Peer-to-Peer Issue 1, Spring 2016 by Moses Brown School

eer-to-Peer P Moses Brown Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Journal of Professional Practice

Issue 1, Spring 2016

Moses Brownâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Peer-to-Peer journal originates from a workshop of the same name, begun in 2009 as a peer writing effort and expanded in 2012 to include presentations and other professional development of broad interest to our faculty and staff. In publishing a print journal, we hope to share of our learning and best educational practices with the larger educational community. Feedback and submissions for future issues are welcome. editor

Erik Wilker ewilker@mosesbrown.org designer

Sam Mandeville smandeville@mosesbrown.org

The individual authors hold the copyright to all contents in this publication, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint inquiries, please contact us. MB Publications | 250 Lloyd Avenue, Providence, R.I., 02906 | Tel 401.831.7350

Table of Contents: PBL Unit on Antigone Applying Quaker Testimonies to a Classic Greek Tragedy Abby Phyfe

Shift into Drive: Google Drive in the Humanities Classroom Jon Gold & Graham Holland

C.A.R.S.: The Road to Reimagining our Middle School Reading Program Maureen Nagle

STEM and BASIC Programming Turn 50 Laurie Center

Engaging Perspectives: Activating Diversity Within Our Schools Erik Wilker & Elizabeth Grumbach

Utilizing the Past to Inspire Ethical Global Leadership for Tomorrow: Project-Based Learning in the World History Classroom Beth Lantz

PBL Unit on Antigone Applying Quaker Testimonies to a Classic Greek Tragedy Abby Phyfe Upper school English

hough English class seems like the perfect place to insert a Project Based Learning Unit, given the artistic projects many of us embed in any study of literature, when I first scanned the examples on the Buck Institute website, I noticed a lack of models that incorporated the essential skills of our department’s curriculum. There were wonderful opportunities for creative writing and role-play as a way to answer an original driving question about a novel, play, story or poem, but these final products did not demonstrate the close reading and analytical skills that Moses Brown’s English department values and seeks to develop in our students. Ultimately, after several years of adjusting the assignments and directions, I’m happy with the way this Antigone PBL unit embraces Friends’ testimonies of Peace and Integrity and the critical everyday skills of conflict resolution, group work, and critical thinking, leading to a respect and appreciation for the language and substance of an ancient Greek play.

My initial driving question for the unit was, “how does language impact conflict and conflict resolution?” because of my concern that the group work would lose a connection to the text and actual words. But by year two, the question more appropriate for what I actually wanted the students to learn became, “what causes conversations to become conflicts and how can these conflicts be resolved?” This change made the level of inquiry more active and dynamic and also led to clearer critical essays by the end of the unit. This PBL comes in my English 1 course after we have already studied Sophocles’ first play in the trilogy, Oedipus Rex, so that is where they get the background for Greek theater and the characters who will grow into people crucial to Antigone. The lens for our study of Antigone becomes the ways that this already fractured family dooms themselves even further based on their inability to resolve conflicts. Though the examples are extreme, we can easily relate to the reality that even the most innocuous conversations can lead to open dispute if both parties fail to listen to each other, respect the other’s opinions, and be honest with personal needs and emotions. Once students can relate to the everyday nature of conflict, we can look at the individual conversations in the play that become conflicts and dissect the steps that lead there. For the entry event, the class pairs up and each couple receives a conversation topic plus four required words. Their task is to create a brief skit in which they roleplay the conversation topic, using the required words, and present these to the class. The conversation subjects include: a coach talking to an athlete about being cut from the team; a friend telling another friend What causes about being hurt by a previous action; a friend telling another conversations friend that he/she is busy and can’t go out; a child requesting something from a parent. Some of the scenarios have different to become power relationships among the speakers and that will impact conflicts and the debriefing. Two groups will cover the same conversation how can these topic and while each topic comes with four required words, for conflicts be the same topic the words will be different; for each of the two conversations, one group’s words are positive and encouraging resolved? and one group’s words are demeaning and discouraging. Though this is a simple and relatively obvious exercise, after the skits are done, it is apparent that some conversations inevitably lead to conflict, while some potential conflicts are more easily resolved given the positive words that had to be Title

spoken. Without having read Antigone, students are primed to look at the text not just for the overarching conflict itself, but also for an understanding of why and how it happens through each individual interaction. The next step in this PBL unit is to actually read the play. For each night’s reading and in-class discussion, students are to think about the following questions: 1. What assumptions does each character bring to the conversation, both about the situation and about the person to whom he or she is speaking?; 2. At what point in each conversation does one character lead the other to conflict? Why does this happen? Where could it have been prevented and how?; and 3. Once the conversation becomes combative, what language do you think could redirect the dialogue away from conflict? Though part of the play includes Chorus chants reflecting the plot of the tragedy and the Theban citizens’ impressions, much of the rest consists of dialogue between two or three individual characters. The driving question guides our general analysis of the play (writing and discussion), and the reading questions facilitate more focused daily class conversations. Early on in our study of the play itself, Galen McNemar Hamann, director of Friends education, teaches two classes about the Quaker principles relative to conflict resolution. She focuses on leading students to an understanding of the testimonies of Peace and Integrity, all the while demonstrating the daily reality of conflict. Students come away from their work with her recognizing that we can’t avoid or prevent all conflict, but we can actively work to de-escalate conflict, speak from our authentic selves, and validate the feelings of all involved. In addition to this two-day visit from Galen, for the past two years we have been fortunate to learn from Maria DeCarvalho, an ordained Episcopal priest, executive coach, and former MB parent. Maria brings her vast experience working with individuals and large companies to show us the value of speaking and listening skills. Her focus for us is on the psychological origins of conflicts, which inevitably arise when one party has feelings and/or needs that aren’t being met by the other party. Following our reading of the play, I present the final assignment, which consists of two parts. The first part is the critical essay in which students work individually and must choose one of five conversations from the play: Antigone and Ismene in the Prologue; Choragos, Sentry, and Creon in Scene 1; Creon and Antigone in

Abby Phyfe

Scene 2; Creon and Haimon in Scene 3; or Teiresias and Creon in Scene V. Using the dialogue from their chosen scene, they create an argument about the conflict that the characters engage in. Students are expected to take advantage of what they learned from Galen and Maria about the complexities of conflict and conflict resolution. And they must offer a very specific thesis that addresses the significance of this particular conflict in the scene itself and relative to the play as a whole. The essay uses direct quotations from the play to support the writer’s own opinions. For more direction, after the first year I shared two thesis statements that worked well for this essay the previous year: “Antigone and Ismene struggle to overcome their many assumptions as they argue over Polyneices’ burial. They hold different beliefs regarding their roles as women, the significance of their mortality, the value of human law, and the character traits driving each other’s decisions.” And “Creon cannot comprehend Teiresias’ message, and instead of listening, fights the truth and lashes out at the blind prophet. The language that Creon uses when talking to Teiresias highlights his ignorance. Ironically, Creon is the blind one and escalates the conflict.” Both of these essays used their thesis statements to focus on the two speakers in each conversation, taking a stance about why the conflict occurs. This individual analytical essay leads naturally into the group part of the final product. The groups have the benefit of exposure to all the information and ideas that came before this point, and their goal now is to create a project that will teach a fourth grade audience what they have learned about the driving question, “what causes conversations to become conflicts and how can these conflicts be resolved?” The format of the project is determined by the group, and past examples include short films, board games, one-act plays, short stories, comic books, and puppet shows, but they can also think of something new. The project should not explicitly mention Antigone, which their fourth grade audience will not have read, but it should demonstrate how our unit has taught the ninth grade students to de-escalate conflict and value the feelings of all participants in a potential dispute. Groups must also write a common explanation that explains their project’s goals and purpose and justifies its value as an educational tool for their audience. Individuals also compose self-reflections to consider their roles within the group and what they think about their final projects. Students present the projects and explanations to their buddies in Moses Brown’s fourth grade class, and the younger students’ engagement with their ninth grade schoolmates demonstrates the value of our school’s vertical PBL Unit on Antigone: Applying Quaker Testimonies to a Classic Greek Tragedy

curriculum and common goals to “inspire the inner promise of each student” from grades nursery through 12. The seeds for this PBL unit came from the one-day visits from Galen that she had prompted several years prior in an attempt to integrate Friends education into other departments besides Humanities. Those lessons and the obvious connections to a play in which unresolved arguments lead to tragic consequences inspired me to create our study of Antigone explicitly through the lens of conflict resolution. The integration of the Quaker testimonies of Peace and Integrity into an English curriculum has been invaluable in demonstrating to students why they attend a Friends school. The critical essays at their best demonstrate students’ recognition of words’ real consequence in escalating or ending conflicts, as well as the significance of listening skills, tone of voice, assumptions within the context of a disagreement. The self-evaluations students write after completing their creative projects consistently confirm the value of the unit as they express their enjoyment of the conception and formation of the project; their appreciation for teaching the fourth graders; and their recognition of the need to use their learned skills of conflict resolution in order to complete their group projects successfully. Ultimately, this unit embraces the significance of Sophocles’ Antigone as a piece of literature while also demonstrating its value to a contemporary ninth grade audience.

Abby Phyfe

Shift into Drive Google Drive in the Humanities Classroom Jon Gold & Graham Holland Middle school history

he rapid development of educational technology has fundamentally altered the ways teachers do their work. In particular, the emergence of cloud-based programs such as Google Drive has opened up a world of possibilities for enhancing studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; learning. Jon Gold and Graham Holland, two middle school history teachers, have been using Google Drive in a variety of ways for the past four years. Recently, we organized a workshop to share some of the philosophy behind our use of Google Drive as well as to showcase some of the features that we believe can most enhance studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experiences in our classrooms. Our key tenet in using this kind of technology is that teachers should only use technology as a means to achieving broader learning goals. We believe that Google Drive is a highly efficient, organized, and, most of all, easy to use tool for solving common teacher problems. Indeed, we have found that our most effective uses of Google Drive are when we use the tools it provides to reinvent or

reconfigure a fairly conventional academic task.

What is Google Drive? Google Drive is essentially an online hard drive where users can store, share, collaborate, and create documents for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. The cloud-based storage enables access to usersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Google Drive on pretty much any web-enabled device. Using their school-issued emails, students can create accounts and manage their documents. Moreover, Google Drive allows users to create folders, which can then be shared or adjusted by anyone with access, thereby enabling efficient collaboration and distribution of materials. Anyone with access to the folder has access to any of the documents stored within it. Any changes made to a Google document are automatically saved for all users who have access to the document, meaning that everyone shared on a particular document has access to the most up-to-date version.

How do we use Google Drive? We have found a variety of uses for Google Drive. These can be broken down into a set of broad categories, each of which is described below.

Teacher Collaboration Because we teach the same courses and keep our class plans in lock-step, we need a system for sharing documents, resources, and lessons. Before we started using Drive, we maintained an active and unwieldy email exchange, often sending revised copies of documents back and forth. In particular, we have come to be very reliant on our class planning document, a spreadsheet that allows us to keep track of our unit and day-to-day planning in the context of a seven-day rotating schedule. We maintain this document collaboratively, using it to keep track of upcoming plans and reflect on previous lessons. Because the document is stored online, it can be expanded or adjusted infinitely. So, in addition to easy access for both us to work on lesson planning, we have space to reflect on lessons and make notes for future lessons. For example, a reading assignment that proved to be too long for one class gets noted on the document, so that next year we break it down into separate readings. We can also save links to websites or videos weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve used right in the document as well as links to other Google documents. We store this document 10

Jon Gold & Graham Holland

in a shared folder along with any other relevant course documents. Google Drive allows us to streamline our teacher collaboration. All lessons are shared, all materials are accessible, and because space is infinite, The true there’s no limit to how much we can share. The efficiency and genius of the organization of this system has freed us up to focus most of our Google Drive energy on the substance of our lessons rather than the mechanics of our collaboration. system is

Individual Student Work

revealed when

As a tool for completing routine academic tasks, Google Drive is a powerful resource. Students can’t forget materials if they are stored in the Cloud, so as an organizational tool, Google Drive can be transformational. We have students use Google Drive in a number of different ways:

students need to collaborate.

• Students maintain a running “assessments digest.” Each time graded work is returned, students log their performance in a spreadsheet that only the student and his/her advisor can access. Because storage is essentially unlimited, students can use their “assessments digest” to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses with regard to the specific assignment and set goals for future work. • Similarly, students create a class journal where they can respond to writing prompts, reflect, or take notes. The document grows over the course of the semester and stands as a testament to student learning and progress throughout the year. • Students can share their documents with their teachers, allowing for greater collaboration between teachers and students. Drive provides a comment function which allows users to make notes on the documents. Students can respond to comments or “mark them as resolved,” giving them an easy way to keep track of their incorporation of feedback. • This is just a sampling of the potential uses for Google Drive as a tool for individual student work. Really, any time students are asked to write or take notes, Google Drive offers an opportunity for greater access, collaboration, and reflection than more conventional systems.

Shift into Drive: Google Drive in the Humanities Classroom

Collaborative Work The true genius of the Google Drive system is revealed when students need to collaborate. As a teacher, the benefits of collaborative work are well-known, and such work has become a prominent feature of class activities. But how can teachers ensure everyone has access to the materials? And how can we keep track of who does what? Google Drive allows users to create folders which can then be shared. Thus, any collaborative project in our classes requires students to create a shared space for their work. On any shared document, we ask our students to select a font color for themselves. Thus, work done by Student A is blue and work done by Student B is red, enabling the teacher to see exactly who is responsible for which aspects of the project. Drive also allows document owners to trace the “revision history” of the documents so that teachers can see who has made which changes and when.

Class Work Google Drive also holds some promising possibilities for enhancing class work. We have used Google Drive to: • Keep a running notes sheet throughout a unit. Each day, a different set of students would have responsibility for keeping track of the class’s learning. For example, one student might provide definitions for any challenging words from the reading, another might take notes on the content of the class discussion, and another might provide some discussion questions. Over the course of a several week unit, students have then collaboratively created a shared catalogue of the class’s learning. • Collect questions and interpretations. We will have students read a document and post questions as they are reading, or provide answers to questions we’ve asked as they read. The document is a live, constantly updated register of all of the students’ thinking, and it lasts as a resource when the class is over. • Unpack a complex primary source. We might assign a challenging document and then assign small groups different paragraphs. The group will then look up any challenging words and “translate” the document. With the document divided up among the class, the final product is a completely translated version of the document in question. Without Drive, students would be working on

Jon Gold & Graham Holland

their own individual copies, but when the document is shared among the class, it opens up a world of collaborative possibilities.

Concluding Thoughts As teachers, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our students’ experience in our classes. We have found Google Drive to be a highly effective way to enhance students’ learning. We are not technology experts; rather, we are willing tinkerers and experimenters. At times we have even relied on our students’ comfort with technology to help us troubleshoot. We also found that our own use of Google Drive (as a tool for planning, collaboration, and storage) has enabled us to feel sufficiently confident using it in our classrooms. Really, it was only when we started using it ourselves that we saw the possibilities for our students. Teachers need to be willing to incorporate technology into their own practice so that they can feel fully confident using it with their students. It’s also important to remember that technical difficulties are inevitable; the key is to be willing to learn from mistakes and apply those lessons moving forward. Lastly, it is critical that teachers use technology as means to achieving broader learning goals, which is why we have found Google Drive to be such a powerful tool for learning. It facilitates our own collaboration, improves our students’ organization and reflection, enables cleaner, more balanced collaboration among students, and allows whole classes to work together to meet even the most challenging learning tasks.

Shift into Drive: Google Drive in the Humanities Classroom

C.A.R.S. The Road to Reimagining our Middle School Reading Program Maureen Nagle Middle school English

etâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face it. There is no place in our entire world that is quite like the middle school classroom. The 12-, 13-, and 14-year-olds that I spend my days with are very literally in the middle, a place between adolescence and young adulthood where decisions will shape the stories of their lives. They are busy people who have high expectations for their own success. They are pulled in many different directions all day long, wanting to hang out with friends, wanting to spend time on that neverending school project, wanting to make their parents and teachers proud of them. Finding space for reading amidst their full days is a challenge, but I know that one of the greatest gifts I can give my students is to help them prioritize their reading, to help them find the space amidst these busy days to carve out time to sit quietly with a book, to help them better understand their reading selves, and to help them build up their resources so they will continue to read even after they walk out of my classroom on a warm day in June.

Driven with this mission to keep students reading, over the past three years, our middle school English department has committed itself to redesigning our independent reading program. And while the motivation may have come from within our small department, it would not have been possible without the support of our entire middle school faculty.

Our Approach and What We Teach In our middle school English classrooms we teach core texts like The Giver in sixth, To Kill a Mockingbird in seventh, and Romeo & Juliet in eighth. We value these class texts because the experiences we have reading them together are powerful. We feel strongly that conversations around a shared text deepen our level of understanding as we ask questions, make comparisons and reach conclusions together. In short, experiences with shared texts make us better readers. What we call Independent Reading—if you think of it from our adult perspective— is the books that we pick up, or download, that we WANT to read. We might also call this “reading for fun”, reading a book that we really want to read, maybe because a friend has recommended it. There are no due dates, no page number restrictions, no reading level restrictions, no topic restrictions, no genre restrictions. In essence, we tell our students, here is our classroom library; here is our school library; here are our e-books; now go and explore and read! As classroom teachers, we see ourselves as guides through this process, so in reimagining our program we knew it had to be designed in a way that would allow students to build a positive relationship with reading.

The Challenge How can we provide an opportunity for authentic exploration into the vast landscape of literature, for students to make progress at their own pace, for students to push themselves to achieve more than they thought capable, and, perhaps most importantly, for students to have fun along the way? With this challenge in mind, we knew that a firm foundation and solid structure were going to be essential to our program’s growth. And as we considered all the programmatic possibilities, we found ourselves asking even more questions: How C.A.R.S.: The Road to Reimagining our Middle School Reading Program

can we keep track of our 60 students’ books? How can we make sure students are actually reading and not simply relying on on-line summaries? How can we support all levels of readers, from the students who tell us that “I’ve never read a book I liked” to those students who live and breathe literature? How can we balance our English program of core texts with a real independent reading program that truly develops life-long readers? How can we help kids see the value in a book so much so that they want to put down a video game or ignore their Instagram feed? These are the questions we spent a summer discussing, and which led us to the development of our middle school C.A.R.S program.

How can we balance our English program of core texts with a real independent reading program that truly develops lifelong readers?

Our Program C.A.R.S. is our acronym for Conversations About Reading Sessions. The structure is pretty simple: small groups of 6-8 students (a mix of gender and all three grade levels) meet regularly with a faculty/staff mentor to talk informally about the books they’re reading and complete simple activities to aid discussion and inspire more reading. Our sessions take place about every six weeks during our “community time.” Our middle school English department constructs the groups, plans the activities, and then prepares students for them during our English classes.

While the program was designed and supported by the English department, it could not succeed without the generous support of time and energy of our middle school faculty and other members of our community who have volunteered as reading mentors. The small-group nature of the work is essential for student engagement, and an adult presence is vital to making students feel comfortable to be themselves and take necessary risks. But the most important thing our faculty and staff mentors provide for our students is as reading role models. In these sessions our faculty talk excitedly about what they are reading, help guide students through their discussions of their own books and demonstrate that reading is a vital part of everyone’s lives, whether a science teacher, technology specialist, or even a head of middle school.

Maureen Nagle

The C.A.R.S. activities themselves are designed to be completely student-led. While the faculty mentor helps to set the tone of the session and get things started, students are provided with explicit step-by-step instructions, suggestions for timemanagement, and any necessary materials to complete their exercise. The activities are simplest early in the school year, where students might talk about their books as they make bookmarks about them to keep or share with their classmates. As the year progresses, activities become more complex. One spring activity challenged students to use their iPad to make a book trailer to advertise their book to their C.A.R.S. groups. Some of these gems were then included as part of our summer reading offerings, to give students a taste of what they might enjoy over the summer. Most recently, to publicize our upcoming spring literary festival, C.A.R.S. groups designed and created posters, which were then hung up around the school and posted on social media. To determine the success of our C.A.R.S. program, we have had to rely heavily on anecdotal evidence. We see the benefits when in a conversation with a student we hear an eighth grader referring to knowing a sixth grader “Oh, she was in my C.A.R.S. group,” or when during a class a student eagerly asks, “Hey, when is our next C.A.R.S. session?” We also see it from our faculty’s positive feedback or on one occasion a large bear-hug in the cafeteria after a particularly fun session. We are confident that C.A.R.S. is working because we feel a palpable difference in our English classrooms around reading conversations. While these early indicators of success are encouraging, we realized that we needed more than six sessions of cross-grade reading groups to build a culture of reading. We needed something more to truly demonstrate how much we value reading. We make time for what we most value, so if we value independent reading as vital to the development of lifelong readers, we must make time for it. With this in mind, two years ago, we piloted a program to begin every English class with ten minutes of silent reading. As you can imagine, this meant many up-front conversations about expectations and helping students problem-solve common issues, the most common one being how to help students remember to bring their books home and then back to school the next day. While ten minutes may seem hardly sufficient, we find that it is just enough to help students keep up the pace of their reading. Additionally, C.A.R.S.: The Road to Reimagining our Middle School Reading Program

it allows us time to meet individually with students about their progress, to help students find and select new books, and perhaps most importantly, through our own reading, to model for them what quiet reading looks like. When students walk into my classroom, they see me quietly sitting at a desk with my book in hand, focused on whatever passage I am enjoying. As students see each other reading, they inevitably want to talk about what theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re enjoying, or not enjoying! In our classroom and hallways we talk about independent reading every day. Have you seen the film trailer for the new Divergent movie? Did you know thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a sequel to The Giver? I hated the ending of The Maze Runner! This dialogue shows us that reading is alive, that the culture is growing. To capitalize on this energy we incorporate periodic book talks into our English classroom. These 1-2 minute presentations allow for students to talk about what they are reading while also working on essential public speaking skills, like how to efficiently summarize material, how to hook your audience, how to be ourselves even when presenting material in a more formal way. As students present, the rest of the class listens attentively and writes down titles of books, an ever-growing resource for when it comes time to hunt for new books. That, after all, is what our program needs to provide for our students: to create an environment where kids can authentically talk about books while providing them a growing array of resources to help them find good books to enjoy. This is why one of their first assignments of the year is to complete a reading survey that allows their teacher to get to know them as a reader, so that we can be reading resources for them. Of course, if we were the only resource, we would be doing our students a disservice since we know that they will inevitably be leaving us come summer vacation. Our students know that we are always there to offer a good recommendation, and we offer our own book talks throughout the year based on the books we are reading and have enjoyed, but we also show them the wide world of resources available to them. We take students to the library to browse the shelves, we offer lessons in downloading apps like Goodreads, we share reading lists from reading conferences we attend, and we share a growing on-line resource called a lib-guide filled with student and teacher recommendations. Our school year is a process of growing familiarity with these resources so that by the end our students are naturally using them in their own hunt for the next great book. That, after all, is what it means to be an independent reader. 18

Maureen Nagle

Building a culture of reading is no easy task, but with our car over-flowing with students who are more than ever seeing themselves as readers and community members who support the program, there is no other road trip we would want to be taking together. While we face the inevitable road blocks—I forgot my independent reading book again!—we keep our wheels moving, knowing that we are nurturing our students’ Inner Light by helping them grow their intellectual identity at this monumental moment in their lives.

C.A.R.S.: The Road to Reimagining our Middle School Reading Program

STEM and BASIC Programming Turn 50 Laurie Center, Ph.D. Director of STEM education

ecently, given the opportunity for a summer sabbatical, I jumped at the chance to re-kindle my interest in computer programming and STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). My sabbatical happened to coincide with the 50th anniversary of BASIC, a computer programming language created by John Kemeny at Dartmouth College to teach students in the liberal arts the concepts of computer programming. My former teacher, Kemeny wanted to “democratize” programming; he promoted the application of quantitative thinking—mathematical models, computational thinking, and other statistical tools—to solve or address a wide range of issues and questions across the social sciences. Years ago, I, too, taught programming, but in the Pascal language, and also introduced students to the Web 1.0 Internet through FTPs or File Transfer Protocols and simple markup languages such as HTML—all of this before Google, iPads, or Twitter. In approaching this sabbatical project, I wondered about the progress among these new mobile and personal technological gadgets, their success 20

in connecting students to real-world issues, and the overall level of student interest in pursuing future STEM opportunities. A quick review of research shows that in 2014 the STEM initiative, more than 50 years old itself, remains mostly unsuccessful in schools. A “leaky pipeline” attracts few students to the STEM fields and produces even fewer university-level graduates for STEM occupations. Though economists predict growth in STEM-related jobs over the next ten years to be two to four times greater than in all other occupations, few students pursue studies in STEM fields, and even fewer complete the educational or training programs. Moreover, women who make up almost half of the workforce occupy less than a quarter of these STEM-related occupations. One statistic claims that in the current employment market, unemployed people outnumber job postings 3.6 to one, but in specific STEM fields, job postings outnumber applicants nearly two to one. This is a significant reversal of opportunities. Having taught statistics, computer programming, and now engineering design, I am aware of the many challenges of attracting and promoting all students’ interests, particularly those of girls, in STEM courses.

A Review of Current Approaches Current K-12 school initiatives match their STEM programs with area resources and school philosophies. Some programs, for example, expand STEM to STEAM, with “A” for Art or Applied as in Applied Math, or alternately, to STREAM with “R” for Religion. Others promote MINT or Math, Information Sciences, Natural Sciences and Technology, or DREAMS referring to Design, Robotics, Engineering, Arts, Math and Sciences. Generally, it appears that many educators think school programs undersell the “T” of technology and the “E” of engineering in STEM, the two interdisciplinary fields that incorporate experiential learning and applications to the real world. Others propose further studies in computer science to advance computational thinking or solving problems through models, simulations and the optimization of complex data. I found both of these initiatives—engineering design and computational thinking—to be a natural match to MB’s Expert Thinking Model, which encourages student-centered learning through tackling and solving real-world problems. Based on what I’ve learned, I believe that the “E” of STEM is too often absent STEM and BASIC Programming Turn 50

in school programs. In K-12 schools, engineering courses focus on the engineering process: the designing, prototyping, and tinkering in an iterative process that generates optimal solutions given constraints of time and material. Engineering is about solving problems; it’s not only about computations or calculations. It is interdisciplinary and experiential by nature and makes connections to everyday issues and challenges. Studying engineering and integrating design challenges allow students to apply their knowledge and skills to real-world problems; current research shows that studying engineering in the K-12 environment motivates students to continue their studies in math and science. Whether designing a portable water bucket out of cardboard and duct tape, designing wind turbine blades to generate sufficient electrical current to light an LED, or recording the speed of balloonpowered cars, students are more engaged in their learning. Similarly, there is confusion over the meaning of the “T” in STEM. Though the “T” stands for technology, it does not refer to digital or computer literacy; it represents a broader sense of technology: applying mathematical and scientific thinking and problem solving strategies to practical issues. Now thought of as computational thinking, a term first offered by Jeanette Wing at Carnegie Mellon, computational thinking brings together the mental tools of abstraction and collaboration, with the more traditional analytical problem-solving strategies of logic, algorithmic, and recursive design. By studying computation, students explore and combine these diverse sets of problem solving skills and strategies to address real-world problems. Computational thinking also promotes the use of models and simulations to understand and explain complex phenomena and large data sets. With the amount of data in the world growing exponentially, managing and interpreting data, particularly recognizing patterns, is a necessary skill for all. Though computational thinking encompasses much more than just computer programming, programming fosters computational thinking through problem solving. The Bureau of Statistics predicts there will be more than 1.4 million programming jobs available by 2018. Yet, historically, schools and universities struggle to meet this employment demand. For example, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) reported that only 30,000 students took the Computer Science AP exam in 2013, 30 times less than the number of students who completed the English AP exam. Moreover, the College Board reports that less than 20% of

Laurie Center

the Computer Science test takers were women (women’s interest in programming peaked in 1984), and less than 11% of examinees were students of color. In fact, in 11 states no African-American students completed the AP Computer Science exam. High schools are struggling to attract a large and varied enough pool of students to explore computer science as a potential academic or professional interest.

The Challenge for MB Successfully introducing and promoting computational thinking in the K-12 environment across all disciplines requires us to re-think our current approach and specific curricular offerings. For a start, we reintroduced programming at all grade levels, coding with Hopscotch and Scratchjr in the lower school, Kodu and Scratch in the middle Computational school, and Arduino C in the upper school. Additionally, students thinking brings from all three divisions participated in the national “Hour of Code” event. This year, we added a new programming course in Python, together the mental extended our commitment to teaching Scratch in the middle tools of abstraction school, and introduced one more grade level to programming in and collaboration, the lower school. Furthermore, we are integrating programming with the more activities in several math courses, showing students how to solve algebraic problems through computer programs. We also are traditional analytical introducing programmable robots (i.e., the Sphero, the Finch, problem-solving and the Hummingbird) and extending our physical programming strategies of logic, course with the Arduino to catch and hold students’ interests; algorithmic and they now control robots and other visible, useable gadgets with programming code. Hopefully, these activities will help build and recursive design. sustain sufficient student interest to support offering the new AP Computer Science Principles course in 2016 - 2017. Additionally, we hope to expand our students’ exposure to the engineering design process through additional courses, units, and challenges, as appropriate and across all grade levels, to provide hands-on experience designing, building, testing, and revising prototypes. A new Y-Lab on campus, an innovators space, named after a Quaker engineer and scientist, Thomas Young, will provide resources and tools to further advance our tinkering, designing, and making curriculum. A place to

STEM and BASIC Programming Turn 50

design, prototype, and promote, the Y-Lab will offer a home to our many inventors and entrepreneurs, and, hopefully, spark innovative solutions to everyday problems. How many future Joy Manganos attend MB now, with a Miracle Mop or Huggable Hanger in their future? The Y-Lab will let students explore these possibilities. Empowering students to explore and experiment with meaningful design challenges, while growing their confidence and resilience with computational thinking, quantitative analysis, and scientific reasoning continue to be the main focus of school STEM programs. We now realize that it is important to capture student interest at the earliest possible ages, modeling for students that these areas of study matter and represent viable and compelling career opportunities. It is also important to provide varied STEM opportunities so that students recognize the interdisciplinary nature and multiple paths inherent in STEM-related studies and careers. In sum, the experiences we provide our students should show them the connection between STEM and innovationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and capture their imaginations. These experiences should propel them on a journey that includes future STEM learning opportunities and ensures that students incorporate quantitative and design thinking into their everyday problem-solving habits.

Laurie Center

Engaging Perspectives Activating Diversity Within Our Schools Erik Wilker & Elizabeth Grumbach All school diversity committee co-clerks

mong its chief priorities, Moses Brown is 1) working hard to diversify its student and faculty bodies, and 2) endeavoring to prepare its students to be fulfilled citizens and ethical leaders in a time of rapid globalization. A scan of the literature and mission statements of many independent schools tells us that we arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t alone in these efforts. These are, of course, two central challenges facing most independent schools today. The good news is that progress on one frontier can contribute to advancements on the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;efforts to create a diverse school population of wide-ranging perspectives enables an intellectual culture that in turn can engender the collaborative, creative, and empathic leadership skills our students need to succeed in our unfolding century. In fact, the conditions that we strive to achieve in terms of demographic diversity at our schools are necessary, but not sufficient, to produce the skills and proficiencies we want our students to develop. Becoming demographically diverse does not ensure

that a school will become an intellectually or culturally inclusive community, a place where children listen to, appreciate, and grow from the perspectives of others. In order to activate the diversity within our schools we need to capitalize on the enriching perspectives of our school communities through best curricular choices and pedagogical practices.

So Where to Begin? Align Pedagogy with Mission and Vision A clear first step for any school interested in this work is to evaluate its mission and vision statements to determine which chief skills it seeks to engender in its students. At MB we have defined these to include not only traditional academic skills such as the ability to write articulately or solve mathematical problems accurately, but also those newly coined 21st century skills such as creative problem solving, global competency, and ethical leadership. Other schools have similar lists of macro-skills that they strive to develop, and there is further common ground in the underlying aptitudes that comprise these larger skills, aptitudes such as: collaboration, creativity, curiosity, empathy and respect for difference, integrity, and ethical play. There are near infinite constellations that schools can draw among these values, but we largely are all choosing from, and referring to, the same guiding stars.

Activate Diversity With these essential skills identified, our next step as educators is to make sure that these abilities are actively being developed through classroom activities. In order to build cross-culturally competent critical thinkers, a school will need to utilize curriculum and pedagogy that purposefully draws out and puts into play students’ diverse histories, identities, and worldviews. Best educational practices will challenge students to grapple with multiple perspectives as they collaboratively hone their intellectual, empathic, and ethical skill sets. In designing learning projects, we often unnecessarily limit ourselves by approaching pedagogical and curricular choices in terms of an oppositional tradeoff—trying to find a balance between the competing pull of collaborative, open-ended, skill-based activities and that of ‘covering content’. So schools protect academic content time by moving robust discussions outside the day-to-day

Erik Wilker & Elizabeth Grumbach

working of the classroom. These atypical programming elements are often the ones we use as educators to explicitly address traditional diversity programming. Few would argue the value we create for students when we bring alumni back for panel discussions around race or gender or when we implement pull-out workshops addressing sexuality identity or white privilege. In these instances, we clearly are helping students to consider and synthesize the array of different perspectives inherent in the community and world around them. Yet many schools are resistant to move past strict, binary thinking when it comes to the daily working of our classrooms—to find ways to develop classroom content learning in concert with collaborative skill development. Thankfully, there are ways to structure learning so that students can practice social, collaborative, creative, and empathic skills while advancing the mastery of more traditionally defined academic subjects and skills. And these teaching approaches provide additional benefit, in that they allow a school’s demographic diversity, with its broad and divergent starting points, to contribute powerfully to learning that is not explicitly about traditional diversity subjects. We offer here a few guiding principles that have served MB well in activating diversity within our day-to-day classroom teaching.

Elevate Peer Learning In order to build collaborative and empathic skills in the daily operation of our classrooms, we embrace a pedagogical shift that decentralizes the teacher’s role and puts greater emphasis on peer-to-peer learning. By elevating the role of fellow students to that of “second teacher” we can create highly social and cooperative learning environments where students develop facility understanding and integrating one another’s perspectives and contributions. Morning meetings, Harkness discussions, ethnographic research, peer-editing, shared math strategies, cross-divisional partnerships, and student-defined and enforced behavioral expectations are a few of the many concrete strategies that teachers and school leaders can adopt to draw more deeply on student contributions. For example, when students in a diverse classroom discuss modern interpretations of the First Amendment and explain their thinking behind the political cartoons

Engaging Perspectives: Activating Diversity Within Our Schools

they created for homework, they are being given an opportunity to share personal reflections, to provide windows into their own varied worlds. Every student in the room is learning about the concept of freedom of speech, as well as appreciating what it means to people with different life experiences. The insights they gain from these peer interactions accumulate over time, deepening their appreciation of diverse worldviews.

Embrace Open-ended Learning Like many schools, MB has come to embrace pedagogies such as Project Based Learning and Design Thinking as particularly effective means for contextualizing academic learning within a framework that demands student interaction and collaboration. Practical and effective for children in all divisions, classroom experiences such as these hook students in with a real-life problem and demand that they work in groups to find the best solution before presenting their ideas to a broader audience. Our middle school students are asked to work in groups to present an argument for whether or not our school should continue recognizing Columbus Day. Ninth graders apply themes from Antigone and a study of conflict resolution to design a creative project that illustrates what they learned for elementary students. Fourth graders are challenged to use what they have learned about World Religions to design and prototype interfaith community centers. In the design of these curricular units, the teacher is no longer the one holding the answer. The answer actually is unknown, forcing the students to use one another as colleagues: as peer resources, guides, and sounding boards. The studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ability to share their ideas articulately, listen to each other respectfully, cooperate, problem-solve, and work collaboratively has a determinant impact on the innovation, creativity, and efficacy of their final solution. By requiring students to understand and integrate information and insights from different members of their group, the project does more than build content knowledge and a solutionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it values and utilizes the human resources around the table.

Choose Real World, Potentially Messy Topics of Great Social Import Students are more engaged when they feel that they personally have something at stake, when the subject is framed in terms of their role in a communityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;their classroom, school, city, or shared global citizenry. Opportunities for applied learning exist in every classroom and every academic field. Middle school math 28

Erik Wilker & Elizabeth Grumbach

students can explore the diversity of socio-economics as they calculate taxes and take-home pay from wages in different familiar jobs. High school environmental science students can calculate the cost of changing their home’s lighting to CFL, and how long it would take to begin saving money for their family. These realworld topics ask students to ante something of themselves into the learning process, and that makes for powerful collaborative learning. They provide the fodder for conversations in which students are deeply invested. Students engage the content, consider the issues, challenge their own and others’ assumptions and build personal connections with the subject and with their The project classmates. does more than

Commit to Productive Tensions

build content

Beyond just hoping that our student diversity is providing meaningful benefit to our academic program, we are called to create the structured interactions that will ensure that it does. In service of this goal, we have found success employing project- and peer-based learning models, finding that they reliably produce the best academic thinking and that they successfully model the realworld collaborative working relations that our students will use to enrich their lives and their careers outside of school.

knowledge and a solution— it values and utilizes the human resources around the table.

Like many other independent educators, we work diligently to ensure that our schools are filled with talented, curious, and diverse students, and we additionally make sure that we honor that work, and, more importantly, that we honor our students’ diversity by putting their worldviews in productive tension with those of others. In doing so, we give our students meaningful access to the rich human resource of each other, and we allow them opportunity to become collaborative, brave, imaginative problem–solvers—to develop the characteristics most likely to produce the future’s best leaders and most fulfilled citizens.

Engaging Perspectives: Activating Diversity Within Our Schools

Utilizing the Past to Inspire Ethical Global Leadership for Tomorrow Project-Based Learning in the World History Classroom Beth Lantz Upper school humanities

hen I decided to become a history teacher 16 years ago, I remember a family member asking me, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why would you want to teach history? It already happened. Who cares?â&#x20AC;? While I found this somewhat comical at the time, the essence of these questions have stuck with me, as they strike at the heart of why I teach what I teach. As someone who is passionate about history, I work to make my students dwell in the stories of the past and appreciate the lives and events of those that came before us. This work has merit, and I remain committed to it as a vehicle for teaching students to hone analytical and critical reading/writing skills while gaining essential knowledge about the course of humanity. However, there has always been an additional goal of my teaching, and that is to utilize the past to inspire students to tackle current day problems as effective, ethical leaders. I have incorporated several types of pedagogies into my repertoire of teaching to achieve this goal, but one of the most effective I that I have found is Project-Based Learning.

What is Project-Based Learning? According to the Buck Institute for Education (BIE), Project-Based Learning (PBL) “is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, problem, or challenge.” Working in teams, students research information, determine a possible solution, and demonstrate their learning through authentic products that are shared beyond the classroom teacher. In PBL, students foster key skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and communication—all of which are essential to 21st century learning. In beginning to develop my first real PBL endeavor during the 2012-2013 academic year, I relied on BIE’s original eight key components to PBL: • Significant Content

• Need to Know

• 21st-Century Competencies

• Voice and Choice

• In-Depth Inquiry

• Revision and Reflection

• Driving Question

• Public Audience.

In designing the course, I also was able to partner with Jennifer Klein. Jennifer is the professional development director for World Leadership School (WLS). She coaches teachers and develops collaborative learning experiences between North American classrooms and schools in other parts of the world, and she leads professional development trainings and trips for the WLS. The PBL I present below is the result of my work with Jennifer.

It All Begins With an Idea: Significant Content Designing a PBL is much like designing any other unit—I had to decide on the significant content that I wanted my students to learn. For several years, I have taught a unit on the Enlightenment as part of my ninth grade world history course. At the end of the unit, I had students write an essay where they analyze the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Both of these contemporary documents show students that humanity is still trying to live up to the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers

Utilizing the Past to Inspire Ethical Global Leadership for Tomorrow: Project-Based Learning in the World History Classroom

of the 18th century. For my PBL, I had the idea of allowing students to research the MDG in more depth and learn more about the global issues that the United Nations is trying to solve.

Entry Event & Driving Question An essential step in beginning a PBL is an entry event, which is a creative way to grab students’ attention, introduce them to the subject matter, and give a human face to the challenge they will attempt to solve. For my entry event, I told my ninth grade students that the United Nations asked high school teachers who teach about the MDG in their curriculum to play a certain video clip to their students. I then played the students a short video about the MDG and the progress that has been made since 2000. The end of the video states that there is still much to be done in order to achieve the MDG and calls on the audience to “Define the Future.” After the video, I had students do a free write on the following questions: • Why did the UN ask Beth to show us this clip? • What images, words, or phrases struck you as you watched the clip? Why? • What do you think the UN’s message is here? • What is your vision for an ideal future? • How do you think that you can “define the future”? • What does the clip make you want to know more about? Students shared their responses with the class and we had a discussion about their ideas. Right away, I could tell that the video sparked the students’ interest, and they already felt empathy for the people pictured in the film, as well as a sense of urgency in addressing the MDG. I then shared the driving question with the students, which encompassed the challenge of the PBL and worked as the framework for the rest of the project:

“How have the United Nations and its partner organizations made progress on the Millennium Development Goals and what can the Moses Brown community do to ‘define the future’ and support continued success by 2015?”

Beth Lantz

Voice and Choice One of the most exciting, but equally daunting, components of PBL is allowing a place for student voice and choice, which means that students get to make some of the decisions instead of the teacher. In my PBL, I allowed for students to decide which global problem they wanted to research. This was a bit different for me because usually I make all of the content choices for my students. I remember sharing the outline of my PBL with our upper school librarian; she asked me what the students would be researching, and I had to reply, “I don’t know!” These words don’t usually come out of the mouths of teachers, especially regarding what students will be studying, but in PBL it’s ok for teachers to say “I don’t know” because they aren’t supposed to be the experts—the students are. Students visited two different resources and selected their top three global problems that they wanted to research. Based on the students’ top choices, I formed four groups of four on the following topics: • Hunger & Clean Water in Malawi

• Combatting HIV/AIDS in Botswana

• Hunger & Malnutrition in Tanzania

• Achieving Universal Education in Kenya

Public Audience, 21st-Century Competencies, Need to Know, In-Depth Inquiry Once students had selected their group topics, I informed them of the products that their teams would be responsible for creating: • iMovie ŋŋ a video that identifies the global problem; the progress that has been made; and what needs to be done to make further progress on your global problem • Letters ŋŋ one to the Moses Brown Student Senate ŋŋ one to a person/organization outside of the Moses Brown community ŋŋ both outline how to support continued success of your global problem and include a compelling message to act All of these products were shared with folks besides me—an essential aspect of PBL. Utilizing the Past to Inspire Ethical Global Leadership for Tomorrow: Project-Based Learning in the World History Classroom

Groups used Google Drive to create a group contract, a work log, and a document for their need to know content. All three documents emphasized the collaborative nature of the project—a key 21st-century skill that PBL allows students to practice. I provided students with reliable places to begin their research and then they took off into the world of their topic. I was amazed at It’s ok for how motivated students were to complete their group assigned teachers to say tasks and how invested they were in one another’s success. When “I don’t know” it came time to quiz groups on the content that they were learning, I went to their need to know documents and created the quiz from because they aren’t the information that they had deemed relevant. What a switch supposed to be from a usual quiz, where I decide what content is worth learning. the experts—the By the end of the research process, students had become experts on students are. their topics and taught me so much about these important global issues. All the while, they honed their creative, collaborative, critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills.

Outcomes, Revision, and Reflection In addition to the iMovie and letters that the groups created, the PBL took on another life of its own—completely driven by the students—that I did not anticipate. All groups either requested a donation from our Student Senate, or conducted a fundraiser of their own to support a non-profit group that is working to address their global issue. This resulted in the following donations:

Moses Brown Student Senate: • $250 to UNICEF • $250 to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

Other fundraisers: • $170 to the International HIV/AIDS Alliance • $113 to the Nobelity Project Throughout the project, I had students keep a “Define the Future” journal in Google Drive where they assessed their performance, the performance of their classmates, and kept track of what they were learning about themselves as leaders 34

Beth Lantz

and collaborators. I also provided feedback for groups on drafts of their letters, their iMovie storyboards, and their iMovie productions. It was a real treat for me to travel along with my students throughout the process, and I felt as though I had a strong handle on how each of the groups was doing. Allowing students to revise their work and reflect on their learning is a key aspect of PBL, one that provides students with rich opportunities to hone critical metacognitive skills. At the end of the project, I had students complete an anonymous survey about the PBL in order to gather their perspectives about the project. The survey provided me with ample feedback to consider when planning future PLB endeavors; however, one question in particular has stuck with me. I asked students to assess the following statement: “The PBL made me think positively about my role in making a positive change in the world.” Thirteen of the fifteen students who completed the survey responded “Totally agree” and one student responded “Mostly agree.” To me, this was a game-changer. Since my very first day as a teacher, I have wanted to empower students to view themselves as positive change agents in the world, but it wasn’t until I utilized PBL that I actually assessed whether or not I was doing that. Now that I see PBL as not only an effective pedagogy, but also a means by which I can foster problem-solving skills in my students, I make it a priority to include it in my teaching. PBL also provides me with a fantastic answer to that question my family member posed so long ago—“Why teach history?” One reason I teach history is because PBL transforms the past into relevant information and skills that my students need to be ethical leaders in the 21st century. Sounds like a worthy pursuit to me.

Utilizing the Past to Inspire Ethical Global Leadership for Tomorrow: Project-Based Learning in the World History Classroom

Moses Brown School

Providence, RI 02906 www.mosesbrown.org