 Welcome everyone. I'm Karen Fastenpauer, part of the DL MOOC team. It is February 10th, and we are so glad to have you here with us, whether you're watching live or on the archive. As with all live sessions, we will be archiving this at DL MOOC.net. This week, we are exploring a topic that's of great interest to me personally, which is student voice and choice. And on the blog at DL MOOC, we have some great suggestions for cultivating a culture of personalization and learning, and we look forward to hearing your own experiences with this throughout this week. Many of you are blogging about what you're learning and putting into practice as we go through DL MOOC together. Today, Joan Sobol from the Cambridge Latin School wrote about her own reflections in DL MOOC, and that's posted on the G Plus community if you didn't see it. She talked about the value she's getting from collecting various resources and ideas from our sessions and our conversation together, and she also writes about the importance of failure in deeper learning. And I wanted to read just a couple sentences from her post. She says, again and again, we are reminded that taking risks, experimenting, and even failing are essential to deeper learning. But we keep hearing beautiful and very inspiring deeper learning success narratives that sound more linear than I suspect they actually were. I would like to learn about moments when the plan needed to change significantly or a completely unanticipated significant learning resulted from a more circuitous path. I think such stories often provide reassurance as well as inspiration to people daring to foster deeper learning. Perhaps DL MOOC participants could be encouraged to post about deeper learning generated failures. So I want to just extend an invitation to our community and to our panelists tonight and in future sessions to also talk about those challenges we have. And I think Joan's so right that that's how we all learn. If you are watching on the YouTube stream page, if you go to G+. There's a Q&A portion and we invite everyone to put their own questions for our panel into the Q&A or to tweet them with the hashtag DL MOOC. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rob Reardon to kick off our panel. Thank you, Karen, and welcome everyone. Karen, your note from Joan reminds me of a story, so I'm just going to have to start with that. I mean, you'll just have to. James G., from the University of Arizona, who's done a lot of work on video games and video gaming consciousness and so on, visited High Tech High at one point. And he was walking across the courtyard and he watched as five High Tech High students tried to get a helicopter to lift off that they had built. And it wouldn't lift off. And they tried and then they talked about what was wrong and they tried to fix and they tried again and it wouldn't lift off. On the sixth time, they got the helicopter to lift off. And he came over to them and said, wow, that was really great. And they were all embarrassed that had taken them six times to get the helicopter to lift off. And James G. said, oh no, no, no, I learned much more about what you know about design and lift off, watching you figure out what to do when you were failing. So anyway, it's just a little story. So welcome. Tonight's session is about student voice and choice. Part of the title is personalization. That's a pretty loaded term and it's understood in many, many different ways. It can be individualization, where the teacher prescribes different treatments for different students. Or it can be something where there is more student ownership, where students exercise voice and choice in their learning. We're going with that strand today. So the focus really is on not prescription, but on ownership, student ownership. So we're sticking on the voice and choice side. So we're going to meet our panel just in a moment. And then we're going to get right into our questions and of course the floor is open for questions from the audience. I'll introduce myself first. My name is Rob Reardon. I'm the co-founder of High Tech High and the president of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Where we do devote a lot of thought and time to incorporating student voice and choice and work both of our graduate students and our K-12 students. At the very beginning of my teaching career, many years ago, I taught in an alternative public high school where students had the balance of power on the committee that hired staff. And ever since then, I've kind of appreciated the value and power of student voice and choice in all aspects of teaching and learning. So that's me. Let's go on. Let's go around the panel. Michelle. Hi, my name is Michelle Sidrina Clark and I teach 11th grade U.S. History and American Literature at High Tech High North County. And personalization is one of my favorite design principles that we have here at our school. I'm kind of infamous for saying that students don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And so if you are doing the put into practice this week as a TA for the DL MOOC, I was responsible for this week's put into practice. So hopefully you're trying some of those out and if you're finding success, we would love to hear about that on the G Plus community. If you try one out and it's a disaster, just try another one. But I'm really excited to be a part of this conversation because I do think that student voice and choice is just an integral part to deeper learning. So I'm really happy that it's a part of this course. Thank you, Michelle. We have Sam Allender here, a student from the New Country School. Sam. Hi, I'm Sam A. Lander. I'm a senior at the Minnesota New Country School. Yeah. Good. Thank you, Sam. We'll get back to you because we have a question for you. Oh, good. Kevin, you're here. Kevin? Yeah. Okay. Yep. I'm Kevin Crowley with Edwidge and Schools and I've been teaching in a traditional type system for 12 and a half years, but then for the last 12 or 15 years or so, I've been working in a very personalized environment. At the Minnesota New Country School, also at Edwidge and South Campus, online school, having a great opportunity to really experience what personalization can really mean in schools. Great. Thanks, Kevin. And Kathleen? I'm Kathleen Cushman and I've been documenting the work of schools for over 25 years, starting out with the Coalition of Essential Schools back in the late 80s and progressing through a lot of school transformation movements. And about 13 years ago, I helped to found the nonprofit What Kids Can Do, which was founded as a way to raise the voices of youth on matters relating to their learning. And so, since that time, I've really devoted myself to listening closely to the voices of youth and publishing in print on the web and in mixed media form, making their voices known. Great. Thank you, Kathleen. And Brandon? Hi, everyone. My name is Brandon Wiley and I'm the Executive Director of Asia Society's International Studies Schools Network, or ISSN for short. We're a national network of public schools around the U.S. that are designed to prepare kids to be globally competent, to know more about the world, and to apply their learning in authentic settings. So as you might imagine, our schools are very much predicated on this idea of student choice and voice and trying to find ways to get them more involved in authentic ways, both in and out of school. So I'm glad to join tonight. Great. Thanks, Brandon. And Allison? Hi. Yes, I'm Allison Cooke-Sethar. I'm a Professor of Education at Bryn Mawr College. And I've been interested in student voice forever, as long as I can remember. When I was Director of our teacher education program, I designed a program in 1994 that paired high school students, secondary students with pre-service teachers, people who are in school getting certified to teach at the secondary level with the secondary students positioned as teacher educators, pedagogical consultants. And so from that program, I've moved to create a partnership program between college undergraduates and college faculty, which works the same way where the undergraduates serve as pedagogical consultants and really offer their experiences and expertise to faculty at the college level and engage in a dialogue about what makes learning meaningful and personal and engaging at the college level. Allison, thank you. I'm going to dive right into the question of personalization via student voice and choice and kind of ask what it looks like. I'm going to start by asking Kathleen, who has visited many, many schools around the country and has worked at this for a long time. And then I'm going to move over to Sam and ask what it looks like in her life in school and then over to Brandon. So we'll get three different takes at least on what student voice and choice looks like. Kathleen, over to you. Okay, well, thanks, Rob. The way I think about it and the way I observe it in schools, student voice makes students really active participants in the discourse. It makes them citizens, not subjects in the world of schooling. And choice extends that active role, meaning that they can choose to engage in that discourse or not. And students will choose to do that when they value a subject of inquiry, whatever they value they will choose to engage in. And in my own work, a lot of which has to do with student motivation, I refer to that value factor as a necessary factor along with the expectation of being able to succeed in motivating anybody to do anything. So what I've noticed in schools is that teachers have a really key role in making sure that the discourse that we're talking about takes place in a space where every person can feel that their voice has a respected place and that sense of belonging in the discourse, which is really an equity issue, comes up again and again in whose voice gets listened to. And the richest learning environments I document are places where it's safe for youth to raise their voices in disagreement without fear of being attacked or demeaned, and where it's safe to practice those skills of respectful attention to views when those views are divergent. So that can be in any area of school. It's certainly in an academic area, an academic discourse, but it can also be in a whole lot of other things having to do with school culture, school climate, school governance, and I'll stop there. Thank you, Kathleen. I'm glad you brought up the issue of equity. And the notion being that if we're talking about voice and choice, who gets to speak? And in democracy and in education for democracy, we surely want classrooms where everyone feels that it is safe to speak and feels inspired to speak. Sam, tell us about voice and choice in your experience as a student at New Country Day. Okay. Students' voice and choice is very... It's everywhere in our school. We definitely need a voice because it's our education, and so students that are getting their voice about their education are learning more and deeper because they're getting to do what they are most passionate about. At my school, we have a lot of voice in things that go on every day such as... We have our student council so students can decide to make a bill and change policies at the school and get it approved by students. And our choice comes down to our projects that we do every day, and it allows us to decide where we want to pursue our future, and I believe it's very important for every student. Great. Thank you, Sam. And Brian, Brandon, rather. I think for me, this idea of student voice really recognizes that students are a key constituent that we're working with. They're our clients. They're our customers. And so to the extent that we're able to give them the seat of the table, and the table can be defined in a lot of different ways, whether it's around the way schools are structured, the governance of the schools, as Kathleen mentioned, they're the only ones who actually go through our schools from the beginning to the end of the day and truly understand what happens in every classroom. And so even as adults, we don't completely understand what that experience is as students go through the day. So when I think of this in terms of treating them as sort of the adults that we expect to be treated as we expect them to respect us, it has to be a two-way street. So to take it a step further, I think when we think about teaching and learning, the idea of giving students a role and a say in thinking about things like what they're going to learn, how they're going to learn it, and how they're going to demonstrate that learning to me is a very powerful way in which I've seen schools really authentically engage kids in thinking about what is the course content that we're going to be discussing, how am I going to learn it, whether it's in traditional settings, whether it's in a blended setting, out of school, in school, really giving them some options to choose from. And then the assessment piece is really a big one for me. In what ways are we asking kids to demonstrate that learning other than traditional assessments, whether it's through portfolios or public exhibitions. So for me, when I'm working with schools in our network, it's really thinking about those three things, what they learn, how they learn it, and how they're going to demonstrate learning. I'm glad you brought up assessment, Brandon. I just wanted to think also that if we're talking student voice in assessment, that means that for me, anyway, assessment is kind of mutual in two ways. So the question for assessment, for self-assessment, for example, is not simply how I did in this course, but also how this course worked for me. So it becomes an evaluation of the course, as well as my own evaluation of my work in it. Well, the only thing I would add in real quick, Ron, is just in terms of deeper learning, we're talking about self-directed learners. So if we're not able to put students in the driver's seat where they're able to really take ownership of their learning, as adults, we have to structure the learning experience to the extent that they know what the outcomes are, they know what the competencies are that we're trying to help them develop. But in the end, you know, student A may get there in a very different way than student B. And too often in our schools, we're structured in a very traditional siloed approach where it's very lockstep. And so what we're really thinking about is how do we break down some of that and think of assessment in very formative ways instead of the summative ways that it's often used in schools. Yeah, it's a challenge. It can be a challenge and certainly a challenge worth taking up to kind of break the dominance of siloed subject matter and to focus on real problems instead and bring subject matter in that way. We have a question from the audience about whether or not there's value. It's from Bill Gladstone. Is there value in encouraging students to tackle areas of interest that they may not choose on their own? So they may be exposed to new and different things. And Kathleen, I think, how about if you would take a crack at that? Sure. Well, for me, this goes right to one of my favorite debates, which is people are always talking about making things relevant to students so that they'll be interested in them and choose to do them. And very often when people talk about students choosing to do things, they're assuming that students are going to choose to get involved in things that they already know something about. And Bill Gladstone puts his finger on it. I mean, there are many, many things that it's a teacher's responsibility to try to get students interested in because teachers are far more educated, presumably, in the interesting things that are out there in the world of academia. And so the issue, I think, here is that we're obliged to really think carefully about sparking students' curiosity. And curiosity isn't just something that you can study and say, okay, if you do this, kids are going to be curious. Anybody who's ever been curious realizes what a mysterious and interesting thing it is. Curiosity isn't just on or off like a switch that you flip. People will differ in whether they find something interesting and the same people will differ over time in whether they're interested in something. So I think that the most we can really hope for is that teachers will create puzzles. The math teacher puts it, create perplexity in the students and kind of walk that line between the novel and the familiar and the comprehensible and the confusion and be interested in it oneself. The teacher can display evidence and really get excited about things, which is one way that students will get interested in it. And then also another role here of choice is to let students see a lot of things and then choose which ones they do find perplexing or curious making and lots of opportunities to be curious about things that you don't know and then a lot of student choice to follow those sparks of curiosity up on their own. I want to move over to Kevin and get his take on what you've been saying around organizing curriculum around an array of possible questions, curiosities and questions that students may have. Yeah and in the schools that we work with it's very personalized so the students are selecting their own projects and so going back to Bill Gladstone's question, I think there is value in directing or in encouraging students to look at something that they may not have thought of but I think the interesting part is being an instructor in that is the students are coming up with all sorts of things that I didn't think of and so it's really fun to have them be teaching me and so there's a lot of that going on and so they'll do four, five, six, eight, nine of those or whatever and you make a connection to them and say hey have you thought about this or have you looked into this and suddenly you've got this level playing field that you're working on a relationship that's built and the students will be more apt in my mind to go off in the direction that you might suggest at that point and it's kind of like you've got to spend chips wisely and sometimes you can get students to do things, sometimes you can't and that's really going to depend on the student too. Yeah and I think questions as opposed to interests offers a kind of interesting way in for teachers and soliciting student questions can be really rich in that way. Allison I want to return a little bit to the question of assessment and whether the course is working for me in other words student choice including feedback to the teacher about he or she is doing and you've done a lot of work in this area I wonder if you would talk about that a little bit with us. Yeah absolutely in the way that I did it both in the secondary education program where secondary students were partners with pre-service teachers and also at the college level where undergraduates are partners with faculty they work together as teams to generate questions that will allow students enrolled in the courses to really analyze their own learning and that piece right there I think that's been a theme that's come up already in this conversation is giving students the opportunity to analyze their own learning that also gets at some of what people have been talking about in terms of different perspectives of motivation of teaching and learning in a reciprocal way because it creates a metacognitive awareness about learning that can be shared across students, students can realize oh I learned this way this other student learns a very different way what can I understand from that that's for my own benefit but that also could help me contribute to a learning environment that is better for other students in the class so I think that using assessment in that way not only helps students be better learners, more aware learners but also think of the classroom as a shared responsibility between them and the teacher but also amongst themselves so I see assessment as a way of really opening up those doors for shared responsibility and Allison what's been the reaction of teachers to this approach? well it has to be something that teachers are comfortable doing and my very first recommendation to teachers is if you don't want to hear the answers to any questions that you might ask don't ask them right because if you're going to invite feedback you need to be able to listen to it and be responsive to it and if you're not going to do that just don't ask because it's worse to ask questions and then say well too bad you know that's the way it's going to be then it is not to ask so the response that most teachers have I mean the teachers that I work with generally if one of the things I talk with students about is how can you formulate and articulate a question that's hearable to a teacher or that is going to be framed in a way that is couched in your own learning experience and not necessarily a critique or an attack on a teacher's pedagogical approach so I think the way to approach this is how is this affecting my learning and how together can we work on that and I think that's a much less frightening way of framing assessment questions than typical kinds of assessment questions we see which are very evaluative of teacher performance I think it's a reframing to how can we focus together on learning and formulating questions around that Yeah great, thanks Allison Michelle, we've heard some very interesting and laudatory comments and love for your put it to practice options could you say a word about them and just a word about you know what student voice and choice look like in your classroom it looks like we might be having a little trouble connecting with Michelle so I want to move to another, we'll get back to Michelle with that question but I do want to move to another question and it relates to what Allison was just saying okay so I'm a teacher and I'm really interested in fostering voice and choice in my classroom or I'm an educator and I really want to foster voice and choice a cultural voice and choice in my school what do I do? Where do I start? What needs to be in place? I wonder if anyone would care to respond to that question I can start Go ahead Brandon so I think part of what we have to remember is that if we want students to have voice, the adults have to have voice too and I think too often not all teachers feel as if they have a voice and so it's important that this is all about relationships relationships teacher to teacher, teacher to administrator, teacher to student, student to student any kind of combination you can think of and the bottom line is we have to think about how do we create cultures in school where collaboration is valued where clear communication and clear expectations is the norm for adults and for students once we're able to get that on the page and say that that's what success looks like then I think it's a little bit easier for teachers to engender the same type of ownership and voice for students I loved Alison's point about if you don't ask a question you're not prepared for the answer for because I think that gets to the heart at what I myself, I started as an elementary teacher and I moved to middle school and I can tell you as a middle school teacher trying to stay ahead of kids and trying to anticipate how they're going to react to things but the fun part was when you didn't to Kevin's point when you don't know where it's going to go you know as teachers we have this compulsion always being control and sometimes the best learning experiences that I had as a teacher were things that I didn't structure as well as maybe I could have and sometimes it had great results and sometimes it failed but the truth is I kind of went with it because it was that teachable moment so I guess what I'm getting at is having that flexibility and our thinking as educators that we don't have to have the answers all the time and that in many cases students can inform the direction we go with things that's where some of the most pertinent learning happens but if you don't work in a school where that kind of risk taking is celebrated and welcomed as an adult there's a pretty good chance you're not going to create that for your kids Yeah, one of the things that we've found I'm sure you have too Brandon at high tech high is that it really makes a big difference to practice with adults in groups of adults collaborative planning, collaborative conversations looking at our work together and so forth and we often find when we do that that the very next day teachers are taking those protocols those processes right out to their classrooms because they've experienced them themselves as learners or as co-discussed in these conversations and they want their students also to experience them Kathleen, I see you nodding Are you ready to say something here about this piece of it about what educators can do or need to do to foster a cultural voice and choice? Well, I think that for me it really does come down to the asking of good questions and not just the teacher asking good questions that create perplexity but the students learning to frame good questions themselves One of the things I think is most powerful is Dan Rothstein's right question project which has a very simple question formulation technique which is very easy to use with groups of students it's extremely empowering Dan developed it over the course of decades as actually a social change technique to work with low income that deracinated people to help them gain more empowerment in their communities and then he realized how extremely useful it was in schools and I think that if we get students really framing questions together that they can move into fields that they gain a kind of power in their intellectual power and also power in terms of having their voice be really heard and really framing the questions there's nothing more demeaning than having somebody reframe a question that you're really interested in in a way that makes you really not interested in it anymore I think it's happened to all of us in our schooling one time or another Thanks, Kathleen I think Allison, you wanted to say something about the language that we use in talking with one another and developing a good language Exactly, just building on what Kathleen was just saying about being able to ask good questions that is a skill and it comes with practice and through dialogue and I think one of the things that we can do as teachers to create space and structure for students and teachers to learn how to have these kinds of conversations is to practice together finding language and developing language to name the things that we know that maybe don't have words for and I think this is particularly true for students if they aren't asked very often to analyze their own learning or to talk about their experiences of teaching they just don't necessarily have words for what they know and so part of it is creating a space and developing a language together for naming what we know so that we have a chance maybe of being talking about the same thing of course there's always misunderstanding and possibility for thinking your understanding and going in different directions but trying to develop a shared language I think is important and to complicate what you think is a shared language Yeah, a shared language and maybe some new terms and new ways of looking at things I'm thinking about writing development and writing instruction for example and the set of questions that we often ask around all your topic sentence and your conclusion and your supporting detail and so forth there's a whole other area of questions that we could ask students about their experience of their work what surprised you and what you wrote what did you struggle with which pieces most you and so on so developing a new kind of language also thank you for that it's so important it seems to me Michelle are you back? We're again I think not Okay, we've got a question from Joan Sobel and she's asking how we feel various ones of us about the wealth of importance of teachers creating complexity and conveying genuine caring about the choices students are making and the past they are creating I think we want to turn over to Kathleen for that but I do want to say that Charles Mingus the great jazz bassist once said anyone can make the simple complex creativity lies in making the complex simple Kathleen That's a great quote and I was thinking of what Allison was saying about complicating conversations and I think that teachers who do genuinely care about the choices individual kids are making and the past they're creating are often the teachers that ask the students to tell them more about that thing and I love the question when I'm doing collaborative investigation with students I always teach them to use the leading phrase tell me more because students are in our schools often taught just to give an answer in fact there's far more emphasis on teaching them to repeat the question and then what I think about US Congress is such and such and rather than taking something and moving it further and telling them more and I think the wait time that a teacher gives a student the time and the encouragement a teacher gives a student to really let their thoughts develop and not to push them to have a right answer but just say can you tell me more about that or what was that like for you or when you say that can you give me an example of it from your life and that kind of genuine caring not only comes across as welcoming them into the academic discourse but actually makes them think in a more complicated and interesting way and validates their thinking in a complicated and interesting way Kathleen I often think when we're looking for new teachers and we're watching demonstration lessons and so forth what we're really looking for is someone who wants to know what and how kids think and we're looking to see that in the demonstration lesson and tell me more is a bedrock question for getting there getting in that direction and just one other thing I think that very often new teachers see themselves as persons who need to have answers and so they get a question from the class or from the student and they provide the answer and it might it helps teachers I think to see themselves not as answerers but as shepherds of questions putting up the good questions that we have asking students where do you think we need to go to get an answer to that question or how does this question connect to the question that we just heard a moment ago and so on that just the shepherds of questions of Sam I want to get back to you and your experience as a student and can you tell us a little bit about some work that you're actually engaged in a project that you're working on now or a question that you're pursuing sure so right now I'm working on my senior project and it's a big task it's a 300 hour project with a 10 page research paper we also have to have community involvement and career exploration involved in our project and the project that I have decided to take and on is working with the historical society in my town so it's called the JR Brown Center and they've kind of given me some guidelines to focus on that they would like me to help them out with and that being working on a curriculum for 5th graders based on the southern Minnesota river valley and a focus on Joseph R. Brown so I guess most of the project that I've been working on so far has been really getting it going and trying to find out what I should involve in the project and looking at standards for 5th graders and I guess how I'm going to pursue the rest of the project how did you come to get into that project well I was looking for a project idea and this was kind of an idea that the council had had floating around for a student mentor to help them out because right now everyone on their board from their board meetings is 75 and over so they wanted to get a little younger blood involved and they find that younger students and getting the young people involved can expand and grow the community in history and learning and so with the school being in town they approached my advisor about it and she offered the idea to me with that and I decided that I would take it home Fabulous, fabulous so this is an example of something that we were talking about earlier where someone came to you with an idea with an option and you took it and have done something with it and owned it it sounds like Yes Kevin, does that sound like a typical story in your school? Yep, very much so and a lot of times students will come up with their own projects other times there's going to be like what Sam's working on, somebody will bring something into the school and some student will be interested in jumping on board with that and it really kind of points out to me a lot of the ideas of this whole idea of choice and voice and really giving students true choice, you know it's not like you get to pick between two or three things that the teacher wants it's the real choice that you're giving giving the students on that Thanks Kevin, we have a question that's been in our inbox here for a while from Chris Widmeyer it's a question about the rate of learning, does choice student choice also mean different rates of learning and so forth and how might teachers manage that Kathleen would you like to take a crack at that? Sure I think it's a really fascinating question Chris and I'm wondering if you're thinking only in school because when we think about learning in general learning takes place at very different rates, I'm thinking for example of the act of writing something well which is something of course I struggle with all the time and sometimes it goes very quickly and a lot of times it goes very very slowly and writing is thinking so sometimes that thinking and learning is going very slowly I don't think that that's a bad thing I think I might feel bad it doesn't particularly fit my schedule to do it slowly but I think it's the same in the classroom that real learning takes all different dimensions and that when we organize classrooms in a way that everybody has to learn at the same pace then we're really doing a deep disservice and this is Ted Sizer's view too to the students in that sense setting up structures in the classroom that can accommodate the different rates at which people are carrying out their learning is really one of the big equity issues of our time especially in a time when everybody is racing toward a particular one high-stakes assessment that is coming up so I really admire schools like Minnesota New Country where that's really prized as an inviolable truth that kids are going to be learning at different paces and we should support that I wonder if, thank you Kathleen I wonder if Michelle is with us Michelle can you hear me can everybody hear me yes we can hear you, yeah great Michelle I want to ask you to follow up on Kathleen's what Kathleen is talking about around the different rates at which students may be learning or the different ways that different tasks feel to different students and so on you work in an untracked classroom with kids of very very different academic experiences from different parts of town and so forth all in the same classroom how do you manage the voice and choice in a way that offers access and challenge to all students that is a great question and I really hope that I stay on the stream long enough to answer it but I have to do it in a really simple way for myself so I call it cultivating a care culture so I basically just take the word care and I've developed this across it so the C in care stands for create an environment of trust and stability for the students the A is allow for students to see some of the real me because if I'm asking students to share their voice they'll feel comfortable and I can say that in some ways but they can also see that the teacher is the one able to and the R is responding to students in this pattern and that gets that really figuring out what students not only are passionate about but also what their needs are because their needs are very different and then the E stands for encourage and expect growth which I think gets to build Gladstone's earlier question about not letting students just stay in this pattern of what they're interested in but also continuing to push them and you're only able to do that if you truly personalize and know your students then you can figure out how to push them easier because I have smaller class sizes of 23 to 24 students and I can imagine it would be a little bit more challenging and a bigger class size to be able to to personalize and assess in that way but I do think that is possible Did everyone hear that? Thank you Michelle Anybody else on this question of access and challenge for all students? Voice and choice but in any classroom we've got a range of students in there how do we manage all of that? I think you might have stumped us on this one I mean it's this is the million dollar question I think not just for voice and choice but schooling in general right now is how are we structuring things in our schools to ensure that students on all ends of the spectrum whether it's academically, socially, emotionally financially wherever they're coming from these equitable opportunities for learning and learning that's responsive to their needs including the time it takes for them to learn concepts. My concern is that many of the policies that we're seeing put in place across the country are very sort of outcome driven and it almost focuses on the middle. We're not thinking about the extreme users at all and the problem is schools are being asked to accommodate for a lot of different needs a lot of different students that's just a very long-winded way of me saying that I think as schools we have to get to know our kids better. We have to think about how we utilize the resources that we have at hand more effectively and efficiently and we have to think about how the role of teaching has to evolve this role of teacher as the lead has to evolve to thinking about how we can create structures for teachers and you brought this up earlier around about how teachers need to be able to experience what this looks like so we want students to engage in more project based learning and more authentic learning we have to think about how our teacher preparation programs model that type of experience for teachers. We have to think differently about how schools are structured in those ways and I think that's what's great about the deeper learning movement is that we have these schools all across the United States that are really thinking deeply about how they're structuring the learning how they're creating learning opportunities for both adults and students and this is what excites me most about the MOOC is that this is a community that's really trying to push the envelope and learn from each other about how we can think about teaching and learning differently. It's the only way to my mind we're really going to be able to address this equity issue is if we fundamentally change the way we think about schooling. Brandon thank you so much the, you know people refer to high as a project based learning school and I always feel as though that kind of this states what we do I think we see ourselves as a project in social class integration and that if we are a project based learning school we are such because it's the engine that drives our equity efforts because projects offer many ways in many entry points and many ways for students to shine and so the equity issue again in the foreground so we have a question what is one thing that a practicing teacher can do tomorrow that can help get more voice and choice from students focusing on looking at sort of what are practical things that you've seen that worked and maybe either Michelle or Brandon would like to take that question I think that I think there are a few things in the put into practice this week that might be helpful but the first thing is just to ask the students directly I mean I feel like if that's exactly what we're going for have an honest conversation with students about voice and choice in the classroom and where they see the classroom structure going well in terms of voice and choice and where they would like a little bit more voice and choice so I think just opening up the conversation and if it feels unnatural or uncomfortable they're not at the point where they could have that conversation out loud even having them write about it and then pulling some of those slips of paper and having a discussion about it I think also the dear teacher that is in the put into practice is super helpful for just ongoing voice and choice and then if you have a project or an assignment any time that you can give them an opportunity to have voice or choice whether it's in reading or writing for example they're doing persuasive speeches this week and it's the skill set of persuasive speeches and rhetoric that I want them to learn so the topic can be totally up to them so anytime that you can give them buy in an ownership over their learning you're going or I've found anyway that you'll see much more quality results in what students produce Brandon take it away so I mean I'll just build on that because I think that's right on so you offered Michelle an acrostic so I'm going to give you another across it and it's one that we use in our network it's called SAGE S-A-G-E and basically when we're helping teachers think about their curriculum in particular their summative assessments we ask them to think about this the S stands for student choice which we've been talking about so again it's in terms of whether that students can have choice around what they're learning how they're learning it or how they're going to demonstrate that learning so in a very concrete example if I'm a social studies teacher or learning about immigration I might be able to provide a lot of different options for students to think about the different entry points in other words the different cultures the different you know there's a lot of different ways they can perspectives they can take around that issue they're still learning about the essence of immigration and its impact the A stands for authentic they were asking students to do work that's authentic that we as adults would do you know I don't know about any of you but I have not ever been assessed as an adult in my job by building a shoebox diorama so why we would ask students you know to do something like that so is it authentic is it a business plan is it something that we would do as adults the G stands for global significance that we're trying to help kids think about issues that are globally significant and really give a purpose to the learning and our hope is that by doing that we're giving them the chance to really understand why they're learning things and apply it in realistic ways to solve problems and the E stands for exhibition this idea that students have an opportunity to exhibit their learning to a broader audience beyond just the classroom teacher because very often you know they just they think it's for us and us alone and often it is but we found that motivation and engagement increases when students know that it's going to be for the external audience so just a very simple heuristic you know gives teachers a starting point to think about how to frame their curriculum how to frame the learning which typically does engagement it doesn't give all the student voice piece but it does get that student engagement piece that we're looking for we're moving towards the end of this I want to just insert a little micro thing here if I were going into a classroom tomorrow and I was interested in fostering voice and choice I would do a parent share I mean I would get 30 voices talking all at once kids talking to each other and reporting out around a question that I was interested in or a question that they might be interested in might be share a question about yourself or about the world and in the parent share we look at the listening make sure that you feel that you're being heard by your partner and so forth then we report those out and we collect our wisdom on the board but for me parent share is the ultimate micro voice and choice mechanism Allison did I see you ready to say something there yeah just picking up on what you're saying about voice and choice and parent share we have a lot of things about speaking immediately I would also offer an activity that is called a silent board discussion I know people have heard of this where there's a topic or an issue or a question put up on the board and students come up and write on the board in silence first of all and then talk about it afterwards and what's fabulous about this is that all the voices go up at once simultaneously and so then you can pick up the various possible conversations that might that couldn't happen in a linear sequential way and so it's a very powerful way of using silence to then open up a space for more voice yeah great idea that some people call that chalk talk and other people call it graffiti discussion and so on yeah that's another great way to get all the voices on right out there thanks Allison so we're going to have to we're going to be running out of time here I think that we had another question about just about and then we're going to go around to the panel for everyone to have a final word but a question about standards based environments with pacing guides and local assessment and so on how do we manage this method of student centered or learner centered methodology and this is a question from Dan Winters where there's this environment of pacing and so forth and I wonder Sam if you and Kevin would take a crack at this and so yeah I'll take a bit of a crack at it but as Brandon was talking about meeting different learning environments and all of that the schools that we work with have really done our best to throw out a lot of these sorts of things like what are you doing in the classroom well we've gotten rid of classrooms so we don't have to worry about that quite so much and so when you come into this whole idea of pacing and everybody has to be at the same pace what we're really looking at is that the students in our schools are working on projects of interest and then connecting standards to them so the standards become secondary instead of primary and I think that helps the learning pace those students I think learn from what I've seen learn quite a bit quicker when it's stuff that they're interested in and so to get a specific answer on what you can do tomorrow I mean most of you probably aren't going to throw out classrooms tomorrow that might be a little extreme but being able to not have every student at the same place at the same time and get to that personalization to me moves us forward much quicker than trying to put everybody at the same place at the same time okay Sam I guess I'm not quite understanding the question other than how we're I guess I really don't know okay so I think that's a good sign actually because you're experiencing an environment where you're not don't feel dissent by the pace of things and the standards and so forth that where instead you're pursuing an interest and a project that matters in the world that's what it feels like to me that's what it does to you alright I don't think I have anything I'm not okay okay good Allison back to you did you have something you wanted to say about this something about in terms of about the common core standards and the pace of things or maybe that was earlier that you were wanting to talk about yeah I wanted to say about the silent board discussion okay so we're drawing toward a close here now so what we're going to do is have a short closing comment from everyone we're just going to go right around the panel say that one last thing that you'd like to say it needs to be brief and you may pass if you'd like to you're not required to say something but let's just go around who will start I'll start alright so I think that one of the most powerful ways of raising student's voices is to ask them what they already think about something whatever it is that you're the topic of your studies is in other words find out what they already know and if they if they seem not to know something that's probably probably for example if we had stayed with Sam a little longer then she would have spoken about something that really went right to the point but I think that this question of pacing goes to letting students actually describe their own experience of what it is one is talking about so if you're talking about the Holocaust their own experience of exclusion or being not regarded as part of a group math question same thing what do they already think and then take the time to let that unfold and then invite other student's voices into the mix and slowly start to make sense of things this is how knowledge gets deeper learning gets deeper thank you who's next closing comments this is Kevin I can go next one of the things I've been in a traditional for quite a few years and also in a more personalized environment and I think we as teachers sometimes have trouble giving students choice so when my young kids used to I wanted them to drink a glass of milk and they would have they didn't want to and so I would hold up two glasses a blue cup and a red cup and I would say oh you want to drink milk out of the blue cup or the red cup and they'd be all excited and they would say blue cup blue cup blue cup and I put milk in the blue cup and they drank the milk and kind of realized oh wait as kids get older they kind of recognize those choices that we give them as not really being choices so I think we need to be careful as teachers if we're going to do choice and voice that we're really open about that and we really you know if we're not going to give them a real choice and voice but it has to be a choice within certain parameters and all of that and then in the end of that if they're not satisfied with those choices I think we need to be open about that too is that do we need to give them real choice because from that real choice is where you get the engagement that's where you get the students you know jumping in and going deeper and asking the continual questions if we fake them out and we're just they're responding to what we want them to respond to we lose a lot of out thank you Kevin Michelle you're up I just wanted to talk a little bit about the pitfalls of personalization so just something to be aware of because right now everything's all bait in the rainbows but I do think some uh-oh technical problems hopefully wouldn't get back to Michelle who would be next we're moving on with closing comments Michelle I'm back yes I'm here can you hear me yes great should I say that whole spiel over again um you were talking about pitfalls of personalization so you don't have to tell us you're going to talk about that okay I was just mentioning that oftentimes personalization we talk about kind of the bacon rainbows all the great parts of personalization but I do think sometimes there are things to be aware of um such as entitlement sometimes when you give a ton of voice and choice students have the tendency or at least the ability to move towards entitlement and sort of expect and demand things to always be a certain way and you might as a teacher be trying to teach a different lesson so I just think those are things to be aware of and also getting emotionally involved in some of the personalization that happens you become closer to students and there's a danger of getting really emotionally involved in some of the things that are happening in their life so those are just a couple of things but obviously I'm proponent of it and I think that if you do the put into practice this week you'll see tons of benefits of voice and choice always a matter of balance thank you Michelle who's next I can go next that was actually exactly what I was going to say which is that it's always a matter of balance that you know what Kathleen's talking about you know finding out what students already know about and I think a great compliment to that is finding out what they want to know and don't know already and sort of back and forth between those so it's always a give and take and I think there's a lot of risk involved in this worth acknowledging that you know you have to be flexible you have to be responsive you have to be willing to not know where you're going to get led and be willing to follow there and then sometimes also be able to say okay we need to go back here so it's again I know several people have said it's about relationships and I completely agree with that thank you Allison Brandon so this has been really great and I've enjoyed it I would just make one recommendation that we do this again but we do it with all students and no teachers because that to me is really what this is about right that we shut up in a sense and we listen and that's what I'd like to leave on so I would like to just say that you know there's a group of students both high school and college students around the world that are really focusing on this there's a group called studentvoice.org on Monday nights at 8.30 on Twitter they have a Twitter chat like there are students engaging in meaningful deep conversations around all these issues that we've discussed and as an adult I've just found it really exciting to kind of lurk on those chats and to be able to contribute when asked to so I just encourage all any students who might see this or certainly teachers that watch this so please engage your kids in that movement and my good buddy Zach Malomet of the University of Maryland started it with a Twitter chat and frankly it's just it's spread like wildfire which is an example of students wanting a voice they want a seat at the table they want to inform our decisions as you know the decision makers and I just hope that we'll get out of the way and let them lead so we'll get those URLs up on the MOOC website if they're not up there already thank you Brandon and we have Kevin oh it was me sorry I'm signed in as Kevin yeah I just want to say yeah listen to the students because it's our education so definitely listen to your students because we have great ideas too and I just want to thank you guys for letting me talk and I hope I added some good feedback you definitely did thanks Sam and Kevin is Kevin with us he is I don't have anything beyond my blue and red milk okay okay I've got one more thing to say before turning it over to Karen with respect to student voice Brandon you reminded me of back in my early days in teaching I was in a small alternative school we used to have community meetings and the rule was for 20 minutes no adult is allowed to speak only students could speak for the first 20 minutes of the meeting and then Allison's comment about risk there is risk involved in fostering voice and choice in your classroom there is also risk in teaching in the traditional model and the risk there is that you lose your kids you may lose them anywhere but let's just be mindful that there is huge risk in the traditional approach as well with that let's and thanks to everyone on the panel Sam especially as a student bringing your voice to us but to everyone and back over to you Karen thank you so much Rob and Sam I couldn't have put it better than your closing comment so we really appreciate your being here and as to the comment of we should do an all student panel that was the perfect setup because on Thursday next week that's exactly what we're doing so for our lens into the classroom session on Thursday at 4 o'clock Los Angeles time instead of doing our normal protocol we are going to do an all student panel with students from a variety of schools talking about what deeper learning means to them and further discussion of student choice and voice so we are excited about that I also want to mention that we have a face to face meetup of DL MOOC participants in Boston at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge this Thursday evening so we are excited about that look for more information on the G Plus community and then finally Brian Zink has invited all of us to be a part of the mexed chat Twitter chat which is this evening and if I'm doing my time conversions right that should be in about two hours from now the topic is motivation it's a great tie in to what we've talked about this evening if you haven't done a Twitter chat before it's a really great opportunity to connect with other educators on Twitter and have a vibrant conversation you can either use Twitter and search for the hashtag mexed chat or you can use the site like tweetchat.com which will make that a little bit easier and we will post that on the DL MOOC Twitter chat and we will be on there as well so again thank you to our panel thank you Rob and everyone on the DL MOOC team and we will see you online soon thank you