About class...
As a lazy person I sometimes conflate things that I think will be good with easy. This happens a lot when hosting dinner parties. I'll put together this ambitious menu with lots of components, marinades, sauces, garnishes, multiple appetizers, multiple courses, and of course everything is made from scratch. To begin with I cannot even find all the ingredients at the same store! It is at least three stores before I have everything I need. Then there is the pre-prep: marinades, seasonings, cutting and flavoring, sometimes baking. The actual prep comes and I still have some juice in the tank, food is coming together but I am running out of cooking space. The oven is full, the stove is covered, and the dishes are piling up. That is usually when I figure out that I forgot an ingredient or five for the appetizers I am putting together. Oh shit! WE DON'T HAVE ANY MORE ICE!
People show up. Grab a drink. Get a bite to eat. Sip, savor, repeat. I am sweating but have cleaned up nicely for the soiree. Music is playing. It feels nice, it feels right. Of course the food was amazing. But it is just not the food is it? It is the whole experience. The ambitious menu, the three stores, the thought and characteristic to want to have the dinner in the first place. You have to want to be there. As a lazy person it is still tough to do. Change can be a scary thing for folks. But in education, change is a requirement. I like to think of this as a cycle of refinement. There is an obvious source of tension where innovation occurs, the transition may not always be easy, but in education I think it is more difficult for the adults than the students. Transitioning to a new model in education requires critical thought about change leadership and and understanding of your teams learning styles. Initially some people need more logistics information than others; while some folks might need more conceptual understanding of the changes. No matter the preference being on the same page means that eventually the what, how, and why are all important for staff to understand.
This was a successful week and a nice way to kick off the year. Two of my students are rocking out at their internship right out of the gate at a local restaurant Besitos. Alijah has worked his way up to the sous chef and Frankie is a server, cashier, and social media marketer. Both of them are working together on an LTI project to propose three new items to sell in the fall. Their long-term project is to simulate BE.Cuisine's Taste of Series beginning sometime in October. Travis, Abraham, and Kevin will be taking on the Pizza Project for this year. We are getting a travelling wood burning pizza oven to sell fresh Neapolitan style pizzas each Tuesday and Thursday. The first part of their project will be to develop and pitch the concept complete with a business and marketing plan. Ana is excited to get working on her novel and even more excited at the prospect of finding a mentor. We have a lead and are anxiously awaiting a reply. This year we are making a shift to becoming a full fledged Big Picture School. I say full fledged because it seemed to me that we were Big Picture Lite. Our focus was combining our CTE instruction, which students are naturally interested in, with internship and LTI opportunities. This was really awesome stuff. We have students working along side some of the area's best chefs, students flying in emergency helicopters, and a group of students fabricating a train for a budding entrepreneur. But our core academic classes remained detached from these experiences. Kids rarely got credited for work they were doing for their LTI or in their CTE instruction.
When Covid-19 hit, teachers were thrown into panic mode. But schools like ours had a different approach that adapted well to this new landscape. More than just PBL, our curriculum is driven by student's personal interests. With the help of our brilliant English teacher, BE.Tech was able to pivot from its CTE core and help students put together projects that reflected work they could do on their own. Some cooked and baked, while others pursued coding, or took time to learn new art forms. Our spring exhibitions were rich with the new skills student's acquired, and the lessons they learned from those experiences. Picking up where we left off, we are fully implementing the Big Picture Learning philosophy by integrating our core academic content areas with our CTE pathways and student's personal interests. We have also made the change from offering LTI days only on Friday to BOTH Tuesday and Thursday. This move cannot be understated because I think the value of having a consistent internship two days a week versus just the one increases the visibility and accountability of the student which will translate to increased autonomy and responsibility. These are not new changes, they are refinements, and the response has overwhelmingly been positive from our students and parents. I look forward to sharing more of this journey as the year continues. The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind:
My work right now is tied so closely to what I think my purpose is and the seemingly endless stream of new problems and things to tinker with has not been depressing. In the past, especially in the middle of my career in education I would get a sense of anxiety around preparing for the new year because I did not know if I was in the right place. I did not feel like I was serving students in the best way that I could. The past few years at BE.Tech I feel a renewed sense of purpose and comfort in the ability to control my own destiny and work to not leave things to chance. Comfort is the wrong word because the pressure to do this work well is real, but it does not feel stressful, it feels good. I imagined that working from my WHY would feel like this, sensations of intense focus, honest collaboration (not to be confused with easy!), and tangible outcomes. Moving forward I need to find ways to continue this momentum. Shortly I will be adding my learning plan to this website in addition to some other functions as I begin to use this space as my portfolio. Portfolios are something we are going to require of all of our students this year and so this will be my model. I look forward to seeing if I can keep up with this work consistently and regularly reflect on the work I am doing. REMINDER: Check-in with my accountability partner! What matters to young people?When I think about what young people need from schools to be successful I think about how I want them to feel as their future selves. I want students to feel like they are the captains of their own ships and that destiny is a destination that they are fully capable of reaching. But does this matter to young people?
The following are questions posed during a breakout session at The Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education entitled "Improving What Matters to Young People": 1. What is the difference between working WITH and TO students? 2. How do we better understand the ASSETS and EXPERTISE of students? 3. To what extent did you NEED your schools to improve in order to TO THRIVE in your life? 4. How might we go beyond student panels and empathy interviews? 5. What is the role of relationships in networked communities of practice? We have a student run cafe on campus. The idea is that students operate a business open to the public to get on-the-job training in a real-world setting. The cafe is open from 8:00 to 1:00 Monday through Thursday selling coffees, baked goods, salads, soups, and sandwiches. We have students grades nine through twelve working as baristas, sandwich makers, and cash register operators four days a week for the majority of the school year.
Even sitting here writing it out and reading it back to myself, it reads like a fantastic idea. But having seen this work up close and worked with students in the trenches, I am seeing a gap in what looks good on paper and what is actually the best for students. I think my school is one of these schools: a paper school. A school that looks good in annual district reports and political stump speeches about the progress of education. Our school looks great in newspaper articles and magazines. But are our policies and procedures best for student needs? After graduating from The Teachers College of San Joaquin, I made it my mission to continue the work I started with my Master's Degree in Education, to not just say I jumped through a bunch of hoops to get a degree so I can move up the pay scale. My degree really meant something to me. This has been the most difficult time of my professional career in education but the fruit is finally being harvested. This week at Be.Tech we are implementing the Big Picture process they call Exhibitions. Here we are calling them Expo's, but the results are the same: student's taking ownership of their own growth and learning through honest reflection and project work. In our PLC meeting this morning, it was so gratifying to me to hear the Be.Tech crew talk about their own success with the Expo model. It is a very exciting time to be an educator...
"That is a good idea. How can i incorporate that into my class?" The traditional model of school is so ingrained. Maybe it is just where I live. That is what I tell myself, that reform is not HERE yet. Still waiting. In my curriculum 341 we survey different ideas of what schools should or could look like. Big Picture, 21st century skills, Career and Technical Ed., College and Career readiness, blended learning, and such. We discuss the past, observe the present, and discuss the future; best practices, strategies other programs use, and a litany examples of why business as usual is no longer acceptable. And yet, at the end of the day, I still get: "But how do we DO that?" It is not even so much a question, but a statement against; or worse, a feeling of hopelessness. Change is not easy. But it is not as hard as it is sometimes made to be. What are you waiting for?
We kicked off the week talking about Blended Learning. In our initial gallery walk of terms applicable to class Blended Learning was one area that was foreign to the majority of students. Blended learning is defined by Michael Horn in his book "Blended" as "A formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online learning with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace and at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home." The idea of blended learning partly ties into the multiple intelligence theory by Howard Gardner who postulates that people have a preferred learning style or intelligence for example Michael Jordan serves as an example of a bodily-kinesthetic learner who is able to expertly "manipulate objects and fine-tune physical skills." The connection is that through blended learning, true differentiation may be possible in the near future. Gardner proposes eight intelligences that would be difficult to differentiate instruction to in the traditional classroom context of 34 students to one teacher in a lecture format. Through a blended learning paradigm, the opportunity to cater to student needs academically is a true possibility. "Learning will occur where there is interest" Sugata Mitra In his TED talk "Hole in the Wall" Mitra proposes an educational paradigm where students are able to learn and attain knowledge through technology and encouragement alone.
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March 2022
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