Findings

It’s been two and a half months now since I first walked onto the campus of the American School of Bombay (ASB) and began my volunteer internship in the areas of Tech-Integration into Education and Educational Research & Development. Being a recent Game Development graduate of Full Sail University and upon understanding ASB’s desire to study, prototype, and integrate games-based learning into the educational experience of their students, I leapt at the opportunity to teach a weekly Game Design Workshop.

Game design, for me, represents something incredible – it allows you to create a virtual world comprised of systems and laws that are shaped by your passions, dreams, fears, and desires. Once you have designed this world, you can share it with others to create an experience unlike anything else. As most of you know, the students here at the American School of Bombay are inundated with extracurricular activities – everything from athletics to theatre to community service. So, when I sent out an email to the student community telling them that I would be offering a Game Design Workshop on Saturdays, I was astounded by the responses and, in the end, the seven students who made up my first student-cohort ranged from grade 7 to grade 12 became a dedicated group of future game designers (I guess we were a Mulit-Aged Classroom—a reality that gaming has inherent in its DNA, but that’s fodder for a later blog).

My singular objective was to prove to students that they have the ability to create engaging games, regardless of the medium. In order to do this, we first began by introducing the formal aspects of game design – where I explained through my own experiences the skills required by a game designer (interestingly, these very clearly parallel what edu-speak refers to as ‘21st century skills’).  The most important paradigm shift in becoming a successful game designer is becoming a ‘better’ player; which means that instead of passively absorbing the games the students are playing in their free time, they need to view everything with a critical eye to better understand what design choices were made and why (imagine an educational environment where students didn’t want to passively absorb the learning but attack it, consume it, design it…but I digress). The concept of ‘fun’ is one that is not easily defined, from a educational lens, yet approaching an understanding of what it means is essential to designing ‘fun’ games. I would like to share one of the first activities I gave my students; see if you can identify what qualities make games ‘fun’ for you!

Exercise 1 – Listing Your Top Games

• Take a moment to think about and write down 5-10 of your favorite games of all time. These can be anything from sports, childhood games, board games, card games, or video games.
• Then, in bullets, write down a couple of words or phrases next to each. Identifying what qualities or characteristics this game has that made it one of your favorites.
• Once you have done this, look back over your list and see if you can identify themes or ideas that seem to appear in multiple places – you might be surprised by what makes games appealing to you.

This was just one of the many exercises aimed at helping the kids become more aware of why they find fun in the games they play on a daily basis. I remember doing a similar activity in my AP English class…an class, by the way, that was very gamified. A great class. Where the ‘fun’ was being ‘engaged’ and…oh, here I go again, off on a tangent of how great teachers are great gamers, and great classrooms are a constant game.  The game is learning.

By the end of the fifth workshop session the class had produced several different physical prototypes of games – ranging from an exploration/geography turn-based role-playing game to a hexagon territory multiplayer puzzle game to a Risk style island conquest game.

It was a pleasure getting to know the students, teaching them, and learning from them. I am looking forward to expanding Game Design here at the American School of Bombay either through an online course or series of after school workshops next year.

Oh, and if you have any personal interest in Game Design – I highly recommend Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop, Second Edition

Susan Cain’s powerful TED talk on The Power of Introverts left me little choice but to write this post.  Susan’s impassioned pleas to just leave introverts alone and let them think included taking educators to task for forcing students to cooperate and collaborate in areas such as math and writing where surely they would do better on their own.  After all, Cain states, “Introverts are actually better students than extroverts.”  Cain also acknowledges, however, that students do need to “learn to work together” and throws a small bone at the need for global collaboration to solve our world’s over-complicated problems.

Can we as educators, then, be confident in our impact on students at all points on the “vert” spectrum if we deftly balance independent and group modes of work, and if we provide ample but not overwhelming opportunities for speaking in front of an audience? Is this enough to encourage kids to grow into the space on the other side(s) of the spectrum from where they feel most comfortable?

This may have been enough, or at least the best we could do, 15 years ago before the invention of social media, but I feel that Cain has missed a critical development in our society: the culture our younger generations are creating with social media tools.

The explosion of social media has many explanations, but one of these that is frequently cited is the lowering of social inhibitions that these tools facilitate.

For better or for worse and for a variety of reasons, people say things they wouldn’t normally say to people they wouldn’t normally talk to on these sites.  In the classroom, savvy teachers have learned to bring out the best of this behavior.

In a May 2011 NY Times article Trip Gabriel documents how students using social technologies such as backchannels feel more comfortable sharing in class.

Ultimately blog posts, tweets, and video sharing may provide safe ground for introverts to participate in more social learning opportunities without the anxiety felt in face-to-face situations.  That said,  could we now say that we as educators face a moral obligation to provide this type of outlet for all of our students?  If extroverts have been, as Cain describes them, “the darlings of modern culture”, isn’t it time we give introverts their say?

A common question around Project-Based Learning (PBL) is how it differs from the projects we all did in school. The volcano, the bridge, and the model projects many of us did back in the day were fun change-of-pace activities that helped motivate us to learn, or at least come to class on time, but these projects lacked several elements that distinguishes PBL in the 21st century as a transformative teaching and learning practice.

In a recent post on this blog, Scot Hoffman laid out the criteria for PBL project as described by W. Thomas in his review of literature on Project-Based Learning.  One of these criteria in particular illuminates how student learning is affected by this approach.

(2) PBL projects are focused on questions or problems that “drive” students to encounter (and struggle with) the central concepts and principles of a discipline.

This criterion is tall order; it is a significant departure from the teaching methods most of us experienced in school or learned in our teacher ed programs.  It represents a modern standards-based expression of constructivist or constructionist learning and utilizes elements of discovery, inquiry, and problem-based learning.  But what does it mean?

Great projects motivate students to explore and/or generate real-world questions or problems that are so relevant to the curriculum that students must learn the central concepts and skills of the unit in order to address those questions or problems.  A PBL project is not completed at the end of a unit to assess what students have learned, rather it is begun before the student has even identified the knowledge and skills he or she will need in order to finish it.

Consider a time when you had to solve an important problem in your work or personal life.  Chances are you did not know everything you needed to know to solve it.  You asked important questions, identified the resources you might need, located and studied those resources, determined a course of action, and executed it.  What you learned along the way, whether you were successful or not, probably involved multiple disciplines and made you a more confident problem-solver, researcher and lifelong learner.   Isn’t this what we want for our children in the 21st century?

As we research about integrating technology, project based-learning, personalized learning, brain-based research, 21^st century skills, and basically what is best for our students to be ready for the future, I’ve had teachers ask, well, how are we going to do all of this? My response: Blended Learning!

Blended learning is a pedagogical approach which combines the classroom, face-to-face education that includes teacher support and student interaction, with the opportunities that technology has to offer. A certain amount of school time students spend working by themselves on the computer, learning or researching information.  As they are doing this, we are teaching them to become active learners (brain based research), we teach them to be digital literates, (21^st century skills). At the same time, we allow them to work at their own pace, readiness and interest (personalized learning). When students come to the classroom, they use what they have learned and researched in higher-order thinking activities (21^st century skills) along with other students (collaboration). They become interactive learners (brain based research) and take part in workshops and projects (PBL) that allow them to further their understanding.

The role of the teacher? To be a facilitator, a guide, to expose and model to our students how to find information in the overwhelming internet, to provide engaging activities and projects that will allow them to use the information  they have found to further their understanding.

This video can help you better understand what a blended school looks like.

Carpe Diem Schools

The Online Blended Learning Task Force (Abhishek Singh, Julie Allison, Martin Reinsmoen, Brian Chanen, and Andrea Reinsmoen) have been researching and studying both Blended and Online learning to see what best fits our school. Our conclusion? Our recommendation will be coming out soon!

In the next few weeks the Green Education Task Force will be unveiling a few ideas of how students and families can consume less resources.  It seems cliche at this point to notify you all, but really, we needlessly consume a lot of resources at ASB.

Here’s one example:

By a recent estimate from the high school environmental club, ASB uses between 1,500 and 2,000 paper cups each week at the water fountains.  This means that these people are not buying disposable plastic bottles, which I suppose is a positive for the environment.  However, it is an awfully big waste of paper instead.

The water that comes out of  these fountains is very clean and just to make sure, it is tested twice a week by Envirocare.  By the time you drink water from these fountains, our water has gone through an extensive filtration process.  Here’s how it works:

1. Water enters ASB from the BMC main pipe (20,000-25,000 liters per day).

2.  Three 20,000 liter tanks are kept full in case of a fire.  The rest of the water is pumped through a sand, then charcoal, and then U.V. filtration system and is stored in one of our 20,000 l. holding tanks.

3.  As it is required, the water is pressurized and pumped throughout the school to the water fountains, toilets, kitchen, sinks, etc.

4.  The drinking water is once again filtered using a U.V. system.

Our water is very safe and very clean.  Envirocare delivers their bi-weekly reports and in addition to this, Mr. Sant Khana administers random tests throughout the building to ensure top quality.

Therefor, there is no reason that any of us should need to purchase a plastic water bottle from the cafeteria.  Please do your part to reduce the paper and plastic waste surrounding drinking water at our school.  Bring your own water bottle and more importantly, use it.

I would like to first introduce the ASB community to the members of the Games-Based Learning Task Force:

• Savio D’Mello, Tech
• Rory Newcomb, HS Science
• Abishek Singh, HS Tech
• Anna Pagdiwalla, HS Science
• Solomon Senrick, MS Social Studies
• Nupur Gupta, MS Art
• Kurt Johnson, MS Science
• Arpita Varma, ES
• Tiffany Hill, ES
• Anisha Lulla, ES
• Shilpa Sanghavi, ES

The members of this task force have been researching the impact of games-based learning on the educational paradigm of 21st century learning at ASB.   There is no question that games have a motivational edge over teaching methods that do not engage the digital native in our students. A more compelling question that we have to ask ourselves is how can games prepare our children for a future that will require them to be collaborators, risk-takers, innovators, and critical thinkers?  One of the books that the task force has read this year, Reality is Broken, provides an answer to this question.

In this book, Jane McGonigal proposes that we can harness the power of games to solve real-world problems.  Below is a link to McGonigal’s TED talk where she discusses her research and the role that gaming will play in our future.  At the end of her talk, she describes three games that she has helped to develop:

• World Without Oil
• Superstruct
• Evoke

After watching her TED talk, I invite you to explore the imaginings of the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis, read about the superstructures created by future forecasters, and dive right in on a crash course in changing the world.

Watch the TED talk at the link below:

Click on Image to Watch TED talk

Gaming can Make a Better World

It is striking to listen to the R&D team work through the ideas underpinning our various task forces.  Here we have some of ASB’s greatest teachers and thinkers, K through 12, synthesizing some of the most profound educational ideas of our time.  We are on the verge of redefining the learning for some 700+ students with initiatives such as multi-age classrooms, project-based learning, and personalized learning.  The leaders of these teams share passionate, thought-provoking ideas that support our school’s mission and yet we sometimes fail to see eye-to-eye, to reach consensus, and to fully grasp the magnitude of what these changes might mean to our school.

We live and work in one of the most populated city in the world — Mumbai, our glorious Maximum City.  As India and Mumbai grow and develop, an alarming trend is being watched by the Mumbai Environmental Social Network: there are a lot of cars out there on the street.  Now, it probably didn’t take an NGO with several observers to realize this and many of you who have lived here a lot longer than me can feel the change in your own lives.  You’ve experienced longer commutes, heard more honking horns, smelled the air and seen the difference.

A recent estimate by the group found that there has been very little change in the number of auto rickshaws here in the city over the last decade, but there has been an 11% increase in cars, a 7% increase in the number of taxis, and a staggering 14% increase in the number of commercial vehicles roaming the streets (not sure if they are counting those amazing egg-wallahs on their bicycles!).  In other words, people are increasingly looking to cars as there primary mode of transportation.

As someone who has recently moved to Mumbai (back in July 2010), I’m sure not the best judge of life in Mumbai, but I do understand that many people have specific and important needs for buying more than one car.  And, I would certainly not sit here and preach to you all to give up your cars — nor would I judge those of you that have more than one car in your family.

Just this morning, Craig, our superintendent, reported to me that he has talked with several CEO’s here that actually prefer to bike to work (see Times of India article) here in Mumbai.  So, there ARE alternatives.

And this brings me to carpooling … it’s fun, it’s a social experience, I get to have a few professional conversation now and again, I get to be with my wife, I can do work on my laptop, I can chill out and listen to my iPod, and it is one less car getting in the way of everyone else.

So, be safe (especially if you are biking!) and consider this: should Green Education end at the walls of our school?  Of course not — Green Education is a lifestyle, a paradigm shift, and the understanding that every day we make choices, and these choices have consequences.

See you on the bus/train/bike lane, Reid

When, like Jason, I think of the most meaningful educational experiences I have had, I remember a number of moments from working through a difficult novel to the time I finally realized that if you throw a Rubik’s cube really hard against a wall it will break into colorful mini-cubes. If I’m serious about trying to envision important moments of learning, though, I also tend to remember people—the teachers who helped me or the friends who took classes with me. I often consider myself lucky to be at a school that is small enough for teachers and students to work closely together and dedicated enough to invest heavily in a face-to-face, brick-and-mortar expansion into a new building. Everyone here at ASB is excited to create an innovative space where students, teachers, and community members can interact and learn.
So why abandon all of this for online learning?
The answer is that being an innovative educational institution means building on your strengths and exploring possibilities for growth. Online learning offers the possibilities for students to continue work they were doing before they moved to Mumbai, to take courses that are personally interesting but not within our scope to offer, or to test the waters with new interests. Online learning also gives teachers the chance to share a little bit of our expertise with the wider world.
ASB is uniquely positioned to explore multiple worlds of learning. In some ways we find ourselves in a position similar (though on a different scale) to that of Stanford. As a technologically innovative university Stanford finds itself creating the very technology that may make its physical institution obsolete. So what does Stanford do? Perhaps their answer, as discussed in this editorial (The University of Wherever), is relevant to us. We value the educational experience that is shaped by the people in our community. We invest in that future. And while we are at it we consider how we can offer even more to our students or try to expand our own reach.

The online/blended learning committee is working now to help develop a policy for the use of online courses in the high school and, more importantly, to suggest the development of a suite of online courses and professional development in both blended learning and online facilitation.

One of the main goals of education in the 21st century is to provide a learning environment that facilitates the acquisition of skills and processes that will help students to respond appropriately under pressure to a variety of situations.  The acquisition of skills and processes necessary to develop innovators requires a risk-taking mindset for learning.

Earlier this year, the Stanford Graduate School of Business published an article entitled Why Failure Drives Innovation.  In this article the author highlights two ways in which people view failure.  The majority of people fall under the Type 1 mindset which is characterized by a fear of failure. For people to be innovative and successful in the 21st century, they need view failure with more of a Type 2 mindset, in which people fear the loss of opportunity and value failure as part of the learning process.

How then do we get people to switch from a Type 1 mindset to a Type 2 mindset?  The article suggests that rapid prototyping and creating a sense of desperation or “jugaad” will help to change people’s perspective.   Rapid prototyping is a process by which people rapidly brainstorm new ideas and then quickly develop a physical model of a solution.  When failure occurs, you try something new, so you are always moving in a positive direction and failure is simply part of the learning process.

Games-based learning is an approach to learning that can foster a Type 2 mindset in our children. Gaming engages a similar skill set required of rapid prototyping in a controlled fashion.  Not only do games provide a safe environment for students to experience failure and learn from their mistakes, they are also motivating, engaging and fun!  In the spirit of Halloween, let’s look at a how the math game, Escape from Fraction Manor, can teach fractions using the elements of gaming.

The goal:  Cleo the Cat has wandered into the mysterious and spooky Fraction Manor.  The resident scientist, Dr. Fractionstein, sees this as an opportunity to test his new puzzles.  Cleo is trapped inside until the puzzles are solved.  Your job is to use your fraction skills to help Cleo escape Fraction Manor.  Each time you solve a puzzle a key will appear that opens a new door.  The further you get in the game, the more challenging the puzzles become.  Can you lead Cleo the Cat safely out of Fraction Manor?

Play this game at home and see if you can spot the gaming elements listed below:

• clearly defined learning objectives that are integral to game play
• a winning condition and rewards throughout play
• built-in elements of engagement that motivate the player to stay involved
•  challenges to overcome through trial and error and development of strategy
• Increasing level of difficulty
•  player control of exploration and learning acquisition
• Continuous immediate feedback

Feel free to comment on this post with your findings!

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it he coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.” He argued that the way our messages are delivered change society more than the content of our messages. Even the lightbulb, empty of any message content, “creates an environment by its mere presence.”

McLuhan went further to categorize media by their effect. In one category he placed hot media, those which fostered detachment. In the other category were cool media that compel us to engage completely. Radio was the former. Seminars are the latter.

So today we find ourselves with social media, perhaps the “coolest” of all. Sites like Facebook or Twitter (or Edmodo or Ning) have literally no content upon creation, yet we’ve each felt compelled to engage with them. As Michael Wesch shares below, there’s something in the air. It shapes us, our relationships, and our learning.

Abhishek Singh, Madeline Sodhi, Will Pamperin and I are exploring this media and its implication for our school community. Let’s begin with a question:

You are sitting at home, or in your car or in the atrium of your child’s school. You have just used a computer, tablet or phone to read a blog and watch an online lecture. You’ve been told that changes such as these will radically alter not only your relationships but also your child’s education. What do you do?

Tweet us your answer: @SocialASB

Why is it that schools today resemble assembly lines- with students being packaged by their “date of manufacture,” rather than individual ability levels, learning styles or interests?  While students of the same age may share a common birth year, often times their individual needs are spread out over a wide continuum of learning, that can be neglected when chronological constraints take priority.

The purpose of Multi-Age Classes Task Force is  to examine current research and practice in regards to Multi-Age Classrooms and to investigate the possibility of grouping students of various ages, and allowing progress based on ability rather than age; seeking to answer the question, “Will intentionally blended groups of children from a variety of ages promote acquisition of learning based on individual needs rather than grade level expectations?”

While the “assembly line” is surely efficient and orderly in educating masses, does it really provide the skills needed for a 21st century learner?  With a rapidly increasing flow of information readily available around us, what will be the tools children need to succeed in the world of tomorrow?  Grade level content or a mutual commitment to collaboration and cooperation?

Our own “Multi-Age” Task Force includes myself, Jeff Mostade, Jennifer Piccolo, Trish Tynan, Abby Kasky, Erica Barclay, & Eric Nelson.  And while I will not be revealing our ages through this blog, you can be sure that we do not share a common date of manufacture- like so many others in the world who naturally come together based on skills, interest, and mutual respect.

At a recent meeting a middle school teacher related a concern with the group that illuminates an issue at the root of our research into building an effective 21st century school.  He remarked at how quickly sixth graders become accustomed to subject-based learning blocks after learning in a predominantly trans-disciplinary curriculum in the Elementary School:

“When I introduced an element of math in with my social studies lesson, several students were alarmed by this and asked why they were being asked to do math outside math class?”

This comment, one that all middle and high school teachers have no doubt been confronted with, speaks to the need to stretch inquiry-based learning covering multiple disciplines from the primary years through the middle years and beyond.  If we do something that we know works in fourth and fifth grade,  then why do we abandon it in sixth grade?

This is also likely the reason that the question of how to address all disciplines comes up time and again as a question of concern when trying to build a model of essential conditions for success with problem-based learning (PBL).  Published research acknowledges that building a trans-disciplinary curriculum is not an easy task and requires teams of committed teachers with ample time for collaboration.  It is also widely published that building a problem-based curriculum requires the same collaborative planning foundation.

This is a handy coincidence, but is the link between PBL and trans-disciplinary learning really just about the collaboration?  David Moursund, in his book Project-Based Learning Using Information Technology, claims that anytime you have a real-world problem to solve,  the solution will involve multiple disciplines.

This, then, becomes the link:  the real challenge is not to kluge together awkward assignments incorporating several subjects,  but to draw on the power of collaborative teams to design authentic real-world problems and wrap them in a solid project-based learning structure.

The online/blended learning group hasn’t even met, but blended learning is in full swing at ASB. In fact, you are participating in online learning right now (at least, the online part for sure). As soon as you combine face-to-face learning with any online content, you are facilitating or participating in blended learning. Ever watched a TED talk in class? That’s blended learning (again, at least the blended part).

Though some have suggested that there are 6 models for blended learning (http://www.innosightinstitute.org/blended_learning_models/) the reality is that blended learning can happen in almost as many ways as learning itself can happen.

So what is our mission in the online/blended learning task force? It is to investigate how best to combine the educational resources available to us online with the face-to-face experience here at school. How exactly do we harness the web to offer the best education for each individual student?

While we are doing plenty of online/blended learning already at ASB (think online courses for teachers pursuing a Master’s degree or courses for students who need to make up credit lost in high school) our approach may be less than systematic. How do we find the best online material or courses to use at our school? How do we evaluate these courses? How do we facilitate or regulate online learning? What is the best model to follow for blending the online and face-to-face experience?

If we look just at online courses and tutorials designed specifically for use in K-12 classrooms we see a wide variety of possible opportunities for ASB. Courses range from thorough, independent, blended (but significantly online) programs such as the George Washington University High School to tutorials meant to be implemented alongside traditional school (Khan Academy).  Our goal is to look at tools like these to see what they mean for the learning we do here at ASB. Since we all learn online, by interacting with print texts, and by speaking to each other, our desire is to come up with the perfect mix for our community and a set of standards for evaluating what goes into the mix.

The online/blended learning task force is excited to find ways to harness exciting tools that are online in -line with our mission and our philosophies of teaching.

One of the new challenges facing educators in the 21st century is finding appropriate strategies to help our young digital natives learn.  One educational strategy that aligns with the learning styles of students today is games-based learning.  There has been a great deal of research in recent years on this approach.  You will be hearing more about this throughout the year from the Games-Based Learning Task Force, but to get an idea of what this learning strategy is all about, take a look at this infographic about video games in education from Online Colleges.

Infographic on Video Games in Education

A good introduction to how games in education can motivate and help students reach their learning goals is Quizlet.  Quizlet is an online flashcard tool that makes use of games to help students learn concepts.  While there are many other features to Quizlet, the feature that students seem to enjoy the most is the games feature.  The great thing about this online tool is that it is accessible to all students at all levels in all disciplines, and the games change as the content changes.

To get started, you can either search for sets that have already been created like this set for multiplication tables or you can sign up for a free account and create your own sets of flashcards.  Once the set of flashcards has been created, you have several options that all provide students with immediate feedback:

Flashcard Options

• You can practice spelling words by using the speller function.  Quizlet will prompt you with a computer generated audio and you type the word.
• You can learn the concepts by an online flashcard simulation that prompts you with the definition and requires you to type in the corresponding word (you can set this to prompt you with the word instead).
• You can take tests created for you by Quizlet from your set of flashcards.  For instructions on how to format tests, check out this blog post.
• You can play one of two games: Scatter or Space Race.

The games function allows students within a class or group to compete against each other for the high score.  The students have so much fun trying to get the high score that they don’t realize that they are learning!  Space Race is my favorite game as it is similar to Space Invaders, an Atari classic that I played when I was younger.  In Space Race definitions move across the screen and you have to enter the word that corresponds to the definition in order to shoot the definition out of the sky and score points.  If the definition makes it all the way across the screen, the game pauses and it tells you the correct answer.  However, Quizlet goes one step further by making you retype the correct answer before the  game will continue.  This repetition helps to retain the information in your memory for a longer period of time.

The game, Scatter, has a similar structure.  In this game, definitions and words are scattered all over the screen and you have to drag the words to the corresponding definition to make them disappear.

To make this tool even more accessible, Quizlet has developed mobile apps for a wide variety of mobile devices, so students can study on the go while sitting in Mumbai traffic!  For a video tutorial on all of the features of Quizlet, visit this site.

When can a school building itself be the driving force in the community of learners?  Could the actual building itself help to teach our students, faculty, and community members about environmental sustainability?

The Green Education Task Force thinks so.  And here’s how we can do it (in a nutshell of course).

As ASB embarks on the momentous challenge to expand into a new building AND retrofit the current building, environmental sustainability is a no-brainer.  Thinking “Green” establishes us as a leader in the local community, reduces our carbon footprint, saves us money in the long run, and most importantly, sets an example for the students, teachers, and families in our community.

At the Howe Dell Primary School in Hatfield (U.K.) the building itself is a living part of the curriculum.  There, students learn about green technologies such as rain water harvesting, roof-top gardens, and ecological principles such as interdependence by examining not just text books, but their real-life school.  These students are surrounded by not just the technological advances brought on by the green revolution, but the ethical stance that says: I care about the environmental impact that my personal choices have.

Over the coming months, we hope to continue to find ways to weave Green Education principles into the design, construction, and curriculum for the ASB of the future.  We envision a school where each student feels responsible for their choices — where each student takes responsibility for their choices — and each student keeps their environmental impact in mind every time they use another disposable cup at the water fountain or throws away yet another plastic water bottle.

It would not be too far off the mark to describe ASB as a kind of a purposeful beehive of activity.  Watching students, parents and ASB employees move through our building can be like watching the activity of a beehive. If you’re reading this, chances are, you know what it means to be as busy as a bee. Recently, IT consulting firm Gartner shared ten changes they predict will affect the way we work in the next ten years. One of those predictions is the emergence of a way of working called Work Swarms. Here’s how they describe this way of working.

“Swarming is a work style characterized by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity; Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is emerging. Teams have historically consisted of people who have worked together before and who know each other reasonably well, often working in the same organization and for the same manager. Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.”

Swarming is the best way I can think of to describe the new work emerging at ASB through the formation of the Teaching & Learning and Research & Development structures and their respective task forces. A work swarm is characterized by a high premium on collaboration and also bears a close resemblance to project-based learning (PBL) projects.Three main phases of swarms and PBL projects are:

1. Gather Information
2. Make sense of the information
3. Construct/Communicate

The busy bees on our Project-Based Learning Task Force are: myself, Kevin Crouch
Abby Kasky, Paul Kasky, Jennifer Piccolo, Jason Roy, Madeline Sodhi, Swapna Trivedy
and Purvi Vora.  Our group has started gathering information around these five initial questions::

1. Is project-based learning successful with all students?  What does the research say about this?
2. What are the conditions needed for project-based learning to have maximum impact?
3. What isn’t a project and what is?
4. What schools are good at it around the world?  Can we Skype them?
5. How does project-based learning incorporate other disciplines effectively?

We’re looking forward to making sense of what we uncover and sharing our findings.  In the meantime, If you’re interested in finding out more about Project-Based Learning, try this Buck Institute for Education link. or have a chat with one of our task force members.

Happy swarming ASB! (and sweet results)