#i’ll also be studying montessori education there so i need to figure out where it would be

[percysheliey]

besties i think im serious about moving to london after i graduate ….

[the-windowproject]

Make me a mechanic

The workshop for the bike mechanic course is tucked in an estate off Caledonian Road. I arrive on The Beast, my much-used tourer of six years. Its frame is peppered with scratches and there’s a small dent from where, I guess, someone tried to steal it. Never has it had a full service.

The course tutor is David, an aviation engineer turned bike mechanic. David’s perceptions are grounded in physics. He is wedded to rules, logic and formulas: there’s always a right or wrong, a yes or a no in David’s world. Dissembling and reassembling objects are second nature to him, something I’ve never experienced. Still, over the next two days, David attempts to impart this approach to me as I get hands on with the bike.

And I’m curious to learn. A long-term cyclist, I can still only do the basics (i.e. fix a puncture, replace a chain): anything that involves cables continues to daunt me. I’m here also for professional reasons. I work part-time at Wheely Tots, a charitable cycling start up. While my job is largely desk-based, better knowing my way around a bike will undoubtedly support my work.

My fellow students hope to use the course to encourage others to get on their bike as Wheely Tots’ ambassadors and freelancers: Jimmy, a health support worker, Armagan, a yoga teacher, Ana, a Montessori educator, and Gail, a Wheely Tots’ session leader and cycling instructor with 20 years’ experience.

We gather round David as he explains the course set up. I get the impression that the workshop is his sanctuary. The walls are lined with tools, each with a place of their own. Strip lighting bounces off the pristine metal worktops. Down the middle is a row of bikes on stands: bikes that remain in this strip-lit environment, never to be splashed with mud or rain. Tyres that don’t meet tarmac or grass. Instead, hand after amateur hand fiddle with these bikes, eyes under furrowed brows study their parts, trying to figure out how they work.

It is on these bikes that I index gears, remove a tyre without tyre levers, take off and put on a chain, attempt to true a wheel (so hard!), take out and replace ball bearings in a wheel, adjust brakes and check a headset.

It’ll take me a few more goes to really embed these skills into my muscle memory. But here are some of my points of learning, aimed mainly at my fellow novices. They come with the caveat that the bike mechanic in your life may well contest them:

Don’t use M*ck Off to clean your bike. Apparently the fish don’t like it and washing up liquid is gentler on the environment and just as good.

David recommended cleaning your chain every 60 to100 miles. There’s such a thing as a chain cleaner, though I tend to use an old toothbrush.

On the topic of chains, it’s easy to mis-grease them. Rather than drenching the whole thing in lubricant, grease the bits between the links and wipe off excess with a clean rag. Also, you’re aiming for the parts of the chain that connect with the sprockets (the metal discs with teeth that the chain sits on), so better to grease along the top of the lower part of the chain. According to David, rapeseed oil is up to the task.

I finally learnt what a group set is (basically brakes, gears, chain, cranks, and all the connecting cables). Armagan poetically described it as the bike’s nervous system, while the frame is its skeleton.

When you look at the cassette (the collection of sprockets your chain moves up and down on), you can think of it as a mountain: high (gears) at the top, low (gears) at the bottom. As a person who does not retain this vocabulary without an aide memoire, this is really helpful for me.

The adage ‘rightly tightly, lefty loosey’ left me in a confused, frustrated mess at times, because whether you go right or left depends on the position of your hand. Better for me to think clockwise to tighten, anticlockwise to loosen.

Precision is pretty important. Though my brother, a bike mechanic, dismissed the need for torque wrenches.

On that note, being an effective mechanic is less about strength and more about being tuned into your senses. “Soft hands,” David kept saying. Incremental adjustments can be all that you need. In fact, the fewer unnecessary twists and turns you perform on your bike, the less wear and tear its components will sustain. Makes sense.

This is a good place to go for sound information, albeit Shimano-centric. (David doesn’t tolerate much of ‘the rubbish on YouTube’)

Since doing the course, I’ve conducted an informal survey with a few of my friends (all male interestingly) about their approach to bike mechanics. They alll freely admit that they’ve not known exactly what they’re doing when they’ve attempted to fix or service their bikes. This has led to them making some pretty fundamental mistakes, but is equally how the learning’s stuck. At one point, as I worked away at the gears, doubting my ability, David gave me some feedback and said, “We’ll make a mechanic out of you.” It’s not an innate skill: it’s about confidence and practice.

I also have a renewed connection with The Beast. Each time David introduced a topic – the importance of a clean chain, brake adjustments - my thoughts would stray to my bike and I would add another item to a mental to do list. I feel like I understand the machine better and therefore - fingers crossed - I won’t allow niggles to persist for as long as I previously have. And maybe I’ll finally replace that saddle.

[zipgrowth]

From Personalized Math to Micro-Schools, This NewSchools Cohort Is Reimagining Learning

How do you find educators who want to completely rethink our notions of what a school is and design something entirely new?

That was the question gnawing at Scott Benson two years ago when he ran into his friend—and fellow senior leader in education—Aylon Samouha in a hallway at the iNACOL conference in Orlando.

“Aylon was in the early phase of founding what became Transcend Education,” says Benson, a managing partner for NewSchools Venture Fund. “And I asked him, ‘Aylon, how are you thinking about building pipelines for the kinds of teams that are reimagining education?’ And he said, ‘Good question. I’ve been thinking about it, but I’m not sure I have a good answer.’”

Scott Benson NewSchools Venture Fund Twitter: @scottb_edu

So their two organizations decided to work together, creating The Collaborative—a ten-month, intensive professional-development experience for ten school districts and charter school management organizations from across the country.

The ten teams met once each in San Francisco, Austin, and New York City and also worked with Collaborative staff and consultants locally over the course of the 2016-17 school year. At the end of the program, each had a plan of action.

A second iteration of The Collaborative started last month. Today, NewSchools and Transcend released a case study that looks at the first Collaborative. EdSurge talked to Benson about some of the findings in that study.

EdSurge: What did the school districts and charter networks typically focus on in the redesign work?

Scott Benson: I’ll give you three examples.

First, let’s talk about Gestalt Community Schools, which is a charter management organization in Memphis, Tennessee. They had already begun a process of designing a new middle school, called Nexus Middle School, to be a STEM-based school that incorporated personalized learning. They entered the program with a real desire to focus deeply on what it meant to have a more effective personalized learning experience in math—including everything from curriculum design and the use of technology to the roles of teachers and students in the classroom and the adoption of “passion projects.” They wanted to think about the entire school model, with an initial lens on math, but also thinking about the school holistically.

Second, there’s an organization called Hiawatha Academies in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And a lot of their focus was on making sure that they listened to their students, teachers, families and their community in an authentic way. They invited all of these stakeholders to be a part of a large team that came together to design a new middle school to be opened in 2018. And there was a big focus on how to make the curriculum speak to students while allowing them to express their own interests, desires and passions.

They wanted to think about the entire school model, with an initial lens on math, but also thinking about the school holistically.

And then there’s the Spring Branch (Texas) Independent School District, which made a long-standing middle school its focus. They started with this idea of doing a fundamental redesign of the entire school and they may ultimately go there. However, their innovation for this coming year is a micro-school, a school within a school, that will allow them to test different components of a new kind of model. These include self-directed learning time, expeditions and executive coaches. In addition, the district is running its own version of the program for ten other schools in the district in hopes that others will follow a similar path.

Were there any elements that all the participants wanted to introduce to their schools?

There’s a consistent theme around interdisciplinary learning, trying to figure out how to more effectively collaborate across different subject areas. They are all keen to use technology to help personalize learning for students. And the last thing is increased opportunities for students to engage in leadership opportunities.

You used a lot of approaches—visits to innovative schools, guest speakers, readings, etc.—to get your first cohort thinking about substantive change. Which seemed the most effective triggers?

Number one, listening. Taking the time to listen to students, taking a step back and hearing from a wide variety of voices with an ear toward what is leading these students to success and where are the gaps and the limitations of the way that we are currently doing things.

Number two, just being in a cohort-based experience is powerful. Doing this alongside others over a course of time that allows you to develop real, authentic professional relationships with a wide variety of people is valuable.

Number three, undoubtedly learning visits to schools and other organizations. No one went to a school and said, “This is it. I simply have to implement this particular model.” More often it was the case that people were inspired by different elements of different schools. They would then come back as a team and talk about how they might incorporate those elements into their vision.

THE COHORT—The ten school districts and charter school organizations that participated in the first NewSchools + Transcend Collaborative are:

Camino Nuevo Charter Academy

Citizens of the World Charter Schools

District of Columbia Public Schools

Excel Academy Charter Schools

Gestalt Community Schools

Hiawatha Academies

KIPP: Houston Public Schools

Spring Branch Independent School District

Tulsa Public Schools

Yes Prep Public Schools

Tell us about some of the outcomes that most excited you.

In terms of its impact on what these schools are actually doing, nine of the ten are moving forward in some way with new innovations they weren’t planning to do before the program. So that’s a success.

Among this group, there were some—like Hiawatha, Gestalt and Citizens of the World (a charter network with six schools in three regions)—that used this opportunity to radically rethink the way they are operating at least one school over the coming year. Others were more comfortable making smaller adaptations.

Is there anything from The Collaborative experience that can be generalized for other schools or organizations that might be contemplating school design change?

Absolutely. One lesson we took away is that having a lens on equity in the design process is a helpful frame. You can look at it in a number of ways. We did it through empathy interviews with students and families, and that helped our school leaders develop empathy for the end user.

Our second lesson is to push people out of their comfort zones a little bit.

How’d you do that?

We did this a lot, but one way was through an exercise we called “The Probable Versus the Possible.” The way this worked was you had teams imagine they continued to do everything they’re doing now. What would be the probable outcome for students in their schools? Typically you would see a line of incremental improvement. “We’re getting better,” they’d say, “but we’re not getting better fast enough.” Then we’d ask them to imagine not just the probable but the possible. Where might they go if somehow they had a step change in improvement with some kind of newfangled technology or new curriculum or better student engagement?

That exercise proved powerful for a lot of people and helped them create a case for change.

Any takeaways about the people doing the work or how to support them?

We found that the composition of the team—making sure you have the right people on the bus, a team that is engaged in this work and that has the time to really focus on it—is instrumental. And having that team not just design in the abstract but actually having tangible goals that are time-bound.

The second point is around customized coaching. If people expect that teachers will just go to a seminar, learn about something, and walk away and then magic will happen—I’m not sure that theory of change works particularly well. We found that the combination of in-person experiences alongside custom coaching and an ongoing support mechanism between these sessions was valuable.

We found that the combination of in-person experiences alongside custom coaching and an ongoing support mechanism between these sessions was valuable.

So my advice back to the broader field is don’t expect teams to create breakthrough innovations after a single big event. Try to find ways to keep the conversation alive, continue supporting and pushing people along their journey because they’re going to need that support.

Collaborative Learning

It wouldn’t be an educational exercise without homework. Here are some of the readings and other materials that Collaborative participants were asked to study last year:

Readings The End of Average, chapters 1 and 2, by Todd Rose “Our High School Kids: Tired, Stressed, Bored," by Greg Toppo, USA Today "The 17 Great Challenges of the 21st Century," adapted from The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future, by James Martin Google’s Moonshot Summit “Developing Student Agency Improves Equity and Access,” by Rhonda Broussard “The Revolution Will Be Tweeted," by Teaching Tolerance Staff “Unlearning is Critical for Deep Learning,” by Jal Mehta “Beyond the Viral Video: Inside Educators’ Emotional Debate About ‘No Excuses’ Discipline," by Elizabeth Green “The Science of Learning,” by Deans for Impact “An Answer to the Crisis in Education,” an excerpt from Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, by Angeline Lillard. Why Students Don’t Like School, by Daniel Willingham Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why, by Paul Tough "Developmental Stages of Infants and Children," Wisconsin Child Welfare System “Racial Identity Development,” an excerpt from Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom, by Beverly Daniel Tatum “Subtractive Schooling, Caring Relations, and Social Capital in the Schooling of U.S.-Mexican Youth,” by Angela Valenzuela Viewings Sir Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms Andrew McAfee: What will future jobs look like? Sugata Mitra: The Child-Driven Education Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud Nadine Burke Harris: How Childhood Trauma Affect Health Across a Lifetime Podcasts Education and Skill for the Fourth Revolution Audio A Conversation About Growing Up Black, by Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz A Conversation With White People on Race, by Michèle Stephenson and Blair Foster From Personalized Math to Micro-Schools, This NewSchools Cohort Is Reimagining Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2x05DG9