Category: Career and Technical Education

Anything but Random

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

P1040221It was a system he’d devised for grouping students that led me into my colleague’s 8th grade Industrial Technology class:

He knows, given a choice, that students will sit with their friends. So on the first day of school, when his 8th graders come into the lab setting where they will sit four to a table, he lets them do that. What he further observes is that those self-selected groups tend to be homogeneous—most everyone is a member of some social group: the brains, the preps, the slackers, etc. Kids (and adults, it must be said) are usually friends with the people who are most like they are.

But for many of the projects in IT—Project-Lead-the-Way’s Gateway to Engineering course—a heterogeneously grouped team works better. So, to get the kids into such groups without their realizing they’ve been strategically placed, this savvy teacher puts a coffee cup on each table. In each cup are pieces of paper numbered 1,2,3,4. Everyone draws a number. Basically, all the ones become a group, all the twos, all the threes, etc. If the group needs to be smaller, it can be subdivided, but divided or not, what happens is that every group includes someone from each of the social groups—and the kids think they’ve been drawing numbers randomly. No hard feelings for a student who might not have been picked. No subtle labeling by the teacher when he or she divides the kids up.

Leave it to an IT teacher to work out the mechanics of social engineering.

I stayed on that day to watch these teams at work on their Rube Goldberg projects. You remember who Rube Goldberg was: an inventor, an engineer, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who drew elaborate machines to perform simple tasks. His name has become an adjective in the English language to designate any complex solution to a simple problem.

In sixth grade, these students had learned about the six simple machines:

  • incline plane
  • wedge
  • screw
  • lever (3 classes, depending upon where the fulcrum is located relative to the load)
  • wheel and axle
  • pulley

Now their task was to design a system that would use all six machines at least once to transfer energy from a given point on a 12” x 12” plywood base in a minimum of 3 seconds. A longer time is better—this is Rube Goldberg after all! Ultimately, all the complex machines would attach in a line. Students would have to devise the transitional steps between any two.

By the time I got there, toward the end of the semester, kids had already done the reading for this unit. They’d already learned the vocabulary (Try words like these and tell me they aren’t Tier 3 language: force, friction, gravity, mechanical advantage, open loop system, kinetic energy, potential energy, prototype, torque, velocity, work. Not to mention the names of the six simple machines themselves.)

The students had already been to the computers to find five common examples of each of the six simple machines: things like ramps to load or offload heavy equipment, door stops, circular slides on playgrounds, teeter-totters, wheelbarrows, shovels, rolling pins, and window shades. The research component of this project teaches kids to open their eyes to the world around them—and the amazing display of human invention that is all around us.

P1040229They’d already drawn their plans, and those were spread out on the tables as the kids gathered materials and assembled their machines. The supplies came from random materials my colleague had salvaged, scrounged, selected, and squirreled away just for this project: odd pieces of lumber, random pieces of metal, old bits of hardware, spools, caps, plastic parts of unknown origin, cardboard and whatnot. To an outside observer, the junk pile looked like trash—but it was treasure to these aspiring inventors.

They were keeping track of their “costs” as well. While no purchased parts are allowed for these projects, the students keep a running list of the costs they incur for the materials they consume, for the use of tools, even for the teacher’s “consulting time.” At the end, cost figures into the overall evaluation of their finished product.

I watched kids consult, make adjustments, compare the product to the plan, test their device. Painstakingly. Thoughtfully. Respectfully.

P1040230And when the bell rang, I looked around: All the tables were clear, the projects had been stowed until the next day, quiet had descended. Actually, the quiet was more the cessation of the power saws than the kids voices—because their voices had been  collaborative in tone; their words, purposeful.  Everyone had been contributing to the group effort; no one was a lone ranger.

There was nothing random about this class at all.

Leave it to an IT teacher to make complexity, simple: To teach kids upper level thinking skills, problem-solution strategies, skills of collaboration, math applications, and a whole lot of vocabulary, comprehension, and discipline-specific writing.

I was blown away.

License to Sew

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

Middle School FACS (Family and Consumer Sciences) isn’t the cooking and sewing of yesterday. In fact, many FACS teachers don’t teach sewing at all P1040022these days.  It’s not in the state standards as a stand-alone skill.  Fashion design, care of resources, reading instruction manuals: These are covered in the standards, but not teaching of sewing per se.  Fortunately, the middle schools in my district still have sewing machines, local standards still allow for teaching kids how to operate them, and the teachers understand that the justification for omitting sewing from the state standards—“No one sews anymore”—is not entirely true.  In my part of the world, 4-H is still a big deal and fabric stores still exist. In the larger world, the world beyond the borders of my county, the fashion industry is HUGE—and people who enter into that world need to know how garments are constructed if they’re going to design them.  Learning to sew is a career skill for some kids—no less important than learning to draw, play a musical instrument, or use basic computer programs like Excel and Word.

So it was a thrill yesterday to watch a sewing lesson—and one that was about as perfect as any lesson could be.

The kids came into the room, put their binders and paraphernalia on the desks in the classroom portion of the FACS room, and proceeded without delay or loud chatter to their assigned sewing tables.  Their teacher took attendance by simply asking the tables to report out the names of the missing kids.  Two kids were gone; she recorded their names later. Then she began the class with three very simple, short directives.  First, a correction to a privilege she’d accorded the students earlier in the year (one sentence, very clear, about music and iPods). Then, a review of the parts of the sewing machine (The students pointed appropriately as the teacher called out the names of the parts: presser foot, bobbin winder, feed dogs, and so forth).  Finally, the day’s agenda (Steps 8-11 on the License to Sew).

Have you ever tried to explain a complex task to an 8th grader? Try thirty at a time on a potentially dangerous, motorized machine.  Can’t you just see the apprehension in a novice teacher’s eyes? The constant hands in the air? The ever-rising level of talk as the students  wait for the teacher to run around the room to each one individually identifying parts, showing each one how to load the bobbin, confirming that the machine is correctly threaded? The horsing around that middle school students are so very capable of? None of that happened in this FACS room.

Here’s how this teacher did it: She issued those students a “License to Sew.”

P1040025If you look closely at that “license,”  you’ll see genius at work.  To start with, the students taught themselves the parts of the machine and how to thread it (including bobbin winding) by reading the instruction manual.  Anyone with a question first asked a fellow student at the same sewing table.  On the blackboard, the place of last resort, was the teacher’s HELP list.  The teacher answered the questions of the kids who had put their names on that list. What that meant was that she wasn’t frantically trying to answer thirty questions, all exactly the same, many about trivial matters, or running around reassuring the anxious ones and restraining the ones with the potential to cause harm.  She was helping kids who genuinely needed her expertise.  For all the rest, self-reliance and a little help from a friend did the trick. Incidently, that’s an important goal of the FACS standards: helping kids learn to act responsibly and productively.  Kids moved ahead at their own pace, and a quiz later on—taken individually, when the student was ready, in a one-on-one minute with the teacher—confirmed knowledge of the parts of the machine and the necessary application skills.  The next step was practice sewing on paper templates. I missed that scene, but I saw the templates, commonly used in introductory sewing lessons to give the students practice without wasting resources–in this case, precious fabric.

When I was in that FACS class yesterday, about a third of the way into the P1040019hour, when everyone had been issued their “license to sew,” the teacher conducted a quick demo.  The kids—orderly, quiet, attentive— clustered around her as she showed them the next steps in their first project, a pincushion.  She showed them how to pin two pieces of fabric together (“Right sides kissing!”), leave a hole, turn the item inside out and stuff it, starting with the corners. Then she released the students to the machines.

At one point, a student I was standing near asked me for help. Her bobbin thread was hopelessly tangled, but I didn’t know the machine, and besides, the rule was, ask a friend first.  So I suggested that and reiterated that if she P1040015didn’t understand, she should write her name on the HELP list. Another student overheard my response and stepped right up: “I can help you with that,” she said. Exit me.

Imagine some of the other things that could have been going on in this classroom:  At a table covered with fabric scraps (from which the students were to choose two pieces for the pincushion), no one was tussling over the fabric, pushing or shoving others, or throwing fabric wildly about. The scene was orderly—and  the teacher wasn’t standing nearby controlling this situation, either.  She was seated at another table where kids who finished could line up with their license and their project in hand. She P1040024measured their seams and checked off the steps on the license. All over the room, kids were working at their own pace, and everyone was engaged.

When the end of class grew near, the rest of this teacher’s clearly articulated and rehearsed expectations played out: Without reminders or fuss, the kids stowed their possessions, picked up the room and put all the equipment back where it belonged. They disposed of the fabric bits that had fallen to the floor and pushed their chairs in. Exit them.

A spectacular class: Specific skills were learned, character traits like self-reliance and independence were honored and nurtured, and the instruction the teacher provided and the procedures she had instituted allowed for students to progress at their own rate and take responsibility for their learning.  I’ve seen art teachers and music teachers and technology teachers do this same thing.  In any project-based learning scenario in any subject area, the procedures must be clear and the pacing has to be orchestrated to accommodate different kids progressing at different rates. The class must operate (forgive the pun) like a well-oiled machine.

This one did.