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By Jeff Pierce, 21 January 2010 16:49

Partially due to procrastination¹, but also thanks to some timely inspiration², I decided to try out something different.

I stopped by my classroom on the weekend and did this:

Goodbye Chairs

All tables and chairs, pushed to the side.

Man you shoulda heard the kids as they walked in on Monday. “Mr Pierce, who DID this? Where do we SIT?” An atrocity, truly.

Open Space³ is beautifully simple. “You have five minutes to create a a space where you can be comfortable and finish your warm up activity.” And we end every lesson ten minutes early, which gives us enough time to reset the classroom back to square one, clean up the whole place, and wrap up what we learned that day.

Amazing stuff happens. Kids are free to hide under the window ledge, lay on the carpet, huddle in a circle with their friends, or pull four desks together to create a fort-type structure.⁴

My students are finally being good stewards of our classroom. They get to start every lesson exercising a choice about where they feel like sitting. They get to end every lesson helping everyone out and cleaning up our space.

And to be honest, I don’t want this experiment to end after a week. To paraphrase a wise beyond her years 8th grader: “Well Mr Pierce, Open Space is great, but we couldn’t do it for a lecture. Actually…no, why not? We could do it anytime! Except for maybe a test…”

I’m already thinking ahead to Open Time. I want these kids to need me less and less.

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Comments (1)

By Jeff Pierce, 18 September 2009 14:47

I’m about halfway through yet another tech conference.

21C Learning Hong Kong, hosted by my school, HKIS, is happening this weekend. Big names from the blogosphere have been flown in, both in real life and in Second Life, and tech-savvy teachers and techevangelists from the Asia region have come to the city to swap ideas for tools and tricks to increase technology use and learning in classrooms.

I have gone to five of these now dating over the past two years. Two of them in Shanghai, and this is the third in Hong Kong. All of the conferences have been put on professionally and thoroughly. I am especially impressed with what my friend Justin has accomplished here in Hong Kong.

However, not to complain, but just to comment…I feel overloaded. Nothing sounds new. That is not to say that the speakers and ideas aren’t still inspiring at times! But what follows is an attempt to toss out some of these ideas…not a finished set of concepts below, but I would love feedback / pushback on what I think I’m thinking.

One pattern that I note is how easy it is to give lip service to the idea that “it’s all about how technology changes the learning” and yet spend the majority of the time in workshops looking at cool new tools. I know that I am as guilty as the next person about this, as I have given two presentations about wikis and blogs without much time spent talking about the transformative capabilities of these tools.

But it’s so hard. How do we have practical discussions about how to make drastic changes in the day to day experience inside of a school?  Surely the conversations need to be focused on something more than just the next cool Web2.0 tool. However is a classroom teacher in any position to implement anything radical? What I keep on hearing / coming back to myself is a frankly naive wish to simply “blow up” the current paradigm of education and start off afresh. I love the idea of a “Ten Man School” as Rob suggested today, take ten committed teachers and build the experience around student learning, with no concessions given for our preconceived notions of what a curriculum ought to be. I loved working at a new school for three years and feeling as if my energy could make a big difference in the way learning would happen for the students.

But what can I do now? Must I be testing out and tinkering with each new Web 2.0 tool? I’m supposed to be delivering Social Studies knowledge, concepts and skills, not teaching my students the next coolest slick looking online gadget like Prezi.

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By Jeff Pierce, 18 August 2009 14:49

Well, we started classes yesterday. And let me share with you one of my tools for better teaching this year:

my secret weapon

I don’t see any way that this post won’t come across as vain and elitist. However, if you knew me well, you’re probably rolling on the floor right now as you realize that JEFF is writing about FASHION. When I mentioned to my mother that I bought more cufflinks over the summer, she laughed. “Do you even have the shirts to go with them?”

But I believe that this is an improvement over the standard business casual. For me, it’s my uniform, and like everything else in my teaching I want my clothes to be a notch above. When I’ve got on a tie and cufflinks, I take myself more seriously. My students can tell that I look like I mean business. And lastly, I feel that it’s one part of my response to all those critiques of teaching as an “easy job”. It’s easier to say that I deserve to be treated like a respected professional when I look like it.

Of course I’m not saying this replaces lesson prep, or pedagogy, or that it applies the same in all school contexts. Appearance isn’t everything. But it does count for something.

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Tangent Number One, aka “Best Laid Plans”:

I started off my first day well-prepared…except that I left my work laptop at home. A bit of a flustered start.

Tangent Number Two:

A more valid criticism of this is that I’m playing to, and reinforcing, class stereotypes. I work at one of the oldest private schools in Hong Kong, and also one of the most expensive. Class and race are knotted up in Hong Kong, always lurking below the surface. They are much bigger issues that I don’t even know how to start untangling. For now, all I can do is to stay aware of their presence.