Metaphors We Teach By, Part Four: On the Rhetoric of Change in Schools, Plasticity vs. Flexibility

Change is Hard

Me w/ Pat Bassett at Oakridge

Pat Bassett recently visited my school to deliver a talk on "The Big Shifts in Education,” and much of the discussion that Mr. Bassett encouraged us to explore focused on identifying the shifts and changes taking place on our campus as well as the ones we anticipate or desire to take place as the future continues to unfold. I remember one of Bassett’s slides that day projecting the provocative declaration: “If you’re not a school of the future, you won’t be a school in the future.” That’s a statement that should make one stop and think, perhaps inspiring a feeling of excitement and opportunity, while also leaving some of us with a lingering sense of anxiety. But why is that the case? Because change isn’t easy, and oftentimes it comes with many discomforts and unexpected mishaps. So what do we do to work through that? What kind of language do we employ to make sense of the difficulties that come with growth? It’s an important question because the language we use directly shapes and models the ways we make sense of important concepts such as change as well as concepts involving the relations of power. [1]  

Oftentimes when we implement a sudden change in our classroom procedures, policies, or routines, students react with resistance and hesitation, perhaps even distrust, because they too feel like they’re out of their comfort zone and fear the prospect of an unpredictable mishap. Change is hard, plain and simple. When thinking about such situations, what language does a teacher employ to get students to cope with the adjustment? How do we mobilize a class of students or an assemblage of personalities to move towards the change we want to happen? One might enact the figure of authority, for instance, and demand compliance: “You will do what I’m asking because I’m the teacher and I said so! Just trust me.” This of course relies on a model of central-command authority, which has its costs emotionally and relationally speaking. But what about strategies that are less coercive? One that comes to mind is the commonly-voiced idea of being flexible. The person or teacher who invokes this notion of flexibility no longer commands authority in the same straightforward way; instead this person coaches, encourages, and/or reasons with the frustrated student, gently urging him to recognize that the change being implemented is necessary (and therefore inevitable) and the student must understand, as a result, that the best response to the inevitable is to be flexible. Here we have the model of the facilitator/manager who molds and bends the student through intervention, encouragement, and persuasion, reminding the person to flex with and conform to that which is inevitable... Flexibility here serves as an interesting rhetorical figure, for it suggests the properties of being bendable and stretchable, as well as something that conforms or molds to stronger forces/harder objects. In other words, it too gives shape to a model that necessitates the exercise of unilateral power.

To empower students and encourage critical thinking, I think we need a more symmetrically balanced model of give-and-take that does not enforce the figure of flexibility upon the weaker partner, and I believe this is true for all modalities of relationships in a school (in other words, for all the siloed binary pairings of teacher-student; faculty-admin.; department-to-department; division-to-division; etc.), especially when coping with or embracing change as an educational community. How do we empower a student body or a staff to take ownership of the change in process? First of all, we need to think about the politics of our metaphors. What does it mean to be flexible? What if we thought about the connections & relationships of a school community, not as being made functional by the participants’ promise to be flexible, but as being shaped by the principle of plasticity?

On Plasticity as an Emancipatory Metaphor

Many people have a tree growing in their heads but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. 
-G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 15

In Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain?, she explores the implications of a neuroplastic model for the brain, but she approaches her topic from a more literary-philosophical point of view, which makes her keenly aware of the ideological assumptions that accompany one's word choices, metaphors, and modes of articulation, even in the realm of the sciences. She writes, “Any vision of the brain is necessarily political. It is not the identity of cerebral organization and socioeconomic organization that poses a problem, but rather the unconsciousness of this identity” (52). In other words, any metaphor or mode of verbal representation we employ to make sense of what we mean by “brain” reflects certain assumptions and biases of how we think politics, power, and the social. As stated in the previous post, our models and metaphors reveal our assumptions, values, and desired outcomes as a society, a culture, or a given group of people. (I think of how functionalism for instance as an approach to philosophy of mind came hand-in-hand with our increased fascination with computing as a model for intelligence and problem-solving.) Malabou mentions one common vision for the brain which likens it to a rigid command center, “which gives rise to so many unsettling metaphors in the register of command and government: a controller that sends orders down from on high, a central telephone exchange, a computer…” (4-5). Of course, she discusses this in order to explore a newer, alternative model for brain-functioning, namely one that relies on the metaphorical notion of plasticity, which describes something as both receiving and giving form (commands), thereby having the ability to constantly connect, modify, repair, and re-map. 

The receiving and giving of form is what distinguishes plasticity from flexibility. Malabou explains it further stating, “The word plasticity thus unfolds its meaning between sculptural molding and deflagration, which is to say explosion. From this perspective, to talk about the plasticity of the brain means to see in it as not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (6). “Neuroplasticity” as Google defines it is “...the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.” In other words, new research about the plasticity of the brain shows that the brain is less of a rigid command center and more of an ever-changing neuronal network whose form adapts, molds, and adjusts in response to the environmental exposures and encounters during its history and development as an organ. Our brain and its neuronal functionings also help shape the workings of the brain as well as its environment both in and outside the biological system of the body, meaning “…neuronal functioning and social functioning interdetermine each other and mutually give each other form, to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish them” (9). We have not realized the entire reach of this useful concept, says Malabou, for neuronal plasticity entails freedom from unilateral demands for compliance. It's a give-and-take model and this means “...it is not just a matter of uncovering, in the name of brain plasticity, a certain freedom of the brain but rather… to free this freedom, to disengage it from a certain number of ideological presuppositions that implicitly governs the entire neuroscientific field and, by mirror effect, the entire field of politics” (11). Plasticity helps us envision how relationships could function in a more egalitarian, horizontal manner and therefore shifts our mindset in terms of how we cultivate partnerships for change. 

IMAGE CREDIT: Esther Beaton/Australian Geographic

Most of the time, however, we still rely on compliance to push things forward: “[Although] the brain is plastic [and] free, we are still always and everywhere in chains” (11). Catherine Malabou argues that “...today, the true sense of plasticity is hidden, and we tend constantly to substitute for its mistaken cognate, flexibility… [and] the problem is that [flexibility] grasp[s] only one of the semantic registers of plasticity: that of receiving form. Indeed, what flexibility lacks is the resource of giving form, the power to create, to invent or even to erase an impression, the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius” (12). When we want to implement change, whether it be in a classroom or among a whole staff, we need to be more “genius” like our plastic brains by empowering all participants transparently and collaboratively. And I suggest we need to conceive of all campus-wide relations in terms of plasticity, as opposed to flexibility or other modalities of power relations. Like the wasp and orchid, plasticity is about aparallel evolution. [2] 

Examples: 
-When I suddenly decided to “gamify” my class last year (in the middle of the semester), it demanded a lot of adjustment out of my students, so it was important to be transparent, communicative, and open to student feedback and intervention. I constantly asked them for ideas and suggestions for improvement, and we molded to each other in the process of our shared exchange while embarking on this new experience together. 
-Recently, the leadership at my school has done a great job embracing plasticity over flexibility as we continue to challenge each other to embrace certain changes to serve our students even better: (1) Today, we’re hosting an “unconference” on campus where teachers freely lead and facilitate sessions that they deem most necessary and relevant for our needs as a school in relation to professional development. Usually the agenda for PD comes from the top-down. (2) Additionally, this semester we are launching several teacher-led (as opposed to department or divisional heads) research & design teams to discuss changes needed to meet our long range vision and goals as a school. 

It’s great to see the aparallel evolution of certain campus silos such that they are working together in a way where collaboration takes the place of compliance.  Jacques Ranciere put it nicely when he said, “He who bends others best is he who bends best himself” (85). My challenge to myself is to replace the demand for flexibility with the model of plasticity both as a teacher and as a collaborative colleague. Otherwise, relationships become a struggle for power, which reminds me of something else Pat Bassett said the other day: “Education is relational, not transactional.”

"Dendrites" - http://www.nica-institute.com/dendrites/

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Print

Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Metaphors We Teach By, Part Three - Consider the Rhizome: On Deterritorializing Silos in Schools

It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again.

               -Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20

What models and metaphors do we employ to make sense of how we organize our schools? Much has been said about the “factory model of education” (go here or here to see what I mean), and Audrey Watters is right to make the point that a large part of the story has been manufactured to fit certain narratives about the present (go here to read her critique of “the factory model of education” conversation). However, factory and school design are both born out of a similar historical-intellectual event, one that is rightly associated with the Enlightenment and its influence. Both institutions, more often than not, exemplify organizational models that reveal our tendency (as post-Enlightenment thinkers) to “mathematize our life-world” as Edmund Husserl might put it - or what Bernard Stiegler might call the “grammatization of human life.” Understandably, schools and factories, like many other organizations, are structured according to rationalist concepts such as binary logic, hierarchy, centralization, and order, and with this in mind, I understand why critics of contemporary school models might make connections (but perhaps too crudely) between factories and campuses.

On the Idea of Silos:

So what’s prompted all this philosophical reflection? I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of silos and more specifically how a “silo mentality” fits well with organizational structures that are hierarchical and centralized (like a hub-and-spoke or factory model, for instance).  And I’ve been asking myself: what about Silos in schools? I'd like to thank Seth Burgess and Sanje Ratnavale for pushing my thinking in this direction! Seth and I will be delivering an Ignite Keynote, titled “Breaking Down the Silo Mentality – A Grassroots Movement,” at the upcoming OESIS conference in L.A., this Feb. 23-24, 2016.

Not that long ago, the idea of silos was foreign to me, and others like me might be wondering what the term means in this context. The concept helps one describe an institution’s vertical organization; it’s used metaphorically to mean a system, process, or department that operates in isolation from others.  Audra Bianca defines silos with the following critique: “A silo mentality can occur when a team or department shares common tasks but derives their power and status from their group. They are less likely to share resources or ideas with other groups or welcome suggestions as to how they might improve. Collaboration in a business culture with silos among teams or departments will be limited… In addition, the members of a silo tend to think alike. They get their power from association with their function and their shared technical knowledge” (“What Do Silos Mean in Business Culture?”).

What drives us to think and operate in this way, one might argue, is the well-founded desire to successfully facilitate management, productivity, and efficiency at the workplace. When presented with the question of what’s the most rational way to organize company x or institution y, models like the hub-and-spoke example serve us well (at least in relation to certain desired outcomes such as order and efficiency). Emotionally speaking, the silo mentality may stem from basic human desires to belong to something, to have significance, and to be able to exercise one’s sense of responsibility in ways that are manageable and quantifiable (or traceable). At the root of this mindset, therefore, one uncovers the natural and good desire to belong to something and to be responsible for it, and it’s important to remember this when discussing institutional changes like “breaking down silos.” Usually, we don’t seek to change something because we disagree with the intention behind it – more often, we share common goals, desires, and priorities but seek to change things because the map to getting there constantly needs improvement, clarification, and adjustment. But before mapping new changes (and employing new organizational models in the process) one first needs to know clearly and specifically the values, goals, or desired outcomes of the institutional culture in question.

On Goals, Priorities, and Outcomes:

What are the goals, priorities, and desired outcomes shared by educators who seek to prepare the citizens of our global future? How have Silos – as a form of organizational mapping – come up short in helping us realize these goals? What do we need to adjust, improve upon, or change when thinking about the functionality of Silos? But first, what do Silos look like in education today? Immediately I think of academic departments, content-based linear curricula, classrooms, campuses, division & grade levels, etc., and it occurs to me that a Siloed organization operates according to the logic of binaries: one is either in a class or outside it, on a campus or off of it, engaging relevant curriculum or indulging irrelevant information, and as my colleague Jason Kern points out, the person who is the least siloed in schools is the student herself. She is the nomad who travels from one territory to another while the instructors and administrators remain in their fiefdoms, so one might ask, what are we modeling for our highly connected and heterogenous students as isolated instructors? Gilles Deleuze writes, "We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do.' Our only teachers are those who tell us to 'do with me,' and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce" (Difference and Repition 23). Departmental silos often demand students to "do as I do" and to trace and reproduce in isolation, so why have silos in schools? One answer gets back to the models and metaphors which shape our organizational thinking, but another response points towards the goals and outcomes we seek to realize.

When thinking about our desired goals as educators it’s important to remember that the metaphors and models we teach by can limit and expand our possible ways of thinking about certain concepts and how they can work. In other words, our mindsets map the expanses and limits of our ability to match thinking and strategy to the realization of our goals and priorities. With this in mind, what do the metaphors or models of binaries, factories, hub-and-spoke structures, etc., expand for us in terms of desired goals or outcomes? Possible answers might be maximizing profit and efficiency, establishing control and power, fostering competition, maintaining safety and predictability. Some of these might be goals we value and prioritize for schools today, but others may not, meaning we need to pose the opposite question as well: What do the metaphors or models of binaries, factories, hub-and-spoke structures, etc., limit for us in terms of desired goals or outcomes? Some responses might be trust and collaboration are more inhibited; spontaneity and risk tend to be discouraged, and divergent thinking as well as creativity could be stifled; yet many of us will agree that these are priorities we want to expand upon, not limit, in our modern learning spaces. So I think we have to (continually) return to two questions: what are the most important priorities we need to focus on as a school, as a class, etc.? And what are the models and metaphors for thinking that expand the possibility for us to make those priorities a reality?  Instead of factories, hubs-and-spokes, binaries (and dare I say trees), we need to root our thinking about education in new metaphors; in fact, we need a new kind of root altogether: consider the Rhizome, for instance.

On the Rhizome and Responsibility:

Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees... That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight... 

               -Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 9

Google defines a rhizome as “a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.” Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guatarri offer it as a metaphor or model whose purpose is to resist binary conceptualization and static formalization (It’s much easier to teach Plato’s theory of the forms when discussing trees as an example as opposed to considering the Rhizome…). It’s hard to talk about “the form of the Rhizome” in traditional, ontological terms, but D&G suggest the following qualities:

-A rhizome is pure connectivity

-A rhizome is pure differentiation

-A rhizome is pure multiplicity (as opposed to binary)

-A rhizome resists territorialization

-A rhizome maps, but never traces

-A rhizome is a form of decalcomania: “forming through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation, thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organization and restriction” (A Thousand Plateaus 20).

What if we thought about school organization more rhizomatically? How might rhizomatic models help us deterritorialize the fiefdoms of silos, especially when they discourage collaboration, creativity, communication, and spontaneity? As I think of rhizomatic models (along with hub-and-spoke or factory structures), one common goal or priority stands out for me: all of these organizational frameworks want to encourage teachers, administrators, and students to exercise responsibility for something, but responsibility can work differently according to the metaphors and models we use. In the siloed form of organization, responsibility tends to function as such: as an English teacher, I am responsible for the student’s education in literature and composition, but her knowledge of polynomials does not matter for my purposes. I call this distributed responsibility. But what if we thought about our organization differently? In place of factories, I suggest the metaphor of the community garden, which is much more rhizomatic in the way such social spaces promote unpredictable connections and spontaneity as well as a deterritorialized sense of ownership. No one owns that specific tomato, for instance, but everyone is responsible for the garden itself: I call this shared responsibility. What if we could deterritorialize the departmental landscape of the traditional school model? How might that make possible new pathways for mapping our responsibility for the student’s learning and development? Like a community garden, education is about sharing the responsibility of cultivating certain universally-valued skills that all learners need to master; it's not about Shakespeare vs. polynomials or curricular material vs. irrelevant information. Instead of asking, have they learned Shakespeare?, we need to ask together are students thinking critically? Are they exploring creative solutions? Are they collaborating and connecting with others? Silos, unfortunately, often discourage the latter kind of mindset.

As students, administrators, and teachers, we all care about results (and we should) and with that comes the need to feel in control. Silos make that emotional reassurance possible, in my opinion. We feel a heavy sense of responsibility to produce certain outcomes because there is so much at stake, but it’s also possible to share the weight of our labor more collaboratively. Hub and spoke, inside and outside silos, curricular content and irrelevant info, inside and outside departments… these categorical binaries are meant to help us trace certain outcomes, but where are the opportunities to map new possibilities which resist such rigid organization? It’s important to make clear, however, that organizational infrastructures and models (on a macro-institutional scale) can’t be rethought in completely rhizomatic terms, not for tomorrow at least (that would be a revolution, for sure), but my call to action is a “grassroots” one. How can we as teachers, students, and administrators rhizomatically disrupt (actually, make that deterritorialize) the silos we found ourselves in today? What can we do tomorrow? Think of a silo (such as a classroom, a department, a campus, a curriculum) and ask this question: where is there an opportunity for an offshoot, for a new line of flight? What small steps can I take to deterritorialize our traditional landscapes for learning?

Some examples in recent years for me:

-Last fall, the drama director at our school invited me to direct a one-Act version of William Shakespeare's Richard III. I had never directed, blocked, or acted in a Shakespeare production in my life. We also invited the drama teacher to join our literature class project and discussion which focused on cutting lines for the production. Drama and English departments were in lock-step, molding to each other's shape like the wasp and the orchid, and students' learning became more connected, relevant, and integrated.

-Last spring, the forensics science teacher enlisted the theatre & set design class to build a crime scene for a project. Drama students were cultivating the appropriate skills for building sets while also engaging in conversations about science and forensics making their learning more spontaneious in its offshoots.

-In recent years, I (along with two teachers from different schools) have collaborated across campuses using blogs, garageband & audacity, youtube, as well as other programs, in an ad-hoc, organic way such that the boundaries of who's teaching whose students (as well as boundaries of who's the student and who's the teacher) have become more and more rhizomatic and fluid. (Go here to watch a K12 video about these collaborative projects)

-Last spring, I gamified my British Literature class, which provided more options, paths, and methods for demonstrating learning, and with a wider variety of assignments and learning styles, students discovered passions well beyond that of literary analysis. One student made a dagger (don't worry! it was blunted metal!) when studying Macbeth for some extra XP points, and in the process, he discovered his love for building things. It may have been "irrelevant," but it was awesome all the same!

-In recent years, I have used google docs as a platform for my students to construct and curate their own exam, making it a collaborative, student-driven form of inquiry such that the high-stakes test itself truly becomes something for the students & by the students. As a result, they owned the learning together. 

****

In Charles Dickens's novel, Hard Times, one might recall the scene where Mr. Gradgrind, the utilitarian school supervisor, stands above the rows of desks filled with silent, passive children as he proclaims, "Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them" (9). I can't help but imagine Deleuze and Guattari interrupting to say, "Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Don't just have ideas, just have an idea" (A Thousand Plateaus, 24-25)

Mark Ingham. Boy Pool Rhizome: http://socialdigitalelective.wordpress.com/groups/rhizomes/

Works Cited:

Bianca, Audra. "What Do Silos Mean in Business Culture?" yourbusiness.azcentral.com. Gannett Satelite Information Network, Inc., n.d. Web. 17 December 2015.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repitition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Barnes and Nobles Books, 2004. Print.

Watters, Audrey. "The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education.'" hackeducation.com, 25 April 2015. Web. 17 December 2015.

Using Google Docs and Online Discussions to Increase Student Engagement with Shakespeare

I’m a big fan of reading Shakespeare aloud in class, assigning various roles to students, even if the reading process takes a little more time. Using online discussions has allowed me to do this more often than not since we can outsource the discussion to the digital sphere beyond the walls and time constraints of the daily class meeting. In fact, I’ve seen three additional benefits to “flipping” the class in this way: (1) the shy student rises to the occasion, voicing her insights with just as much volume and force as the more vocal learners; (2) the teacher is not the center of the discussion (even in Socratic seminars, decentering the role of the teacher becomes difficult) for I simply monitor and direct attention to certain highlights of the a-synchronized conversation, but I resist chiming in directly; (3) students later can cite each other in their papers, making the discussions an experience where they are reading and thinking for each other and not simply for the teacher.  Citing each other’s comments from the digital discussions also provides an authentic audience for the writing process and provides opportunity to practice digital literacy.

Here's a screen capture of an Online Discussion from one of my classes

I didn’t start this post to reflect on the benefits of online discussions; I wanted to share a strategy I’ve been using to keep ALL students engaged when trying to read a difficult scene aloud in class. My classes typically have about 20 students in them, and reading aloud only engages the handful of students who have a part in the given scene being read. How do you make sure the other students don’t “space out” and disengage from the experience? More importantly, how do you create an environment where they remain engaged and do so collaboratively? Short answer: create a back channel and distribute tasks which get them to read the text closely with intention.

A week or so ago, we were reading Act 4 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and we had made it to the last scene (Scene 3 which takes place at the English court). It’s a very difficult scene for high school students: it’s long, wordy, with plenty of digressions that are difficult to follow or unpack. I knew that the 16 or so students who would not be reading would have a really hard time staying focused, so I set up a Google Doc, changed the sharing settings such that anyone with the link could edit, and typed in four categories of interest: characteristics of England; characteristics of Scotland; the definition of a king; and lastly, the definition of a tyrant. I divided the non-readers into four groups accordingly, and their job was to get on the google doc to type bullet-pointed notes related to their assigned category as it related to the scene in question; meanwhile, the other handful of students read the scene aloud for all of us. Everyone was focused because we all had a task, and the entire class participated in a collaborative, close reading of a very difficult scene from the Scottish play. At the end, we put the document on the digital projector and reflected on the notes as a class – better yet, as a reading community. It was a huge success born out of a simple, no-brainer solution. More importantly, they made the notes together and constructed the meaning collaboratively, and I simply sat back and enjoyed the experience. Here's some screen caps of one classes notes at the end of the reading:

The Joys of Collaboration: Shakespeare across the Campuses

I’ve written and presented quite often on the joys of collaboration (go here) and on its benefits for improving my potential to be a truly student-centered teacher, and I had to return to the blog today to reflect more on this (more reflection here as well) because it really has been such an amazing month of multi-directional collaboration both in and outside the classroom, both at my school and beyond. There is something in the air right now, a kind of buzz of energy, which could only be made possible because it’s not just coming from me. And much to my pleasure, all of it in some way gets back to igniting student interest in Shakespeare and doing so authentically.

Seth Burgess presenting with me at OESIS

This weekend, I returned from Boston where I presented with Seth Burgess of Lausanne Collegiate School at the OESIS gathering. It was a fantastic conference! So many connections were made with other innovative, creative-thinking educators who stretched me to reflect more deeply and more critically about topics such as blended learning, student-centered pedagogy, and meaningful tech integration in the 21^st century classroom. (Shout out to @danamhuff, @mattscully, @tomgavin, @jeannettemelee, @mrtedp, and @ianhabs to name a few!) Seth and I hosted three workshops at OESIS on how we gamified a unit of study on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (check out our resources here), and one thing was made clear: our success was very much the result of our willingness to collaborate together and to do so adventurously, despite the risks involved. Another thing that stuck out for me was the fact that in both our testimonies it was made abundantly clear that students got excited about Shakespeare as a result of our curricular approach – an approach that valued student choice, autonomy, and independence. Seth even shared how his students, after finishing the unit, demanded that Lausanne Collegiate School put on a Macbeth performance in the theatre department. How cool is that!

When the conference concluded, I rushed to Boston’s Logan Airport on Sat. to fly back to DFW (along with a cabin full of Patriots fans… poor Cowboys…) so I could catch The Oakridge School production of “An Evening with Shakespeare.” Our campus’s English Department collaborated with Fine Arts this fall to stage two 50 min. productions of Richard III and The Merry Wives of Windsor. My directorial debut was the R3 production, and Brad Deborde, Oakridge Drama Dir., was in charge of staging Merry Wives. The students did an outstanding job! Simply amazing! They were excited, focused, and motivated, and part of the excitement, I think, was the collaborative approach Brad and I modeled for the students who got involved. It was meaningful for them to see the valued connection between English and Fine Arts; it made it something bigger and more profound. Oh! And we even cast the upper school Chemistry instructor (@DrJRoberts) as an extra! So many connections for the students to see in action! And it was fun for everyone!

Zoe M. as Richard III speaking to Caleb B. as Buckingham

The excitement hasn’t stopped, however. Following a tradition that was born here on Oakridge campus, Greenhill School is hosting an inter-institutional paper colloquium on William Shakespeare’s Midsummers Night’s Dream on February 29, 2016. Students from schools in the area are invited to craft papers on the Shakespearean Comedy, and those who submit their compositions will be considered for acceptance to present on Greenhill campus in Feb. of 2016. (For more info, feel free to reach out to Joel Garza, Upper School English Instructor at Greenhill).

Although Oakridge first hosted something similar in 2013 on James Joyce’s Dubliners and again in 2014 on Shakespeare’s Richard III, the reason it was as successful as it proved to be was due to the collaborative buy-in that schools like Greenhill generously provided. We not only hosted Greenhill and other schools on campus; we collaborated together online, using blogs and various media well before both colloquia ever took place. And now, the same is happening again, and it’s such a thrilling thing to watch unfold! Just the other day, Greenhill sent us an mp3 with their responses and insights about Scene 2 of Act 1 of MND; check it out:

Post-skype session selfie!

We of course were planning a response of our own when Mr. Garza reached out (right when we were about to record!), inspiring us to skype in to his class to share our thoughts in real time. Everyone was giddy; Shakespeare felt relevant and worthwhile to the students. Simply put, there was a lot of joy in the room.Of course, I can’t forget to mention that Greenhill will also be performing the Comedy outdoors on their campus October 22, 24, and 25, and they have graciously invited us to join the celebration in anticipation of the “midwinter” colloquium. The collaboration and connectedness just continues to grow!

Speaking of collaboration, Joel and I look forward to sharing some of these experiences tomorrow actually at the ITEC Iowa conference which is taking place as we speak. We’ll be presenting Oct. 13 at 11am here, and it’s free for anyone to join (much thanks to @zeitz for inviting us to share the joy with what looks like an awesome gathering of passionate educators!). Can’t wait to make more exciting connections with like-minded pedagogical adventurers in Iowa! Oh, and here's our wiki page for the conference presentation tomorrow (there's lots of resources to check out so make a point to visit the page). 

All this to say, it’s been a rewarding and joyful month in terms of making connections and collaborating with others; such encounters continue to inspire me to grow and improve as a passionate, student-centered educator. Hope to see you tomorrow!