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Look around the habitable world: how few know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.   -Juvenal, Satires

During the summer following my first experience with Kiva in my classroom, I was searching for a way to extend and deepen what I had begun through Kiva, namely a continued connection between my classroom and the world.  Kiva was wonderful for providing the stories and faces of real people whom my students could help through microlending (for a complete discussion of this project, see Math Made Compelling: The Kiva Renaissance).  I felt that it was time to explore the possibility of contacting and perhaps even collaborating with students in other parts of the world.  I wanted them to feel intensely connected to the world and excited to be in that place.  I wanted (and continue to want) my students to feel that reaching out to others is not only doable, but completely logical and a source of great joy.

iEARN and My Hero

To be honest, when I first set out looking for a way to collaborate with other classrooms around the world, I had no idea what to look for.  I dipped into the vast waters of Google and just began searching around.  It was pretty fruitless at the start.  At the time, I also happened to be preparing for a Language Arts focus on Heroes, so I also was looking for information to allow my students to study a wide range of heroes and their characteristics.  Very quickly, I was drawn to a Californian based site called My Hero that allows students to post stories of their heroes online.  I was intrigued by the possibility of my students creating their own projects and was also very impressed by the vast bank of hero projects and videos created by others.

In a rather circuitous way, I ended up watching a video about a young, recovering child soldier named Mohamed Sidibay from Sierra Leone.  A class from Ontario had created the video and had contacted Mohamed through an organization called iEARN (International Education and Resource Network).

Eureka!

It was exactly what I was looking for.  The iEARN website contained a mind-boggling list of teachers, projects and professional development from around the world, all centered around creating opportunities for collaboration between teachers and classrooms.  Amazingly, the organization celebrated its twentieth anniversary this past year!  I couldn’t believe that it had existed so long and that I had never heard of it.  I felt so behind the times!  In another crazy coincidence, iEARN was advertising a project in collaboration with My Hero.  They were looking for teachers willing to join a team of other teachers and classes from around the globe in an exchange of information about heroes and a final sharing of student work posted on the My Hero website.  I couldn’t believe my luck!

Signing Up

I was so excited to be a part of the project, that I felt like I had received a major award when I received confirmation of acceptance onto one of the teams.  On my team were teachers from Romania, Russia, Iraq, Slovenia and the United States.  We were given a group email address and quickly began to exchange information ourselves and our schools.  Next came class surveys, which we eagerly filled out and shared.  We also created “Welcome Packages” which were basically collections of small artifacts that demonstrate what it is to be a kid from your home country.  My students rounded up stamps, dried leaves, stickers, pebbles, drawings, coins and anything else we could fit into the envelopes.  We popped them into the mail (after spending over $30 in postage) and waited.

Looking Within

“Global education…is a voyage along two complimentary pathways.  While the journey outwards leads to students to discover the world in which they live, the journey inwards heightens their understanding of themselves and their potential.  Both journeys constitute a necessary preparation for personal fulfillment and social responsibility in an interdependent and rapidly changing world.” (In the Global Classroom, Graham Pike and David Selby, 1999)

Meanwhile, the kids were fully immersed in the language of heroism.  We started our study by looking at the characteristics of heroism such as courage, empathy, perseverance and inspiration.  We took the time to analyze our responses to social issues at school in the light of each of these characteristics.  We wrote poetry and prose about these issues.  Learning the vocabulary of heroism not only gave my students a more developed means to analyze those whom we identify as heroes, but also a means to understand that acting heroically is at the heart of our own humanity.  Giving students the language to express this allows them to consciously access this.  This behaviour–to persevere, to put others first, to inspire, to have empathy and courage–should never be accidental.  It should be fostered and celebrated.

Analysis and Evaluation:

I had found novels and short stories on various real heroes such as Iqbal Masih, Sadako, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King and Ruby Bridges.  I also organized links to short videos and readings online.  The students chose books and reinforced concepts by completing further readings in web format or by watching videos online.  When they felt that they understood a hero well enough, they engaged in some thoughtful analysis of their hero.  They answered questions such as, “If you are an innocent victim, are you instantly a hero?”, “Is death an important part of being a hero?” and “Is this person definitely a hero?  How do you know?”.  The depth many of my students could achieve was astounding at times.  Allowing students to read, view and research until they were ready to write about their heroes was very successful.  I wished, at times, that I had more than a 1:3 ratio of laptops to students, but how could I complain?  The organization was a little tricky at the start of a session, but ten minutes in, the class was utterly focused and engaged.

Team Connections:

My students needed me to update them on the latest email updates from our team members.  I printed off any photos or writings sent by other classes and posted them on a bulletin board, but I was not terribly satisfied with this.  There had to be a way for the kids to engage in discussion with one another.

I suggested to our team on a regular basis that I was eager to attempt to set up a protected discussion board where students could respond directly to one another.  I also said that I would be willing to try out Skype to contact another class, if they could manage it.  I had never done it before, but it couldn’t hurt to try!  A class from New Jersey had the technology to manage a Skype discussion.  It took us about a week to coordinate times and find one another on Skype and then we gave it a go.  It was incredibly cool and worked very well.  I set my MacBook up so that the built-in webcam was pointed at my students and I had a projector set perpendicular to it so the kids could see the other class easily.  The best part was hearing the “phone” ring while my kids waited in anticipation.  The first “hello” was probably the most exciting word spoken all term!  It was the day before the election in the States, so many of my students questions were about Obama vs McCain.  The kids in New Jersey were exploding with debate and excitement.  It was a pretty neat time.

Full of Potential…However…

I kept pressing the communication agenda, but most were not able or really that interested in pursuing a more meaningful connection between the classes.  I really felt like my kids were out of the loop, unable to receive or provide meaningful feedback from others.  All writing exchanged was on a one way path, which was such a shame.  My students, however, were not entirely aware of what they were missing.  They asked regularly about whether we had received any Welcome Packages from the other team members or whether we were going to have a Skype conversation with any other classes.  In the end, we never did have any other Skype conversations.  The teacher from New Jersey continued to be interested, but was too busy to follow through.  We ended up receiving two Welcome Packages out of ten, which was a bit of a disappointment as well.  The “Reaching Out” part of the project seemed to be a failure when it started out with so much potential!

Fortunately, this is not the way the project ended.  My students still had their main research projects to come, and they were definitely not a failure.  In Part Two, I will discuss the approach I took to the projects and some very surprising connections we made when my students reached out to their heroes!  Part two was, by far, the most exciting part of this project.

Jen

“Building a thought-filled curriculum serves the larger agenda of building a more thought-filled world–an interdependent learning community where people continually search for ways to care for one another, learn together, and grow towards greater intelligence.  We must deepen student thinking to hasten the arrival of a world community…” (Arthur L. Costa, “The Thought-Filled Curriculm”, Educational Leadership, 2008)

When you have to worry about covering all of the hundreds of learning objectives prescribed in mandated curricula, how is it possible to change the world?  Especially when there is barely enough time to dedicate to all that you have to teach!  Following your heart and connecting your students to amazing people and stories the world over seems like a luxury, perhaps even an abdication of responsibility.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  My experience using Kiva in my classroom has changed the way I “cover the curriculum”.  It is been an amazing, meaningful context for the learning of significant objectives, particularly in Math.

“To engage students in learning, we must begin by bringing out the imaginative and emotional features of the content, whether in mathematics, science, or any other curriculum area.  Everything in the curriculum is human knowledge–a product of human hopes, fears, and passions.  If we want to make that knowledge engaging to students, we have to show it in the context of the hopes, fears and passions from which is has grown and in which it finds a living meaning.” (Kieran Egan and Gillian Judson, “Of Whales and Wonder”, Educational Leadership 2008)

The “living context” I chose were entrepreneurs from around the developing world, whose business plans and profiles are featured on the microloan website, Kiva.  For a more in depth discussion of what Kiva is and how it impacted my classroom in the first year I used it, see my recent post, “Math Made Compelling: Phase 1 of the Kiva Project“.

When I first had the opportunity to use Kiva in my classroom, I witnessed a perseverance and enthusiasm for understanding and working with numbers that I have never experienced before.  My students were helping people all over the world through Kiva.  They were choosing who to help all by themselves.  The only hitch was that they had to justify their decisions using some pretty complicated numbers.  Life expectancy.  AIDS prevalence rates.  Literacy Rates.  GDP per capita.

Is this really grade 4 and 5 stuff?? I thought it was a bit of a stretch, at first, especially given that most kids don’t learn about these human statistics until middle or high school.  However, the more I studied them, the more I realized that a huge range of numeracy skills are embedded in each of these statistics.

Let’s start with GDP per capita! This statistic is now basic in my class.  Basic in terms of understanding the power that people in various countries have to maintain the health and happiness of themselves and their families, but also basic in terms of number concept.  GDP per capita (which of course is an average annual per person “income”) ranges from hundreds of dollars ($188 for people in Zimbabwe, for example) to tens of thousands of dollars ($40,200 for people living in Canada).  In the grade 4 curriculum, students are expected to demonstrate understanding of numbers up to 10,000 in a variety of ways.  These ways include reading, writing, ordering, comparing, and representing.  It was quite simple for me to have my students find, order, compare, read and write GDP per capita numbers from a range of countries.  The purpose of doing so was explicit and reasonable to my students.  By knowing the GDP per capita of a country and by comparing this amount to what we have in our own country, you have a way of understanding the desperate conditions under which many people in the world live.  This makes it easy to justify helping someone who happens to live in that country.  We mapped, graphed, and explained GDP per capita.  We added up the cost of our Christmas gifts to show how easily we surpassed what many people make in a year.   We solved problems that required us to calculate differences, to determine “per day” or “per month” amounts, and to use words such as double, triple and quadruple.  It was astounding to see how even my most reluctant math students tackled these number activities with gusto.  It was so meaningful and so purposeful.

AIDS and Population Statistics:

I group these two statistical categories together because it is hard to understand the significance of AIDS numbers without knowing the size of the population that they impact.  For example, it is very difficult to tell if 220,000 adults living with AIDS in Swaziland is a particularly significant number until you know that their entire population is only 1,128,814.  My grade 5’s worked with AIDS and population numbers quite extensively.  Many individuals asking for loans through Kiva were impacted by AIDS.  We have made loans to widows and grandmothers looking after their own children and sometimes even the children of deceased loved ones.  My students know to research and write about the impact of AIDS on the country of their loan recipients.  It helps them better understand their needs and feel more confident that their loan is helping the world’s most vulnerable people.

Why just the Grade 5’s? I chose to use AIDS and population statistics as a meaningful context in which to read, write, sort, describe and analyse numbers in the hundreds of thousands and millions, which are significant Grade 5 learning objectives.  My students had very emotional reactions to these numbers.  The nature of the disease and how it is transmitted spurred grand debates about rules–such as cultural rules against sexual activity in Middle Eastern countries–versus education of youth about the risks they face.  Through study of the numbers, they discovered that the latter was not nearly as effective at stopping the spread of AIDS, although many of my students passionately defended the need for people to be able to make decisions for themselves, even though their choices may be poor.  It, indeed, was a very compelling issue.  Admittedly, it dealt with a topic that is not part of the scope and sequence of health education for Grade 5’s.  Nonetheless, I felt quite comfortable leading the discussion and felt that it served to emotionally connect my students to the numbers, something that can be quite difficult to achieve in Mathematics.

Lessons of Literacy Rates:

Literacy rates are not only windows into the differences in basic education levels of people from country to country, but also a measurement of personal empowerment and opportunity.  In Canada, literacy rates are 99% for both males and females.  After examining countries with the lowest GDP per capita, my students noticed two things.  1- That literacy rates were often very low compared to Canada.   For example, in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, the literacy rates are 28%, 37.1% and 42% successively.   2- That female literacy rates were almost always lower than male literacy rates.  Sometimes those differences were very significant.  For example, in Afghanistan, the literacy rate for females is 12.6% compared to 43.1% for males.  In an article entitled, “The Dangers of Teaching Girls in Afghanistan” in The Guardian, Janet Swinney wrote:

“In 2004, The World Bank found that a one year increase in the schooling attainment of all adult females in a country is associated with an increase in GDP per capita for around US$700 per annum.  It also found that education enables women to deveop the skills and the confidence to become active in their communities and to participate in the political process.”

Thus, lower female literacy rates are an incredibly important indicator of the empowerment and opportunities for women.  My students often choose to loan to women for this reason.  Again, knowing literacy rates helps them feel confident that they are empowering and providing opportunity for those who are considered to be less than equal in their own countries.  It is true that literacy rates are expressed as percentages, which are numbers that my students are not supposed to learn until Grade 6.  However, the statistic is far too valuable keep from them simply because is expressed in percent form.  Besides, the more students are exposed to numbers in meaningful contexts, the more fluency they will obtain.  Exposure to these numbers will serve a foundation for deeper study of these numbers in the future, much the same way that exposure to money values in a young life provides a foundation for understanding decimals and decimal fractions.

Life Expectancy:  Pulling It All Together…

Life Expectancy is the final statistic that I exposed my students to this year.  I chose to leave it until the end, not because it is a complicated statistic to understand, but because it can possibly be explained through careful analysis of GDP per capita, AIDS numbers and Literacy Rates.  At the most basic level, it is evidence for how well people are able to meet their basic needs…the ones that translate into longer, healthier lives.  At a more complex level, it is the result of a complicated web of factors.  My grade 5’s embarked in an analysis of Life Expectancy data a couple of months ago.  The looked for correlations not only with AIDS, literacy and GDP per capita, but also with war and risk of infectious diseases.  There were no easy answers, although there were lots of questions and debate (all carried out on a class discussion board).  It was an engaging and eye-opening activity, not just for the kids, but for me as well.

This year, my eyes were fully open to the opportunities for not only emotionally engaging my students in the “cold” world of mathematics, but for effectively covering learning objectives as well.  Kiva was the turning point for me, and it has truly developed into a Renaissance in my classroom.  I now find myself actively seeking engaging, relevant and emotional contexts for all of my teaching (and learning) in Math.  It is hard for me to accept anything else when I have witnessed first hand, just how powerful and effective a meaningful context can be.  I will continue to chronicle these contexts as time goes on.  Believe me…once you give them a go, you’ll never turn back!

Jen

My husband and I heard about the microloan website, Kiva, in the spring of 2007.  It was (and still is) an incredible concept: individuals entrepreneurs in need of money to begin (or further) businesses in the developing world connect with lenders with both the means and desire to help out.  Potential lenders review the stories and business plans of these entrepreneurs and make loans as small as $25 dollars interest free.  The money is paid back according to payment terms laid out in the profile.  When the money is paid back, lenders have the option to lend again, or retrieve their credit and invest it elsewhere.  When I heard about it, I knew that it would be an amazing vehicle for teaching all kinds of concepts related to Math, Social Studies, Reading, Writing and Social Responsibility.  Imaging the kids making and justifying their own loans!  It was certainly worth a try, so I set about creating my own Kiva account.

Getting Started: Setting up an account with Kiva was not difficult to do, although I had to accept that if I wanted to do this in my classroom, that I would have to use my own credit card to provide the money for the loans.  For me, it was worth the risk.  I loved the Kiva concept and was willing to make loans myself anyway.  Plus, I really wanted to give it a go in my own classroom.  My principal was also willing to do the accounting on the school side for me and set up a Kiva account for funds raised by my class.  Whenever I added credit to the Kiva account, I submitted a receipt to the school and was quickly reimbursed.

Fund Raising Efforts: Our first fund raising efforts for Kiva (December 2007) were accomplished as a class.  I came up with the idea of a “math-a-thon”.  The kids would raise the money by being pledged per math sheet accurately completed during a two and a half hour math marathon.  It was a very efficient fund raiser!  We raised $1150 in that short time.  The kids worked really hard, although did not “enjoy” it.  They were utterly exhausted by the end of the session.  I was happy to have the funds, although decided that I needed to use a different method!   They needed to have more imput and as much connection and control of the fund raising effort possible.  Why?  Ultimately, I want the kids to think that doing this kind of stuff is both worthwhile and within their own power.

Decisions Made and Justified (Phase 1)- In the first year, I introduced my students to a range of statistics from GDP per capita and population below the poverty line, to infant mortality and literacy rates.  I dealt with it all at the same time and had them pouring over pretty skookum data sheets, looking for the most needy countries in the world.  Pretty overwhelming stuff, although amazingly, they accepted this unflinchingly.  In very short order, they were scanning business profiles, family stories and country statistics of the Kiva entrepreneurs.  They individually made their decisions and I made loans for them on the spot ($25 each).  They then put together a little writing project with photos of the entrepreneur they helped for display. The kids were very proud of their efforts.  We were lucky to be featured 3 times in local newspapers, invited to guest host a Student Leadership Conference in Maple Ridge, and present our efforts to the Board.

Reflections on the First Year-This was an incredibly powerful project, even though it was really very experimental.  I definitely recognized, and to a certain extent, used the project as a vehicle to cover outcomes in math, reading and writing.  It was a little loose, however.  I taught far too many statistics which were used in a limited way in their decision making.  I had not developed any rubrics for assessment.  The kids had one shot at making a loan on their own.  Their reflections on the experience were limited to group conversations and a film that we made for our day at the Student Leadership Conference.  It was all very cool, but needed a ton of refining and expanding!

This year, I have dealt with many of the issues from the first year.  It is truly a huge part of our classroom culture.  In my next entry, I will start to explain some of the more powerful numeracy components of Kiva Project this year.

Until next time…

Jen

I have been teaching for 10 years and for 10 years I have both encouraged and KILLED reading in my classroom.  Comprehension tasks, vocabulary development, journals, oral discussions, group projects, dramas, reports, reviews…I could go on.  I have never been completely satisfied with any of them because, at the end of the day, the students have been focused on the TASK and the reading gets lost somehow.  What is the true POINT of all of these things?  Here is really what I want for my students:

• To connect with their books and drive to figure them out, even when parts don’t make sense.
• To engage in thinking about what they are reading willingly.
• To learn something new about life and its possibilities by uncovering exciting connections.
• To savor the written word.
• To develop a desire for writing, too.

Very few (if any) of these goals were achieved through traditional means.  I was responsibly covering curriculum, providing feedback and evaluating my students based on their products, but I was not turning them into readers.  They were not buzzing about books.  They exhibited no perseverance.  They completed the book and the tasks.  I constantly tried to light their fires and bring to light interesting issues and connection in oral discussions.  I created really interesting questions and writing tasks.  I integrated reading themes with other areas of the curriculum.  Only a handful of students (the ones who enjoyed reading anyway) ever really caught on.

Technology to the Rescue?-

Prior to Christmas this year, I started teaching my students how to use discussion boards.  I have my own classroom Share Point site (password protected) and discussion boards are an interesting, easy to use feature.  At the start, we used them to discuss interesting topics such as Internet Safety, to display and explain art of World War 1, and to even post up individual progress on fund raising efforts.  They were taught appropriate language and allowed to practice both from home and at school.  I considered that they might be an interesting tool to use in conjunction with reading.  I was too afraid to give this a go at first, even though I had the technology to facilitate this (10 MacBooks, to be exact).

The Context- I had a very good selection of novels in groups of various sizes.  They were certainly compelling books, from The Giver and Holes, to Ryan and Jimmy and Iqbal.  I wanted the students to be able to read at their own pace and to be able to choose which books they wanted to move on to.  I didn’t want to just ask them questions or get them to complete a journal or book report to make sure that they were actually connecting with their novels, otherwise I would end up with a focus on completing tasks again.  And reading would be work and therefore, a chore.  So what to do?

“The reality that knowledge rather than being found in books and in lectures or on the Internet, is actually constructed in collaborations among learners.  It is when technology supports the jerky, jagged, and looping lines of shared discovery that it fulfills its own evolutionary promise.” Brown, J.S.  & Duguid, P. (2002) The Social Life of Information

Enter Discussion Boards-I thought perhaps that I would create a discussion where all of the kids could discuss all of their novels, relating them to other books and answering questions based on theme.  At the last minute, I decided that I couldn’t manage this.  How would I provide feedback?  How could I keep track of different threads of the discussion?  Would they get it?  I opted for single novel discussions which would occur in the classroom on the laptops.  It wouldn’t matter what part of the novel my kids were at, because we would be discussing broader issues. I also decided that I needed to be a part of the discussions, because the kids would need me to model responses and provide direction and feedback.  So I grabbed a my laptop, sat in the middle of the floor and began to participate.

Unexpected Benefits-Have you ever tried to lead a small group, oral discussion while others are working on other tasks?  I have.  Constant interruptions make the process very difficult.  Plus the talking, no matter how quiet, leads to disruption of the rest of the group.  I have had the kids manage discussion on their own, but I really want depth in a discussion and I never know if I am getting it.  ANYWAY, quite unexpectedly, I found that written online discussions eliminate all of these issues.  I still am interrupted, but it is no big deal.  I set aside my computer, assist the student in need, and the discussion goes on without me.  They don’t need me there as leader.  I am only a participant, although I definitely see myself as a guide.  Interestingly, my students ask as many questions as they answer.  I always start off with 3 or 4 good questions.  By the end of a discussion,  I have 10 – 15 questions going, all added by the kids.

The Importance of Questions-

If you don’t ask the right questions, you are not going to have an interesting discussion.  I have met many people who are concerned about discussion boards and ask the following question:  “What if the kids copy one another?”  I have been with two separate groups of teachers and this was the first question asked in BOTH groups.  Um…don’t ask questions that require one correct answer.  Problem eliminated.  Great questions are going to be interesting, compelling, and controversial.  You want to get them wrangling over the issues!  Then they have a reason to read what others think.  That is key: discussion boards are as much about reading, connecting and thinking as they are about writing.  Plus, I have found that the kids start to post their own questions that are just as good.  Why?  Because they want people to respond.  If they don’t ask good questions, they won’t get answered.  Period.

Issues of Time and Place- I find that I fit a relatively good discussion in the space of a 40 minute reading block.  It is hard to stop them, because I always find the group on the brink of a break through.  So what to do?  Well, I do two things.  One is to show the entire group how the discussion went.  We read it over as a class and do some analysis.  This is great, because the kids who have not read the book find this quite a teaser.  They are desperate to read the book, because they want to know for themselves what is going on.  They want to have an opinion too.  Plus, I get to expose some of the key issues and show off some of the more interesting bits of the discussion.  It allows the participants to see that there is a big picture.  The other step I take is to take some of the more interesting questions generated by the kids and carry them over into the next discussion of the novel.

“Making meaning is not just an individual operation. Learning is a reciprocal process; the individual influences the group’s thinking, and the group influences the individual’s thinking” (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978)

Draw Backs?? There are some.  Unequal written participation is one.  Some kids are right in there and offer lots of insights, points, counterpoints and questions.  Others are like ghosts, making the odd, fleeting entry here or there.  How much are they actually participating?  Are they reading what others have to say?  WHAT TO DO??  Well, my thought is that I need to get everyone to write about the whole experience in some clever way.  Perhaps they need to write about the most interesting points in the discussion and what it made them think about.  I am going to be playing around with this idea over the coming months and I’ll let you know how it goes!

Jen