Last week I wrote about how design principles should apply to curriculum. I’ve been thinking about one of those elements in particular: the idea of white space. This isn’t really a new concept, but I think it bears some examination.

Curriculum today is very full. We do our best to stuff every little thing that may have some importance or relevance to a subject into the 180 day school year, and since it won’t all fit, we assign the rest as homework. Any teacher who has been teaching for more than a year knows that there is no practical way to complete the entire prescribed curriculum in one year, even if you take the tour bus approach and just point out the highlights to the students as you cruise by at seventy miles and hour.

I’m no longer convinced that the purpose of curriculum is to assemble in one place all the important “stuff” that a kid should know by the end of the school year. There’s too much that’s important anyway, we won’t all agree on which things are truly important, and the volume increases almost daily.

So what if curriculum instead were designed with holes, with a certain amount of white space? In visual design, the white space does a few things: it brings attention to the other elements of the design, it allows them to breathe, and it helps make them dynamic. Taking out some stuff and leaving more space in the curriculum can do similar things for the student.

Invite. Curriculum should first be built so that the student wants to engage with the content. It should be active, it should be interesting, it should be personal. Make it real and relevant. Start with where the students are. Connect to their interests and their worlds.

Inspire. Next the curriculum should motivate students to want to learn about the subject. The word inspire originally meant “to breathe into” or “to infuse life by breathing”. There is very little breathing room in today’s curriculum. Kids have no time to breathe in and reflect on their learning. They just have to cram it in and move on.

Ignite. Finally, the curriculum must light the fire. Leave students at the end of the unit or school year feeling like there is so much more to explore and so much deeper to go. If we ignite their passions and their natural curiosity, they will continue to pursue it on their own.

I remember so many times “discovering” a subject as a teacher that I thought I had no interest in learning about, but when I really engaged it (because I had to teach it), I found it fascinating and went on to study it on my own. I think a well-designed curriculum can do that for students.

Understand that I don’t believe curriculum can do this alone. None of these things can or will happen without an excellent teacher. Curriculum doesn’t live until students and teachers interact and engage it. But a strong curriculum will give the teacher the tools and resources to accomplish these things more easily.

Accomplishing this is the real challenge, of course. How do we create a curriculum that does these things? How do we anticipate where kids are when there are so many different varied experiences around the world? Perhaps this is an argument for purely locally designed curricula, but I’m not sure that’s practical. What do you think? How can we make this happen? Or is it just a fantasy that will never become reality?

Due to the nature of this post, the Department of Blogging requires that I begin with this statement:

Notice: The consumption of raw or undercooked blog posts may increase your risk of thought-borne illness.

Be aware that the ideas I’m going to share here (a) are undercooked and need some additional processing before they are complete, and (b) likely come from a variety of other sources, so if I’ve not given the proper credit for everything here, please let me know in the comments.

On my flight back from ISTE 2010 in Denver yesterday, I finished reading Presentation Zen. In it, Garr Reynolds presents, among other things, a concise explanation of the principles of visual design that one should use when creating slides for a presentation.

Being an educator, I began to think about how those principles would look if we applied them to curriculum design. Here is where my brain has gone with it so far. (And this is the undercooked part. I’m sure some of these won’t or can’t work, and I’m sure there are elements I’m missing. Chime in on the comments to help me sort it all out.) My goal is to elaborate on at least a few of these in future posts.

Signal vs. Noise Ratio. This is about sticking to the message. What is the point or the goal of the curriculum plan? If there is anything in the plan that gets in the way of that goal, eliminate it.

Picture Superiority Effect. People remember pictures better than words, so in essence, this principle means show, don’t tell. Presenters use visuals to activate emotion and connection between the audience and the content. In terms of curriculum design, I think we need to take it further. Not only should visuals be an integral part of every curriculum design, but we need to ensure that learners interact with and manipulate what they are learning.

Empty Space. A key to making visuals cleaner and more effective is to incorporate white space. Reynolds says, “empty space in a design is not ‘nothing,’ it is indeed a powerful ‘something,’ which gives the few elements on your slide their power.” We tend to treat curriculum as if we are packing for a vacation: get as much as we possibly can into the fewest number of bags. Bring extra clothes in case of unforeseen mishaps, and bring a big variety in case the weather takes an unexpected turn. Empty space in our curriculum design might give students a chance to breathe and reflect.

Contrast. Visually we use contrast to make something stand out. When was the last time you saw a curriculum where certain elements were deliberately arranged to stand out against the rest? We notice and remember what is different.

Repetition. Visual patterns help a presentation audience follow what is going on. Curriculum should be designed the same way: in predictable patterns that enhance the message without becoming trite and simplistic.

Alignment. Again quoting Reynolds, “The whole point of the alignment principle is that nothing in your slide design should look as if it were placed there randomly.” So often I have seen things dropped into the middle of a unit that seem like it’s there just because. Alignment means that everything in a curriculum design is there on purpose and with a conscious connection to other elements and other parts of the curriculum.

Proximity. Finally, clustering related items together helps cement the connection to the viewer. If the student has to expend energy trying to figure out why a unit is structured the way it is, then the structure isn’t working for the curriculum.

Okay, so help me avoid making all my readers ill by helping me cook this. What have I missed? Is this overly obvious, or is there something worth digging out more?

Two themes are emerging in what I’m learning here at ISTE 2010. These aren’t new ideas by any stretch, even to me. It’s just that they are being driven home in very powerful and deep ways.

The world is small and flat. Not precisely in the sense that Thomas Friedman meant in his book, but in the sense of connections and relationships. As I said yesterday, I can hardly turn around anywhere without seeing someone I know, or meeting someone I’ve conversed with on Twitter. Today I met Jeff Agamenoni and Sue Waters, from Montana and Australia respectively, and with whom I have chatted many times over the last couple of years. (Sue, of course, reminded me almost immediately that I forgot to bring her the chocolate I promised her. And then I took her seat in the Blogger’s Cafe. Great way to treat someone I’ve just met.)

When our students leave our schools, they are going to land in a world where they need to relate not just with people who live and work near them, but with people around the world. It’s not optional any more. Everyone is your neighbor. Distance is now measured not in miles but by your ability to connect with different channels. The more communication tools you know, the closer you are. Kids are going to have to be able to find people and be found, to build their own digital homes and tell their own digital stories.

Which is the second theme I’m seeing over and over:

Design is an essential skill. Garr Reynolds in his book and blog, Presentation Zen, talks about how often people treat design as an afterthought, as though it’s decoration to be painted on after making the content. But design is much deeper. It is ultimately about effective communication and facilitating connection. If a valuable message is obscured by poor design, the message will lose power, or the recipient will give up before it gets through.

Just as kids have to learn how to connect with the world and manage those connections, they have to learn how to effectively use the principles and tools of design to enhance their communication. The only way we will ever be able to teach those skills is to use them ourselves.

So my first takeaway from the day is that all educators, not just the ones who like that “technology stuff,” have to become connected and become designers. It’s not optional anymore, because we will be putting our kids at a disadvantage if we don’t get there.

Though it has taken me much longer than I planned to get back to this topic, I want to share with you today what I believe is an outstanding and probably very obscure tool that would be excellent for gifted students.

Think back a few years. No, further back. A little further. When home computers had memory measured in kilobytes, an 8-color monitor was high resolution, and disks were floppy.

The cutting-edge trend in computer entertainment was something called a “text adventure game.” Zork is the classic example of games in this genre, but there were dozens of them. They had no graphics and no need for a controller, because the entire means of interacting with the game was through text.

For those who have never played a text adventure, here is a typical sequence of moves you might see in one of these games (this is part of the sample transcript that was in the instruction manual for the original Zork): Read the rest of this entry

I’ve been reading Garr Reynolds’s book &EAN=9780321525659&itm=3" target="_blank">Presentation Zen (and am a fan of his blog, too). I picked it up because I wanted to improve my presentation and design skills, but in the process I’m seeing some parallels with curriculum design.

We’re all familiar with the “Death by PowerPoint” scenario:

Some of the characteristics typical of bad PowerPoint presentations:

• Slides crammed with content
• Meaningless clip art, animations, and effects
• A superfluous presenter
• Poor design based on stock templates

PowerPoint, used poorly, can cripple a powerful message. In fact, the use of PowerPoint as a communication tool may even be partly to blame for the disaster that destroyed the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Read the rest of this entry

Perceptive readers of this blog (er, maybe using the plural there is presumptuous) will notice that the tagline has changed. Though I will still have a bent towards technology and gifted education here, because both of those are passions of mine, I decided the change was in order for two reasons.

First, from the start my posts have often ranged beyond those two topics into other areas of education, and I always felt awkward writing outside of my declared focus area. The new tag more accurately reflects what I write about and why.

Second, I have begun to realize that teachers can no longer afford to be just teachers.

[Cue Don LaFontaine:] In a world where tests reign and textbooks rule, one tireless soul has the power to turn a ragtag bunch of kids into a lean, mean, learning machine: The Teacher. [Thank you. That will be all, Mr. Fontaine.]

Before we can be teachers, though, we must first add two other titles to our resumes: learner and designer.

Read the rest of this entry

I’ve decided that I’m going to begin this school year with my students by letting them dream. I have several reasons for doing it, not the least of which is that it gives me a chance to get to know a little more about each of them and what makes them tick. Mostly, though, it will be a reminder for me of who I’m doing this for and what my focus needs to be. It’s a way of staying centered on the students—instead of being centered on the curriculum or my interests or the district assessment plan.

There are many ways I could go about finding out my students’ dreams: I could ask them about their goals in life, for example, or places they’d like to visit. An interesting idea occurred to me, though, when I started thinking about my district’s plan to build several new elementary schools.

Read the rest of this entry

As I was rereading Wiggins and McTighe‘s Understanding by Design recently, it occurred to me that there is a disconnect between authentic learning and the way we are required to teach today. Teaching is increasingly focused into neat little packages that are easily assessed and can be boiled down into a single test score for accountability and record keeping. Curriculum and unit plans are structured and pretty documents, having a well-defined beginning, middle and end. Lessons are little self-contained deals, 45-minutes or less, with a clear structure and closure and don’t necessarily connect to anything else.

It’s teaching in a Twitter and YouTube world where significance boils down to a 140-character summary or a 30-second video clip.

But learning in the real world, or at least in my real world, is messy, lumpy, and long-term. I was thinking about how I personally learn almost everything I’ve learned in the last few years: web design, writing interactive fiction, curriculum compacting, even IEP writing. In most cases, I learned most of what I know simply by jumping in with both feet, getting dirty, and mucking around with things. In a lot of cases, I learned some of the “basics” after I learned more advanced techniques. I learned things as I needed them. When I wanted to make a web page do what I wanted it to do, I just went in and figured it out. There was very little systematic about the process. When I ran into a roadblock, I’d go looking for help, either from those more structured resources or from my network of friends and colleagues.

Not that I didn’t have some structure to my learning. In most cases I did take the time to read tutorials, or introductory level books about what I was learning, and I tried some structured activities designed to walk me through what I needed to know. But often I didn’t know what I needed to know until I was in the midst of my own real project.

I think this is what Wiggins and McTighe are interested in getting at with more authentic ways of assessing students. But how to fit it into the structured world of school? My own teaching the last few years has tended towards the messy, unstructured variety. Often, I’ll teach a unit by having an idea of a project I want my students to complete, and some specific goals I want them to get out of it, and we just sort of dive in and work out most of the details as we go along. There’s some value in this, I think, and as much as I’ve criticized myself for not being organized enough or planning enough, when I look back I can see a lot of good learning that has taken place in my students over the years. The feedback I get from the students and their parents has also reinforced this.

But to an outsider (or an administrator) looking on, it’s hard to explain. I don’t always have finely-detailed unit plans, and less often do I have well-structured daily lesson plans. I don’t always have the clearest idea where something is going to take us, and often the students push a project in directions I couldn’t have imagined it going when I conceived it in the first place. More often than not, too, these learning experiences don’t always wrap themselves up into a tidy package with a bow that I can send home at the end of the marking period. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve set up our annual end of the year open house display with multiple signs indicating “works-in-progress”.

As a teacher of the gifted, I have much more freedom to try these messy projects with my students. But there has to be a way to tighten things up, too. As much as authentic learning is messy, I do want my students to be able to walk away from the year with a sense of accomplishment and completion, and I want to be able to help maintain an appropriate focus.

So where’s the balance? How do we keep things “authentic” (and therefore potentially messy) and still have the neat, accountable package that the school system demands? What are the conflicting forces that pull you in two different directions as you teach and how do you reconcile them?

(This article originally appeared in a slightly different form at Grandé With Room)

I love jazz. There is such an energy and freedom to the music, and it has this capacity for plugging directly into my emotions. The same piece can move me on so many levels. I can experience it raw, or I can process and analyze the intricacies of the music’s structure and the performer’s subtle interactions.

Last week I attended a performance by the great Barry Miles, accompanied by Bob Shomo, Tim Lekan, and Paul Hannah. The quartet played a variety of numbers, and I was blown away by the way they completely inhabited each piece they played and brought the audience inside with them on the journey.

At some point during the concert, though, I became aware that my mind was beginning to do its split attention trick. I was immersed in the jazz, but at the same time I started thinking about how much teaching is like the performance that was going on in front of me.

Jazz is hard to define, but one of its core elements is improvisation. Each piece began simply, piano and bass building the chord structure on top of the foundation set by the drummer, and the sax player weaving a melody around this framework. As the piece moved on, though, the roles of the combo slowly and subtly shifted. The four men would trade responsibilities, shifting from melody to support and back again. Sometimes one of them would take off on an extended solo, riffing on the ideas in the melody and playing with different sounds and how they interacted with the chords. Sometimes they would deftly toss little motifs back and forth to each other like jugglers, the music creating intricate, layered patterns.

The music always seemed to become more and more chaotic and unstructured as it went along. As the chords and rhythms got more complex and the melodies strayed further from where the song began, I often got lost in the beautiful jumble of sounds. What amazed me most was how the musicians seemed to lose themselves in the experience, too, but always, without fail, they came out at the end of the piece in the same place at the same time, somehow tying it all together in a way that was totally satisfying and seemed completely inevitable.

I realized (in my analytical brain) that even though the music seemed (in my emotional brain) to have lost its way, that at no time did the musicians ever forget either the foundation they set up at the beginning or the goal towards which they were moving the whole time. Even though we in the audience may have felt like we were lost in an exquisite anarchy, the musicians knew exactly where they were the whole time. This was driven home to me at the moment when the musicians, all four improvising at once and apparently going in completely different directions, landed without warning on the same note at the same time. It was like watching a kaleidoscope where all of the colors and shapes are swirling around and suddenly form a recognizable picture out of nowhere.

Good teaching should always be like this. The teacher and students should always start in the same place and know where they are going, but in the midst of the learning process (activity, lesson, unit, whatever) can wander and improvise and go where their ideas and instincts lead them, but keeping that end goal in view the whole time, aiming to land on that final note and together wrap the package up in a satisfying and understandable (and even perhaps inevitable) way.

Another aspect of the concert that struck me was how the four musicians interacted. There was a clear leader the whole time: Barry Miles. He selected the music, he started each piece, set the tempo and feel, and guided the group through the song to the end he devised. Yet the whole group worked as a team. Barry stepped back and let the other musicians play their parts, and at times he dropped out completely to allow someone else to take over. They each sometimes seemed to pull away from the group, doing their own things, but they always came back to where the rest were heading musically. What was especially interesting was watching their eyes. The four of them watched each other intently throughout, making eye contact frequently. It was clear that this was how they were staying connected and communicating. It was also clear that no one in the group was more important than any other–including the obvious leader. In the midst of the song, all four had very different but equally important roles, and they all respected the necessity for balance and supporting each other.

I thought about how I wanted my teaching to become more like this. Yes, I’m the teacher, and I need to start the learning process, set the goals, determine the structure within which the learning will take place. But once the song gets going, I want to step back and let my students shine. They each need their space to have a solo, they each need an opportunity to support the others, and it’s my job not to keep the piece tightly controlled like the conductor of an orchestra, but instead to pay attention to where the group is heading, to keep the goal in view, and to help each member of the class stay in tune with all the others and help them all land on that final chord at the same time.

Finally, the last thing I noticed about the group was that while they were working very hard and were intensely focused the entire evening, they were having fun doing it. There was a joy and satisfaction on their faces during every song. They were exhausted at the end of the concert, but at no time did any of them seem to lose energy. If I can do that for my kids: give them experiences where they pour themselves into what they’re doing, work hard, and come out on the other end with joy and satisfaction, then I’ve done my job.