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Seed and Season Date: Sun, 8 Sep 1996 Hi folks, As we and our students return to our classrooms, a hint of enormous possibilities adds to the excitement and energy this time of year brings. Different cultures have determined the starting point of the year differently. Different hemispheres assign seasons in perfectly symmetrical opposition. The ancient Chinese noted that darkness begins its return on the first day of summer, and light begins its increase in the dead of winter, the seeds of opposites found within their maximum respective expression. While the calendar tells us we are three quarters through 1996, and the farmers almanac speaks of harvest, I've come to observe a rhythm that convinces me that we (of the Northern hemisphere) are actually at the beginning, of a precious time, at that. Although year-round school advocates see the summer vacation as an anachronistic vestige of an agrarian life, we educators continue to work in a 40 week growing season whose harvest is determined by the ground we prepare for planting in the first weeks of our new year. Seasoned educators may agree with the following observations. No matter our good intentions, there is a flow to the 40 weeks we in America share with our students. Working backwards, the capacity to introduce new directions to our content is nearly nil as we approach the end of the year. While it used to be "it's all over by Memorial Day", there are those who feel the pull of the "sap rising", both in maples and our students, which precludes changing directions after spring break. More recently, I've even heard teachers confide that they're consolidating the progress their students have made from President's Weekend on out. This is not to imply that learning is not possible all year long, or that it fails to happen in classrooms throughout the year. It is to acknowledge that learning is continuous, and contiguous to activities that trace back to earlier, more formative and fluid beginnings. Once these are set, the pathways and goals either connect to and amplify these beginnings, or stand alone. What we do with our students from this day forward will either take sustenance from our overall contexts for learning, or compete with these contexts. This is a particular problem when we think about integrating the Internet into our daily classroom activities throughout the year. How can I anticipate the great things that may surface by May, which I'll be profoundly excited about, but which don't exist yet, cannot be foreseen, and still find ways to provide meaningful links to the overall goals of my students? How many times have you seen a wonderful project announcement fly by on one or more listservs or web pages, and have to decline, like a sated guest exiting a gourmet dinner, walking past Restaurant Row? Now's the Time Talking with colleagues, both in person and online, we took a hard look at our next 40 weeks. Some holes in the calendar we can anticipate (for example in NJ we have a total of twelve full teaching days, and four 1 PM dismissals in November, due to holidays, teacher/parent conferences and conventions) , and we know it takes two weeks just to establish rhythms with our new students. The first 10 weeks will set the stage for everything else that follows. The next 10 allow interrupted time for reinforcement (due to waves of holidays, consecutive five day teaching weeks are the exception) and checking individual student progress. The third 10 can be structured for individual and small group investigations that flow from previous class experiences. In the home stretch, 10 weeks are available for students to showcase what they've learned, and provide feedback to their peers, as they review and evaluate examples from portfolios. What's this look like in real life? Here are some concrete examples, based on previous mistakes. The logistics of scalability in moving from classroom wide to district wide participation are not trivial. For the past two years, each spring I've realized that the KidLink Big Days Celebration approached without my students' having been adequately prepared to participate as full fledged members of this online community. Planning for 675 students means far more than having them each respond to the Four Questions that are the heart of the project. Help will be needed to track the registration of each student for their IRC passwords, and to coordinate the many project options with their class work. This implies training student and/or parent volunteers to manage the flow of information, devising and conducting such training sufficiently in advance to permit students to "lock in" these new skills before November. The solution may be to plant seeds outside the traditional schoolyard garden, or at least invite others in to tend it. The level of individualization implied by the possible project choices requires some technological assistance. There are dozens of projects within KidLink that my students may choose to pursue, and dozens more possibilities from listservs, enterprising school based web sites, government, non-profit organizations and commercial sources. Getting a handle on each student's involvement and progress with these projects would keep a person busy full time (or perhaps, a computer!). This year, the plan is to have a networked relational database that tracks each student, each lesson conducted in the lab, each follow-up activity pursued in classrooms, homework centers or via home Internet connections, and each teacher's curricular goals for using the Internet, and places the results into individual student electronic portfolios. Recent developments have made it possible to use the World Wide Web as a front end to such a database, meaning that students can build their portfolio from any place where they can reach the Web. Help will be needed to develop this online infrastructure, and it may come from partners in the Online Internet Institute (who might be in Oregon, New Mexico, Texas, Minnesota, in addition to New Jersey) or local graduate students at Princeton, or our parents. Again, interest in growing such a solution extends far beyond Princeton, and by presenting opportunities to share in the harvest, we can distribute the work required to nurture the crop. I'll be back in a couple weeks to share with you the results, as well as some web addresses you can visit to see how our garden grows, and perhaps till a plot for yourself. Wishing you a bountiful year! |
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