Ed Camps / Honing the craft

An Ed Camp in Roswell, GA focusing on the teaching of English

I’m loving the new movement towards Ed Camps. The idea of taking control of our own staff development is a long time overdue. I’m so excited, a colleague and I are going to host our own Ed Camp in March.

I don’t mind that administrators try to ensure that we continue honing our craft. In fact, I think it’s an often overlooked component of what we do. We talk about being “life-long learners,” but with a family, attempts at outside hobbies, papers to grade, lessons to plan (even if only in my head), and life to live, it’s tough to get find time to work on being a better teacher. Sometimes I’m blown away by the books others read, the conferences attended, and projects completed by so many of my peers. If I’m honest, they make me somewhat self-conscious. I don’t like having my inadequacies pointed out by someone else’s competency.

So, I’m glad that we have staff development, excuse me, professional development. No one asked me, but I would have gone with Staff Training and Development just for fun.

The problem though is that this well intended element of our profession is dominated by people who don’t do what we do. They taught one to twenty-five years ago, but we all know how quickly teacher amnesia sets in. Heck, I forget how to teach over Spring Break.

So Ed Camps are the way to go. To be clear, not the Ed Camps that are really Staff Training and Development with a new name, but the REAL Ed Camps. Those lead by teachers with teachers as students and collaborators.

Ownership and relevance are important for meaningful learning.

We know that ownership and relevance are important when learning. If we do our jobs right, we’re trying to give these things to our students. The question though is if we know what’s important for learning, why am I sitting in a theater listening to someone go over differentiation for the fifteenth time without the presenter even attempting to discuss relevance.

Jack Hussard says meaningful learning comes from the following:

• Non-arbitrary, non-verbatim, substantive incorporation of new knowledge into cognitive structure.
• Deliberate effort to link new knowledge with higher order concepts in cognitive structure
• Learning related to experiences with events or objects.
• Affective commitment to relate new knowledge to prior learning.

Ed Camps, by giving teachers control of their learning, do these things. I’m going to my first Ed Camp next weekend. In my sixteen years of teaching, I’ve never been more excited about a training or conference.

There are many ways teachers can take back control of our profession. I’m excited to be a part of whatever comes next.

Minecraft – Lord of the Flies – IT Dept

One of the many things I’m trying to change is to slow down and let the kids absorb a lesson. With such a huge focus on standards and curriculum, it’s easy for me to get lost in getting everything done. 

I’ve tried many things over the years to introduce Lord of the Flies to them. Giving them time alone, thought experiments, prewrites about war. It’s usually mildly successful, but meh…take it or leave it. I just haven’t taken the time to do it right. This year, I used Minecraft to introduce the novel.

If you’re not sure what Minecraft is, or how it could work in your classroom, watch this intro to MinecraftEDU.

This year, I created a map of the island in WorldPainter, a program that lets you build custom Minecraft maps. Then I let the kids explore the island for two days. 

Here’s a quick tour of the island and the actual world I made.

They had to journal about each day’s experience as if they were actually trying to survive. Quick time out to say, EVERYONE did their journals! The only instructions were to pretend like it was a real survival situation and really try to survive.

The first day, they all gathered resources and worked on building houses. They teamed up. Kids that knew Minecraft helped the others. On day two, a few of the kids started attacking each other and burning down houses, just as I had expected.

I struggled with whether to let them attack one another, but the level of violence is minimal, and it isn’t graphic. I eventually decided to allow them to play against each other. On the second day, they did just that. A few of the kids ran around attacking each other, and burning houses. That led to a great discussion about human nature and the real world parallels. 

We’ll revisit the island throughout the book to reenact scenes, or try to fine tune the map to more closely fit. I’m hoping these exercises help them read closely and visualize the island better.

I see a lot of other opportunities for my tenth graders.

• Create the ranch in Of Mice and Men paying a lot of attention to each location. Curly and his wife’s room, the bunk house, the barn, the dream ranch.
• Macbeth’s castle – There are a TON of castle maps.
• Download a map of the Globe theater and have the kids screencast (Jing – Free) scenes from the play.

Finally, a quick note about working with your IT department. It’s easy to feel like the central office doesn’t care about trying new things. Sometimes that’s true. Bureaucracies are inherently change averse. Usually though, that’s only because either they don’t know why the thing you want is beneficial or because they are overloaded like we are.  

My advice, get a name. After going around and around, I reached out to one of the Techs who had his phone number in his email signature. Once I got to talk to Dennis and explained what I wanted to do and why, he worked day and night to help me get the project up and running. 

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Update: Here’s a quick video of the kids actually interacting on the island. I use this to talk about how quickly they went from cooperation to competition and destruction.