Something that should be shared with all teachers

As I am catching up on my reader lately after relying solely on a delete or star ranking system, I am finding gems that some of you have penned in the last two or three weeks. This one, from Scott Elias via Leader Talk, aptly titled R-E-S-P-E-C-T, hits home as I really dig in to look at creating new culture in our schools. At SLA, I remember hearing Chris talk about how his teachers first and foremost must “teach kids, not content.” Scott brings up this in context to classroom management. Rather than butcher his list, here it is in it’s entirety:

• They chat students up at the classroom door.
  How Harry Wong of me to notice, but these are the teachers who make it
  a priority to be in the hallway during passing times. One of our
  veteran teachers high-fives every student who enters his classroom.
• They are willing to “take one for the team.”
  So you taught all three of your classes today only to be told by a
  student in your last class of the day that your fly is down. Decision
  time: Freak out and toss the disrespectful student out of class, or
  play it off. If you’re willing to be humble — to laugh at yourself –
  you’ll improve your cred. Trip and fall over a desk or a student’s book
  bag? Think twice before spazzing out at the student for not following
  rule #19, paragraph b: “Classroom aisles must be free from clutter at
  all times.”
• They engage kids in the content.
  This looks different for everyone. Some use technology if it’s in their
  comfort zone. Some bring the clicker system. And still some are
  supremely engaging lecturers who have a gift for making world history
  come alive for their students. Engaged kids don’t have time to get “in
  trouble.” Bored kids, on the other hand…
• When it’s necessary to talk to a kid about a behavior, they do it in a low-key way that is not punitive.
  Before you launch into a tirade at a student who has frustrated you and
  pushed you to your wit’s end, remember that lashing out and throwing
  your weight around may get what you want (compliance), but at what
  cost? You will have effectively ruined the relationship with the
  student which, arguably, may not matter to you. But you’ve also shown
  the other 20-30 kids in that class that your buttons can be pushed to
  their limit.
• They’re nice people. This
  is so often overlooked. There is a quote I like from the movie, “You’ve
  Got Mail.” (I could lie and say my wife makes me watch it, but I’m
  going to own my manliness and say that it’s a good movie…) When Tom
  Hanks’s character, Joe Fox buys out Meg Ryan’s “Ma and Pa” bookstore he
  tells her, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” To which she replies,
  “It was personal to me. What’s so wrong about being
  personal? Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being
  personal!” Students want to know that you’re more than just Mrs. Math
  or Mr. English.

I love technology and its potential in the classroom and in learning over the course of my lifetime and my children’s lifetimes. However, more than anything else, I want them exposed to the power of caring and fairness in dealing with people. Seeing Scott’s list makes me think of all of the missed opportunities I had to make a difference by asking questions of my students on subjects that perhaps did not relate to history or technology, but to their own lives. Also, I want back some of those situations where I didn’t handle a particular student with rational and calm discipline.

Darren Draper recently responded to Mark Prensky’s call to administrators in Educational Leadership by saying that we need to be spending more hours talking to students about their learning each day. Scott’s and Darren’s reactions are indeed related through that need to be involved with as many of our students as we can. From personal experience, the simple act of greeting them at the door, combined with the others in Scott’s list (like being a good person because, seriously, who is going to like to be greeted at the door every day by a miserable wretch of a teacher), sets a tone that is conducive to learning.

Technorati Tags: markprensky, darrendraper, scottelias, leadertalk, pjhiggins, chaldust101, emapathy

The Fastest Growing Segment

Thanks to Scott McLeod for posting this on his blog recently. This highlights something we often neglect to mention when talking about the 21st Century learner: their age. Too frequently, we focus on students being those that are youthful in age, but forsake those youthful in mind. This video clearly points out that ceasing to learn and adapt as you age is not an option for every generation under 60.

We work with teachers to help provide our students with the optimum environments for learning.  What are we doing to help our teachers optimize their learning?

ASCD Reflection

Being the first giant conference I have ever been to, and being the first non-tech-centered one as well, ASCD was fascinating on a few levels. The oddest thing about it was the fact that I chose not be connected via internet (god bless the iPhone and Twitter) for most of the conference. It might be a silent protest, but paying for wireless internet in hotels doesn’t sit well with me, especially when I am fronting the money. We listen often to people talk about the ubiquity of free Internet we will see in the future, but I feel it’s a long way off. More and more businesses are choosing to put proprietary restraints on the use of their wireless networks. Let’s use the Google model here: give it away and we will stay and use your product. Or at least we will give the perception to passersby that we are enjoying your business. I’ll end that rant there.

Bigger issues seem to dominate my thinking lately, issues such as school change and culture change within our society. My reading and writing tends to focus on the areas of motivating people to want something better, and giving them the means to create it for themselves. I am not going to be dishonest, I have goals and ideas that I would like to see put in place not only in schools, but in the larger picture as well (stay tuned for the world domination post to come shortly); however, I am wise enough, I think, to know that what I want matters little if the people I work with don’t see the value in it.

On the way down here, I sat next to a gentleman named Simon Sinek, of Sinek Partners. A while back, in my days as an expatriate in Greece, I worked for man who taught me that airline flights were the best places to go to school. “Interesting people fly and travel,” he said. Talk to the people around you on the plane.” So I took Fouad’s advice and struck up a conversation with this gentleman to my left. It turns out that Simon had an idea that he was trying to spread that involved asking corporations, individuals, government, or whoever would listen to articulate to themselves and others why they do the things they do. Without knowledge of and presentation of the “why” no one will be able to understand you, or better still, buy into what you are doing.

Often, he said, we confuse the “what” with the “why.” In business, people rarely buy the “what,” but more likely buy the “why.” I use Apple computers, and if you asked me why, I would probably rattle off that their design is intuitive, they are less buggy, I like the interface, etc. But what I would leave out would be the essential part of why I use them: I subconsciously buy into Steve Jobs ideal of irreverence and individuality. We might say the “what’s,” but only because we can’t articulate the “why.” I’ll admit it, I bought into “Think Different,” and why wouldn’t I? It’s a fantastic ideal.

Translating all of that into my practice, we ask our schools to change, and we say we need to change so that we “promote lifelong learning,” “create students capable of excelling in the 21st Century,” or any one of the mission statement buzzwords we might put there. But do we articulate why we do the things we do? What if I told my teachers that I wanted to inspire them to be innovative? Leave the kids out of it for a moment, and focus on the teachers. Inspire and innovate. I don’t have to tell them what that looks like, I have to model it in my own practice. Innovation comes from the fringes. Ric Murry and I had a banter back and forth about this via twitter the other day, but I think we can understand that teaching is not a “fringe,” but the model still works; it’s just semantics. Our teachers should be the ones leading the change and innovating. My role in all of this is to help provide the “why”. Steve Jobs didn’t make the iPod, he made the idea of an iPod possible. Teachers should be sharing their “innovations” with one another regularly, and I should be connecting them to one another to help spread that innovation.

Comparing what I do to what Steve Jobs does makes me feel way too self-important, but I think it’s an easy way to see the relationship between what we sometimes lack in schools and where we need to go.We don’t need mission statements, but rather leaders that inspire through action and empathy. Ginsberg’s session on Friday gave me a great insight into how to create a community of teachers that cares not only about one another, but about the level of teaching in the building: observations should be done with a group of teachers, as well as an administrator. Group observations and group debriefings, all with a common language and goals will become commonplace.

My thinking is shifting once again, and this time it’s shifting toward inclusion. Get on board, and grab an oar.

The Key to Moving People is Moving People

Part of what we do as teachers and learners is report back on what we find out in our personal inquiries.  As teachers it was done on a daily basis with our students.  We helped them disseminate the information that they need to be successful.  As administrators, the number of presentations often lessens, but the audience usually increases; at any one time there could be up to 100 people in the room we are presenting in.

What strategies were successful for us when we stood in front of students and helped them make sense of information?  What can we take from our time in the classroom and make it work for us as presenters?

Saturday at ASCD, I changed my schedule around so that I could attend a workshop by Deborah Estes, a presenter, former teacher and administrator from Texas.  The title is what originally caught my eye: “Brain-Friendly Presentation Skills.”

I present frequently to my departments, and I’ve struggled recently with creating engaging content.  Not that what I am saying is earth-shattering stuff, but I know that there are moments in my presentations that I need to invite the audience to digest what I am saying and give me feedback.  Sitting in Estes’ presentation, I learned that I have not been nearly observant enough of my audience; your audience and being able to read them and redirect them through the use of movement, storytelling, and, of all things, touch, determines the success or failure of your message.  Information without reflection and discussion does nothing for learners.  Give them the chance to hash out what you are saying and clarify it for one another and you stand a much better chance of making a difference in their learning.

Right from the start, Estes subtly began to coerce me into her presentation.  I was early by about 20 minutes, but she was much earlier than me.  She greeted me with a handshake and used my name (name-tag) when she did.

Points #1 and #2: Be early and set up at least 30 minutes before your scheduled start to greet your audience by name and appropriate touch (handshake) as they enter.

As she began to speak to the room of 150+ people, like most presenters, she gave her background and brief bio.  Hers was not done as a description of credentials or current occupation, but rather the story of how she became a teacher, coach, administrator, and speaker.  It was done structurally, meaning she related herself to all levels of educators: high school teachers, middle school teachers, and elementary teachers.  Each part of her opening story, which took about 5 minutes, had relevance to someone in the room because in our lives we, too, held or currently hold one of the positions she did.  More than that, her stories were relative to experiences we have all had.

Point #3: Use the power of storytelling to share information.  We remember best when we give our information context.

One of the most powerful things she did was move us.  Not the kind where we were emotionally moved, but rather we physically moved around the room.  In the 90+ minutes we were there, we moved over 15 times.  We conversed, we shared information and discussed the topics in the handout on our own terms, but in ways that she dictated.

Point #4: Move people.  Look at your audience and find clues that they are disengaging.  When you see the nods or the glazed eyes, change their state.

Some examples of what we did:

• Moved to another seat
• Turned and talked
• Four corners of the room (body voting)
• Invented names
• Hand voting (raise your hand and think of a number, use your fingers to represent the number, then find someone else in the room who has that number.  When you do, discuss the topic with them).
• People bingo
• Touch blue (simply walk around the room and touch something blue)
• Take your neighbor for a walk around the room while discussing the topic at hand.

Another thing I often struggled with is the format of how I present.  Should I do straight lecture and give a handout with all of the cute slides on the handout?  What other options are out there?  Estes presented us with at least 10 examples of how to change up the format of your lecture.

Point #5: Transfer of information does not have to be in the format that we all learned it: the straight lecture.  What if your audience knows a great deal about the topic you are covering?  Why spend time on the details if they already have them?  Give them the opportunity to list everything they know about the topic.  Have them present it to the crowd.  Based on what they know, amend your presentation on the fly and allow your group to go deeper into the topic.

After leaving the room, I realized that not only had I met over 20 people during the course of her presentation due to the movement and socialization, but I reflected on the attitudes of the staff that I work with as they receive information during faculty or department meetings.  Wow.  I see the source of their boredom and frustration.  They are disconnected from the information because they never have time to reflect on it.  The subtleties of presenting were on display for me today, and I thank Deborah Estes for sharing them with me.

Technorati Tags: presentation, deborahestes, ascd08, ascd, brainresearch,

Notes from ASCD Pre-conference Session: Motivation and School Change

New Orleans is a quiet city, if taken in at the right moments. We woke early today to get out before the city woke up and began its consistent cycle of reveling. A run through the streets of the quarter, over cobblestones and remnants of the previous night, set the tone for our day.
We were scheduled to attend a pre-conference workshop given by Margery Ginsberg from the University of Washington-Seattle. When we sat down a few weeks back to select this one, Dan, Kathy and I saw it as an opportunity to learns some strategies for moving the district forward. What we have been learning over the course of the last few weeks via feedback from meetings and conversations with the faculty is that they need to buy in to what is going on; they need to feel part of the change that is occurring.
Ginsberg’s workshop, titled, Motivation and School Change, came for us at a crucial time. Tremendous change is afoot in our buildings with construction and the impact it has on curriculum. We need to be able to provide framework for our staff to feel validated and know that they are essential to improving how we educate our students. What we learned today gave us a few great strategies and a key to developing the framework for building trust, establishing a common language for our buildings (so they can begin to see themselves as learning communities), and giving teachers voice.
Some of the things we discussed regarding motivation:
• Motivation based on improving test scores is a short term gain (Sinek would say that you are motivating based on a “what”: an outcome rather than an idea)
• Intrinsic motivation should be to love learning (this is a “why”) An effect of this type of motivation might be improved test scores.
• Motivation focused on classroom learning—also focused on those who do that.
Lesson Study:
• Finding teachers willing to make their own teaching public.
• Talking in explicit terms about instructional practice
• “Catch them in the act of being competent.”
• Video is huge.
• Asking teachers to share lessons and/or teaching practices.
• What does learning look like when all of our curriculum has relevance to student’s lives.
• How do you combat entitlement among staff—those that feel they are entitled to their position and there is no need to move forward.
What are some moments where you felt like you were: Creative, Capable, and Joyful?
• Birth of Parker and realization that I am now capable of doing this, being a parent.
What do people, especially teachers need in order to feel motivated?
• Positive Feedback- Give teachers feedback that is substantive and positive while still providing food for thought. Nothing punitive here.
• Successful Outcomes- teachers, anyone for that matter, needs to know that what they are a part of is destined for success.
• Validation- how do you provide them with the tools and support they need to feel like what they are doing is the right thing?
Strategies used during the workshop:
• Human Highlighters: people designated as speakers in a large group. Use them for giving voice and summarizing what they group might be feeling. Select several
• Carousel: each group works on a question, writes the answers down on their paper then passes the paper to another group. On the one you receive, they are to underline the things that they agree with, plus add to the list with their new ideas.
• Wows and Wonders- when giving feedback to teachers, use a system of Wows to describe positive contributions and attributes of the lesson and teacher. When attempting to give some constructive feedback, phrase it in the form of a “I wonder if..” or a “how could you…”
o “I wonder if you had the chance to think about…”
o “I wonder what would have happened if you did this…”
Central Characteristics of Schools that change well:
• Shared Language of instruction and change.
• Adult Collaboration
o Make time for it
o Expect it and encourage it.
• Creative Data
• System-wide Advocacy
o All shareholders feel like they can voice their concerns and be heard equally
o Students, parents, teachers, administrators
• “signature” or “identity
o Figure out the “why” before you figure out the how.
o Who are we?
4 Norms for Groups to build trust
• Honor the absence of others
o No talking behind each other’s backs.
• State challenges in problem-solving terms. Speak as if things can be solved.
o Maintain a problem solving disposition
• No blame, because it is too easy.
• Respectful listening, which can be defined by the group.
• Teach each other in the moment.

“New Orleans at Disneyland” from matthewsage’s photostream

Reaction from a conversation I overheard

I think it was at EduCon, but it could have been from somewhere before that, or even in a twitter discussion, but Joyce Valenza was given credit for coining the phrase “I want to be a widget in your learning space.”

That got me thinking, and since I have been playing around with using iGoogle or Pageflakes as the hub of a class I am creating, I told myself to try to find out if that is possible: a teacher with a presence in their students learning space. This is the closest I have come.  I built it using something called Sprout, which was fairly easy to navigate.  Go check it out and see what you think of its potential.

I know I took the quote literally, but the ideas coming out of this are pretty intense:

• marketing classes designing page-specific ads
• running for student council?  Why not insert widgets into your friends pages on Facebook or Myspace?
• use the RSS feed aspect of the widget to have pertinent class information displayed immediately on your widgets (edits follow the widgets wherever they are placed).

What are you ideas?

Blog Survey on Vimeo

Here is the latest survey I did with some of our students in relation to their use of blogs in the classroom.

from www.vimeo.com posted with vodpod

The Moments Never Announce Themselves, They Just Arrive

I am not a principal. I don’t run a school. I don’t monitor if you sign in or not. I develop curriculum and help teachers hone their methodology. It’s what I love to do. But I also found out over the last three days, I lead people too.
For the last few weeks, there has been a growing disconnect between the staff I work with and myself. I am new; my position was just created as of December 1st, but I have worked with this staff in other capacities for almost 5 years. Something was afoot, something palpable, an undercurrent of discontent that showed itself in subtle ways.
Then the fences went up.
We are beginning a three-year construction process (if we are lucky and the construction management Gods smile upon us), and the initial steps to begin destruction of buildings not in the redesign were taken last week. While the exuberance of teaching in a state-of-the-art building appeals to all of the staff, the reality of the three or so years leading up to it hadn’t shown its forlorn self until those fences appeared.
When I was in the classroom, I lead students by example. My passion was my greatest weapon, and the stories we shared together about the history of the world enveloped us all. As I migrated into staff development I relied on the same practice; it was a passionate relationship with the possibilities that technology and new pedagogy opened for me. It, too, infected those around me. Leading people was so much more about the “hey, look what I am doing. I’ll show you so you can do it too.” And it worked because it was a suggestion to a colleague.
What changed when I entered administration, and I don’t know whether it was a preparatory change I made sub-consciously or a change that was overt, was that method of leading by doing no longer was seen as suggestion, but mandate. Although I still felt like a colleague, acted like a colleague, and contributed to the development of ideas, it was no longer taken as collegial, but rather a directive.
Prior to this past week, I had been contacted by a few of the teachers in the departments that I oversee about the climate of the building in which they work. The general feeling was that the morale was extremely low, that teachers were not happy, that they had no voice and no support on issues that are essential to their ability to do their job. Decisions were made that affected their classrooms and they were being told about it after the fact. The top-down approach they were seeing was not helping them feel as if they had a stake in the future of our school.
My plan originally was to address the individuals who spoke with me and assess the situation in a one-to-one conversation. By the time our department meetings rolled around this week, it became clear that what we had was something close to revolution. Our agenda for this week was to have each department meet for 3 hours a day during the HSPA Testing and work on curricular issues. Each department would have 6 hours over the two days to examine their curriculum, methods and resources. That’s a lot to ask of an unhappy group. We have a professional staff and they worked brilliantly to revise and add resources to their curriculum. It was in these meetings over the course of three days that I learned something valuable about leadership.
The English Department came in on Tuesday and on Thursday faced with re-writing their research process due to the fact that our Media Center will not be a Media Center next year, but most likely become classroom space due to rooms lost to reconstruction. Our goal was to analyze what we wanted our students to do with the resources we did have left. As they progressed through the morning, I noticed that they worked hard, they were knowledgeable about what they taught and they cared deeply about doing it well. Something was missing.
A lot of the conversations in the blogosphere are about making students feel like what they are doing has a point in the real world. Meaning is a bigger issue than information. I agree with that, but I agree with that for teachers as well. On Thursday morning, I had planned to do all of this crazy tech stuff with the teachers: Google Docs, Notestar, Google Earth, etc. ad nauseum. On Wednesday afternoon, after meeting with one of the members of the department, I decided to throw all of that aside.
I gave them a copy of my image for the Passion Quilt Meme, and talked about the things I was passionate about in education. I asked them to list the things that made them become English teachers. What were there passions? And we talked about them, we agreed on things, we stole each other’s ideas, we learned about one another, and we laughed with one another. Then I asked them to take those passions and describe how they would want to pass them along to their students. Who do they want entering the world after they graduate? Our results connected us by way of our common and disparate ideas for our students.

I feel like most of the meaningful moments in my career are accidental; that I have no control over when my greatest lessons are going to be learned. This is what happened to me yesterday. I learned to be a leader, and I learned to do it by listening to people tell me what they want, and then helping them get there. Yesterday told me that leadership is not always about gaining control of situations, but giving it over to the people that need it.

I listened, of course, but then I let them act.

Technorati Tags: change, leadership, school, education, patrickhiggins, connections

Flickr image credits: “Flat” and “Heirarchy” from timabbott’s photostream

Dig Deep or Scratch a Large Surface

A while back, I sat down with a teacher whom I believe truly makes a difference in the minds of students. His concern was a one that I, too, struggled with while in the classroom, and even now when I present:

Depth v. Breadth

Those of us in public education are faced with a set of standards that we must teach our students within a certain time frame; in fact, we are legally bound to do so. But what does that mean if in the process of covering said standards, little time is given to deep inquiry or study of material in an academic manner?

Last week over at Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds put his musings on this topic together in this way:

…I have wondered for the longest time if teachers — especially
college professors — attempt to cover too much ground (and not
enough depth) per semester. That is, do too many classes sacrifice
depth and understanding for scope? Yes, it depends on the subject I
suppose, but is it better to learn, say, only six core ideas deeply and
repeatedly or is it better to cover as much ground as possible and go
for the greatest breadth in the time allotted? Great scope certainly
makes for an impressive syllabus and perhaps even a feeling of
accomplishment for those who pushed hard and got the highest marks. But
how many of the students who got a ‘C’ or better will actually remember
what they studied a year later?

My downfall as a teacher was never making it through the prescribed curriculum in the allowable 180 days of school; the real hope is that there is a marriage of the two, that the teacher will be able to engage and explore areas of student interest deeply while still managing to satisfy the state requirements. How likely is that? Looking at the range of time, the range of topics, and the fixed time that teachers have with students, it does not look promising. If you ask teachers the reasons why one area is covered and not another, invariably the issue of time comes up.

Just for nostalgia, here is Barry’s analysis of “time” in a school year:

I am beginning to think that time, in the most commonly thought of manner, is not the answer. We are tasked to present material to students in a given frame of time and of context. What they do with it when they leave our classroom is entirely up to them. We don’t know when they will think about what we discussed, when they will process it, mash it up, connect it to something else in their lives, or even have a conversation with someone else about it.

However, what if we gave them that chance to revisit it. Someone in one of my first Web 2.0 classes brought that up about discussion boards on wikis. She called it the “drive-home effect;” your incredible contribution to the classroom discussion that day happens several hours later in the privacy of your car and to an audience of no one. We can give them that space. We have the tools to continue conversation online, and to archive it, retrieve it, and bring it back into the present so that it has relevance again.

So, to recap, here is my answer to the depth v. breadth conundrum in public schools: teach mightily and try to manage depth within the required curriculum, but provide a space where your topics are debated by those who so choose to do so. Don’t hold onto the learning, let it go and let your students play with it in a secure environment. Make it real, and engage the hell out of ‘em.

Technorati Tags: garrreynolds, presentationzen, depthvbreadth, education, curriculum