Welcome to the blog of Zaq Roberts, Associate Head of School at The Berkeley School in Berkeley, CA. I blog about a wide variety of topics, from classroom moments I witness, to administrative events and conversations, to the educational blogs, videos, and books I am reading and watching, and how they are influencing my thinking. I hope this eclectic approach will give you insight into the many ways that I am engaging in advancing the school and strengthening our program, and I welcome your thoughts and comments!
This blog takes its name from a quotation by Archimedes that reads "Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world." The TBS mission speaks directly to the need to engage a changing world, while many of the experiences in our program focus on the development of students' agency and authority. TBS is the lever by which we all - administration, faculty, students, and parents - can together move the world to be more humane, compassionate, and responsive. To borrow an important Montessori phrase, it is our way to remake the world.
This morning we held a monthly assembly in the Depot. We began by having each of the administrators introduce themselves to the students - an activity that was suggest by the Student Council, as there are many kids on campus who don't regularly interact with the adults in the office, and may not even know their names, let alone what they do.
This was followed by a presentation by two members of the Student Council on the recent penny drive that the students have been doing. This community service fundraising is raising donations for Literacy Lifeboats, an initiative by Lucy Calkins and Teacher's College in New York that is serving schools hard hit by Hurricane Sandy. The reps reported that the K-5 students raised $363.61, and the 6-8 students raised $453, totaling $816.61.
Cerrito Creek then presented a Showcase of Learning on their recent work with electricity and magnets. Students were enthralled by the video, and I'm sure you will be too, as the 4th and 5th grade students explain their understanding of how magnets, motors and coils work.
Finally, we ended with a full-throated sing-along to What A Wonderful World.
This morning featured the second K-8 assembly of the year. After a short reminder of why we have assemblies (to Build, Strengthen, Share, and Celebrate, of course), we launched into a rousing rendition of Yellow Submarine (The Beatles were September's "Composer of the Month" in K-6 music).
The first Showcase of Learning this year was presented by Laurel Creek, who treated us to three songs they have learned about the sounds of letters. I captured the second half of the Vowel Song: the movements provide a kinestic reinforcement for the sound to the students.
Kate Klaire then discussed the work of this year's Student Council, including an acknowledgement of last year's pioneering Student Council representatives.
Next, the Middle School presented a Showcase of Learning about the recent 7th/8th grade rafting trip, complete with tableaus of the emotions they felt at various points of the trip, reading aloud a reflective essay about the experience of one student, and finishing off with a slide show.
We completed our celebration of The Beatles (Happy birthday, John Lennon) and closed out the assembly with All You Need is Love.
I love playing games. Rhythm and drama games, games of chance and luck, team and individual sports, board games and card games, strategy games and logic problems, even jigsaw puzzles: I haven't met a game I didn't enjoy. One of my earliest memories -- and a favorite family story about my childhood -- is beating my father and brother in two consecutive games of Uno at the tender age of three while on a houseboat in Florida (both times I ended with two wilds in my hand).
Games are one of several powerful forms of play (along with imaginative play, rough-and-tumble play, object play, etc), and as Dr. Stuart Brown taught us, play is an essential life skill that has a direct impact on brain development, physiological and emotional health, social skills, professional success, and learning and memory. Which is why I enjoyed reading a recent CNN article about the Quest to Learn school in New York, which uses games as the primary instructional technique in the classroom.
At TBS, we also believe in the effectiveness of play as a basis for educative experience, and though it isn't the central pedagogical tool used in our classroom, it is deeply integrated into our practices. I wrote about the use of games in a K/1 Reading Workshop class this spring in Mission Moments #5, while the Investigations in Numbers, Data and Space math curriculum contains an extraordinarily rich variety of games including student favorites Roll and Record, Close to 100, Factor Bingo, and many more. Games are also a part of the Montessori approach, including the Stamp Game, which is used for teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and the Imaginary Island Project, which teaches a variety of concepts about physical and cultural geography.
Going beyond playing games for the educative experience of knowledge construction and skill building that can result, I also see great value in teaching children to think critically about how games work, as it teaches them to identify context, frames, and principles. As a middle school teacher, I offered a course in game theory and design, in which we analyze the construction, rules, and guiding principles of games beginning with Tic Tac Toe and Rock Paper Scissors, moving on to Connect Four, checkers, and chess, and finishing with board games such as Monopoly and Risk. For a final project, students designed and built prototypes of their own games (which we then played in order to assess the design and underlying principles).
Connecting game-playing to the TBS mission to engage a changing world, check out Jane McGonigal's TED talk about games, and the possibility that games can actually be agents of social and societal change. She points to a real-life example of gamers finding a solution for how to fold certain proteins in certain ways that scientists had been unable solve as the potential for games to lead to a better world.
Problem solving is a type of game, so here's a problem that I'm also forwarding to our 4th-8th grade math teachers. It's the classic "Monty Hall" problem, and it's great for teaching concepts in probability, and for the ability to replicate and simulate variations to test answers within the classroom:
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1 [but the door is not opened], and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
You can check your solution here (warning, it's a link to Wikipedia).
Gene Wade is the hero of my day. Wow! This little clip has me fired up. So much of what he is saying resonates deeply with my understanding of TBS' mission.
I'm sharing this video with our K-8 faculty, because it speaks to the need to consider our teaching practices in light of the diverse ways in which students learn. Thanks to parent Keren Stronach for passing it along!
Remember when you could program the family VCR, but your parents could not? Children have always been forward-thinking when it comes to technology; perhaps it's their innate imagination and creativity that enable them to envision a future differently from adults operate, or their ability to question patterns, or the high neuroplasticity of their brains.
Since our children are aware of - and in many cases using - the newest technology as it emerges, and because we are thinking about both their present and future lives, I want to share a great video making the rounds these days about the impact that technology is having on literacy, featuring professor David Crystal. His ideas make total sense, and yet are challenging to many assumptions we have about the impact of technology on written literacy.
For a fuller summery on the video, check out George Couros' post on edsocialmedia.com
I used this short video today while talking with a Kindergarten student who had hurt another child. It turned out, not surprisingly, that there were a whole series of events that occurred before the culminating incident, and I was thinking about how to show, and not just tell, the child both the impact of his decision-making, and the idea of escalation. The concreteness of the dominos effectively helped the child understand that a small decision can lead to another decision can lead to another decision etc, and that the way to avoid knocking down the dominos is to make a different decision at the beginning.
A series of letters between Diane Ravitch (featured just last week on this blog) and Deborah Meier (founder of Central Park East and a leading light in public education) on how the events in Wisconson relate to public education.
Testing for knowledge, or the ability to ask for help? Vickie Bergman's post is a little chaotic, but the central point resonates, and the short video at the end is a hilarious must-watch!
Diane Ravitch on the Daily Show vaguely makes the case that poverty and the larger cultural context is the primary reason for low test scores, and that NCLB and Race to the Top are damaging public education. Important ideas, but not a ton of substance in this interview. Her interview on top-ed.com is slightly better, as is her address at NYU (though the production values aren't as high in either one).
This is a PBS Newshour piece on how teen brains are being literally rewired in response to living in the digital realm. Worth a watch, perhaps in series with this RSA Animate from Philip Zimbardo about time, which speaks to the digital rewiring of teen brains:
I just read an interesting article in the New York Times, in which researchers are attempting to develop a model for teacher evaluation that uses a multi-faceted scoring system, rather than the "value-added" model in which only the impact on standardized test scores for students in each class is calculated. The work is being funded by the Gates Foundation, and spearheaded by Educational Testing Services - the publishers of many of those same standardized tests - with a focus on using videos of teachers in the classroom to create scoring norms. Watching videos and conducting critiques, either in groups or in a self-reflective manner, has been an aspect of faculty evaluation for some time - just last week, the TBS faculty study group looking at student conferencing within the Positive Discipline framework used a video that Jed had shot of himself as the basis for their conversation - and to hear about an attempt to create a broad platform for using it is exciting (even if the article is a little short on specifics about what the criteria are that are being applied to develop the scoring rubric).
This was followed by a presentation by two members of the Student Council on the recent penny drive that the students have been doing. This community service fundraising is raising donations for Literacy Lifeboats, an initiative by Lucy Calkins and Teacher's College in New York that is serving schools hard hit by Hurricane Sandy. The reps reported that the K-5 students raised $363.61, and the 6-8 students raised $453, totaling $816.61.
