Tryangulation

Our efforts rewarded

Daily visits to our garden to get encouraging images like these make the whole frustrating project worthwhile.

We've had lots of unseasonal rain in the last few weeks, which has been great for our endangered wildflowers. I have a new Canon PowerShot this year, and our visiting film student son Andy has helped me figure it out. I'm doing better at getting the shots I want, and I'm eager to share them.

I just uploaded a batch to a Flickr photo set, which I've embedded here as a slideshow. (If you are reading this post by email, you will have to visit my blog to see the slideshow.) The photo set on Flickr has more detailed general information about the project, captions for most of the photos,  and links to other related photo sets and blog posts.

So go to the Flickr photo set for the project based learning main course.  This is just the dessert:

P.S. If you're a new email subscriber, you might not have noticed that the highlighted text (like this: Tryangulation) is actually a hyperlink, to make it easier for you to find the websites I mention in my blog posts.

Whether we work together or apart

Last week when I shared our little flower's survival of winter and good intentions, I prefaced my post with a line from a Robert Frost poem, Mending Wall. While I was setting up the previous post just now about a local newspaper covering the reappearance of the flowers in the wild, I sorted through my own old photographs, too impatient to hold out for this year's crop of photos.

I found this one, which I had taken a couple miles from where we collected seeds. This image is perfect for another of my favorite Frost poems, The Tuft of Flowers, which, in its own way, is also fitting for all kinds of virtual co-labor.

The poem relates the melancholy of a field worker alone on a beautiful morning, after his co-laborer has moved on:

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,--alone,
`As all must be,' I said within my heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

The laborer is then surprised that his unseen partner has  left uncut a  tuft of flowers growing among the hay:

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

Even though his coworker is still out of sight and earshot, this shared beauty unites their spirits and joins their separate tasks into one labor. We too can find things of beauty and leave them for our co-laborers in the next field, or across time.

... and feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

They noticed!

It was encouraging to see in the Today's Zaman online edition that our little flowers --or rather their still wild cousins-- got some press. Last year I didn't go out to the meadow where we collect seeds, so I didn't realize until reading this new article by Zaman that they were down to an area of only 30 square meters. I'm going to use that news article to do some campaigning!

Something there is that doesn't love a row

Newer readers might not be aware of my contentious school project to protect the beautiful and critically endangered Centaurea tchihattcheffi (yanardöner in Turkish). The natural habitat of this nearly extinct species of the cornflower family is in the vicinity of our school, and for the past few years two of our science teachers and I have bravely fought to propagate seeds on our campus  (click here for photos and text from a happier time).

The flower's habitat is threatened by large scale agriculture, Ankara's urban sprawl and, ironically, its failure to be noticed (behavior which I have commented on before). After first collecting seeds in the wild (natural habitat pix here), we carefully prepared a plot close enough to be observed, but just out of the school bus and recess commotion. For a couple years following, we (that is, I) collected seeds, cleaned and sorted them, and then recruited students and colleagues to get a little dirty in the name of species diversity, sowing the seeds in our gradually increasing garden.

Who would have thought three years ago that we ourselves were a threat to our centaurea's survival?

Like I wrote recently concerning the local aversion to disorder, straight lines and right angles are the norm for flower gardens, and our nonconformist self-seeding weeds were a threat to that system. Our well meaning grounds crews and I were constantly in a race, they to restore order, and I to protect disheveled nature. As soon as I got one crew and crew chief on board with the project, they would be reassigned and new workers would show up, hustling to clean up the mess their predecessors apparently had left behind.

I was away for the entire fall semester this year, a critical time for fending off welldoers. When I returned to school in February I was disheartened to see that orderliness had finally won out: the garden was neatly hoed and planted with shrubs in straight little rows.  The notion of death by PBL crossed my mind.

A few weeks ago I finally went out to see if anything had survived, and felt the faintest whisper of hope when I found that there were, in fact, a few buds creeping out of the ground. I went back today and saw that quite a few more were popping up at the edges of the plot. I found the newest commander of the gardeners (the 4th in the lifetime of this project) and together we assessed the state of the plot and agreed on a plan and a compromise: once the centaurea were in bloom and easy to spot, workers could go in among them and pull up the other less desirable weeds.

While we were examining the grounds, we found that two had bloomed. I took some quick shots with my mobile phone, as evidence that our project had survived all our best efforts at project based learning.

The title of this post is adapted from the poem Mending Wall, by Robert Frost. The photo is unretouched, taken under heavily overcast skies.

My how they've grown!

Getting trumped by your students can be a good thing.

Our debate club is organizing an international youth summit fashioned after the Model UN. The three students from the steering committee met with me briefly today, and we got into a debate whether they should use PBWiki or Wikispaces or Basecamp to organize tasks, project communications and other management issues. These students have been using wikis and Basecamp for a couple years now (since they were 15), and it warmed my heart to have such a constructive conversation about choosing a tool according to the job at hand.

While I was away some changes in our accounting department resulted in our Basecamp account being frozen for nonpayment.  Soon after I got back I was bombarded with pleas to get it turned on again. I got the payments straightened out, and five days ago it was up and running again. In that time 17 students (and zero) teachers have logged on and gotten back to work.

So I thought that Basecamp was the best tool for their needs with the youth summit. They didn't agree. They're running the show and proved that they knew better than I what they wanted to do so, as an advocate of project based learning and authentic work and all that stuff, I had to acquiesce to their decision.

In other words, I lost the argument.

So here's three gold stars for I, B and A. And thanks for later telling me that I'm cool. I feel all better now.

Project mentality and project based learning

In project based learning, whose idea of a "project mentality" are we looking for?

Some time ago the project management blog Slow Leadership had a post entitled Measurement versus Trust, about the issues of an increasing demand for measuring and evaluating minute details of projects. The post included a 2x2 matrix of different management styles that varied according to the level of trust between the project team and management.

This brought to mind some other approaches to differences in management and leadership styles, such as the classic matrix by Hershey and Blanchard, which looks at competence levels and how much the leader directs or supports the team members.  Follow this link for a different explanation of this model.

I don't think school-based projects and project based learning are headed toward such detailed analyses any time soon, but still this got me thinking about management styles and student projects.

The assessment of student projects --including peer assessments among team members-- can include several not-quite-quantitative criteria such as the quality of planning, project execution, communication within the group, team work, demonstration of knowledge of the subject matter, and how well the project achieved the stated goals.

The problem is that there are several different ways to manage a project or a team, depending on the situation and the work styles (and personalities) of the team members. In some situations a more directive approach is needed, in other situations a more participatory approach is preferred. This creates a dilemma in project assessment if the assessor (i.e. teacher) expects the students to work with one style (very likely his or her own style), when perhaps the personalities in the team or the task at hand would dictate a different style.

Without putting too fine a point on this, if adults have to deal with these kinds of differences, our guidance and assessment practices should be flexible enough to accommodate them as well.

For an interesting interpretation of Hershey and Blanchard's model for the classroom, follow this link.

 

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Clean hands not allowed

A project I've been working on for the last two years has been the cultivation of a critically endangered wildflower that's found only in the vicinity of our school (click here for more background).

Yesterday our Botany Club got in the mud to plant some of the seeds I collected this summer (about 2000!) in some new beds next to our original yanar döner plot. We also took another step toward our long term goal by adding another endemic species, Centaurea cyanocephala. There are 25 endangered wildflowers in our province, so we've got big plans for our big new campus!

The C. cyanocephala are biannuals, so now we'll have to be extra careful to make sure that our well intentioned school gardeners don't clean and hoe the area next summer. To see what we did and how we managed the problem of the biannuals, look at my Flickr set here. Some of the photos have notes attached to them which you can see if you pass your mouse pointer over the image. Maybe this will give some you new ideas for using photographs in your lessons. 

As winter approaches, we'll start work on the the club website, and I'm looking forward to trying some other cool tools with the group.

Looking forward to another year with the yanardöner

After many weeks of sharing ideas, making plans, getting expert advice, adjusting our plans, and talking the project up to just about everybody, we have succeeded in making TED's yanardöner wildflower population more permanent and secure.  To get some of the background, see posts (here and here) at this blog's previous address.
We now have officially desginated about 35 sq. meters on the campus for sustainable seed production for aesthetic, experimental and conservation purposes and - just as important - it looks like we have all the key stakeholders on campus buying into the common goal of protecting and enjoying this beautiful and  endangered wildflower in the most sustainable way possible. To see the source of our inspiration, check out my photo set of yanardöner and peygamber çiçeği in their natural habitat on Flickr.
The photos are of our seed planting ceremony on 26 Oct 2005, with special honored guests Mr. Süha Günel, our General Director, and Mrs. Melike Toklucu, our High School Principal. The seeds we planted were collected last summer from flowers growing on campus, and our expanded flower bed incorporates smaller plots where the flowers have already begun to naturalize.
We learned that the seeds need to spend the winter under snow for the best germination, which is why we're planting the seeds now instead of in the spring. I'll keep everyone posted on our progress.