Building a Community of Practice with SPACE &

RemixWorld

Ben ShapiroMorgridge Institute for Research

Tene' GrayAkili Lee

Nichole PinkardDigital Youth Network, DePaul University

 Denise Nacu

Urban Education Institute, University of Chicago

Digital Youth Network

Urban youth-centered

Working professionals (poets, designers, musicians, film-makers, animators) as mentors with no prior education training.

Project-focused

In- & Out-of- School

Cultural and Teaching Goal

Inculcate students in the critical culture of the media domains they are working in:• How to produce• How to present• How to critique

⇒How to thrive in a realm where media products are capital.

Teacher Learning Challenge

Artists-cum-mentors need to• learn about instructional

designo identifying goalso planning instructiono assessing student

thinking• develop practices for

learning from one another

DYN practices help them to do that.

Today

I will describe a Community of Practice that helps artist mentors become expert teachers.

Communities of PracticeGroups of DYN participants work and learn together in distinct and carefully crafted ways.

The Communities of Practice framework helps us to understand how.

CoP describes what makes some specialized groups distinct from the world at large and highlights organizational processes that can promote learning.

Delineating questions:• What is it about?  i.e., joint enterprise• How does it function? i.e., mutual engagement• What capability does it produce? i.e., shared

repertoire Wenger (1999)

Linked Communities of Practice

Curriculum DesignMentors

and Coach

MediaProduction

Mentors and

Students

Today's Focus

Mutually Engagement in Instructional Design and AssessmentThe literature on school organizations and teacher learning warns of the perils of creating cultures of independence in instruction. We do not want to replicate school's egg-crate culture.

But we can learn schools: We know that collegiality, common vision, and processes for sharing knowledge can improve the quality of teaching and learning.

The Mentor-Coach CoP is intended to support that.

Lortie (1975); Fullan (1990); Rosenholtz (1991); Roberts (1996, 1997), 

Roberts, Sloane, & Wilson (1996), Wilson et al (2000)

Mentor Learning Goals for Curriculum Design CoPUnderstanding the connections between curriculum, instruction, and assessment• Goals - skills and roles (artist, producer, critic)• Projects and Units• Assessment

Sharing lessons learned with one another.

Curriculum Design CoP

Joint Enterprise - Developing a curriculum library.

Mutual Engagement – Writing Units. Assessment Collaboration (evaluating student work and refining criteria for assessing it); Use of SPACE tool.

Shared Repertoire - Database of goals, lessons, and rubrics; common understandings.

Common components used and revised by all mentors.

SPACE - Supporting Projects with Authoring, Critique, and ExemplarsCurriculum Design, Management, and Assessment Tool.

Used by mentors and mentor-coach to collaborate on the creation and revision of common curriculum library and formative assessment of student work.

SPACE - Curriculum Design, Management, and Assessment Tool

Project

SPACE - Curriculum Design, Management, and Assessment Tool

Project Goals

SPACE - Curriculum Design, Management, and Assessment Tool

Project Goals

Deliverables

SPACE - Curriculum Design, Management, and Assessment Tool

Project Goals

Deliverables Rubrics

SPACE - Curriculum Design, Management, and Assessment Tool

Project Goals

Deliverables Rubrics

Lessons

SPACE User Interface

How SPACE is Used • DYN combines SPACE with strategic

professional development.o SPACE provides a central place

to share and revise projects, units, and rubrics.

• Mentors write new units by remixing content in SPACE (deliverables, whole projects, lessons, etc.).o They use rubrics to create

student-friendly instructions that explain what quality work looks like.

• They present those units, as well as applicable student work, to the mentor-coach and to the team and revise in accord with feedback.  

 

Closing the Loop

Planning

Teaching

ProductionAssessment

Lesson Plans Instructions

& Rubrics

Student Work & Rubrics

Assessed Student Work

Mentor-Coach TalkBackground: Asia has scored a piece of student work lower than Jennifer did.

Asia [Mentor]: She faded herself out while she was talking. I think I was there for that lesson; I saw part of that lesson when you were like, "where should I do this", did I do it to early or did I do it to soon. So, I know that she knew how to do this.

Tene' [Facilitator]: What made you [Jennifer] give it a 2 though?

Jennifer [Mentor]: Uhm, because, uhm, I gave it a 2 because for me understanding like with the background noise. I...when I graded them I knew they had to record under certain circumstances. So, it was kind of unavoidable for the background noise. So, that's why I was like, I'll give it a 2.

Asia [Mentor]: That didn't bother me. I felt like I was listening to like an NPR where they were at a cafe. The music fit cafe like. I was like oh, okay.  So, that didn't bother me at all.

Mentor-Coach TalkTene’: That's true. It did sound like that. It did absolutely sound like that. I sort of went back and forth between a 1 and a 2 and I think, I think what just...I said okay this is a 2, uhm, it wasn't distracting, it was just inconsistent for me. So, I think that's what just made me, uhm, choose a 2 as opposed to a 1 or a 1 1/2. Uhm, I do...there was noise present, uhm, and, again it did sound like the whole NPR cafe type setup. But I think that was the sort of the deciding factor for me in giving it a 2. So, if we had to agree, I mean, would we...and listening to what Asia said, does that change your thinking a little bit in terms of you [Jennifer] scoring it a 2. Would you...

Jennifer: I think I would still score it a 2. Yeah.

Mentor-Coach TalkTene’: What about you [Asia]? Would you...you would keep it a 1 1/2?

Asia: Only because I know that she was taught explicitly not to fade out. If I hadn't sat in or walked in on that part of the lesson, maybe I would've given her a 2....she was all over the place, she could've picked up the volume because she knew how to edit the volume.

Mutual Engagement in Assessment

We just heard mentors discussing contrasting interpretations of a student's work through the lens of a rubric.

They drew on shared repertoire (rubric, observations of class) to justify interpretations.

Even if they did not ultimately agree, they are sharpening their perceptions of what matters. 

This kind of talk feeds curriculum redesign for next year.

What We Are Finding

SPACE can help facilitate critical conversations about teaching and learning.

SPACE can help mentors & trainers understand the connections between curriculum and assessment to help them to become effective planners.

SPACE enables the strategic planning and enactment  of professional development for new mentors as a way to understand the DYN model.

Linked CoPs

Curriculum DesignMentors

and Trainers

MediaProduction

Mentors and

Students

Where We Are Headed

Designing tools to more tightly couple the Curriculum Design CoP to the Media Production CoP. 

RemixWorld

A complementary tool for student-mentor collaboration.

Social-networking site for creating, sharing, critiquing, assessing, and revising media.

RemixWorld

Closing the Loop

Content in RemixWorld is synchronized with SPACE.

Closing the Loop

Planning

Teaching

ProductionAssessment

SPACE SPACE

Lesson Plans

RemixWorld

SPACE & RemixWorld

Instructions & Rubrics

Student Work & Rubrics

Assessed Student Work

Why This Is Important

Creating collaborative routines for planning instruction, assessing student work, and reflecting on student outcomes has been exceedingly difficult to implement in schools.

The DYN model, combining strategic professional development with purpose-built information technology, demonstrates a sustainable model for continuous instructional improvement. A model for informal and formal education.

Standing on the Shoulders of PiratesKurt’s point – Not all learning is going to happen in game. But play can catalyze in-school conversations.

How can we build processes and tools like this around games in schools? e.g., What’s the difference between a 1.5 and a 2 when playing civ? How should teachers help a student who’s doing a 2 get to a 4 while maintaining play as process?

What do we need to do to capture and represent in-game interactions in ways that afford teachers helping students?

Tool + Knowledge + Practice + Organizational Challenge.