An Open Letter to My Students

Last Sunday our seniors at Northeast Hamilton walked across the stage and received their diplomas. As I watched them give their speeches and receive their awards, a couple of things struck me.

1. After four years at NEH I feel like I will be graduating as well.

2. Mr. Hocking's (@phock66) speech about embracing change applied to more than just the seniors - it's exciting, it's scary, it's inevitable.

Much like I'm sure the seniors felt, I am excited, nervous, sad, scared, anxious, and a whole other range of emotions about leaving in just a couple short weeks. I have eaten lunch with the same people, sat in the same seat, taught the same classes (to an extent - I never did have a year that was exactly the same as the last), and grown up and matured along the way - just like my students.

As I prepare to move on to my next adventure, I can't help but feel like I too am going on to "college". My new "college" is actually Prairie Lakes AEA, but I'm headed into a new environment with a lot more people, the "campus" is a lot more spread out (across NW Iowa), and I'll be making new friends, meeting new people, and growing as a professional under many people that I greatly admire. All while greatly missing the friends and

So in light of my own new journey, I wanted to share my version of a "graduation speech" in an open letter to my NEH students:

To my students, who have taught me so much over the last four years:

It seems that more and more over the last couple of years I find myself explaining to you not just the ideas related to our classroom, but the ideas that are coming out of education. Why we are studying the United Nations MDGs for sub-saharan Africa instead of learning the major cities of each country; what the future of our earth is in terms of globalization, competing markets, and what that means for our schools and education instead of the ins and outs of price floors and ceilings, the importance of sharing your work with a global audience and getting outside perspectives.

I hope that after I leave you will take these lessons and demand for yourselves the education you deserve - no matter where life takes you, which school district, which college, remember that you deserve a world class education. You deserve to be prepared for a world that is centered around innovation, creation, and collaboration. I hope I played a small part in pushing you in that direction. I know that I threw some different concepts, weird lessons, and "unique" learning formats at you, but even if it wasn't always your favorite way to learn I hope that I helped you see part of what could be out there for you.

Remember that your learning is just that - YOUR learning! So continue to find ways to apply math and science and history and language to areas that interest you, to explore different paths, to be open to creating your own way of doing things, and to NEVER be afraid to fail - because that's how you LEARN! You deserve a voice. Continue to use it. If the first way doesn't work, try again. What should you change? What could be done differently? Don't ever be afraid to reflect and learn from mistakes. I did - not every lesson was perfect, but I kept working to give you the best that I could.

To my 6th graders - you have taught me patience and perseverance. I saw so many of you have these qualities, and I think you'll agree sometimes needed them myself! ;-) I appreciate the way you are always willing to hep one another solve problems, and I know that each of you will continue to grow and mature into amazing individuals.

To my 7th graders - I have watched you guys grow up a lot this year, and am always amazed at the growth I can see from the beginning of the year to the end. Your class reinforced for me the ideas that diversity and individualization are key elements to the learning process. You also impressed me with your ability to take a project and make it your own - whether it was blogging, web designing, or Minecraft-ing. You guys taught me a lot about myself as an educator and as a person.

To the 8th grade - While I've only had you for a year you taught me a couple of key things. 1) Make sure you have fun in everything you do - dancing to Aicha is sometimes an appropriate way to end a class period, and 2) Trust is one of the most important parts of education - you guys trusted me, even though we were still getting to know each other, with some big, new projects and concepts this year, and I appreciate that. Whether it was reading Slave Girl or Gamifying our course, you went with me and we learned together.

My 9th grade - Squeakers, Cheeseburger, Giblatar (how the heck do you spell a word he made up???), and the rest (I wish you all had fun names) - I have probably some of my funniest memories from your class, and I think that is the lesson I will take from you. Keeping a good attitude about myself, finding humor in even the stressful times, and taking time to celebrate as many birthdays as possible - because it's about the people and the relationships you create, not just the work that needs to be done.

To the sophomores - Oh sophomores, what am I going to do without you? You're the only class that I've had all four years. Your class will forever remind me of things like being accepting of others' points of view, the value of COLLECTIVE LEARNING, how to enjoy trying new things (think of the mussels that Bryce brought for our country project), and the value of learning together - your random questions and ideas often sparked cool projects/lessons and opportunities for me to learn right along with you.

Juniors - Even though I didn't have you in class this year I feel like you guys really taught me that through teamwork awesome things can happen - I know it wasn't ideal to do prom with me on maternity leave, but the way you guys brought it all together reminded me of how much more we can accomplish when you work together. You have so many different personalities, and I will miss all of them - no matter who makes up a group (all the different types of people), you guys figure it out.

Seniors - I always feel slightly disconnected from my seniors, especially first semester, after not having had you in class for a year. I told you on our last day together that I felt like we had grown up together - that we started together (high school for you, teaching for me), and we were ending our journeys at NEH together. I hope that I can face my new challenges with the grace, dignity, and poise that I saw in each (most? ;-) ) of you throughout our time together. You are a talented group of individuals who have amazing opportunities ahead of you. I hope I can live up to those changes and challenges just like I know each of you will.

And finally, to all of you, I hope that I have shown you that it's not just about being "good at school". So many times you told me you'd rather memorize vocabulary or fill in worksheets because it was easy or because you knew how to get an A that way. You know what? Those activities are easier for me, too, because I could have copied them out of a book and never thought about it twice. I would have driven me nuts as a student (something I told you many times), because I was one of those kids who was "good at school". But I promise you that those times that I made you THINK about things instead of memorize, when I asked you to design rubrics with me instead of me handing it to you, when I asked you to tackle content on your terms or asked you to define quality work WILL help you in the long run.

If you came to me in 10 years and said, "Mrs. Keehn I don't remember a single date (I'd tell you to Google it), but I do remember having to create something" or "having to push through something I didn't understand" or even "I remember the time you told me you didn't even know what this would look like in the end because it was up to me to determine and it took on a life of its own", I would consider my time with you successful.

Thank you for all that you have given me. Now that I'm done being sappy let's make these last couple weeks something to remember!

It's Almost Over - Lessons from 2012-13

As I reflect back on my time in the classroom this year I can't help but think about the changes I'd like to make for next year. However I won't be making those changes for next year - at least not in my own classroom. There are a few lessons from this year that I will take with me to Prairie Lakes, though. They are lessons that I think we all can learn from.

1. It's okay to start small sometimes. If a project seems overwhelming, you don't have to attack it all at once. Break it down, pilot it on the small scale first. This one came from Scott McLeod (@mcleod), and I think it's important to remember that you can still accomplish big things even if you start on a small scale. 

2. Great things can happen when you take a chance on something new. Inspired by Bettendorf's PD model this year I "gamified" my 8th grade class for the second quarter. I watched kids grow and push themselves in ways that I had not previously seen. They were doing homework on Friday nights for fun. They were pushing me to keep up with them in terms of information and content and activities. My husband (@keehner87) then took the model and adapted it to his classroom setting. 

3. It's okay to fail - in fact, it should be encouraged. Failure is how we learn, learning from that failure is how we improve, and it is a natural part of the path to greatness. If you can learn how to fail, you can learn anything - because when you truly "learn how to fail" you also learn how to persevere, improve, and ultimately accomplish great things. When a lesson doesn't work the right way, I reteach it or at the very least make changes for next year. If a student doesn't get the material, we look for ways that s/he can get the information another way. Learning to fail is just as important as learning to succeed, and this is an especially important skill if you follow #2 - taking chances on something new.

To be continued...

Dirty Little Secrets

Which of the six secrets do you think MOST impacts the United States economy? Why? It would seem that more people today have higher degrees than they did 60 years ago, yet our economy is not nearly as strong as it was 60 years ago. Why do you think that is? To what extent are education and the economy tied together? Post your response in the comments section.

*Some of the pictures aren't quite the right size for the slideshow, so I apologize for that. Do the best you can.

Education according to those being educated...

Last year I fell into a great lesson on what education should look like (according to my students) in the 21st century as they prepare for graduation, college, and the job market. I tried to recreate it this year, and this is what came of it:

The first image (on the left) is the list of qualities that my senior Econ class has identified as necessary to being successful in a 21st century job market. They created this list based on personal experience and our reading of the book "The World is Flat 3.0" by Tom Friedman. Then I gave them the prompt (written in blue) in the second photo (on the right). I drew a picture of a school building, and asked them to fill in what they needed out of it.

After we filled our school, I asked them to identify the ones they really felt strongly about - a star meant it was super important, an "x" meant that they really felt strongly that it was unnecessary. The list in blue on either side of the top of the school is the list of qualities last year's class thought they needed that was NOT included in the list this year's class created.

Here are some of the thoughts my students shared on their blogs:

Is there still value to the liberal arts education?

There is still much value to the liberal arts education. Today, we tend to focus more on the math, reading, and science as a core of a good education, but the liberal arts (histories, politics, and other sciences) are essential to connecting our knowledge and creating innovations. In the liberal arts, creativity makes the way for innovation and has resulted in many of the advances we have today (multiple typefaces, astrological projections, music players, political analysis systems). Truly, the liberal arts program makes our core knowledge more diverse, which then results in more learning and  our learning how to learn.

Is there still value to the liberal arts education?

While I do see the importance of the liberal arts' program, I truly don't think it is necessary and valuable any longer in today's society. It is good to be a well versed and well rounded person, but typically employers today are looking for localized and focused personnel. Typically a mechanic would not get hired because they know extensive history and ancient literature passages, but if they are good at what they do, which is fix machines, they will get hired. I also believe you spend the majority of your elementary, middle school, and high school practically in the liberal arts department because you are learning a little about everything. It seems as if liberal arts is for those people really don't know what they want to do with their life and liberal arts helps to guide them into something else. Like Steve Jobs mentioned in the text he didn't know what he wanted to do but went to college anyways. In my opinion this can be both beneficial and harmful. He learned what he wanted to do through exploring different areas and not being so focused on one subject, but he also wasted a lot of money getting there. In my opinion, it is the person's job to sort through what they are interested and not interested in to help them prepare for their future.

Is there still value to the liberal arts education?

I believe liberal arts education has more value than society displays it to have. The liberal arts need to be more emphasized than they are today. In my opinion, liberal arts education allows for and develops creativity. I think it also encourages abstract thinking. These two skills, creativity and critical thinking, are skills that are lacking in our math and science focused world. Creativity and innovativeness is especially important in today's flat world. Jobs that don't require creativity and abstract thinking are easily shipped overseas. Those who are creative are more able to compete in this globalized economy.

I also believe the liberal arts can be intriguing and encourage curiosity. Many people do not enjoy learning science or math. The liberal arts involve many subjects that people would enjoy. Because they enjoy this subject, they may grow passionate about it and new innovative ideas could arise. Although many jobs may require math and science backgrounds, I believe an education in math and science AND the liberal arts would be ideal. It would also give an individual an advantage in the workforce.

I watched a TED talk this year entitled, "Schools Kill Creativity." In this presentation, Sir Ken Robinson outlined schools lack of emphasis on the arts. Although this is only one component of liberal arts, I believed it still pertained to this issue. Robinson stated schools don't allow for people to be creative. Instead, they enroll students in the generic math and science classes. He also states how schools kill curiosity. In daddition to the lack of support for the arts, schools discourage failure. Failure and being wrong are seen as bad things and everybody tries to avoid them. In reality, however, originality and creativity arises from failure and being wrong. If everyone feared failure, new things wouldn't be discovered, new inventions wouldn't be created, technology wouldn't be as developed, our world wouldn't be flat. The liberal arts encourages exploration and abstract thinking. It may not have set answers or reasons. For this reason, the liberal arts encourages creativity, something missing in our flattened world.

"Fu bu guo san dai" If the first generation builds, the second maintains, and the third squanders, what will you (your generation) do?

      I believe my generation is still not building up the money we used in the third generation.  We are trying and the high paying people with good jobs are trying to save the money but since our unemployment rate is so low during this generation, it is making it difficult for people to save their money.  According to the text, the Chinese are amazed that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt. They believe we are becoming more ill-disciplined, distracted, and dissolute. We under-fund public schools while the media is focusing on fighting over feeding tubes. People need the money so much our economy right now that saving money is harder than it was in earlier generations. Therefore, I believe that people are trying to save up money again but we are continue to drown in our debt and we are becoming more and more in trouble when it comes to trying to get our money back and save it.

Blog Prompt: "fu bu guo san dai" If the first generation builds, the second maintains, and the third squanders, what will YOU (your generation) do?

Based upon the above saying, I would say my generation consists of the adapters and reinventors. Previous generations worked to become successful and maintain it and our predecessors waste away that success and lose it. Therefore, we are responsible for regaining that success. However, because times have changed, which may have caused us to lose our successes, we must learn how to adapt to the changing times. We also must use creativity to create new ideas to aid in regaining success. For this reason, we are the transitioners, the ones who are relied upon to create change. A change for the better.

Show someone my work!

I've posted about my daughter a few times, but as a refresher, Rylee will be 7 this month and is in the first grade at Northeast Hamilton. I don't teach elementary, but so many of my experiences come from that level through my own children and the people I work with, that from time to time I feel that I have enough authority to make observations.

Rylee started blogging recently. She lives the life of a teacher's daughter and is often stuck at school with me for much longer than she'd like. The other day she was particularly chatty and I was particularly busy, so I asked her if she'd like to blog. She was intrigued, so I quickly created a new blog, put her name on it, and set her up to type. At 4:15 she was still typing and I was ready to go. I had to promise her we could save it and work on it the next day before she would consent to come home! We came to school early the next day so she could keep typing. Twenty minutes later I had to cut her off from her "proof-reading" (and proof read it myself) before I could get her to go down to class.

Later I showed her that I had shared her post on Twitter and Facebook and she was ecstatic to learn that 32 people had viewed her blog - her writing - her creation! In pro blogger world you can laugh at 32, but to a 6 year old girl from small town Iowa it might as well have been a million. She was back at it the next day, sharing it with my husband, sharing it with her teacher, and planning what her next post would be about. She wanted to know when we could stay at school again to work on the computer so she could write on her blog.

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 Her experience got me thinking about how important it is to give kids a public sphere for their work. She craved the attention and feedback that came with sharing something she had created. She wanted me to read it and make sure it was okay to post. She wanted to add pictures to make it more interesting. Is it perfect? No. But I showed her how to use the shift key to make capital letters, so it's improving. She wants it to be good before she publishes. She WANTS to produce quality work that she can be proud of. How often do we see that in students' work? They want to do well not because they'll get a good grade or their parents want them to, but because they want to produce something that other people will be impressed with and they can be proud of? Not often enough.

I was in a PD session a couple weeks ago where we had a similar discussion. Scott McLeod (@mcleod) was leading the discussion and he said when students produce work for teachers, they want it to be good enough. When they produce work for the public, they want it to be good. This is absolutely true of my students. How does this change your classroom? Your project expectations? Your outlook on student work?

I'm not looking for the minimum requirements, I'm sitting with students in small group meetings discussing what quality work looks like and helping them build their own rubrics for what "good" work looks like. We are connecting with people all over the globe to contribute to their work. Next week my 7th & 10th graders will discuss their projects with people from the World Food Prize, the Gates Foundation, and John Deere's South Africa branch.

Say what you will about the Common Core, but I'm excited about the push for literacy across content areas; about the emphasis on writing and producing. My students - and my children - are capable of greatness. Technology is going to offer them an opportunity to share that greatness with the world. I can't wait to be a small part of that.

Defining Globalization

Today as we were reading "The World is Flat" in Econ I asked my seniors to define/explain Friedman's levels of globalization in words and in sculpture. Here is what they came up with:

Globalization 1.0 (Top left): The countries of the world came together to make one globe and shrank it from large to medium. 

Globalization 2.0 (Top right): We created America because it was becoming part of the globalizing process, and its companies, along with other European countries' companies integrated to make their economy grow. The companies were able to control economies and expand overseas, working side by side.

Globalization 3:0 (Bottom right): Our sculpture was all the countries stacked on top of each other to resemble the world becoming flat and united. Our rainbow of colors shows all the different countries/ethnicities who will take part in 3.0. Since more countries are taking part in globalization and competing with one another, our world is becoming small and flatter. 

It actually worked out quite nicely that 1.0 and 3.0 made similar sculptures, but that 3.0 was much more flat than 1.0.

Collective Learning

In February the sophomores discussed language, art, communication, and collective learning in terms of how humans have advanced our society and culture over time. We defined collective learning as the advancements of human learning over an extended period of time (through generations) - building on the knowledge of previous groups and using it to adapt and change in new environments. 

Within a discussion of the similarities, differences, and lifestyles of Neanderthals, homo erectus, and modern humans we looked at the language and art forms of early people. Then, the students used finger painting (similar to early cave paintings) to define and express the idea of “collective learning” without using written language. They had the option of creating individual pieces or creating a collection as a group. This is the culmination of their work.