Classrooms of the Future

I wrote this in response to an email from our Head of Upper School about plans for building the school's Academic Commons (our school's name for a new type of library) and classrooms of the future. The question really revolved around what technology should be included, and how to maximize innovation for teachers. What I wrote is opinionated and idealistic, and I certainly don't claim to talk for all teachers, but the issues raised are definitely worth thinking about.

***

My main feeling is that the whole thing needs to be mobile. What I love about our current Audio Nonfiction class is the flexibility of sending students out for an interview at any time, because they can carry a whole recording studio with them (they use an iPod Nano and a Belkin Tune Talk microphone). We can also listen to pieces at any time with the projection and speakers in the classroom, and the fact that everything can be stored is on a laptop. The software we use (Audacity) is free and can be downloaded on any computer. However, I wish our classrooms were more flexible. The desks in the science and math rooms help this somewhat, because they are more like tables, where things can be laid out, like you would to see the whole structure of a journalism project, and the desks can be combined to make a large table for a conference room feeling. They are conducive to work, because you can have a book, a notebook, a set of pens, and a computer on them all at once without it feeling crowded. The old desks in the English classrooms are really only good for sitting, and they're not even very good for that. The math/science desks are bulky, though, and take up a lot more space, so it's more difficult to clear out the room if you want to have space to move around. My mythology class does Budokon once a semester - a form of yoga and martial arts - and I believe this type of experiential learning will become more and more important in the future. The more flexible the spaces are, and the more adaptable the technology, the more effective the teaching can be. Projection screens are useful (I mainly use smart boards as projection screens now), and it would be interesting to explore if a single projector could project in more than one direction, with screens on each of the walls. I'm not positive how I would use this, but it would offer the type of flexibility that really lets teachers and students improvise.

That's the main word I think is necessary as we move into the future with technology and innovation - improvisation. In my opinion, the smart board is a great technology, but ultimately is more limiting than a white board and projection screen. For one thing, you can't take it with you between classrooms (most rooms in our school have them, but not all of them), and it also reduces the amount of white board space you have. I know that they make pocket projectors now that work just as well as a big projector, and maybe that's the way of the future. These can be plugged into iPhones or iPods or Netbooks. To my mind, the technology we use needs to get smaller and more personalized. For the nonfiction class, the whole recording studio fits easily in the palm of your hand. This allows a spontaneous improvisation - a student at a basketball game can suddenly interview the winning coach without having to set anything up. Teachers need to have the same freedom in their classrooms.

For the Living Epic class I'm going to do with our Academic Dean next semester, our goal is to turn the students into experts. In this case, we need maximum flexibility to create any type of space that the students may spontaneously need. Some students may want to work with blueprints, and so they need desks or tables to accommodate that. Some may want to teach the class martial arts, so it needs to be able to be completely cleared out. Some may want to build something in the room (like a huge lego tower), and some may want to create a film. It's amazing how easy green-screen technology is getting to be, so having a good video camera, a big green screen that can be pulled down on a moment's notice, and good editing software on a laptop will allow students to create the next Star Wars right in the classroom itself. But we don't need to plan for the technologies - we can presume they will be small, personalized and portable, and so what we really need to concentrate on is planning for the flexibility of the space.

I think the Academic Commons also needs a few bigger spaces as well. A space that can accommodate a true class meeting will free up the complete traffic jam that is our theater for real instruction in classes like Senior Seminar. But a room for a class meeting needs to be completely flexible as well, so that it can be transformed into a medium-sized performance space for instrumental and choral music, student-directed plays, senior project presentations, etc. Since they will be used for a variety of purposes, these spaces need to be sound-proofed and have flexible lighting - in other words, a great deal of natural light that can be blocked out completely. And these spaces need to be sacred for work with students. Our current so-called Student Activity Center is anything but. It's used for so many meetings with the Trustees and Parents' Committees that it is rarely available for classes to meet in, and almost never used by students in their spare time, as far as I can tell, which is why they spend their free time in the library, and why that space becomes a difficult place to get any studying done.

The Academic Commons also needs both quiet spaces and spaces that really encourage socializing and collaboration. The sound proofing needs to be good enough that students can hold recording sessions in small rooms - both for instrumental and choral work (to make audition tapes for colleges, for example) and for projects in classes like Audio Nonfiction and the Film course. And there need to be enough of these to accommodate multiple projects happening at the same time, with no real need to schedule the spaces in advance. What we want to capture is the ability for spontaneous improvisation. There need to be smaller spaces that are just large enough for a group of students to collaborate on a project, but which don't become too casual. Access to technology should be readily available (speakers, projectors, video cameras, laptops), but should be as hidden as possible, and again - the technology needs to be small. I think the iPod Touch is a perfect model for what the technology of the future will be, especially when the pocket projectors arrive on the mass market. Even better for me is the Android phone, which allows an overlap of applications, so that one application can piggy-back on another one. The GPS technology is especially exciting, because a teacher can plug curriculum into a set of coordinates and send the students off on a quest. The folks at MIT are already working on this.

So in my opinion, we would make a mistake if we made technology the centerpiece of the Academic Commons - especially technology that is big or expensive, or which figures into the design of the buildings or rooms in any way. It's all changing way too fast to predict what it will be, except the one trend that seems definite: technology is becoming much smaller and more personalized, and soon, everything you need will be able to be carried in your pocket, and inexpensive enough to be owned by everyone. Instead, the Academic Commons needs to be designed for maximum collaboration. It needs places where students can gather to socialize, places where they can work together on a project, places where teachers can meet with students, and places where classes can really roll up their sleeves and get to work. And there need to be enough of them that one is available in a moment of spontaneous inspiration. Horizontal space (like the math desks) is essential, but it must be easily removable so that the space can be completely clear for exercises or work on the floor. Now that Barnes & Noble is releasing its version of the Kindle with more flexibility and capacity, it's only a matter of time until textbooks will be electronic, which will not only save many adolescent backs, but will let us pick and choose the physical books that really matter. I could easily see all of my classes buying an eBook reader freshman year, and then downloading all their English books for half the price they would normally buy them for. Most classics will be free, thanks to Google, and that's a large part of what we teach. The only thing that's holding me back now is the inability to scribble in the margins, but that is only a matter of months. I strongly believe there will always be a place for a real library, but the reference section will become obsolete. To me, the library will become a center of collaboration rather than a place for reference, and we need to design the space to accommodate that. Rather than making it a place for silent contemplation (we need a different space for that, like graduate carrels), the sound in the library should be geared toward group collaboration, so that sound does not carry generally throughout the room as it does now, but also doesn't make students uneasy about their excitement.

The idea that innovation can happen in a single mind is an old fairy tale. True creativity comes from the excitement of shared ideas. A classroom of the future will require the ability to focus on a variety of different projects, the flexibility to follow the whims of spontaneous inspiration, and the feeling of freedom that is essential to a playground of the mind.

Friends on a Raft

Here is a link to Friends on a Raft - something I wrote for our current production of Big River, the story of Huckleberry Finn, which opens on Wednesday.  I am really proud of the production, and wrote this note at the request of the administration to take advantage of a teachable moment with our students on the issues of race and diversity.  I'll be posting pictures when we have them.

Would love to hear any comments you may have.

Why Literature is Bad for you

Here is a terrific article about why books - especially the classics - should come with warnings from the Surgeon General.

Prime Minister Heathcliff!

Wow. This should interest my former students. The current prime minister of Britain is comparing himself to Heathcliff! It's now being used in Parliament as a mark of derision against him. One minister said, "It's time for Heathcliff to come down from dithering heights."

Check out the video on the website. It's why British people are such better public speakers than Americans - their parliament requires it! The video shows a relatively calm day. Here's a more typical day, where you can actually see Heathcliff in action.

From Juba to Hoofin' and Beyond

One of the primary projects I'm working on this summer is revamping my classes. British Literature is no longer offered, and so I'm teaching semester-long courses in the Hebrew Bible, World Mythology, and Literary Nonfiction. I taught the Bible and Myth courses once 2 years ago, but the Nonfiction course is entirely new. Allen Chamberlain and I received an innovation grant to work on the course this summer, and I've been having a pretty amazing time with it. The course will deal with both written and audio nonfiction, and the preliminary ideas are on a wiki I'm developing over the summer, which will eventually become a platform for the whole class to work in.

Today, I was reading one of the essays in our textbook, and got really excited about a possible project that I may work on while the students work on their own individual projects. The essay mentioned Juba dancing, and since I didn't know what that was, I looked it up. It's a form of dance that slaves did on plantations when slave owners outlawed any musical instruments, thinking music would cause unrest and riots among the slaves. In 1848, "Master Juba" (William Henry Lane) was taken to London by P.T. Barnum to dance before Queen Victoria. While he was there, he combined Juba dancing with traditional Irish dancing to create tap dance. Reading this reminded me of one of the most astonishing Broadway shows I've ever seen - Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk - starring Savion Glover. The rest of the brainstorm - and several videos - are on the wiki, which you can check out here. It's still in rough form, but I think the videos are sufficiently amazing to justify the incompleteness of the thought process.

But just in case you don't know Savion Glover, here's a 2 minute video that ought to inspire you to look at the rest of it. But if you have time for nothing else, watch the video of him and his group (Not Your Ordinary Tappers) at the White House, which is the 2nd from last on the page.

When grammar results in duels

An excellent article on the death of the semicolon.

Jet Skiing on the Internet

This is a response to a blog on another site, where the author asked if Google was making us stupid, and cited this article, by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly.

Here is my initial response, with a follow-up:

I find myself thinking more broadly, but I don't see myself thinking any less deeply. What I regret is not having a book in my hand that will lead me into tangents as I research an answer - those tangents are often the best place for inspiration! But the internet does the same thing in its own way. Looking up something on Google Images leads to completely unexpected places, and putting together those connections inspires a type of creativity that I find very powerful. So I don't see myself thinking less deeply as a result of the internet, but I do see myself thinking more broadly. I typically keep my internet thinking and my book thinking and my conversation thinking separate, so I believe that as long as we teach and encourage all three skills, our students will be ready for what faces them.

That said, I haven't read the article yet, and have already written my response. That's certainly a habit I've developed, because I do find myself skimming all the time when I read on the internet, which is not at all what I do when I have a book in my hand... But I'll read the article now. ;-)

And then I read the article, and replied with this:

and now that I've read it (or read/skimmed it, as I usually do with the internet)...

I agree that our brains are starting to function differently. But I'm sure they did that when mathematics was developed, when quantum physics took hold, when cars were invented, or as Carr notes, when the printing press took over from hand writing.

My brain feels more fluid now, and I agree with the jet-ski image that Carr offers, it's true the book-reading/depth capacity needs to be exercised just like the body does. When I am trying to work out something complex, I never use a keyboard - I insist on writing it out longhand first, because the brain is forced to move more slowly. I won't allow students to read assignments online, and I insist that they have pens in their hands as they read, and will often check their notes. Journals must all be written long-hand. Perhaps because I'm an English teacher, I do a bit more reading than the average person, but I think we need to value each of the methods of learning as complementary, rather than feeling that one is replacing another.

I hear all the time in the Upper School about how our students don't have long attention spans, or that they seem uninterested in complex critical thinking. That - across the board for four years now - has been the opposite of my experience. Most of the time, when a student comes to ask me what they think is a simple question, I hand them a book, tell them to digest it fully, and then come ask me again. This is separate from what I require in class. I keep a large pile of books on my desk for this very purpose. I will also typically hand similar books to their friends or to Julie Miller (the glorious Sun around which the students orbit in the Upper School), and I find that quite deep conversations result and reverberate in unexpected places. The students typically come back not only having read and fully digested the whole book, but asking for another. I've loaned out so many books now that I can't keep track of them. That part of their brains is hungry to be exercised, and I think the more we jet-ski, the more we are going to long for scuba diving.

What is key, though, is that we must rely on the curiosity of our students, and help coach it along, rather than expecting them to be automatically curious about what we find interesting. Once we have made a move toward them, I always find that they very quickly move back towards us, and then prod incessantly for more and more. I had an incredibly difficult time in my study hall this year getting any work done, because I was discussing all the parallel syllabi that had emerged in our students. The internet pulls the brain horizontally, but at some point, it reaches maximum stretch, and begins to curve back in again. In the same way, online work is so isolating that we've seen a huge rise in online social networking. Sure, it's not face to face, but there's a different type of communication that happens here that wouldn't happen in the cafeteria, and I value that function too.

I have little fear of what Google represents - we will see some temporary setbacks as our brains evolve, but what is most important in our brains will remain a longing that will demand to be filled.

I put another poll about this on the right side.

Hillary Clinton & the Glass Ceiling

In the (sadly) now defunct British Literature class, one of my favorite units has always been the one on Virginia Woolf. We study A Room of One's Own, and while the students find it tough reading, they routinely report the conversations that result to be among the best of the entire year.

And this year, as in all years, we have lived those issues. The first year I taught the course was immediately after the Larry Summers incident, and every year, current events have pushed us deeper and deeper into the heart of these intense problems. While I ultimately supported Obama, I was really taken by Clinton, especially at first. I think what Woolf would say is that Clinton's anger and frustration got in the way so that she was not able to "express her genius whole and entire" and to "burn incandescently" like Woolf feels Shakespeare did. Obama has worked through his sense of injustice in the world, as he outlines so powerfully in his books, and this is a big part of his appeal to me - the magnanimity with which he treats those who attack him, most clearly in his dealings with Reverend Wright when Obama refused the easy rejection and paid the consequences. Clinton understandably is still working through a lifetime's worth of frustration and anger, and part of what turned some voters like me off was the edge of desperation that marked the second half of her campaign. She is right that while she did not break the glass ceiling, she put eighteen million cracks in it. And for that, we should all be grateful.

Here's a good article that sums this up, and asks, as I do, why it is that Clinton's last speech of the campaign was her most powerful and genuine. I suspect this is because she felt that in order to win, she still needed to project a certain image that was in some fundamental way either at odds with her soul, or if not that, then at least partial. Woolf said she felt women needed a hundred years from when she was writing before the progress could truly manifest. If her prophesy is correct, we still have twenty to go, which would make the time right when my current students come of age.

We live in exciting times.

Karen Armstrong

I am currently reading two books by Karen Armstong - A History of God and In the Beginning: a New Interpretation of Genesis. Armstrong's command of her subject is extraordinary. The Genesis book is more personal but still excellent scholarship, and expresses a great deal of what I have often believed about that book, particularly the idea that the contradictions in the text are not unskillful writing, but instead are intentional complexities that show us how inadequate our current axioms about God are. I am sure I will write more about this, but suffice to say that her books are the equivalent of a graduate course in Western religion.