesson: Professionals don't speak to each other the way they do to non-professionals. This is not an indictment of educational jargon. To assume that everything in education is simple and can be explained in words of one syllable or less is to fall into the "I went to school, how hard can teaching be?" trap.

More than ever, the public needs easily comprehensible information about what is going on in schools, what is working and what is not. So what’s an education journalist to do?

 Learn the terminology and explain it clearly to your readers. In other words, your job.

Does Promoting 21st-Century Instruction Mean That 20th-Century Instruction Was Wrong?

TL;DR version: No.

Full version: Of course not. There were obviously many good instructional strategies and great teachers in the 20th century, as there were in the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries, I'm sure. (I wasn't there.) The point, however, is that our students don't live in those centuries. The world has changed. If we want to be effective in teaching students who will live in the 21st century, we can't use the same teaching practices from prior centuries, no matter how great they were in their day. Time for us to move on.

An effective teaching practice, in its time.
"Philo mediev" by Unknown - Castres, bibliothèque municipale. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

What is 21C Education? #YourEduStory TL;DR version

We can't give students the knowledge they will need for an uncertain future. But we can give them the skills they need to learn for themselves. No matter what innovation and changes happen, our students can be successful if they are able to

1. gather information from a variety of sources,
2. evaluate and analyze that information in context, and
3. do something with that information.

This means that it is much more important for students to learn how to learn deeply, independently, and authentically, than for them to master a body of facts. We must teach them to become master learners.

You Might be a Twitter Bot if...

1. Your username has a random string of numbers at the end, that humans would be unlikely to remember.

2. Your profile description is a list of general descriptions with no specific information or location. (And stars in between phrases; what's that all about?)

3. Your profile description is supposed to be "whimsical" but actually sounds like it was written by a machine who had heard of humans but never actually met one. ("Award-winning" what, Jennifer? "Recovering youth worker"? Ew.)

4. Your profile picture is a stock photo found on the web and multiple other Twitter accounts. (Do a Google Image search to check this.)

5. Your tweets are a series of random, non-sensical phrases or ads.

6. Nobody is starring, retweeting, or replying to your tweets.

7. Your tweets can be found verbatim in Wikipedia or dozens of other tweets, but none are re-tweets or replies. (To check this, copy the text of the tweet and paste it in to a Google search. Put quotes around it, to search for the entire phrase verbatim, then click "Search".)

Addendum: What can you do if you are followed by a Twitter Bot? Please report them for spam and do not follow back. It's a small thing to do, but if enough of us do it, we may have an impact.

P.S. This is just the most recent manifestation of Twitter Bots. Click here to read about a previous one.

P.P.S Got another Bot follower literally while I was writing this post:

On Cell Phones in Classrooms

Poster currently in several classrooms in my district

In the spring, I held an after-school workshop titled "Classroom Management in the Age of BYOD". My intent was for teachers to discuss and share some ideas about successful management strategies in classes where students are using their own cell phones, tablets, or laptops on a regular basis. The workshop went in an unexpected (to me) direction when it became apparent that most of the teachers there were more interested in learning how to ban cell phones and prevent their students from using them. We had suggestions ranging from "collect them at the door" to "email all parents asking them to keep the devices at home" to "remove the wi-fi from all classrooms in the district". I left discouraged.

I once had a ban on cell phones in my classroom. I had a poster similar to the one shown here. That was about 15 years ago, when phones were simply phones, and their use in public places was a novelty. Every few days, one of my students' phones would ring during class, because they weren't used to silencing them. Most of the students' phones resembled the cartoons in this poster. I had to teach them about appropriate and inappropriate times to have their phones' ringers on.

Photo by Flikr user "Images Money", CC-BY 2.0

Do I have to state the obvious? What (most) students carry around in their pockets has as much resemblance to a cell phone from the early 2000's as my laptop computer does with a bakelite rotary dial phone. Most people, including students, are accustomed to silencing ringers and notifications at the appropriate times. What they are not necessarily used to, however, is using their powerful pocket computers for learning and research in addition to socializing and games. This is because we haven't taught them how to do that. And we can't teach them how to use their phones for productive work if we confiscate them on entrance or on sight.

Which brings us to the recurrent hand-wringing article or blog post like this one from Edutopia in June. For all the concern about teachers being "tired of seeing students text each other" and "text language and spelling that creeps into student assignments", there is precious little in this article actually concerned with student learning. The author writes about "the best thing you could do for yourself", "you have to enforce it", "[e]very teacher's tolerance... varies". The closest the author gets to addressing instruction and student learning is a throw-away line:

Perhaps the most important element is minimal downtime in your learning activities, because the temptation to sneak a look is just too strong. 

The comments on the article continue in a similar vein: students are just too distracted by their phones, and need to focus and concentrate on what the teacher is presenting. This is decidedly not a student-centered mindset.

Fortunately, there are educators who recognize that these pocket computers (a) are not going away any time soon, (b) are only going to get more powerful, useful, and widespread, and (c) will be a crucial part of our students' jobs and lives, even more than they are today. Exhibit A, from 2010 (!) by Doug Johnson in ISTE's Learning and Leading with Technology. (Thanks to Chris Ratican on Twitter for the link.) Exhibit B, from Katie Martin, Director of Professional Learning at the University of San Diego. Exhibit C, from Lisa Nielsen, in Tech & Learning.

We cannot simply pretend that powerful pocket computers don't exist or are not going to be important to our students in their futures. We have to teach students how to use them for productive learning. Doing otherwise, in 2015, is educational malpractice.

UPDATE: As if on cue, here's this article from CBCNews: "Smartphones in the classroom: a teacher's dream or nightmare?" It's actually a fairly reasonable article except for this key quote:

But what about the distraction? Surely kids with a cellphone or tablet in front of them will stop focusing on a lecture and start Facebooking or online chatting?

As they should! Just as adults do in a meeting during a boring, irrelevant lecture or presentation. Our teaching methods and strategies have got to match up with students' needs. If you're trying to lecture to high school students, don't be surprised to see them tune you out, whether it's with their phone or by doodling or just by daydreaming.

ANOTHER UPDATE 12/6/2015: Here's another one, from NPR in November: How to Get Students to Stop Using Their Cell Phones in Class. As Julie Smith (@julnilsmith) points out on Twitter, the comments are terrifying. There is one comment I like, however, from user616828: "The 1950s called, they want their pedagogy back."

More about Website Creation Tools

In a previous post I shared my frustration with Google Sites. But what are the alternatives? What can I recommend to teachers who want to create a simple website for their classes?

In working with various programs over the last couple of weeks, I've become more familiar with the options. As is my habit, I created a diagram to organize my thoughts and express my understanding. You see the result here.

Most people want something that is easy to use; that's understandable. However, some people want to have the flexibility to create, arrange, and lay out page elements however they want. Other people don't want that; they want a highly structured page where they are just filling in blanks. To my way of thinking, the four tools listed in the diagram each occupy a different spot when plotted along those two axes: easy-hard, flexible-structured.

Our district has a site that pre-dates our adoption of GAFE, that some teachers still use for their websites. It is purely for hosting, with no creation tool. We have Microsoft Expressions available for teachers to use to create and edit pages, which then have to be uploaded by ftp. Within Expressions (or any other html editor), teachers have as much flexibility as they want to arrange, lay out, and design their pages. The flexibility comes at a cost; you have to know what you're doing. For this reason, I've put Expressions in the "flexible, hard-to-use" quadrant.

Google Sites is also hard to use, but it does provide some structure for pages. This earns it a spot in the "structured, hard-to-use" quadrant.

Easier to use than either of these two options are two web-based programs that offer free hosting (as well as premium upgrades for those who want them). I've tried out both of their free versions over the last few weeks. My evaluation is that the main difference between wix.com and weebly.com is in the amount of structure provided. In a Wix website, once you select your theme, you have a lot of control over the location and look of page elements, text, images, etc. Weebly provides more structure for the page, restricting what elements can be placed in what locations. The flexibility of Wix comes at a little bit of a cost: the learning curve for Wix is a bit higher than for Weebly, and Wix does not let you change design themes once you've built your site. With Weebly, you can change themes as much as you like, because the basic structure of the page remains the same. Wix, then, gets the spot in the "flexible, easy-to-use" quadrant, while Weebly goes under "structured, easy-to-use".

Whichever tool you choose to create your website, it is important to make sure that parents and students can easily find the information for which they are searching. Think simple rather than complicated, and after your students have been using it for a few weeks, ask them about how your site could be improved. Don't be afraid to make changes based on student or parent feedback. A website editor that is easy to use makes that idea much less daunting.

5 Reasons I Am Done With Google Sites

Photo by Sybren Stüvel on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Our district uses Google Apps, so all of our teachers and students have access to Google Sites. For the last three years, as teachers have asked me, I've recommended that they use Google Sites to create their class or personal website. Initially, as they struggled, I figured it was just because there was a learning curve, and it would get easier. Besides, Google is always updating their apps, so the small difficulties we encountered would surely be remedied soon, right?

As time went on, and I tried various ways to teach Google Sites to teachers, and as they continued to struggle year after year, I came to realize that it's not the teachers' problem. Google Sites is a pain in the ass. It needs to be completely overhauled, yet the only "updates" Google has made in the last two years are completely minor tweaks to a ridiculously outdated interface. Google Sites was pretty cool in 2011. It is no longer 2011, and I am finished recommending it to teachers.

1) Why in the world is it so hard to edit a sidebar or horizontal navigation bar? Even teachers who use other websites and programs with ease find this rigamarole frustrating and difficult. Teachers who just want to add a new page for a new school year find it nearly impossible.

2) Why is it so hard to simply create a text link to an uploaded file? Most of my teachers just want to upload files for students and parents to download. They can post those files at the bottom of a page or in a file-cabinet page. But then creating text links to those files, like in a class calendar, or assignment post, requires them to right-click to copy a link and then pretend that their file is NOT in their Google Site, but is actually an external URL. This is the most common thing my teachers want to do, and yet it is ridiculously difficult. I made this video when I started as a ToSA, but even that doesn't help.

3) Why can't we sort in a file cabinet page? File cabinet pages are great if you have about one screen worth of files. Any more than that, and the page becomes pretty useless. You can create folders, but you can't set the order of folders. You can't sort files or folders. You can't search for filenames. And if you happen to add a file without a description, you have to know to click in a blank white space to add that description later. Seriously?

4) Want to format a table? Hope you know HTML or CSS or both, because you're not doing that outside of the HTML editor.

5) If I never see the "Some HTML tags are not supported and have been removed" message again, it will be too soon.

It's 2015. Google should either support Sites or abandon it. I've abandoned it. Teachers who want to create and maintain a simple class website should either use Blogger or Weebly. Neither of them is perfect, but they're still hundreds of times easier to use than Sites. I'd love to hear suggestions for other free, modern, easy website builders.

On Locking Down the Browser

Photo by succo on pixabay.com (CC0)

Pretty frequently, teachers ask me some version of this question:

"I want to do online testing with my students using [such-and-such system]. Is there a way to make it so they can't go to any other website while they're testing?"

What they're asking me for is a "lock-down browser", similar to what we use in California for SBAC testing. It presents the test in full-screen mode, without toolbars or tabs or any way to access anything else on the computer without exiting the testing session, which would notify the teacher. There are commercial counterparts available, but our district does not purchase any of them, and we are unlikely to do so in the future.

The concern from teachers seems to be that if students are taking a test on a computer or tablet, they could cheat by looking up answers on Google or some other site, or communicate covertly with each other during the test. Given that a commercial lock-down browser is not in the near future for our district, here are some strategies to address concerns about cheating on online tests.

1) Walk around the room. How do you prevent cheating when students are taking a pencil-and-paper test? You watch what they are doing during the test. You can do the same thing if students are testing on a computer. Remind students that they should have only one window open and one tab open in the browser. It's pretty simple for you to spot anything else open by looking at the taskbar or tab bar. This was my strategy when having my students take tests with Google Forms. The only cheating problem I had was old-fashioned: one student looking over at another's screen.

2) Write "non-Googleable" questions. If you are writing your own questions, try to write higher-level questions without answers that are easily found on Google. If students can look up the answer online, why should they have to memorize that answer just to give it back on a test? Questions at depth of knowledge 3 or 4 are typically much more difficult to answer with a simple and quick Google search.

3) Search your own questions beforehand. How do you know whether your questions are "Googleable"? You have to try it out yourself. Try a few keyword searches related to your test or individual questions. Also search for the entire question within quotes. Less-sophisticated internet searchers typically just type in the entire question, "asking" Google like it's Siri or some other personal assistant. If you find quick answers, think about how you can rewrite your questions.

4) Let them use Google. If your test questions require higher-order thinking, students may need resources and additional evidence to support their claims. Give them a task that requires them to pull together information from multiple sources, and let them find the sources as they can. Then you don't have to worry about keeping them from going to other pages; in fact, you want them to!

5) Replace "tests" with other types of assessments. There is nothing sacred about closed-book tests. If students can demonstrate their learning with some other type of project, presentation, video, or writing, let them! An authentic assessment is worth more than some artificial multiple-choice test.

Banning Cell Phones Prepares Students For the Past

I approve this message...

Banning Cell Phones Prepares Students for the Past

from Lisa Nielsen (@InnovativeEdu)

Copyright and Fair Use

For an online class I recently took, we had to produce an infographic explaning copyright and fair use for teachers. I share it here in case anyone finds it useful. (Download the PDF here.)

What is 21st-Century Instruction?

The largest tag on the right-hand sidebar of this blog is "21st-Century Learning". But what does that even mean?

This week, I spent time with department chairs and administrators from across our district in goal-planning days for next year. My part of the workshop was to discuss our district's emphasis on 21st-century instruction. That meant I had to clarify in my own mind what this nebulous term means. I thought back on articles, blog posts, discussions, conference sessions, and conversations I've had over the last three years as a ToSA for Technology and Learning, and brainstormed a list of comparisons between 20th- and 21st-century instruction.

Download this chart as a PDF (color | B&W for printing)

As I presented this chart to teachers this week, I was (pleasantly) surprised at the positive reception it got, so I share it here in case others may find it valuable. I welcome your comments or additions.

A couple of points arise from this exercise. First, if I had to give an "elevator speech" on 21st-century learning, I would say that the essential component is some amount of student control over their own learning: what they learn, how they learn, when they learn, where they learn, how fast they learn, how they demonstrate that learning. That does not mean complete and total control; the degree and dimension of that control still must be judged by an experienced educator.

Second, notice that instructional technology is only one of the items on this list. Certainly 21st-century technology can help accomplish many of the other items, making them easier or more practical, but 21st-century instruction does not mean simply instructional technology. For that reason, my job title and emphasis will change next year, to ToSA for 21st-Century Instruction (ToSA 21C, for short). I hope to be working with teachers on many of the above topics, including but not limited to instructional technology.

How Do I Get A Job Like This?

In September, I wrote a post about lazy editorial cartoonists, which included this image from Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle from August of 2014:

Earlier today, I saw this image reposted on a blog:

Wow, that seems familiar. I wonder who drew this one? Oh, look, it's Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle in August of 2013. (That teacher has gained some weight over the year. She might want to see a cartoon doctor. Probably one wearing an old-fashioned circular reflector on his head.)

I'm going to gloss over the relative popularity of Facebook and Twitter with school-age children (spoiler alert: it's zero), although I will note that I look forward to McKee's cartoon from August of 2015 where the child shows the dowdy teacher his MySpace page.

I just want to know where I can get a job where you can do the same thing year after year, pulling out your old work, maybe changing a bit here and there, and then submit it to your audience as if it were brand-new. Does anyone know of any profession other than editorial cartoonist where that is acceptable? If I tried to do that as a teacher, I'd... wait a sec...

Oh.....

How SDUHSD Learned to Twitter Chat

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you're not reading Bjorn Paige's blog (bjornpaige.wordpress.com), you are missing some fantastic writing and reflection on education in general and middle school in particular. In January, he announced the second installment of the Diegueño book club for parents and staff, focused on Daniel Wolff's How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations that Made Them. (Amazon link)

Since the book club meeting is scheduled for a Tuesday evening, Bjorn and I decided to also use this book as the topic for our weekly district Twitter chat, On March 10, #SDUHSDchat will be at a special time and will focus on several issues raised in different chapters of the book.

Wolff's book is a collection of 12 more-or-less independent chapters, each describing the education of a famous American and how that education both reflects the ideas of the times and shapes the lives of the people who experience it. Bjorn is planning his own questions for the in-person book club; for our Twitter chat, aimed at people who may or may not have already read the book, each of our discussion questions will be based on a short excerpt from a chapter. If you have the time to read the book beforehand, that would be great; if you don't, you'll still be perfectly able to participate in the chat.

I will be moderating the chat from the book club in-person meeting, at the Diegueño Media Center, from 5:00 to 6:00 on Tuesday the 10th. We will be displaying the chat on a screen in the Media Center, for in-person participants who might be interested. I'm also hoping to be able to bring some of the book club discussion to the Twitter chat as well.

This is an experiment on our part. I've never live-tweeted a book club discussion before, nor have we done a hybrid Twitter/in-person conversation like this. I'm hoping that the combination of the two discussions will produce something greater than the sum of the parts.

4 C's February, Day 17 - Donald Collins

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Donald Collins, Independent Study On Line teacher and PALS advisor at Torrey Pines High School:

endlessorigami.com/comic/group-projects/

Teaching, while perhaps not the oldest profession, has to be one of the oldest, as well as one of them most interesting and challenging in the history of mankind. Some form of our work has existed on every continent, in every culture, in every language throughout the ages.

Think about it. As soon as a group of people understood something they wanted the other people in their group to understand, they shared the information to increase the group’s understanding. That might have been the best methods for hunting, the skills for carving marble or how to read. If you’ve ever spent time on a farm or with puppies, you know it’s not just people who teach and learn, but also animals teach and learn together. Researchers suggest even moths and insects are not driven entirely by instinct and may be trained to smell for chemical weapons!!

The politics of learning: the what, when, where, how and why we learning, have existed nearly as long as learning itself. Once we know how to teach something at some point we also have to answer the question, “Is it ethical to train moths to smell for chemical weapons?” While there is plenty of room for debate about topics in education like standardized testing, or whole language vs. phonics, what can’t be debated is that kids who learn to communicate effectively, solve problems creatively and think critically will be more successful in their endeavors than those who don’t learn these skills.

Yet teaching these skills without a sense of connection to others developed through social interaction and collaboration can create more havoc than having a society of ignorant morons because that same creative, critically-thinking, smooth-talking problem solving student could end up another Bernie Madoff rather than an Irene Sendler. While both were creative, critical and perhaps even deceptively sneaky problem solvers and risk takers, one had a sense of concern for others and is considered a hero, while the other has been called a sociopath and diagnosed, probably without substantial counter argument, as suffering from anti-social personality disorder.

This is some of the thought process that goes on in my mind when I consider what we do every day as teachers. We must remember the importance and power of the decisions we make, the activities we assign and the way we interact with our students every day. On our good days we help student make sense of the world, of themselves, and of each other. On our best days, we inspire them to help others do the same. As they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words” - the difference speaks for itself.

We know as teachers if we want our kids to think well and communicate well, we have got to create opportunities that are interesting enough to engage them in new ways in order to challenge them to develop these desired skills. Helping them to tap into themselves to apply their inborn, natural creativity and curiosity to a situation or problem that challenge has to be interesting or rewarding, and preferably both or else we all know there are far more rewarding, easier ways for kids to distract themselves.

The rewards our system uses and the ones the kids are used to are grades. Grades are a reflection of assessment and are a great reward when the student does well, but there are others that can be very motivating like winning a competition or simple prizes (praise, stickers, money, pizza day, free homework coupon, special seating in the class, etc.), the enjoyment of interesting, meaningful work and the joy of being of service to others. There are other ways, but these are some intrinsic motivators for most people. The better assignments have more of these motivational rewards, which is why filling out a ditto isn’t too rewarding, but a grape smelly sticker for a 100% makes a not-so-interesting assignment better.

One part of teaching I love is where I get to create new one of these real-world activities that matter. The inspirations can come from the strangest places. In the late 90’s during my first years of teaching, my family was experiencing the changes and challenges of my uncle’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis. I started to learn much more about the difficult realities of this disease on my visits with my mother and aunt to my uncle in the Alzheimer’s facility. Talking with workers there I found out about the spectrum of the illness and found out that while some patients recall nothing, some can still clearly recall the past very clearly. My uncle was WW II Pacific Theater Veteran and shared stories about old cars, and his work in the space industry on the first space craft to go to Mars. He was sharing not just his, but America’s history.

It was from this experience of listening to stories that I developed an assignment for students to create oral history PowerPoints from interviewing patients and families that would be supported by scanning family documents and photos. Of course, an older person wouldn’t need to have Alzheimer’s in order to enjoy the interaction and experience of having their story compiled for the family to enjoy and share. It was only years later that I found out that my big, original idea was actually old hat and could be found in a number of different variations on the Internet.

When I was thinking about my Four C’s of February Blog Assignment, this Oral History Assignment was the first one I created myself that challenged students to engage in all four C’s in meaningful ways and I loved everything about it: meaningful connections between the students with the families and then with each other as they shared about their senior, meaningful use of technology to create a meaningful final product that used creativity and critical thinking to organize and plan the story in a format that could be enjoyed and shared by the family for a long time to come. I didn’t use that one because I am not doing that assignment currently, I am doing the one I want to share about!

The good news is there are lots of new ideas for creative assignments on the Internet, so I don’t have to work so hard. The even better great news is that many organizations, like newspapers and community interest groups, have created all sorts of classroom opportunities that even sometimes offer cash prizes and the groups are just looking for us to tackle them! In fact, there’s even a website that collects student competitions in every category from STEM to Arts in one place!!

I started a new job as teacher for the TPHS Peer Assistant Leadership (PALS) class here three years ago. That January I got an email from the Directing Change Program with an amazing contest that fit in directly with the our Yellow Ribbon Suicide Prevention Week activities in March.

The contest is part of statewide efforts to prevent suicide, reduce stigma and discrimination related to mental illness, and to promote the mental health and wellness of students by having groups of up to four students create 60-second Public Service Announcement videos that address Suicide Prevention or Eliminating the Stigma of Mental Illness and meet the criteria and requirements specifically outlined on the website’s contest rule section.

We submitted our final videos last week and there are some amazing ones that are totally student created. Check out two here: 

This initiative is funded by the Mental Health Services Act (Prop 63) and administered by the California Mental Health Services Authority (CalMHSA). For High school students 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners are selected in each category from nine regions within the state of California by a regional judging panel with Regional Cash Prizes in each category of 1st place: $500, 2nd place: $250 and 3rd place: $250 plus schools associated with the winning film in each category, in each region receive $250! All regional first place winners will be provided with travel stipends to attend a legislative briefing at the Capitol and the award ceremony in Sacramento. Winning films will be featured on the Directing Change compilation DVD and the program website which are more props and motivation for the students.

I make it very clear from the start this is a big assignment worth 12% of their grade (One letter grade) and that if it is not accepted by the Directing Change Judges for failure to meet the requirements of the contest, they get a 0 on the assignment and lose a letter grade in the class. They also must meet the deadline, because a busted deadline is a 0 as well. The kids work together, communicate, delegate, use all sorts of technology and time management skills including the website’s checklist to meet all of the criteria of the competition.

The best news for me as a teacher, besides being amazed every year by the films some of the groups create, is that the ENTIRE assignment is already created! The rubrics, the requirements, the forms, everything! All I need to do is create time in class, set requirements and deadlines for the different parts of the process: I use previous examples of great storyboarding and a website with resources, I have students who have had Film Class do a lesson for the class on the different types of shots which the kids love to watch and hear and I show different examples to get the students thinking creatively and pumped up to take me back to Sacramento for the Awards Ceremony again!

We show these student created videos during our Yellow Ribbon Week Speaker Assemblies and the results are awesome. You can check out last year’s entries which include our group of regional winners pictured above and two groups of runner up winners for a total of $1000 in prize money to the students and $250 for our PALS program! We’re working hard, making cheddar and having fun doing it!

Last year I saw first had the advantage of having students with technical film skills involved in the process so I invited Derek Brunkhorst to have members of his Advanced Video Film class join our teams to represent Torrey Pines and create the best videos possible. We all know success breeds success and the students have brought their filming to a whole new level this year as a result of the stories and experience I can share from the previous two years of competition. (think go pro cameras attached to flying drones for aerial shots of football players!!!)

Most students don’t like group work and they like out-of-class group work even less, but students LOVE this assignment because it’s real-world with a real purpose plus there’s the potential to win recognition, a trophy, cash prizes and an all-expense paid trip to Sacramento while being creative, using technology, doing work to reduce suffering and learning.

And to talk for a minute about the learning. The students become exceptionally knowledgeable about mental illness or suicide prevention by the end of meeting all of the film requirements because they are applying what they learn to what they are doing. They also learn about meeting deadlines, communicating with others, attention to details, the value of planning out a great storyboard, in addition to learning how creative and powerful their actions can be to help other people. I encourage you to find a competition that meets your coursework and motivate your students to compete and maybe win!

4 C's February, Day 16 - Doug Gilbert

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Doug Gilbert, social science teacher at Canyon Crest Academy. Doug has posted his entry, about Economics and Government assignments, on his own website, at sites.google.com/a/sduhsd.net/doug-gilbert/4c-s-blog-entry. Thanks, Doug!

4 C's February, Day 15 - Bjorn Paige

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Bjorn Paige, principal at Diegueño Middle School:


T.S. Eliot
“April is the cruelest month.”
A poem of 4 C’s

T.S. Eliot said that “April is the cruelest month.” He wasn't a teacher or he would have known that’s untrue; we get spring break. What April really is, at least at Diegueño, is National Poetry Month. I’m using the celebration as an excuse to step in front of a few classes to teach a lesson on poetry.

As I prepare, I’m keeping in mind the “4 C’s” that my teachers bring to their classrooms every day: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. I've got about an hour scheduled for my dance with Emily Dickinson and friends, and I’m committed to doing my best to make it count.

The plan, still in its infancy, as it relates to the 4 C’s, looks a little like this…

Critical Thinking: After a bit of talk about verse as opposed to prose, I’ll give the kids one of two poems about hope: Emily Dickinson’s famous “thing with feathers” and Emily Brontë’s “timid friend.” Diametrically opposed, the poems will invite students to read closely, annotate, and come up with some ideas about the work.

Communication: After each student has had a chance to spend some time with her poem, I’ll pair the students so each group has both a Dickinson and a Brontë poem, and invite the students to share their poem and their thoughts on form, language, and message.

Collaboration: After each student has had a chance to speak, I’ll blend the groups into quartets, and ask students to work together to develop a unified perspective on these poets’ views. This part of my lesson still has some work to go, but I know I want to have some specific questions to ask the kids, and I know I want to invite them to come up with meaningful questions as well. Depending on time, we may get a bit of biography on Brontë and Dickinson, and I’m hoping that the students will be able to bring the level of rigorous conversation I've seen them show their own English teachers throughout this year.

Creativity: I thought a bit about this as I was doing my initial draft of the lesson, and knew that I wanted the kids to have an opportunity to put pen to paper and come up with a poem of their own. After our discussion of language, form, and poetic constraints, I think I want to end by having them write a haiku. “They’re simple,” I’ll explain. “As long as you know the rules, and bend your creativity to fit within the parameters. Heck, they can even sneak up on you, like the haiku that is the title of this post.”

Bjorn Paige blogs regularly at bjornpaige.wordpress.com

4 C's February, Day 14 - Jennifer McCluan

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Jennifer McCluan, science teacher at San Dieguito Academy:



The “Microbe-scope” and PQP (Phenomenon, Question, Practice)

I must hear three things on NPR driving to and from school every day that get me thinking, “How can I incorporate this in my Health Care Essentials class?” So that’s how this “lesson” began last fall, with a comment during “All Things Considered” about an interesting graph that I knew I had to find and share with my students…and so I present to you, “The Microbe-scope”:

Happily, when I arrived home that day and checked my Facebook and Twitter feeds, several of my amazingly informed friends and colleagues had found it already. Knowing that I teach this class for students interested in health care careers, they shared “The Microbe-scope” with me (thanks Kevin Fairchild and several others for thinking of me and my students).

Strangely enough, I had several conversations with colleagues earlier that day about the struggles our students face when it comes to extracting meaning from graphs and data. I was motivated to develop this into a full-blown lesson, but wasn't sure what form it should (and would) take. So I thought, heck, I’ll throw it up on the screen for our Warm-Up tomorrow and see what happens.

In a nutshell, what happened is that the Warm-Up turned into a week long project completely driven by questions my students developed, researched, and shared with our class. To facilitate, I employed a strategy I find myself using quite a bit these days: PQP (Phenomenon, Question, Practice). While this strategy works well in science, I imagine it could be translated into other disciplines as well. What’s great is that it works for teachers and for students.

First, you think about a phenomenon you want to investigate (the deadliness and contagiousness of diseases, the Ebola outbreak, placebo effect, volcanic lightning, etc.), and then you develop questions that will help you understand an aspect of the phenomenon (Which disease is the most contagious?, Why is Ebola so deadly?, Is there any physiological evidence as to why patients “feel” better when given placebos?, Where has volcanic lightning been documented?, etc.). Finally, you identify which scientific practices you will need to apply to answer these questions (analyzing and interpreting data, engaging in argument from evidence, constructing explanations, planning and carrying out investigations, etc.).

For “The Microbe-scope” lesson, I introduced the graph as a phenomenon, and asked three questions of my students: (1) What does this graph mean? (2) What questions do you have about understanding how to read this graph? (3) What questions does this graph raise for you?. We practiced analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations, and engaging in argument from evidence to answer these questions. I should mention that my students were most surprised by the fact that Whooping Cough was more contagious than Ebola (that untreated rabies was so deadly was a close runner up). My students decided (politely demanded) that they wanted to work collaboratively in small groups to research a disease from the graph of interest to them (their phenomenon). It was delightful (and somewhat disturbing) to hear them cry out triumphantly, “We have Tuberculosis!” or “We got Ebola!”. Each group was asked to develop five questions to guide their research, and to then apply at lease three different practices as they went about finding answers and explanations to share in their presentation.

While we certainly engaged in the four C’s (Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking) I would argue that all of these worked toward building a 5th C: Community. I was incredibly pleased by their enthusiasm, ownership of their own learning, and the end results. I learned a heck of a lot, too. Most importantly, that I shouldn’t be afraid to try something new (and I don’t need a detailed and uber-organized lesson plan for it to be successful).

Here are a couple of slides from their resulting presentations:

Pertussis (Whooping Cough)

Tuberculosis

(Thank you to John Spiegel, San Diego County Office of Education Science Coordinator, for sharing the PQP technique with me.)

4 C's February, Day 13 - Lori Meyer

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Lori Meyer, English teacher at Carmel Valley Middle School:

My students think more creatively when I let go of controlling the outcomes. This year when we read Call of the Wild, I decided to give the students more control over what they did as a culminating project at the end of the book. I did not give a test. I gave them freedom to decide what they wanted to do after reading the book. Some took traditional roads like writing an essay, writing a test, and making a Powerpoint presentations. Others created a playlist of songs to go along with scenes from the book. Several created timelines using technology they had not tried before. Four or five created pieces of art. They collaborated with me on writing a rubric that would be used to score the project, which required much “letting go” on my part.

The thing I liked best about this assignment was that the students enjoyed doing it, and their work far exceeded my expectations in many cases. I had to give a little “wiggle room” on the time constraints for some students. Letting go of our idea of “on time” versus “in time” also makes sense to me if we really want to encourage creativity in our students.

Here is a link to the assignment sheet and rubric.

4 C's February, Day 12 - Samantha Greenstein

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Samantha Greenstein, science teacher at Earl Warren Middle School:


In any science class, the 4 Cs are essential. An increasingly important part of any science classroom is that students develop engineering skills that will better enable them to take on the challenges that they will face in our world. In the Next Generation Science Standards, students are expected to define problems and design solutions.

In my 8th grade science class, I work to make sure that students are practicing the 4 Cs by having them work like engineers. One project we had students do this year was to build a Spaghetti Tower using the following supplies:



The constraints were:

• 10 minutes to plan
• 15 minutes to build
• Marshmallow must be at the top of the structure
• Tower must stand upright for at least 10 seconds

Students practiced the 4 Cs in the following ways:

Communication: Students had 10 minutes to plan their design (2 minutes silently, 2 minutes of sharing, and 6 minutes to create a group plan). It is essential that students understand how to communicate like scientists so that they can best share their ideas and learn from the ideas of others. We encouraged students to use the following sentence starters when sharing their ideas and when listening to others (we also practiced these sentence starters in a different activity before this):



Creativity: Students were limited on supplies, but they had an infinite number of building options. Students needed to come up with innovative solutions in order to make a structure that could actually hold the marshmallow. Innovation is the key to progress!

Collaboration: After the initial build, students were able to look at the other towers that were created around the room and then were allowed an opportunity to rebuild their tower. By talking to other groups about how they went about solving the problem, every student worked collaboratively to try different options and then to create the greatest possible solution.

Critical Thinking: Throughout this entire activity, students needed to overcome obstacles (broken spaghetti, leaning towers, disagreements in their group, etc.) by thinking critically about what the problem was and how they could find a solution.

Engineering challenges give students the opportunity to practice the essential 4 Cs.

4 C's February, Day 11 - Christine Corrao

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Christine Corrao, English teacher at Torrey Pines High School:


21st-century skills: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking

I would love to share some of the ways that I help foster 21st Century literacy skills in my classroom. As an English teacher I am really thrilled about the inclusion of more non-fiction into the classroom with the move towards Common Core. I have always supplemented the teaching of novels by providing my students with articles that reflect the themes presented in our Core novels. Being able to supplement with short, relevant, and aligned text allows me to help students see our “classic” novels in a fresh or modern context. The STRUCTURE of my class period allows me to do this more easily- I don’t have to change how I teach in order to add in non-fiction I just need to arrange my class schedule to support the use of these texts.

The four main 21st Century literacy skills needed for all students (these can be used in any content area when tackling a reading selection) are:

1. The ability to “activate” prior knowledge.
2. Organize or make sense of new information.
3. Comprehend the text. 
4. Summarize, so as to inform others about what you read/learned. 

The best way to embed these skills and support them is by using the structure of the class to give the framework for inclusion. At Torrey Pines we teach in 2 hour block periods. I use this longer length of time to breakup my class period and roughly teach Fiction 50% of the time and Non-Fiction 50% of the time. Then within that 1 hour I allot for Non-fiction texts, I use specific reading strategies that support the four main skills I listed above. I search for a variety of articles/texts/video clips/music that make our novels interesting and relevant and roughly devote about 25 min of time to teaching those specific strategies. One example would be when I taught The Scarlet Letter this Fall and used both evidence from the text and support articles to envision the novel as a story about the effects of post-partum depression. We talked about the several times in the text when the characters referenced Elizabeth Proctor being “unwell” or “not wholly well” after the birth of her last child. I supplemented with a medical reference article on Post-partum depression along with a recent blog post by a women who struggled with depression after the birth of her child. Students were engaged and interested in a topic they did not seem to know much about- they now easily saw the connection to our Core text and were surprised they didn’t “see” it before the non-fiction supplements. Overall, it is just a simple adjustment to how I devote my class time that allows me to creatively and easily infuse non-fiction into my classroom.

4 C's February, Day 10 - Abby Brown

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Abby Brown, math teacher at Torrey Pines High School:


For nearly twenty years I have had my students give regular presentations in class – in math class. This has taken different forms with different classes over the years, but the objectives have been the same: students will become more confident public speakers and will learn to explain their work with clarity and accuracy.

In the more formal presentations that my students do, they are assigned a math problem from the book. However, rather than simply solving it as in homework, the presenters need to show their work, review key concepts, and do something more such as a visualization, animation, data analysis, or three-dimensional model. That is where they are often most creative. The structure for their work is centered on multiple representations. Students share their methods symbolically, graphically, numerically, and verbally. Tying together the different representations deepens their understanding of the concepts and having to present to their peers that takes it even further.

An added twist to these presentations is that the students get feedback beyond the grade from the teacher. We video record each presentation using an old cell phone. The students later watch themselves present and become their own audience. Also, while a group presents, several other students in the class complete critique forms for the talk. They evaluate the presenters on both content and style looking to see that the presentation is both clear and accurate. The presenters review these critique forms while watching their presentation and then answer reflection questions about strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. This helps prepare them for their next presentation and develops their public speaking skills.

Each year when former students visit or send emails to say hello, they ask whether I still have my students do presentations and video. They comment on how much they appreciated that practice. For most students, the ability to speak confidently, clearly, and accurately in front of a group will serve them more in their future work and careers than whether they can solve specific math problems.

4 C's February, Day 9 - Guen Butler

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Guen Butler, current ToSA and former French teacher at San Dieguito Academy and Torrey Pines High School:


“Les Quatre C”

The AP French Language and Culture course requires that students express themselves in French and make insightful cross-cultural comparisons on a wide variety of topics. The course is based around six themes: Beauty and Aesthetics, Global Challenges, Personal and Public Identities, Families and Communities, Science and Technology, and Contemporary Life. To keep up with the high-demand for up-to-date information in this class, the teacher of this course could easily find him or herself spending countless hours researching current events throughout the 44 countries of the French-speaking world, and crafting lessons around those.

Pneumonic Plague in Madagascar? Charlie Hebdo? The Arab Spring? Sure, I could research those and present them to my students. But who would really be doing the learning? Probably me. Why not have THE KIDS do the research and present a topic to the class? This is a language class after all. Shouldn't THEY be the ones collaborating, communicating and thinking creatively and critically?

And, so, inspired by Christophe Barquisseau’s MAC project, that’s what I did. Groups of 4 students in my AP French class chose one of the six course themes. Then, on that theme, they found a newspaper article (en français, bien sûr!) a related 2-minute video or audio clip, and a chart or a graph around which they’d base a multi-part presentation to the class. These groups, working entirely with documents written for a Francophone audience, would, in French:

• Present the article, video, and graph, sharing the information and asking questions to the class
• Teach key vocabulary as needed 
• Synthesize the 3 sources, and lead a class discussion around it.
• And then, of course, create a wildly competitive Jeopardy-style game to review their presentation.

The projects my students presented included:

• Fashion in France for plus-sized women
• Graffiti vs Public art
• Banning cigarette smoking on the beach
• The Burqa in Switzerland
• Drug use among teenagers

My work during these presentations shifted, from being the “finder and presenter” of information to helping students refine their projects, find appropriate sources of information, learn how to interpret complex graphs and charts made for a European audience, develop their public speaking skills, craft engaging questions for their peers, distill complex articles down to their essence, or connect a far-away topic like graffiti in Paris to a local concern, the Surfing Madonna in Encinitas. In short, when I pushed my students to engage deeply with the 4C’s, my class became more engaging, more relevant and, more fun. Not to mention, my students’ spoken and written French got quite a workout!

4 C's February, Day 8 - Tracy Bryant

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Tracy Bryant, social science teacher at Canyon Crest Academy:


A 21st Century Lesson that I developed for AP World History is called Five Minute Professor. AP World students research a topic and become the professor for 5 minutes of the class. Students work with a partner to pick the topic, research what they will teach, and how they will present their topic. They are only limited by a few items: the topic must be about something we are currently studying, it must be creative, students can’t use my technology, and the presentation should only last 5 minutes.

Students have come up with some creative lessons:

• teaching the class to Hula dance and about Hawaiian culture 
• creating and performing a song about Napoleon 
• teaching the class about the Cajun and Creole cultures that developed in Louisiana while serving Gumbo

Because students can’t use my technology, they don’t create a boring Powerpoint. Students have brought in family heirlooms and ancient artifacts. I have heard stories that have been passed down by older family members about regimes that have since died out. I have seen Mao’s Red Book and a piece of the Berlin Wall. If given the right opportunity, students will teach and amaze you!