#SXSWEdu Day 4 ... the end of the line

Sad to see the end of SXSWEdu ... love the energy, ideas, and conversations!


Today I heard Shiza Shahid, mentor to Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Peace Prize recipient.  Shiza told how her story intersected with Malala's story.  Shiza explained that her goal is to find more "Malalas" and find ways to fund them.  She wants to help them scale their projects ... finding social entrepreneurs involved in educating girls and women.  Key thought ... Teaching global citizenship affects the choices our young U. S. girls will make in their future.   How can I teach global citizenship!?!

Then I attended a very short session on integrative thinking!  I don't teach English but I do want to find a way to insert this kind of idea in math!

The conference ended with four inspiring messages!

Bob Santelli spoke to the need for Arts education!

Mimi Ito addressed connected learning.

Goldie Hawn emphasized the need for social emotional education ... brain breaks!

Sal Khan shared his story, his mission to provide "a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere!"

Loved the ending ... and now ... to new beginnings!

#SXSWEdu Day 3

By Day 3, my head was spinning!  And still I attended 2 excellent "extended" sessions!

The first one was three hours with NPR_Ed.  They are doing a series on 50 Great Teachers.  The fun part of the story was that one of their choices is a colleague.  I've been following "mathequalslove" online, loving her teaching ideas!  It was great to finally meet her in person!

Near the end of the session, the panel presented ideas for what defines a great teacher:

• Having a principal willing to encourage taking risks
• Finding one colleague that you can talk to down the hall
• Connecting with teachers like you
• Realizing that innovation and standardization don't go together
• Great passion, very humble, a negotiator, able to break the rules
• Strong knowledge of your discipline
• Able to explain a topic in as many ways as possible
• Able to create an environment in which students are willing to take risks

One of the last questions stuck with me ... are great teachers rare? Oftentimes, teachers don't know who the other "great" teachers are ... we are somewhat isolated in our classrooms.  We rarely get to see the great teaching in other classrooms.  Unless we are well connected we may not know how often other teachers walk into classrooms ready and willing to try new ideas.

I attended a hands-on session later in the day.  We spent 2 hours learning about visual literacy ... sketchnotes, photography, and movie making.  The presenters arranged for us to have iPads for the session.  I used iMovie, Snapseed, and Slow Shutter.  The three presenters were engaging.  They talked fast!  They demonstrated their work, provided instructions, and then structured activities for us.  We sketched our notes.  We had to take a still picture of a hand(s) that represented power.  And last we had to create a 15 second video incorporating three parts of a story using specific camera skills.  They worked us hard!  I would love to share some of the ideas presented with my students!

These five hours stretched my thinking and motivated me to consider how I could use "great" ideas in my classroom!

#SXSWEdu Day 2

Can I just say that there are so many choices at SXSWEdu!  Usually I love choices but today it felt overwhelming!

SXSWEdu is different than many conferences I've attended.  I have attended ASCD, NCTM, and NAGC national conferences.  There you find strands for the practitioner ... the classroom teacher ... relating instructional strategies and curriculum specific content.

SXSWEdu does have an instructional strategies strand and some specific strategies are shared.  But the focus of this conference are the bigger issues, challenges, problem posing and problem solving.  Today in particular the sessions I attended forced me to think outside of my tiny classroom, outside of my lesson planning, outside of the needs of my particular set of students.  And yes, that's a good thing!

I started my day in 2 short Future 15 sessions.  In these sessions presenters have only 10 minutes to make their point!

The first session's title implied something different than what was presented.  The second short presentation was "Becoming Badass in 6 Steps."  I loved the concept and wished the Laura Thomas had more than 10 minutes to build upon the 6 steps she presented.  I needed those steps fleshed out ... here are strategies, ideas, books, anything ... to strengthen the areas needing work!

I particularly liked the way she started her presentation ... creating all sorts of analogies between teaching and cinema heroes.  I couldn't write fast enough to catch them ... but if planning a teacher training, the activity would make a great ice breaker.  Teaching is like .... because ... filling in the blank with a hero and a deed.  Here are a couple of hers as examples:
… teachers have hearts as true as Harry Potter in choosing right over easy
… teachers can Mcgyver their way out of any sticky issue

Next up I went to hear an author I admire, Linda Darling-Hammond.  Darling-Hammond has written extensively on strengthening the teaching profession, teacher training, teacher assessment.  With her was Stephan Turnipseed, former president of Lego Education and the Chairman for The Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  Their topic was Employers Need More Than A Test Score.  The emphasis in their presentation was on the issues created by our testing culture, tests with narrow focus, tests that lead to poor instruction.

The initial activity was a building with Lego activity.  Each of us was given just a few blocks and asked to make a duck with them.  Mr. Turnipseed shared his duck, and asked if ours matched his.  Two did (out of a few hundred)!  Those were the "right" answer.  And of course, he made the point that by focusing on one right answer, he limited creativity.  And that is what is happening in our schools today.

I've been thinking about the application of what I heard in this session to my work.  I can advocate for different accountability measures but I have little control over that.  Instead, I can change how I hold students accountable in my class.  I can use more performance based tasks, real-world modeling, real products, real audiences.  I can help students put together portfolios showing growth in mathematical understanding over time.  This is a topic of discussion to present to my PLC at school.

After lunch I attended Promoting Creativity: Less Talking and More Doing!  This was a panel discussion including Disney, P21, a professor, and an elementary principal.  The panel engaged the audience in a creative activity ... a version of "telephone" that helped to energize the room.  One part that was particularly intriguing to me was the research on creativity.  There are two spikes when comparing creativity to age.  Folks are most creative in their late 20s to 40s.  But there is another spike after 60.  Since I fall in that latter range I was encouraged that it is not too late to express my creativity ...  something I want to explore more!

The last session I attended was the most entertaining. Two New York Times best selling authors, Epstein and Green debated about great instructors ... are they born or built?  Both were amazingly articulate and had great ideas, interesting research to share.  What made the debate even more fun is that these two are engaged to be married in April.  Of course there is no definitive answer to the question.  Personally I believe there are innate qualities that some folks have that make them great teachers.  And as a teacher I believe all people can learn ... so teachers can be trained!  But as I left, I wish I had asked ... how is "great" being defined.  How do we define a great instructor?

So you can see my day was full! There is so much to digest ... so much I want to ponder ... and absolutely so much I want to translate into better instruction to meet the diverse needs of my students!

#SXSWEdu Day 1

Thanks to @TESGlobalCorp, @Wikispaces, @SXSWedu and my tech coach, I was one of 100 teachers who won a badge to SXSWEdu this week. No one was more surprised than I was ... and I am delighted!

Today was Day 1. I chose three sessions to attend.

The first session didn't address the topic I thought the title intended. I know how that can happen sometimes. I did hear a few very difficult statistics. I'd like to know more about the source of these numbers! Two-thirds of students are not ready for college math. 54% don't graduate ... and only 9% of low income students graduate.

So the day got off to a bit of a slow start. In the meanwhile I had meaningful conversations with colleagues. Teaching is a tough job. We shared our challenges, talked about possible tweaks for the next year, and supported one another in our work.

The second session was awesome! The title was "Failure with Style and Grace." I knew it was going to be good when I realized that two of the three speakers were Two Guys on Your Head from KUT Austin. With Dr. Markman and Dr. Duke was Sarah Bush, an artist, artist coach, and creativity consultant.

Here are just a few key ideas I took from their presentation:

• U.S. culture infatuated with talent and effortless success; struggle is unacceptable. How do we change this culture? Struggle is the creative process. When we reject struggle we reject
  process.
• Process is often invisible. Make the process visible, overt, necessary. The process reframes failure.
• Errors, rates of error, mistake making is a necessary part of everything. The only way we speak to our non-conscious selves is by doing something, getting feedback, and making corrections.
• We gladly show off our final products but rarely show off the process of creating. The intermediate steps are hidden. We compare ourselves, our work, to final products. Make available the awful drafts so that students see the process.

One of the presenters shared a "grook" from Piet Hein, The Road to Wisdom:  The road to wisdom?  -- Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.

The take away for my classroom ... stress the process.  Share with students my own processes for solving challenging problems.  Ask them to share with one another the strategies they use - even those that end in dead ends.  Help students respect the process and realize that it is from working through challenges that we learn the most.  Failing at solving a problem isn't wasted time.  Help students reframe what they learned through the process.

My last session of the day, "How to be Curious," was invigorating and mentally stimulating.  The presenter, Sunni Brown, has been named one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” and one of the “10 Most Creative People on Twitter."  She is the author of two books, and the energy behind the Doodle Revolution.  Her topic was about visual language ... making thinking visible through doodling, drawing, illustrating.  Doodling is not about art, but about visually expressive language.  In this session she connected her work to the book, Making Thinking Visible.  We did a couple of doodling exercises ... one on empathy and another on appreciation.  I am inspired to get her books, GameStorming and The Doodle Revolution.  I want to incorporate doodling in our Cornell notes at school.  I feel inhibited because I draw so poorly but as Sunni pointed out, when you learn a language or learn handwriting, the work often lacks shape.  It is with practice that we perfect a language or handwriting ... and so it is with practice that my doodles will look better!  Check out Sunni Brown's Ted Talk here!

As I reflect tonight on the day, I see that the two big ideas ... stressing the process and visualizing thinking go hand in hand!  I look forward to putting my own spin on these ideas in my classroom in the coming weeks!

Thanks, again, to those who are making this week possible!