Pedagogical Autobiography: FruFra

 

One day about 4 years into teaching I walked out of my room and into the math office, which was actually carved out of a corner of my room. The teacher working there turned to me and asked, what is this frufra stuff that you do? I looked at him funny and asked what he meant. What he meant is exemplified by the video that I attached here. 

I did not at the time know the answer. Every day I start by introducing myself and my subject. I then ask for any questions comment thoughts or ripe tomatoes. During this time anything, well almost anything, goes. The rules of frufra are:
  1. You may ask any question, give any comment, or make public any thoughts you would like.
  2. Frufra is done when it ceases to be a whole group discussion. 
  3. There is a third rule, but it is a secret.
At the beginning of the year it is short. Some days it is short. Other days it lasts for a whole class period. Everyone is equal, and students quickly learn what topics will inspire more conversations and which ones less. I was struck by Vivian Gussin Paley's Article in Harvard Educational Review titled On Listening to What Children Say when she says, "Whenever discussion touched on fantasy, fairness, or friendship, participation zoomed upward." (page 124) This is very true. We all like to listen to stories that have their basis in reality. Students need this as well. They learn from their peers and what grabs attention.

I get a lot of questions about physics. This is important because I teach physics. I get a lot of questions about science. I get questions about life and school and family and myself. I get stories about brothers and sisters and dogs. About sickness and health, movies and sports. Johanna Kuyvenhoven says in her book In the Presence of Each Other, "Letting go of the conversation meant unpredictability." (Pg 74) But that is the key. Being open to what is on the group's mind each day is essential to gaining a places of openness that Parker J. Palmer says in To Know As We Are Known is the key to a place for truth seeking. "We must remember that we not only seek truth but that truth seeks us as well." If you are not open to this how can you know what it is?

I think that frufra also keeps me as a teacher informed and able to stay on top of the rest of life. It keeps me balanced to know what is happening around me in the world as my fellow learners are seeing it. Palmer talks about the importance of knowing what is happening in other disciplines as part of the spiritual journey of a teacher. "One discipline is the simple practice of studying in fields outside one's own." (page 114) What better guide to the world that my students live in than the students themselves? While I realize this is not a discipline, it goes towards my ability to translate between the culture of students and the culture of physics.

I remember vividly 5 years ago when a girl asked a question at the top of her voice, "Mr. Peterson, do you have a girlfriend?" The room was silent. I smiled and she began to freak out. I had been dating for about 2 months the woman who would be come my wife. They asked all kinds of questions and the class was done. Everyone wanted to know all about Rebecca. I told them about my hope for the future and my excitement about the gifts God provided for me. I shared with them the story of my life, and they could think of their own lives in terms of the gifts of God. Kuyvenhoven correctly says, "All problem solving abilities, from physics and math to social studies and environmental science, depend on such senses of possibility." (Pg 147) The hope and the promise I could display in the story of my life would show up that year in the problem solving and inquiry that my students would do. Stories help us to imagine the possibilities. Stories come out of frufra.

Stories, transmission of culture, learning from each other, becoming equal learners, creating an open community. Frufra ties together the people in the room to become learners seeking truth.

 

Pedagogical Autobiography: Traditions

When you work at a summer camp the most important thing to find out is what the unwritten rules are. This is probably true anywhere, but camps make their money by carefully enforcing not rules, but traditions. This is not optional. Kids love structure and similarity. When the camp that I work at in the summer built new buildings we had girls who were glad they were in the old cabins, because to sleep in the new ones would have ruined their last year at camp. 

The grace of God allowed me to to have a professor in college who let this line slide out in a class one day. He said he memorized his first paragraph of his lesson, his opener, for every class he taught for his first 5 years of teaching. I thought that was a heroic effort, and one that I could never replicate. I have to admit that I am never that sure of what is going to happen during a class period. But I thought of a solution. On the first day I taught I walked in and I said, "Hello, my name is Mr. Peterson and I will be your Earth Science teacher today." No one looked at me all that funny. This is quite common for the first day. Every once in a while on the first day someone will ask, "Are you our teacher tomorrow too?" Most often I just get the blank stares and smiles that come with the first day. 

When it starts to get interesting is day two. I say the same thing. And again. It takes about two weeks before a student raises their hand and asks, "why?" Why do you do that. I explain that I am striving to meet the goals of a college professor that taught me to have my opener memorized. I explained that it would make them know that they were in a different class than they had just been in, and that I was there to help. Some days, when I am in a hurry, I forget. Usually, in one or two minutes a student will raise their hand and say, "who are you and what are you trying to teach us?" I smile, introduce myself and know that community is being built. 

Another piece of my tradition is the cookie song. It started out rather simple. I would sing the cookie song if there were cookies mentioned anywhere in the third period announcements. Since we have hot lunch and there was dessert with hot lunch this would happen quite regularly, may be twice a week. At the end of the song the students will join for the last part at the top of their lungs. It take 30 seconds, but does so much for the rest of the period. Soon I had to come up with how do we let other hours sing the song. Now my rule is: if you bring homemade cookies for everyone in the class, I sing, they yell, and sometimes I dance. 

You wonder what this can do for a classroom? What does it add to the community other than unhealthy eating habits? I did not really know either until I was at a conference and a sub was in my classroom.  There were cookies in the announcements that day. A student stood up in the class and sang my part of the song. The class yelled. The sub gave them detentions. The next day I was still gone and there were cookies in the announcements. The student sang. The class yelled. The sub gave up. I had a long talk on Monday with the students about respect. They argued that they were respecting the community, I argued that they were not respecting the greater community. I am not sure who was right. I do know I was humbled by their loyalty to the class. 

I have several other traditions, surrounding everything from how and when we take tests, to put downs (I have a zero tolerance tradition and traditional penalties that I apply to myself as well), to assignments, to birthdays, to question and answer time. I also have school wide traditions that involve stories that I tell in chapel and how I lead when asked at faculty events. Each of these thing make people feel safe where they are and comfortable with the environment they are in.

The research on this backs me up. In her book on storytelling in the classroom called, In the Presence of Each Other by Johanna Kuyvenhoven, she says, "Learning depends a lot on being comfortable and happy in the room together." (Pg 88) I felt at home in the classroom described in the book with it daily rhythm of what would happen. The traditions of the room allowed for several different students from all walks of life and cultures to find their voices. Establishing who we are as a group, different from the rest of the world allows everyone, not just kids, the freedom to be who they are in that context. In the book the students have to be ready for their story time and Kuvenhoven established that early on they were not, but as the traditions became a part of who they were as a community, "As the weeks piled up behind us, children were almost always ready." (Pg 68) There was a sense that they became ready to learn as they became part of the learning. This is true as well in my classroom. Students are ready to learn when the traditions are established. They are ready to give to the purpose of the room once ground rules are established and they know where they are. I think that having some positive rules reminds them of a standard of behavior that is expected in the classroom, a standard of learning that is expected as well.

Parker J Palmer in his book To Know As We Are Known argues for the same thing. In the book he claims that, "A learning space has three major characteristics, three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries, and an air of hospitality." (page 71) The traditions I establish meet two of the goals, and lead directly in my experience to the remaining one. He says, "The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care." (page 72) The boundaries are established by the traditions that I set in my classroom. The best part of setting them as traditions is that I need not be the only one who defends the boundaries. In the video attached to this post, listen closely as the cookie song comes. The students yell, "Dance!" I had not started by dancing, but the tradition would not be complete without it. They demand that the boarder is defended. Sometimes another teacher will walk into my room for some reason or another and they will hear students asking for other students to change their behavior or be more careful with equipment. I praise them for being a self disciplining classroom. They are defending the boarders of their learning. 

Palmer's third pillar of an open classroom is the idea of hospitality, "a place where every stranger and every strange utterance is met with welcome." (page 74) I love that description, and I would like to think that I, by defending the boarders with traditions, make a spot for everyone to be a part. I establish traditions for this very effort. I tell them how we are to treat new adults that enter the room. I establish traditions for students not from our hour. There are traditions for students who are late to class and students who have to leave early. We work at including everyone who comes through the physics barriers of our room and make them a part of the community within. 

There are times when the traditions are not followed, and there are dangers to having too well established traditions. They can get  in they way. But as we watch for their harmful effects, they open the classroom itself to the possibility of openness, learning and truth seeking, unlike any classroom I have had before where I did not work hard of this. I am not sure exactly how I got here, but I do feel free to share more about who I am with my classes as we work out our lives and traditions together.

Pedagogical Autobiography: Inquiry

Last spring I sat down at an open house for a graduate of the school. Near me was a parent who I recognized enough to know that I had his children in the past, but how long ago and what his children's names were I could not recall. I introduced myself and he said his name. We talked for a little while about what his kids were up to and how they were doing. Then he said to me, "you know we still use those speakers my son made in class, they sound great."

At the end of each year in physics I have a month and a half of open ended inquiry time. Independent research projects is what I call it. Students have to go and research some area of physics and come up with a product that represents their learning. I leave a lot of room for the students, but do have about 15 projects that have frames about them so that students are not left totally to their own devices. Constraints actually inspire creativity in many situations, so I do not feel bad giving students a topic or concept to explore, and they can always choose the last one, which is make your own project.

Inquiry is scary in this scenario, and it is on the surface doomed to fail. Seniors with six weeks of school left and all the pomp, circumstance and social traditions that distract them, are destined to not want to work hard. Yet some how when I give them room to fail they succeed to greater heights, for the most part. Every other year or so a student simply does nothing and fails. That is nothing compared to all the successes. A single student who wastes 6 weeks of 45 minutes, compared to lives changed, is a small price to pay.

When I say lives changed I mean it. When as a teacher you take a step of faith and allow kids to fail some will. Others will soar. I remember the day that a student had me sign a note saying he could miss class on Friday because of his physics project. I asked, "why are you going to be gone for a whole day?" He replied that he had set up a day to meet with archaeologists at the Field Museum in Chicago. I quickly signed the note. He is a geologist today, putting his physics skill to work on rocks around the world.

One day a student went to shadow an engineer. She had shared with me her struggle with where to go to school and what to do once she graduated. She explained that she felt she really wanted to go to a Christian college but that there were none near her house and she needed to live at home for financial reasons. I told her to pray about it, and that God had never denied me money when I needed it to do God's will. She came back from the job shadow and was so excited. While she was there the engineer had showed her a scholarship that he knew had no applicants that she qualified for. He also had a internship position in the lab he worked in that paid twice what she was making and he hired her. The money made up more than enough for her to go to the college of her dreams. It also confirmed for her that she was following the path that God had in store for her.

Two of my most popular projects started with a pair of students coming up after class and daring to ask if they could make up their own project. My only requirement for project like this is that there be a final product and that they produce a repeatable procedure for their project.  Therefore, if I like the project others can do it again. Now literally hundreds of students have done projects that other students had invented and I had nothing to do with the forming of those projects. Usually these projects are more involved than I would ever require them to on their own. All I had to do is set up and environment where students are allowed to develop intelligence by asking questions and having new, wonderful ideas about the material they gather to answer their questions. In the Having of Wonderful Ideas Duckworth says, "Knowing enough about things is one prerequisite for wonderful ideas." I try to set up the projects so that there is just enough to get the student started with the big questions of their topic and then they can move from there to the new wonderful ideas that they will find.

I also see this and being a direct implementation of the idea of teaching that Palmer presents in To Know As We Are Know. He says, "To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced." I am not truth. I have some insight into truth, but make no claim to being truth. When I set my students free to explore they come up with so much more about the world and truth, than I could ever show them. When I give them to a subject and let the subject show them the way, they learn more than I could ever ask them to learn. In Griffith's book In The Borderlands of Teaching and Learning, he says, "We should help guide the ship, but not be its sole captain." (pg 40)  This is not the way I was taught or even taught to teach. He compares teaching to jazz and describes it this way, "The interaction between teachers and learners are experiments in fluidity with both trying to constuct meaning and forge understanding. The path is not linear, but is can be found."

Schools are not set up for this type of learning at all. We need to remedy this.  Here is a selection of links to projects that my students have done over the years.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/37698117@N08/


http://ajwest.posterous.com/
http://darendsen.posterous.com/
http://natesall.posterous.com/
http://nmichmerhuizen.posterous.com/

Pedagogical Autobiography: Collaborative Problem Solving

The picture is from physics night. It was taken at 9:30 PM on a Monday night at school in the physics room. There is Monday Night Football on the screens and there are clusters of students working together around the room. They are working on a program called CAPA, a web based assignment tool.

The story of differentiated problem solving starts with two people, neither of whom necessarily thought they were advancing a relational way of teaching. A professor at Hope asked me if I wanted to piggy back, for free, on their web based problem system. I said I was interested and started picking problems. I had a computer at every lab station, something that our principal had funded, and thought that I could figure out a way of selling this type of assignment to the students. When I went to the principal to talk through it with him, he demanded that I have one night a week where the room was open for students to come and use the computers, in case they did not have computers at home. So we settled on this plan. I would give homework on Tuesday, a whole weeks worth. Friday would be question and answer day in class. Monday night the computer lab would be open for students to come in and work if they wanted to, with the problems being due at 11:30 that night. This has been my basic schedule in physics for 10 years. I fill the week with other work, like discovery labs and discussions, and the homework and reading happens parallel to the course in the evenings.

So far none of this seems all that radical. I cannot over emphasize how much it has changed my teaching. It took no time to realize what gold the Monday evenings were. We were all learning together. Since everyone has different problems, that the computer keeps track of for me, I can have some comfort in knowing that students who are working together are talking about physics, not copying problems. I learned that I could assign a lot less problems but produce more conversation about the root of the problems. The Monday nights were really a club. A club in the sense of Frank Smith's clubs in The Book of Learning and Forgetting where on page 11 he defines clubs as, "communities of influential people." Without really trying, I had brought together a group of people who we interested in solving physics problems.

And if you walk into the room on Monday nights, you will find that is what it sounds like. A physics club. And I say that because a physics class sounds different, and to some extent has to sound different. On Monday nights I almost always have something going on the television. If not, there is music. There are students arguing about physics concepts and how to apply them. There are students helping each other or asking me questions. There are also students talking football, baseball, choir, and math. There is a lot of socializing. There is a lot of food some years. There is some anxiety because they cannot find their place in the room or the discussion that will benefit them the most. There are students that meet in the hall because they need to be away from the noise.

On top of all of this there are also a variety of student needs that are addressed. Some have the normal physics questions. Even those are broken down into two categories. Some are questions about problem solving, numbers equations and math. Other students gather to discuss and argue how the concepts of physics apply to real world questions that I pose to them each week based on the same material. Other students come because they are done with the problems and would like to help. They are members of the same club who are there to help. This is integral to Smith's idea, because club members, "don't teach you; they help you." (page 18) Finally there is an interesting group of students who come to do other work. Sometimes it is brothers and sisters who have to come, but end up enjoying themselves and finding a room full of people willing to help them. Sometimes it is peers who just would rather study in the presence of the activity of learning.

Collaborative problem solving allows my class to become a club. A social physics learning club. Few things have been a more powerful force in my teaching career.