Treat me like a para.

Are you Ms Coit's best friend?

Naming things, modeling things, sometimes co-influencing student work.

Shared instructional space and permission to make instructional decisions.

Now that I've read the whole story, I think the title is intentionally problematic.

The tone of these last two sentences is in such contrast to the previous two.

!

This strikes me as rationalization and ignorance. Is it driven by guilt?

I like this kind of a t-chart used with standards and it is helpful as a precursor to lesson planning.

What are the world making pedagogies educator communities might design and support?

The business models and leadership frameworks that support such manufacture and transmission seem to be an oppressive byproduct of disconnected systems. The disposition that we hope to foster among teachers involves a support of teacher agency and decision making that can disappoint those business models and leadership approaches.

How can poetry can be healing? How might teachers find a balance between naming systems of oppression, supporting the healing that is necessary daily, and fostering agency through literacies?

The two oppressive forces this introduction is concerned with: policing and the disproportionate harm to Black people during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a weighty backdrop for a journal issue.

As a white male teacher, should I aim to vocal and welcoming about issues of race? My sense is that I should but usually the vocal part is best handled by asserting the importance of authors of color, contemporary and historical.

I love this inquiry question because it seems to me that it can be revised for teachers to think about the way these dilemma's impact their classrooms, practices, and students.

A frame like this seems to have a lot of utility for teachers who see navigating discussions of race as a area of praxis. How might a ___ teacher name race and state its importance if students were ___?

This seems like a pivotal moment where the student is attempting to articulate a positive rationale for why an author would include the word in a written work.

Ebony makes the point that teachers can learn a great deal from looking back at their attempts to navigate these types of complex issues. This instance is illustrative, to me, of the power of having these kinds of interactions documented for teachers to think about when they're not having to navigate all the classroom dynamics.

I think this is an issue to meditate on. I've heard so many perspectives about the issue of the n-word in texts, and in use in classrooms. The word impacts students differently, to be sure, traumatizing some and silencing many, and schools' efforts to norm its use are fraught with complexity. School rules are places that don't navigate complexity well, but our classrooms must be. Knowing when and how to introduce perspectives like Ta-Nehisi Coates' is more art than science from a pedagogy standpoint. It requires a teacher to "read the room," and "read the school."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO15S3WC9pg

These two registers are interesting to think about, especially as they relate to the implications for teacher planning. What I want to communicate about race, or a text that surfaces issues of race, is a really different consideration than how I want to negotiate norms and support a conversation that ensures a measure of safety for participants.

Race as an issue is inescapable, now more than ever. Unfortunately, in our schools and curricula, race conversations are very escapable. We have so many ways of slipping out of equity conversations.

Again, I'm drawn to the word "complex" because of its repeated use and the way it resonates for me. These issues are complex because the relationship between cause and effect are so unpredictable. The rest of this paragraph does a nice job of illustrating why.

I was fascinated to learn about these paradoxes. I am always interested when educators and research reference complexity, which this article does quite a bit. To me, complex issues defy "best practices" that often take the shape of prescriptions by the time they get to practicing teachers. Instead, I think that complex issues require safe-to-fail experiments.

I can reflect on the ways I've created "safe to fail" spaces for me to talk about race with students and for students to share their growing and shifting perspectives about race with each other. I think there are approaches that have felt successful for me, but no recipes that will be guaranteed to work for someone else.

I wonder about the role our language plays in this. I personally want to work on adopting language that asserts the literacy of students who have experienced failure in schools, or are part of an underserved group of students. I think about the immigrant students who are learning English in my school and how we can talk about them in ways that reduce all the learning they're doing, and all the ways they are literate, to an assessment of how well they know English.

Data Driven Instruction is such a force in schools here in the Denver area where I teach. I've seen instances where schools are so hungry for data that they push out hastily created writing assessments with no real concern for how the writing tasks are presented to the students. When students don't engage or aren't given the time to write as well as they can, the numerical scores the writing earns, lumped together in satisfyingly clean spreadsheets, drive a newfound sense of "urgency" among school leaders to "close gaps." This vicious cycle deficitizes writers and numbs teachers in my experience.

I think it is so important to interrogate the concept of "best practices." This article does a nice job of contrasting dominant practices or trends in the teaching of English Language Arts with the decisions made by a teacher who wants to foreground writing by writing with students. The author's stance is all the more important because she's committed to exploring Blackness with her Black students.

There is so much our schools need to unlearn in order to be the sites of learning and growth we want them to be. This is a heavy but valuable list.

I appreciate the "pedagogical recycling" here. In this case, Johnson is repurposing an assignment she discovered in a professional text in order to research the equity-driven inquiry question driving her practice. It is all the more powerful because of the student work which illustrates to some degree the engagement of the young writers.

This session was an important fertile ground for this critique. It seems to me that the dream boards shared by Jennifer and Autumn, along with the stories the researchers shared, acted as a counter narrative to the picture created by Google image searches.

This establishes a clear need for educators to help develop counter narratives in order to challenge a discouraging picture of the future for Black girls.

The approach that Jennifer and Autumn used with Tamika and Malia is inspiring. To me it seems like this design session and the conversation that accompanied it really suggest some powerful ways of listening to the dreams of young people.

This is a highly positive practice that can build momentum. It also follows the old axiom of "don't water the rocks."

This is a goal I can set, or a reflective stance I can take. I know I can't be perfect when I'm learning to be antiracist, but I can think about how I champion marginalized groups and in whose company.

This is true but complex in complex human systems.

Public demands a consideration of audience that is really different, especially if you want to preserve the working relationship with the person you're calling out.

Folks will often empathize with a person who is called out, especially when they show they are hurt. The person with the mic is often seen as the offender when they are wanting to educate.

Moves!

As schools are obsessed with data, this contention seems well supported by all kinds of data. I'm thankful that this piece provides guidance about how to take on the inequities that persist in schools in the form of curricular biases and practices rooted in white supremacy.

I ask my students to respond to reading using Says Means Matters charts. I like them as a flexible tool that provides an opportunity to speak to the text's relevance to their lives. Here's an example of how I model the practice.

Action is important. It isn't sufficient to become more learned about racism and inequity if we aren't prepared to do anything to challenge the status quo and disrupt it.

For a short, collaborative read, I might begin reading here.

I would end the short, collaborative read here.

This student is pushing back on the content and the critical lens. It is interesting that Sarigianides saw her as "resistant."

I appreciate the stance Sarigianides takes and the scholarship behind it. She is surfacing negative stereotypes about youth and deconstructing them with youth. There is a layer of complexity to this work in the schoolhouse, too. Adults and teens interacting in schools have to negotiate norms across a range of interactions and power dynamics. How does her position as a professor and researcher give her a necessary distance from the daily interactions? Does that distance obscure her view of teens?

This discussion about the way texts and readers are treated reminds me of Kenneth Goodman's important criticism of phonics instruction and inauthentic reading assessment. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kgoodman/papers02.html

'In this politicizing of reading instruction, "a virtual censorship of authentic literature and critical thinking enters the classroom through two back doors, which bear the mislabels of science and standards."'

This is an important consideration in instructional design. What are some ways we can build on youth assets in our teaching?

The shutdown was necessitated by the lack of capacity in our healthcare system. This statement seems to name natural immunity as the end goal without mentioning the capacity of the healthcare system.

This is interesting rah-rah rhetoric even while he seems to be hiding from the medical and scientific realities of the problem.

By reopening, the school increases those proximate and frequent contacts exponentially. They have the technical infrastructure to engage learners collaboratively while maintaining physical distance but they're in a hurry to resume with the stubborn improvement plans that are put on hold, which they boast about strangely in this message. They could ask school communities to think together about how they can use the tools at their disposal to not risk more lives and strain the health care system that is clearly ill-equipped. The subtext is that they're in a hurry. Why not marshal the patience and collaborative ingenuity to care for every life while our scientists design testing, treatments and a vaccine?

This seems easy to fact check but also very premature.

Here is how she describes the separation. There are gaping holes in the outline of this. What would treatment look like at these makeshift facilities? How will schools staff up these quarantine centers that are fundamental to this plan? How do we keep these folks who are separated from everyone from becoming an immediate drain on the public health resources that led to the closures in the first place? Don't you have to explain to your student body how this separation process will look and work? Won't every parent want to know?

Here is what is also basic- universities are cornerstones of our democracy and our economy. Our government must find ways to shelter them temporarily from the short term economic impact of this pandemic.

The desperation they're expressing is based on short-sightedness of the moment, and also well founded mistrust in our government that is in denial about the need to protect us economically.

Everyone was told to go home so these centers of learning wouldn't be hotbeds of viral infection. She wants to reconvene them while only paying brief lip service to the health considerations that must be put in place as soon as you give the virus a place to flourish.

This is really a hole in the argument. Here's the crux of the tradeoff that she says is too great for us to be patient with the science.

No mention of all the people quarantined at that hotel and the medical staff they've provided to care for them.

This is a really weak premise. Consider this: if schools reopen with a byzantine health and safety plan, many students will choose to forgo starting college or delay completing their degrees because they don't want to contract a deadly virus that is still not understood.

Chris Rogers's tested out his Morlocks analogy for underground writers in our Educator Innovator webinar. 2 minute, must-watch clip. https://youtu.be/NCRaLMIKKSQ

How do officials benefit from rampant ignorance and unassailable privilege?

How does learning, and knowledge dismantle privilege and empower the oppressed?

What stands out to you in this story?

What does that mean to you?

Why does this matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

What stands out to you in this passage?

What does that mean to you?

Why does this matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

What stands out to you in this reflection?

What does that mean to you?

Why does this matter to you? Why should it matter to others?

Teachers teaching teachers is interesting because Paul Allison navigates the rules of the road on roads less travelled. Also, iterative design by teachers sequestered at home with their kids, like Katie McKay will produce the kinds of innovations that don't come from ed tech start ups. I'm revealing my NWP bias here. Lots of orgs are Zooming and pushing folks into breakout groups. The ones with deep experience with distributed, networked learning will learn and adapt best.

Studies of large organizational systems reveal that nurses need to break rules in order to provide patients empathetic care, and that most teacher (in the UK...but also everywhere) make the decisions they do to survive or get by. These observations are evidence of broken "rule networks."

These chaotic situations amplify the inequities that are there every day.

I've been thinking about the rules, and rule networks that bound professional learning in public schools to traditional paradigms and practices. As our culture in general adopts new rules of the road in so many places and spaces, how do we proceed in safer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D22BOOGbpFM? Where are we inadvertently creating rules of the road that tell school stakeholders, "Quick, merge onto the interstate at 65 miles per hour?"

This "weird mood" is probably the mark of consequential work that will help open the eyes of White students and also open communication channels between these kiddos as they move on to high school.

This sounds like a safe and necessary conversation for both students. I want this for White students- the chance to know that their preconceived notions can be hurtful. This allows them to be allies rather than be defensive about their misconceptions.

This questioning highlights for students the pressures they're under that they might not be conscious of. What a great use of a text, showing students how they probably find it challenging to do the right thing and stand up against oppression.

I appreciate the insight into classroom practice. This is an activity I can adopt and adapt.

This is something for students to be grateful for, and a privilege for them to unpack. This is something worth collectively making meaning of.

This stance makes such a powerfully positive assumption about students' ability to grasp and respond to contemporary issues of inequity.

Keep our eyes open to discovery. Inquiry approaches help set the conditions for this kind of openness.

How do we establish hyper local conflict efficacy while engaged in participatory action research?

Productive conflict surfaces pain points and theories of causality from different stakeholder perspective, but does so without getting the point of non-acceptance.

Having teachers participate in laboratory classroom residencies has had this impact, but communicating the importance to experts is a challenge, and the tyranny of experts is to deny the importance of practitioners gaining insight or seeing new possibilities.

I like creating and testing protocols with peers to develop productive, generative routines. We set aside protocols when the routine suggests new possibilities, and develop new protocols when the routine fails to be productive or generative.

The development of rule networks is critical right now in education. We've needed to establish rule networks to help practitioners understand the unreliability of standardized test data and develop agentive identities that aren't bound to those data sets. Now, in the absence of standardized tests in the US (they've been cancelled this year), charged with helping students learn while schools are closed, we need to establish rule networks that foster empathy and responsiveness to the needs of the community. At the same time we need rule networks that allow for experimentation and discovery.

The tyranny of the expert seems in part to deny the validity of the experience of the practitioners.

Practitioners gain valuable perspective when they are engaged with a community of practice. Inter-organizational networks seem vital to the development of meaningful participatory action research.

This reminds me of the inefficiency of educational technology staff and professional learning in schools. Trainers and coaches can be seen as inefficient because change is slow and implementation of digital tools is uneven and seemingly detached from performance metrics. Still, having people who are knowledgeable and capable of providing job-embedded coaching and support is vital at a time like this, when schools are called upon to be resilient.

This concept was discussed in yesterday's webinar. As we look to the scientific community, we instinctively expect them to be able to present a complete picture of COVID-19, and we expect problem solving to be top down and efficient.

Both of these feel like false choices.

These questions suggest the importance of hyperlocal communities of practice that are engaged in safe-to-fail experiments under these larger areas of shift and potential inquiry.

The governor of New York just proposed sharing ventilators nationally to help states meet their needs. He's also redistributing ventilators around the state.

These conditions seem like a very high bar nationally but perhaps not locally or hyperlocally.

In education we've taken temporary measures related to technology use and access. Students without devices are provided devices by schools, and also provided free access to the Internet.

Teachers, many of whom have had little training, are suddenly charged with teaching online.

This is particularly true because of the use of AI. "Dressing for the Surveillance Age," by John Seabrook explains how researchers have to interact with the surveillance systems in order to develop ways to trick them.

Goldstein’s research is ultimately aimed at understanding these vulnerabilities, and making A.I. systems more secure. He explained that he and his student Zuxuan Wu were able to create a pattern that confuses the network using the same trial-and-error methods employed in training the neural network itself. “If you just try random patterns, you will never find an adversarial example,” he said. “But if you have access to the system you can find a pattern to exploit it.” To make the sweatshirt, they started with a pattern that looked like random static.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/16/dressing-for-the-surveillance-age

In the development of a medical defense against a pandemic, it is vital that we remember that the horrible kinds of triage decisions hospitals are making right now would be less likely if these kinds of digitally mediated emergency measures were developed and ready to deploy.

This kind of technology is ubiquitous here in the US, too. Our infrastructure is just more commercial by nature. This NY Times piece details just how trackable we all are using data gathered from mobile apps. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opinion/tracking-phone-data.html

Isn't it a misrepresentation to say they're giving the books away? Openlibrary.org is loaning books for 14 days only.

The scarcity of ebooks at public libraries is something I've grown accustomed to. The Internet Archive loaning will allow teachers and students greater access to learning resources that are scarce for the poor, and for public school teachers, many of whom routinely buy books for their own classrooms. Ebooks are an innovation that hasn't ever reached its promise in large part due to the economic barriers the publishing industry maintains through phony, arbitrary scarcity they impose.

No mention of students in poverty or public school teachers' lack of resources.

This seems like a misrepresentation. There is a desperate need for students to have access to electronic books during the coronavirus pandemic. Schools and libraries are being shuttered while millions lose their jobs. That justifies more liberal lending practices to support education. It is hard to imagine a more apt scenario in which students would need unfettered access to ebooks.

This window into a teacher's decision making and instructional approach with her students is instructive. Students who hadn't passed an assessment would ordinarily engage in test-prep remediation. Here, the teacher chose to apply her new learning in order to provide the students with a learning opportunity that focused on their sense of identity, and the expertise they drew from lived experience. It strikes me that the teacher and the students were all learning here, which is inspiring.

This means that students who sign up for 365 accounts using @aurorak12.org accounts can play in multiplayer worlds together, but youth from different districts wouldn't be able to play together at the DWP Young Writers Camp.

I really like the idea of an after-action report that allows learners to reflect critically on the experience. Terrific that this will inform your practice moving forward. It strikes me that this class will learn things about how they learn, and you'll make collective discoveries.

This speaks to the power of goals, reflection and agency. I might add that this type of work, combined with the adaptability and flexibility you argue for above, present the opportunity for discovery and even more powerful learning in times of trouble.

It strikes me that being adaptable, honest and resilient is the way to not have it all figured out and work through challenges. This, too, is a teachable moment in which the facilitator doesn't have to have it all figured out.

Speaking personally, I like to create a little disorder and abnormality regularly, which hopefully helps us all be a little more flexible and collaborative in times like these. In my case, I hope to achieve coherence day-to-day, and will seek to achieve that in my online efforts with learners now.

I think it is great that you've made your advice to preservice teachers public. My email inbox is full of Spam from Actively Learn, Newsela, Blackboard, Flipgrid, and PBS LearningMedia, (which is the message I most welcome.)

It is really helpful to contrast the advice of an instructional designer like yourself, who is thinking about higher ed and K12 issues.

Yes to informality! Informal, low-stakes opportunities can communicate that:

1. The facilitator is tinkering, which might ease participant concern.
2. That online learning can be a place of inquiry and discovery, where participant interest, questions and concerns can spark inquiry.

I appreciate this notion of developing roles that participants can play in networked learning.

What roles do you start with? What roles do participants suggest? How can distributed leadership help monitor for whose voices are underrepresented, or who isn't able to access the learning or interaction?

This is such a powerful idea that can be messy for the teacher, leader, or designer (I'll go with facilitator). What are some ways the facilitator can provide these choices and monitor the various channels?

As a learner and MOOC enthusiast, I love the opportunity for participant-to-participant interaction in various channels.

The feedback loop here is important. In this case the adequacy is in large part due to the stance of the teacher. This written work, according to Everett, was ungraded. It also involved a teacher who was "geeking out" with metaphors while asking students to take risks while writing metaphors. There is a lot of support and safety in this loop.

Our failure to approach Black male students with an asset focus and an inquiry stance probably contributes to the number of students who turn their backs on school, or understandably walk away when schools oppress them.

This text was the focus of another Marginal Syllabus conversation in February of 2019. https://educatorinnovator.org/learn-with-marginal-syllabus-february-when-school-is-not-enough-understanding-the-lives-and-literacies-of-black-youth/

These kinds of literacies help us challenge and change systems. I'm struck by the way schools trumpet the successes of students like Shawn, which allows them to maintain the status quo, even as students like Shawn decry the injustices they face at school.

I'm struck here by two things:

1. She's empowering oppressed learners and rejecting notions of pedagogy that position students as receptacles to be filled.
2. She's diving deep into metaphor while teaching with metaphor.

New genres as forms of composition have the potential to recast the writing we ask youth to do in academic spaces. Many new forms are digital, this seems to privilege paper, pencil and music instruments as part of social writing aided by teaching artists.

This phrasing is so vital because of the way it focuses on the assets of youth. Schools can do a way better job of identifying the strengths of writers by asserting at the outset that they have many strengths.

This is powerful to me. I appreciate Alex's storytelling and reflection here. His discontent with his own teaching is an epiphany that carries with it a lot of vulnerability. I love how it becomes a springboard for more flexible, responsive approaches.

It helps me reflect on my own teaching: What are all they times I've wanted to be proud of my instruction but something about the dynamics of it seemed off? As a designer of instruction in my own classroom, what are some times where the inequity of a situation struck me and prompted me to change, even though I had checked many boxes of the elements of good instruction?

Societies have to be saved from the pitfalls of their desires by agentive members who fight society in order to bring about change.

"...he can do something about that, too."

"Now if I were a teacher..."

"What I am trying to suggest..."

The word choice of "fixes" and "problems" are revealing. They suggest to me that this writer is focused on complicated aspects of a complex problem

I would challenge the word "pickers."

This really asks about how we can help teachers become more familiar with possible instructional resources AND how can we help them better interpret the results they get when they begin to incorporate instructional materials into their practice. I think the integration of these materials into instruction is a complex process, as is the interpretation of results.

Are teachers designers and practitioners? Or, are they functionaries who are supposed to follow the script and give students their educational medicine? This synopsis suggests that teachers are dumbing down curriculum- which may be true- but the rationale for doing so might be based on complex factors that don't stand up to an ordered analysis. Resource materials in the hands of designers and practitioners will be employed in all kinds of unique ways and modified for really practical reasons. This article talks about who teachers trust. It is important to understand that practitioners who encounter myriad design challenges shouldn't trust people who can't relate to the demands of the practice or the complexity of those challenges.

If EdReports rated Newsela, they'd need to consider why teachers use it, and how they use it. I'd guess the complexity of an online text repository with associated dashboards and assessments would prove too complex for the analysis. They'd probably end up trying to identify scopes and sequences from something that is more akin to a bookshelf.

This is a new spin on an age old question about whether curriculum is being implemented with fidelity. Seen through the lens of the curriculum expert, the teaching should follow a scope and sequence which is aligned to standards, and quality is something that has high cognitive demand and produces student work that is evidence of a students' practice of the skills related to the standard. Deviations from the ordered plans can be rated in terms of quality.

I'd make an analogy that this is like looking at a basketball team's playbook and judging the quality of the plays. Experts can analyze the sport, the coach, the team, and the individual players through the lens of the playbook and the analysis has value. The question is about the limits of this value.

What does the analysis say about plays that break down? Or, what does this analysis say about point guards who nod their heads in the huddle but abandon plays called from the sidelines when they see cracks in the defense or scoring opportunities? I would guess the expert analysis would be critical about the quality of the offensive play. Luckily, basketball analysts understand that the game isn't played on paper. That's why Doug Moe could run a motion offense in Denver with no set plays and consistently take his team deep into the playoffs. That's why Michael Jordan took so long to adjust to running the triangle offense in Chicago. Basketball plays aren't written for analysts to read and evaluate, they're written to guide a team's decision making in a complex game where defense tries to stop you. Basketball coaches understand that players are practitioners.

Similarly, curriculum is written to guide instruction but it cannot factor in all the complexities of a real classroom or school. Teachers are practitioners and the decisions they make are highly contextual, situated in a complex environment with many logistical considerations that curriculum writers are unable to factor in.

Important to note the commercial lens here- what is eating into a traditional marketshare- as well as the focus on the instructional materials rather than the instruction.

The data set for either study is ordered, rather than the more complex data set that would result from looking at teaching and learning.

Changing the race of characters in familiar stories is an approach to equity work in classrooms that I've seen in other texts in the #marginalsyllabus.

Even Cinderella Is White: (Re)Centering Black Girls’ Voices as Literacies of Resistance is a text about asking students how fairy tales would be different if the characters were from different racial backgrounds.

The curriculum considerations in schools can be entrenched in district politics and financial considerations. It is vital that teachers weigh the decisions that rest with them which can spark meaningful changes from the classroom level out.

DiAngelo argues that white people should try to "be less white." I wonder how Tanner feels about that idea, which seems markedly different than understanding whiteness as a racial identity rife with challenges.

I'm curious to dig into this notion of the logics of white supremacy. One such logic is to confine the definitions of "racism" and "white supremacy" to overt actions of violence and gross forms of discrimination, while dismissing more subtle but pervasive forms.

I visited my daughter's class last year- she's in fourth grade- and students were presenting poster sessions about famous Coloradans. Several of the students studied Chief Little Raven, including my daughter. In each poster session about the Southern Arapahoe Chief, white children would speak about the duplicitous actions of the whites and I was glad to hear the students talk plainly about violence and theft. I went home that day wondering how those white students were making sense of the profound messages their studies held for them about their own race.

I grew up understanding acts of racial hatred and intimidation as "white supremacy." White tolerance for inequitable conditions, and the failure to investigate the ways white privilege perpetuates inequity are at issue here.

A key point in this piece and, to me, an important distinction in equity work.

The author is explicit about trying to get a feel for a constructive way forward.

How best to harness students' curiosity about a place while also highlighting for them the way their background or experience with a place supports their understanding of issues with global importance.

I take this to mean that a critical understanding of a place requires grappling with a place's history. It strikes me that it might also challenge educators to think about how a place is contested space, or space with potential.

This trend goes unnoticed because the costs are bundled into the rising costs of college education. The public's lack of access to real data is a by product.

Public schools' deep ties to the publishing industry go back a long way and understanding them can help us understand the inequities we see in schools. Public education is expensive and very much for profit.

This may very well be the trajectory that the web has set us on, but a new business model will accompany the change. Right now, it appears this business model is in flux.

Michelle's work connects with #marginalsyllabus

These are significant benefits to DoOO. This work as a response to the LMS and commercial platforms for online courses is important for institutions of higher learning. It also important that there is a consistent equity oriented critique of DoOO that can inform iteration and continuous improvement. While the LMS is an appropriate villain and target, resisting the tyranny of the LMS isn't the problem we need higher ed to solve. DoOO is as strong as the learning it leads to about equity.

So important to remember all that data cannot show us and what it will likely make us blind to.

I imagine a disclaimer any time we look at spreadsheets meant to represent a human system. Something like, "Remember, this data presentation is prone to make us talk about people as if they are ants in an ant colony responding predictably to stimuli or data processors that can be programmed. It is only useful if we can resist these temptations and maintain our humanity while we inquire about human systems."

That work is available online here (first 3 pages), and here (last 2 pages).

This talk is a must-watch for educators today. https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg

This is a powerful example of youth activism that has helped shed a light on the scarcity of Black girl characters in classroom libraries and in the books English classrooms foreground. https://youtu.be/U2nN01Pwv_E

The curriculum subtly teaches them they belong in a lower station while reinforcing for white students that their stories have primacy.

I didn't notice this in my first read. It is a link to a lesson plan on Read Write Think. It strikes me that the kind of social annotation we're engaged in here could help groups of teachers share their reactions to these plans and results from teaching them.

A great lens for teachers and school leaders.

It is so important that Alexander's work foregrounds this piece. The problem of mass incarceration must guide the decisions teachers make in the classroom. Her writing should change syllabi, revise rubrics and rearrange the furniture in classrooms.

Highlighting the importance of the knowledge we already possess revalues the voices of the students and the stories they can gather from family and community members.

The hope with new technologies is that we can continually press forward in negotiating what is socially sanctioned. As norms for political discourse change with the advent of new media, how can we put our fingers on the scales of justice to advance equity? I hope we can advance this type of writing.

It would be interesting to see this data as well.

We need to know the means by which they grew these audiences. How, specifically, are they operating in these social networks?

This is a kind of reading assignment that can help students see the transferability of the thinking strategies we bring to both our neighborhoods and the texts we use to study them.

One of my big takeaways from this reading, which for me includes the conversation we had about the text in the webinar (embedded below), is the importance of Tara's inquiry stance. When she was asked to teach using Engage New York's Common Core-aligned curriculum, she asserted both her agency and her curiosity by inviting her class to research and address an issue that resonated with them. To me, her process as a teacher is instructive. https://youtu.be/Gq9AQvjh_PY

Literacy here fosters agency for youth as they understand their place in complex systems.

This seems like a replicable way to ask youth to develop counter narratives at the same time they develop their voice as writers.

This specific explanation reminds me how important it is for us to unpack the word "urban" when we talk about urban schools. Understanding the power of Kara's teaching moves requires us to understand how those moves are responsive and community-specific.

Extending the focus on literacy to non-traditional texts, events and places is vital equity work. We have to understand how biased the traditional framing of literacy is.

This reminds me of an NPR article I read a few years back about more historically accurate maps of the Native American Nations. The type of research and composition that lead to the development of these maps could guide the development of research and composition efforts in schools. I like the article because it points to a more accurate historical reference as well as activist work of a young person.

This is something that feels both subtle and horribly pervasive in the way we think about Native people, always presenting them in historical contexts rather than as part of the modern world.

While there is much we need to unlearn in schools about Native people, the challenge of unlearning is compounded by a supply and demand issue with publishers and teachers who expect their literature about Indigenous cultures to match the general stereotypes we've been raised on.

As I'm thinking jotting notes about what "urban" connotes in this text and what it means to me, I'm reminded of my one and only experience attending the NWP's Urban Sites conference. Unlike other conferences I'd attended hosted by various organizations, this literacy conference foregrounded equity. I remember Black educators remarking during the close of the conference that they felt heard at the urban sites conference in ways they never did at other kinds of convenings. Since urban is so often used interchangeably with negative terms, I want to think more about how it could mean equity-focused, or be related to a predisposition to listening for understanding amidst diverse perspectives.

Here "urban" seems to be synonymous with troubled.

In our conversation about this piece the authors discussed how the word "urban" has come to mean all kinds of things when we discuss the contexts for teaching and learning. Reader respondents also asked what the article meant by "urban." On my second read through this piece, I want to pay attention to what the term signifies here at the same time I pay closer attention to what the word means for me. I've described the schools I work in as urban for so long, I can become more intentional about what I hope to communicate about the place, the students and the teachers' experiences.

Billy must be traveling for work, maybe moving to Bath.

I believe the introduction of texts like Christopher Bell's TED Talk, "Bring on the female superheroes!" and reading activities like the Twitter think aloud in the video below shift students' positioning to an agentive position, where they can choose to shape public discourse. https://youtu.be/bwbkhqlD2XE

https://youtu.be/oAVO9H264aw

Antero Garcia provides background on the writing of this piece in this clip from the full Educator Innovator webinar.

What an important issue to point out. I wonder how the #marginalsyllabus could help with non-dominant scholarship? We should certainly interrogate why other cultures' scholarship is seen as less when we so publicly struggle with our public ed systems.

The transition to asking people how they will vote in response to the dizzying 24 hour news cycle is a key strategy that I appreciate here.

Will you remember that children in cages were a thing on the news, and a policy initiated by our government?

Will you remember that violence against women in the workplace was minimized, as has been our tradition?

Will you accept "thoughts and prayers" again as a response to the shooting of unarmed people in a place of worship?

This reminds me of the Future Backwards facilitation process

This makes me think that the initial processes I'll demonstrate to leadership teams are scaffolds to inquiry, not rigid processes to follow toward an objective.

Underlying these practices is an ethos of invitation that can be precarious on the modern web but must continue. We should be able to learn about trust by engaging this way, and not just in the sense that we encounter so many people who are all trustworthy, but in the sense that we have to think about trust in a transactional way. We have to seek out new ways to establish boundaries and trust at the same time in order to understand the true potential of web based collaboration.

This can be a notoriously hard task. In part of an awesome address to K-State, Jim Groom spoke about his experiments teaching with Wikipedia. (at 16:50 of the video below) https://youtu.be/Ne6jV1kefp4 His talk is an important one for folks thinking about how where these OER OEP conversations have been, are now, and should be headed.

I appreciate the production centered nature of this approach, they learn about OER by using them, critiquing them and helping to create them.

It is helpful to recognize the impatient leaders' idle hands are the devil's playthings. Leading experiments is action oriented and allows stakeholders to do the work and the thinking where we need them to stay cognitively and affectively engaged.

Master schedule building at APS is a situation where people with years of experience are needed to pull it off AND where we need early warnings about complacency.

This may help explain why.

This may help explain why.

This may help explain why.

Staff turnover is an example of a complex situation that we can always understand in hindsight. How might we conduct experiments to give us data about retention?

Ferrari vs rainforest is a good analogy, and "unknown unknowns" an important concept.

This might help explain why we are capturing stories.

This is probably because dealing with complicated and simple problems is much more straightforward, and leaders can provide people with simple answers that satisfy. If everyone wants problems to be simpler, we all have a confirmation bias about presenting problems this way. Math instruction is really helpful here. How often do teachers simplify a complicated math problem for students so that both the teachers and the students have a more gratifying experience? There is a kind of agony for teachers to see students take an approach that will lead to a wrong answer and some frustration. For students, the uncertainty that comes with not having a simple formula when they approach a problem is something that can cause them a heightened fear of failure.

A second point about the complex domain- if an organization is not sure if a situation is complicated or complex, it is important to know that assuming the context is complex, and therefore experimenting, usually requires less cost and produces more insight.

This applies in classroom settings with teens and in online professional learning networks with adults who write about their work in public.

Important to note as we seek to apply theory in complex environments, like the English class, like the large public high school, like the urban school district.

Interesting to think about when leading teams. The saying, "Ask for forgiveness, not permission," is born out of systems where people expect to be denied permission to do things that they deem rational. Moving from managing to leading might be about asking people to think through actions, possible results and consequences without denying them permission. If leaders acknowledge the complexity of the systems they work in, they can reassure people who take risks while allowing those people to experience the weight of risk.

I'm nearing the end of the book Obliquity by John Kay where he talks about decisions being direct or oblique, and how the direct decisions are efforts to impose order while oblique decisions are grounded in listening and experimentation born out of an awareness that complex systems have a lot of unknowns.

This is something I've observed working with school leaders over time. They have different attitudes about about messiness and they understand unordered issues differently, but it is a learning curve they all navigate.

Though this reads as a software plug, it also describes in accessible terms a method for oblique approach to leadership that operates differently than we all have learned to expect leaders to act in support of programs or objectives.

This is interesting in relationship to implementation. Curriculum adoption is something I've had long experience with and I've noticed how the central office, literacy leaders in particular, get so passionate about the use of "best practices" that they talk about teachers as enlightened or unenlightened depending on their acceptance of classroom approaches. What is lost in the labelling of teachers as good or bad is an honest conversation about the real human challenges of teaching diverse, transient populations of students. What is also lost is a discussion of any successes that arise from methods outside of those that are prescribed because leaders can get so fixated on proving that the curriculum adoption and strategy approach is effective and worth the cost.

Here is an argument for oblique, or indirect, feedback methods like story capture.

Finding teachable moments in the darkest of places.

I like to think this can be easy and boring, that this is within reach. I like to think that men can socialize better behavior by moving the lines of what's accepted among men every day. It isn't a favor to women when we take a stand against abuse, it is capably filling the roles we know well and aspire to, the roles of good husbands, coworkers, brothers, fathers, uncles and boyfriends. In each of these roles we can ask for better behavior from the men around us to help socialize better norms among men.

Compassion and accountability are important to think about when men want treatment to help them deal with their issues, or even as we think about what consequences men should suffer when they've been abusive. Culturally, we seem to be coming to terms with the number of stories and the different degrees of violence or inappropriateness in the stories we hear. The moment calls on us to:

1. believe women
2. let men respond to accusations
3. think about the ways we want various industries to respond to abuse
4. think about how to help men who want treatment

I found this theory of action that I drafted for the consideration of participant facilitators. I would hesitate to say that it was the theory of action of CLMOOC, because our intention setting and planning was messier than this, but I remember it being well received, generating discourse across the planning team and being regarded as helpful. I clearly brought a working definition to the work evidenced by this draft.

This is an example of a specific place where designers can reflect on the design and the participation that resulted. Instead of asking if a MOOC achieved a utopian ideal that it never endeavored to, we can ask if the invitations were open-ended. We can ask if they still are.

This work strikes me as important and reminds me that we can place black women writers and related equity issues at the center of our curriculum for all students. The stories and issues we deem worthy of study communicate their cultural importance.

https://youtu.be/WYwTGLdnXkU A student of mine had seen me riding my new skateboard on her SnapChat story. I looked over her shoulder while she scrolled through a morning's worth of snaps at our high school, trying to show me two videos of me somewhere in a volume of images text and videos. I knew students at my school stay tuned into this daily story all the time but I'm still a little awestruck the way she navigates and filters through this media stream on a mobile app. They compose Snaps that have a longer life span- 24 hours- to contribute to this ongoing social stream that gives new meaning to the 24 hour news cycle.

In this context, helping students acquire skills is a school's achievement.

In public education we feel this pressure to say that _ results in higher achievement, as if connecting school to the world in which students live isn't the goal, but a means to a measured end. It seems like connecting school to the world in which students live creates a learning network we can cultivate as opposed to looking at student work as a deliverable that we want to weigh and measure. If we have an asset-focused view of students, connecting school to their lives will serve them and their talents better.

Here's the feed with youth writing about Black Lives Matter on YVL.

I appreciate the notion that enlightened self-interest on the part of learners and a community could lead to meaningful school reform. It can also lead to the creation of pathways in our current systems.

This is a fascinating notion that I had never considered about #connectedlearning. Illich presents funding for school and 3rd spaces as mutually incompatible at least which I don't know if I buy.

Good school, rich school; Bad school, poor school via the Atlantic

Connecticut is not the first state to wrestle with the conundrum caused by relying heavily on local property taxes to fund schools; since the 1970s, nearly every state has had litigation over equitable education, according to Michael Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University. Indeed, the CCJEF lawsuit, first filed in 2005, is the state’s second major lawsuit on equity. The first, in 1977, resulted in the state being required to redistribute some funds among districts, though the plaintiffs in the CCJEF case argue the state has abandoned that system, called Educational Cost Sharing.

This reminds me of the kind of matchmaking that happens in #ds106's assignment bank and the #clmooc make bank.

He seems to indicate that our expenditures to combat poverty are in response to the demands of the poor, not worthy efforts to create level playing fields or to acknowledge interdependence.

The blog post promoting this reading asks a question I like:

How might CLMOOC be an answer to Illich’s critique? Are there other answers?

The professional learning experiment he describes in this paragraph has been taken up in a way by CLMOOC and others leveraging hypothes.is. The CLMOOC community's interest in CL principles constitutes his "intellectual match." The discussion we're having here in the margins is also further distributed across email inboxes when we reply to each other. Discussion might also take place in synchronous webinars if we choose to organize them.