laboratories for learning; more on assessment

The raw space is a shell, determined, simply there. What happens next is active choice - life is breathed into these settings by people who have certain ideas in mind, specific beliefs to enclose. (Ayers, 2001, p. 49)

I believe that chapter three of William Ayers To Teach - “Creating an Environment for Learning” - is one of the most important chapters in the book. Creating an environment conducive to learning is a very important step that every teacher should give careful consideration to. The effects on one’s environment on the psyche are well documented, from the climate one lives in, to the neighborhood one lives in, to the color that the bedroom walls are painted. I remember reading a study long ago that Father Baker pink was the most soothing color in the spectrum and had a dramatic effect on people psychologically - it's clear that our surroundings influence us.

There are many important points in Ayer’s chapter that I’d like to discuss, but first I’d like to mention that it’s not just the individual classroom’s environment, or even the atmosphere of the school building as a whole, that’s singularly critical - I believe that the total environment of the school has a dramatic impact on learning. Too many children must walk to school in neighborhoods that are decrepit and crime-ridden and attend schools that are forced to use video cameras and metal detectors because the threat of violence is so great. These factors influence ability to learn. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is clear that safety needs to be addressed before intellectual pursuits can be successfully engaged in. Improving the total environment of schools should be a high priority for us. Ayers’ words, while not referring specifically to violence in schools, are still apropos: “Questioning everything in the environment…is an important task for teachers. We cannot necessarily change it all, but we can certainly become aware of the messages.” (2001, p. 51)

That said, in schools like these, the individual classroom environment takes on additional importance for kids, because the classroom can provide a nook of safety. Should I find myself teaching in a school with less than ideal conditions for learning, my first hope would be to create a classroom where kids feel safe. Elements of the physical space can do this - I picture warm textiles and comfy, cozy, reading areas - but the biggest step will be to engage in classroom community building. Perhaps the children themselves will have ideas for creating a physical environment that will help them feel more at ease.

Once I’ve tried to create a safe space, I’d like to try and create a space that also encourages active learning. Like Ayers, “I want to build spaces that are laboratories for discovery and surprise.” This early in my quest to become a teacher, I have no real idea what I’ll do with the physical space of my classroom. I do know it will strongly incorporate a sense of wonder (something I’ve never lost), a love of reading, history, and science, and space for hands-on learning. My passion for experiential learning must also be incorporated somehow in the scheme of things. Again like Ayers, I’d like to show my kids that “knowledge [is] available to them and [is] not some fixed entity locked up in textbooks, and that learning can be exciting, potentially awesome, and deeply satisfying.” (Ayers, 2001, p. 57) As much as I’d like my classroom to be an inspiring place for all kinds of learning to occur, I’d also like to get out of the classroom too, even if only figuratively. I’d like my classroom to be a place where imagination can soar.

part II: more on assessment

First of all, on the topic of assessment, I wanted to note a realization that came to me this past week. In one of my classes, we just turned in the single assessed document required for the entire term. I felt a little uneasy about this important writing assignment as I was wrote without a sense of what the instructor’s writing expectations were. In the class I am writing this blog for, of course, we aren’t even being assessed in the traditional sense. That got me thinking about my own attitudes toward assessment. While I ambivalent about standardized assessment, I am, personally, also an assessment junkie. This makes me a walking contradiction, but I do have to admit that I very much missed being assessed this term. This realization is important, because a mini straw poll I conducted in class uncovered a few more people who felt the same way. When I’m trying to create some kind of authentic assessment for my kids, I think I’ll need to remain aware of or uncover just how important a concrete “rating” of their work is to some of them.

I’ve already spoken about some ideas for authentic, alternative assessment in a few of my previous blog posts, but there were a few things in Ayers’ chapter “Keeping Track,” that resounded with me. First, echoing my thoughts above, was his discussion of how seductive standardized assessments are in terms of making us feel good about our kids (or ourselves when we take the West-Es) when they perform well, even as we realize that the standardized assessment was inherently flawed and unfair. I also liked Ayers’ description of the “3ps” of alternative assessment: “projects, portfolios, and performance.” (Ayers, 2001, p. 116) His description of how understanding what we value is the first step in authentic assessment was spot on for me, too. We have to be able to articulate the goals before we can successfully assess what’s been learned. I hope to successfully bear out Ayers' ideas when I'm teaching.

Ayers, W. (2001). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. New York. N.Y. & London: Teachers College Press.

integrated learning, service education: a weekend experience

This past weekend I had the fantastic opportunity to participate in a two day watershed education workshop sponsored by Service Education Adventure (SEA), Learn and Serve Environmental Anthropology Field (LEAF), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Funded by grants provided through NOAA’s Bay-Watershed Education and Training (B-WET), this and similar workshops aim to give teachers the knowledge and resources necessary to get classrooms involved in watershed issues, to see the web of real-world connections that watershed issues embody, and to get kids and classrooms out in the field.

The first day we went out on a part-time research vessel, the Indigo. The day was spent in rotations: one discussing resources and curricula, another learning about the marine environment - which included trawling for plankton and observing it under a microscope, a third learning how to track animals that make their home in watershed basins, and the last learning marine navigation skills (yes, we all got to "drive" the boat!). We also spent a good portion of the afternoon on a beautiful beach at low tide making field observations. This was the first time I ever held an enormous moon snail in the palm of my hand!

The rotations, I felt, did a very good job of highlighting just how interconnected even seemingly disparate areas are. Who would have immediately connected tracking bears with watershed issues? Yet the bear requires a healthy watershed to survive. Who would’ve recognized that the health of the plankton we observed on the boat directly related to the health of all the marine creatures we observed on the beach? Our jam-packed, eye-opening, and educative first day was a strong reaffirmation of my feelings about interdisciplinary teaching and learning. It reinforced my opinion that we can’t hope give our students holistic knowledge about the world and how it works when we chop knowledge up into discrete little cubes and then serve it to our students with a complete lack of context.

Day two was also great, even though we weren’t out on a boat. The day’s classroom instruction was a chance to get some hands-on knowledge about a couple of service learning projects that we could do with our kids. As is probably clear by now, integrated/interdisciplinary learning is one of my great interests, and, to me, adding a service component makes it just that much more attractive. First on the workshop agenda was a presentation by a Stilly-Snohomish Fisheries Enhancement Task Force researcher, who talked with us about both watershed education in general and about water testing.

From her we received a very good overview of how to engage our students in understanding both what a watershed is and about watershed issues - and then we got to learn how to do water tests! Water testing kits are free from Sound Citizen, an organization which is a great starting point for building an experiential or service oriented watershed curriculum. One’s classroom can test anything from a major river’s water, to the water in a ditch by the school, even the school’s own grey water. While simple tests can be done in the classroom, such as turbidity and dissolved oxygen, the Sound Citizen kits are submitted with collection data -such as longitude and latitude of test site, whether salt, stream, lake water, etc. - and analyzed. Soon, your results will be graphed alongside other results on their website so comparisons can be made. This is a great way for kids to understand what “healthy” water looks like and why it’s important for all us and the ecosystem to have healthy water, while simultaneously assisting watershed research.

In the afternoon of the second day, we visited a fledgling ethnobotanical garden and did some key-based plant identification. Then we designed an interpretive sign for the plant we identified, listing two traditional native uses of the plant. Our plant was Arbutus menziesii, or Pacific Madrone, with its interesting red (chartreuse when young!) peeling bark and waxy evergreen leaves. It turns out that this plant was used by the Saanich people for making dye, as a remedy for colds and tuberculosis, and as a contraceptive. What a great service learning project this would be for kids! This project could easily highlight the vital role native plants play in the watershed ecosystem, the negative impact of introduced natives (the removal of which would be another great service leaning opportunity), the importance of our native plants to indigenous peoples, to animals, and to us today, and the design of interpretive signs for the garden that reflect their newfound knowledge and enhance the experience of future visitors.

The whole weekend was an amazing opportunity. I am so happy to have been involved. Even though I am not yet teaching, I now have a lot of things in my toolbox that I can draw on and utilize when I’m in the classroom. I think that programs like these are very important for our kids to realize that what we talk about in classrooms is stuff that directly relates to both them as individuals (we all need clean water, for example) and to the world around us. It also gives kids a way to learn experientially, which is such a powerful way to reinforce learning. It also can provide a way for them to help their communities simultaneously. The workshop even addressed ways to make these types of learning experiences a reality in today’s world of budget cuts and cancelled field trips. NOAA provides grants for your classroom! I’m thankful to whoever posted the information about this workshop to our cohort list, though I’ve forgotten who it was!