I went to a conference two weeks ago, and I am still sitting on my “what I learned at (insert conference name here)” post. It’s not that I didn’t take anything away that is worth squawking about, nor that I haven’t the time to write about it, because, let’s face it, so few of us do anymore. It’s rather that I’ve been trying to find the way to say it without ruffling the feathers of those who put on conferences all over.
There shouldn’t be any educational technology conferences anymore.
Oh great. Now it’s out there. There goes any chance I ever had at presenting at ISTE (or NECC, or whatever it’s next iteration will be).
While I truly love the conference I am speaking of, being that the first time I attended was one of the biggest eye-opening events of my career a few years back, something has changed around the world of education and educational conferences. What’s changed is not the technology–that’s a given. What’s changed is that we now ask different questions than we did before. The more “Ed Tech” conferences I attend, the more I see people there who don’t need to be there. If we are talking about real change in education, the kind that makes nervous people of those with big jobs in big companies that depend on education as a market, than we’ve got to get different people here.
Instead of the word technology or educational technology being mentioned anywhere in the nomenclature of the conference, why don’t we focus on student learning.
If you can’t show me (preferably with live students) how what you are talking about is credible, gets kids excited to learn, and allows them to share their learning with whomever wants to be a part of it, I don’t know if I am interested.
I know this has been said before, and many times here in this space, but it’s not teaching with technology, or learning with technology, or educational technology. It’s just teaching, just learning, and just education. It’s here, it’s your computer connected to the world, and it makes your job easier. And if the educational technologist in your district would just let you know about these conferences, it might just become very clear to you.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that these conferences need to recognize the fact that we moved beyond just inviting directors of technology, technology coordinators, or higher-level administrators, but rather classroom teachers, students, and even community stakeholders.
These things we call relationships, they are funny things when it comes to our professional lives. Regardless of what field you are in, you started in that field somewhere. Depending on where you are now in said field, there are those who you started with in certain positions that either still hold those positions, or have moved on to other responsibilities. It’s just the nature of what we do, whether that be public sector or private sector.
How you handle that relationship matters a whole lot to your success.
That’s precisely the question I want everyone thinking about. We truly focus so much of our energies on getting the format down and getting the “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed, and for many of the students we teach, that is completely necessary; however, as we begin to look at the next phase of what we’d like to do in the district which includes more than just being “proficient” on some state test, can we blend some of the thinking in this post into what we are doing.
And as for making people angry, my advice is that you don’t get the results you really want without making a few people angry along the way. Not that you try to, but when you know that what you are doing will make your students better, you just go with it.
She was asking whether or not it was all right to go forward with some of the ideas in the article, even if it angered some of her colleagues. My response can be boiled down to very few words: “hell yes.”
We don’t propagate change in systems unless we are ready to have battles that we know will end up with feelings being hurt. This is a fact that I am still warming to, as it is very contrary to my personality, and since I am creating change at the curriculum level in a district in which I originally taught. When I think of the alternative, though, I can use that to gather the strength necessary to move forward with the type of thinking that will lead to the schools we need.
Yes, we can create change without alienating everyone on the bus, but there are times when we need to be strong enough in our convictions to say “yes, your voice has been heard and your input factored into the decision, but we need to move forward with this decision.” Or, more simply, this is how we have decided it has to be done. In no circumstances would I advocate a lack of explanation behind the decision, nor sound research supporting that decision. When moving schools forward, we must always ask ourselves, regardless of the position we hold within that school, “does this help/hurt kids.” Once we have that determined, the rest falls into place.
It’s now a few days since my presentation at TechForum Northeast, and judging by the lack of hate-mail or the searches I’ve conducted on all the available backchannels, I didn’t offend anyone too greatly. Although, by traditional standards, I may just be the worst presenter ever.
I have to admit, and I did so to open the session, presenting at EduCon has changed the way I view conferences. The format asked for at EduCon, from the start, has been conversational; the standard role of presenter is completely changed to that of facilitator, and that changes the way you prepare. Personally, it becomes a situation in which I completely invert the presenter-presentee experience. Instead of pursuing the traditional “I speak, you listen” model, the ruling ethos has become
As I have prepared for the last few presentations I have given I am forced to keep asking the same question: How do you get a group of concerned educators together in a room and just deliver the message are asked to deliver without turning them loose on one another?
Very simply, you don’t.
You ask pointed questions, and then listen, and listen very closely to what they say.
Think about where you are when you give a presentation, or view a presenter at a conference. You are in the company of many passionate educators, those passionate enough to travel a distance to learn more about their craft, and most likely lose class time with their students. Who holds the knowledge in that situation? The speaker? perhaps. But what I am banking on when I present, and this may cancel every proposal I submit over the next few months, is that the best information you will gain from being at a conference is from the people who are there attending alongside you.
That is not to say that I have no role in the learning that goes on in these presentations. There had to have been something in the idea I had in pitching the presentation in the first place, and there had to be some direction in which I intended the pretty slides I prepared to move in, right?
But would I have ditched all of it to have a great conversation about how to make the schools we work in into the schools we want to work in? You bet. My role for them was to put in place the interaction pieces so that they could construct something of value for themselves.
This model should sound familiar…but does it?
Image credits:
“January 25th 2008 – The word for the day is “knowledge”, pass it on,” Stephen Poff
We have a problem in our district that most of you probably have: we do not have enough teachers to do what we really want to do. We have classes we’d like to make smaller, classes we’d like to offer more sections of, classes that we dream of creating, and classes that we used to offer that we can no longer staff.
This year, the issue arose with our 5th grade Introduction to World Languages program. Due to schedule changes at both our high school and middle school, the teachers that had in the past traveled to 5th grade from those two buildings to introduce the students to four additional languages they can study at the 6-12 level (they have Spanish from K-4th grades) could no longer travel as the times they are available didn’t match up to the elementary schedules.
We’ve spent the better part of the last two years increasing the minutes that our students spend learning languages in the middle and high school, and to do that we moved the Introductory program to the 5th grade thereby having our 6th graders choose a language to study for their middle school years. Eliminating it was not an option, but realistically nothing was working out for us.
Last year, I reluctantly met with a sales rep from Rosetta Stone. I am not big on proprietary software systems like Rosetta Stone; I find them cumbersome most of the time, but this one was different for a few reasons. First, it reminded me of how the Florida Virtual School worked in that there is the element of individual pacing, and secondly that it may work for students who don’t traditionally perform well within the classroom. I saw potential for its use all over the district. After that meeting, I eagerly brought the demo back to a few members of the department to see what they thought of it. Most dismissed it outright, but some were intrigued, so the idea got put on the back burner.
When our scheduling issues came to a head this summer and it was made clear that we could either move the Introductory program back to the middle school and steal a year away from the focused study of one language, or find a solution that would allow the students to experience the four languages before making a decision to study one further in middle school, out came Rosetta Stone once again.
This past Tuesday, I worked with the four teachers from our department (Russian, German, Mandarin, and French) to create custom curriculum within our web-based launch of Rosetta Stone. Some of these teachers were among those that initially balked at the idea, so I was interested to see what their reaction was once they were immersed in it. Their task was to be a student and go through as much of level 1 as possible, then change hats and become the designers of that curriculum. Rosetta Stone allows you to modify their existing curriculum for their languages, or create your own curriculum entirely.
Their reaction? Let’s just say it’s going to be hard pressed to keep our licensing agreement intact–they want to use it in the other schools they teach in. They loved the idea that they could create rich, dynamic curriculum and learning environments for students and get accurate, timely feedback on their progress. Plus, each of our students is going to be able to progress through the languages at their own pace, and on their own time. Due to the time constraints that our school day places on language learning in 5th grade, which only allows for 35 minutes per week, these students are going to be asked to work on these languages outside of school. Having access to their learning via the web goes a long way toward respecting the time of the students.
I am not affiliated with Rosetta Stone, nor do I think it’s a perfect product; however, what I do think of when I see our teachers working in this environment is a glimpse into what schools can look like in any subject area when quality learning environments are created both online and off. What I am finding in working with more and more teachers on projects like this that change the perceptions of teachers and traditional learning is that what we all can agree on are the elements of that need to be in place for learning to happen. Whether or not those elements look exactly like what we’ve all grown up with is not important to most.
That’s a question that has been flying around not only my own head over the last few weeks, but also the departments with which I work. We are moving toward an open gradebook whereby students and parents will have access to grades online. Yes, I know, for many of you this is old hat; however, as many of you also may remember, it didn’t occur without significant conversation around how it was going to be done (or maybe not). We are in the beginning stages of getting our teachers ready for it, and in speaking with teachers about the process, there is considerable trepidation about how much information parents should have, and whose responsibility is it to make sure they have that information.
For better or for worse, we rely on our students to act as portals to their parents when it comes to giving updates on their progress, and when that system fails, we then access parents directly either via the phone or now through email. In past years, I may have included the traditional handwritten note in that group, but we are talking mainly middle and high school students here, and it is a well-researched fact that there is a cut-off point for when students cease bringing home paper documents from school in their weekly folders. That cut-off point is sometime around October of their 5th grade year. Does the use of web-based grading systems step in at this point and provide that solution for the failed communication between school and home?
Not entirely. Just as I feel that we can never have a completely virtual schooling systems in which there is no personal contact, there can never be a portal that parents and teachers can rely on all of the time, regardless of the information displayed there. However, I truly feel that making student grades and student attendance available 24/7 does much more harm than good for relationships between schools and communities.
The pushback we are receiving is coming in the form of increased pressure on teachers to get grading done in a timely manner. In most math classes, it’s not such a big deal, but in AP Literature and other writing-based classes, the issue of how long a teacher has to grade a major paper becomes a thorny issue. How long does it take to grade two sections worth of five-page essays? How long does it take to grade a senior research project? Two weeks? a month? In addition, the conversations around personal grading styles is now put in the spotlight. If a parent can now see exactly how “teacher A ” grades compared to “teacher B,” they may begin to wonder why they are so different. Why was Johnny weighted so heavily in participation as a sophomore in US History, but not at all as a junior in US History II?
When we moved to providing every teacher with a web page, it made it possible to post everything you handed out in class, effectively building out the excuse made by students that they didn’t have the “handout” or the notes. Not every teacher did this, but it certainly was possible. Philosophically, some disagreed with it, saying that it fostered no accountability by students to pay attention in class. That’s flawed thinking, in my book. Build out the excuses: if they have access to the documents from school or home, their reasoning is not plausible. The same is true, I feel, for gradebooks. By eliminating the unknown, as in how their child is doing, you are removing that from the table when discussing a child’s progress with parents. Instead of “I was shocked to see that he is failing,” the conversation can begin with other terms, such as “how do we get him to do the work?”
I understand that opening up your processes to public scrutiny may feel like an attack on autonomy, but that is not where we are going with this. Getting a group of intelligent, well-educated individuals who care about the success of kids to talk about their instructional practices, especially assessment, will move mountains. It will begin to change the culture of a building.
If you have done this in your district, what input did teachers have on determining the policies behind the implementation and what parents see? I’d like to have a few ideas so that when I begin working with teachers, I can offer suggestions as to how they should proceed.
Dean Shareski posted this photo recently. Created by Will Lion, it aptly states what many of us have felt, and helped teachers and students deal with.
A while back, in the throes of a bout of information tsunami, I lamented the fact that I couldn’t keep up, and as Dean states, it really wasn’t me that was failing, but rather the structures that I set up. Dina Strasser stated as much in the comments on that post when she said:
Consider the parallels to so much of our current curricula. Do our kids think better when we hand them breadth, not depth? So too with blog readers and other social media. You will not miss out on anything if you prune them. On the contrary, your thought will have that much more room to flourish, and seize upon the truly novel and challenging ideas that deserve your attention. Decide what your true upper limit of information is (ten blogs? fifty followers? more? less?)– in otherwords, how much you can take in at a sitting before feeling overwhelmed. Then make a commitment to stick to those limits. You may even wish to abandon some one or two media wholesale. Blogging and Facebook are it for me, for example. Twittering left me with mental caffeine-overdose-like shakes and I had to unsubscribe.
It is now much more for me about making very quick decisions about what information I have time for, and just letting go of the rest. Much like the changes in my department this year (we are no longer in charge of the IT within the district–more on that at a later juncture), it’s difficult to not have all of the answers or to not be the one who reads all the posts or links. That’s what the filters are for.
Dean recommends using others to help you find out what is important–the re-tweeting aspect is one I hadn’t thought of, but will use now. Each morning, I sift through both my reader and the links from the various Diigo groups I belong to. Between those two sources, I think I am keeping myself abreast of what is happening within my sphere, or as Dean suggests, my niche.
(Caveat: I haven’t written anything worthwhile in some time, so I apologize for this post’s and any subsequent posts’ inherent lack of quality voice. These writing muscles are near atrophied.)
This phrase has often been spoken of as the aspects of your curriculum you don’t explicitly state as your objectives: socialization, team-building, self-expression, etc. These are the words that don’t fit neatly into state standards documents.
After spending my spring and summer of this past year creating and editing new curriculum for over twenty new courses, I am noticing something else in regards to the term “embedded curriculum.” It’s the ability to get students the tools they need. It’s not an add-on anymore. It’s necessary and vital to the success of not only the programs we create for them, but to their success after they leave us.
In our district, every teacher from grades six through twelve has a laptop (either a tablet PC, a MacBook, or a standard laptop), so at that level we have put tools in the hands of the teachers. We’ve automated and digitized much of their administrative tasks: our SIS handles all grading, scheduling, attendance, conduct, and record-keeping, all lesson plans are done via our online lesson planner, we have more than half of our K-12 population with Moodle accounts, our Google Apps will be up and running in days, and I could go on.
But what does it all mean?
Our teachers are very wired, but our kids don’t have the same access.
For the most part.
We’ve begun the “Great Netbook Experiment,” in twelve of our classrooms at the middle school. Initial returns are positive, but I haven’t seen the dynamic change yet. What does your classroom look like when you have ten laptops that are always available? How does your teaching change? How can your students learn differently? These are questions I need answers to before I go heavy in that direction.
Recently, we’ve been interviewing for another position in the district, and one of the candidates really hooked me when he stated that the next big hurdle for schools was to put the power to learn back into the hands of students. For me, that means moving the focus from giving the teachers the technology towards putting it in the hands of the students.
So when I sit down this year to re-create our Journalism class, my focus is going to be on giving these students the tools of new media specialists, the kind that Mark S. Luckie speaks about in his new book, “The Digital Journalist’s Handbook.” When I sit down to work with our Mandarin Chinese teacher to formalize his curriculum from 6-12, I’ll ask him which tools he’ll need to make his student successful. Wacom Tablets? Headsets for conversing? We have to start tipping the scales in favor of the question “what could they do if they had…” and go from there. If there is no money for it, fine. But at least let’s start there.
Last week, while I was on vacation we had a huge server meltdown. While I am not an IT guy, I do understand some of the implications of what that means. For example, our student information system (a great little product called Genesis), our wireless Internet radios, our Moodle courses, and many of our other essential services experienced outages that slowed workplace productivity to a crawl. While it was a great week to be on vacation, it did bring to light some very glaring issues.
Only 31 percent of respondents said their districts have enough IT staff to satisfy their needs; that’s up only marginally from 27 percent in last year’s survey. And 55 percent of those polled–the same percentage as last year–said they spend more than half their time reacting to technical problems, instead of working proactively on long-range planning and projects.
IT staffs in schools are traditionally understaffed. In most districts I’ve been in, the ratios between number of IT staff and machines to service, not to mention servers and systems, is outrageous. When issues like the one we ran into last week occur, an overworked staff becomes increasingly stressed.
Last October at TechForum Northeast, I was fortunate enough to sit on a panel with David Warlick in which we discussed some hurdles to implementation of new thinking in schools. One teacher from the audience lamented, much as Jim did in his post, that the tech staff in his building are guarded and unwilling to allow for teachers to experiment with open-source technologies for fear of corruption to the network. If, this audience member suggested, teachers are expected to push the limit on what they can have students achieving in the classroom, should they be constrained by an IT staff that does not have the best interest of the students in mind?
It’s an interesting dichotomy, the students v. IT staff one, isn’t it? On the one hand we have students who are growing up in a world where 11-year olds make huge profits by designing iPhone apps, and on the other we have them working in school environments that can’t give them access to the types of tools that would let them create such apps.
At the tale end of Jim’s post, he presents a solution, one that I have heard via Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez in the past: give the students the ability to aid the IT department. We are not talking giving them access to the firewall, or the major components of the infrastructure, but rather allow them to handle basic repairs, quick imaging and system setups so that the IT staff can begin doing some of their own imaginative work.
Be sure to check out her list of GenYes Schools where this solution is actually in place.
I have not been a contributor to any of those whom I rely on for inspiration in quite some time. This space, twitter, any of the Ning’s I belong to–all of them have been foreign to me. While a good many of the teachers who find it difficult to contribute during the year have truly blossomed (I have been reading) in their comments and reflections during these summer months, there hasn’t been much for me to say. Or, I haven’t had the motivation or the open thinking space in my days to make the effort.
See, I’ve reached a saturation point of sorts that I have been ignoring for a few weeks. My influx of information is at an all-time high; more resources, conversations, and ideas come at me on a daily basis than I ever thought possible when I started down this road a few years back, but my ability to handle them has not kept up. I need some pruning, and, actually, I need some tips on how to handle this overload.
Gasp.
A short time ago, I would have scoffed at the notion that I needed to figure out a way to handle all of the information coming my way. RSS, Diigo, social networks, etc. was a rush. Every day, sometimes multiple times a day I would gather the newest round of articles, links, quotes, or whatever my manual trolling brought in. Not so any more. I’ll admit it, I can’t keep up. There are too many of you now that have great ideas.
So I ask, what is the next level? I feel like I’ve just worked so hard to attain access to the Dragon Scroll, yet I don’t have enough inner knowledge to understand its message. Can anyone point me to resources that attack this next level of information mastery? Who has great systems in place for being discretionary about information?
I think Cisco is on target with their ad campaign that celebrates the human network. I was reminded of just how important the people side of things is when I had the opportunity to sit next to Walt Ratterman on a recent flight from Atlanta to Portland, OR. He is the power behind SunEnergy Power International, described this way on its web site: “SEPI [as a 501(c)(3)]develops and implements humanitarian renewable energy projects in remote, rural parts of the world. It is the mission of SunEnergy Power International to promote an increased quality of life in remote, rural regions of the world through the use of renewable energy.”
He was on his way home from Senegal where he had been working with local folks to install solar power generating equipment for schools across that nation. Beyond the details, I met a man who has great technical skills and knowledge. In and of itself, the technical conversation around solar was interesting. But it was what he was doing with his knowledge and skills to help real people do real things that made his story so powerfully fascinating.
So – how are learners using their knowledge and skills where you and yours live and learn? I sure hope it is for more than getting good scores on tests and passing from grade to grade. They need to do more, and the world needs them to do more.
The emphasis is mine. I really like Jim’s thinking, and it dovetails nicely with the thinking that I have been doing lately on the types of things we should be learning and teaching with our students. It’s key here, too, that Jim mentions the brilliance of this man within his solitary discipline, but then expands upon it by showing that it’s simply not enough to just be good at that.
The question he asks is perhaps the most important idea driving me right now.
Maurice Elias’ short piece on service learning in Edutopia had been sitting as an open tab just staring at me for about a week now. It’s common practice for me to dump all open tabs at the end of a day just as a means of starting fresh for the next day. However, each day I would run through the tabs, dumping many of the grand ideas in hyperlink form culled from the network, and make decisions about what was worth my time, and this one would stick. I just couldn’t dump it.
Today I decided to give it a real once over to see if it there was anything within it I could pull together for our Connections teachers. Last year, as I have noted previously, the idea that we allowed them to push student thinking to action led them into projects that had real-world implications: refugees in Darfur, analysis of the market fluctuations and their affect on the global economy, carbon footprint, and many more. What struck me most about the work the students chose to do was the desire they showed in wanting to do more than just read and write about the causes they studied; they wanted to contribute.
Elias points to a few studies that show the academic benefits of service learning, and hints at the fact there may not be definite academic measures (in the form of the number of A’s, B’s, and C’s received by students who participated in service learning projects being higher than those who did not), but there are other indicators that are reliable:
Further evidence comes from the work of Andrew Furco, who compared high school students who engaged in service learning with peers who either performed community service or participated in no service. The service-learning group scored higher on all academic measures — based on a rubric of academic goals — and engaged in ongoing reflective opportunities.
One line that struck me was that he calls out the dichotomy that exists between what people call community service and actual service learning:
a plain distinction needs to be made between community service and service learning. When youth engage in service learning, it involves more than arriving at a soup kitchen or a park and serving food or cleaning up. It begins with preparation and learning about the particular problem area or context the service experience will address and, ideally, is linked to academic subject matter being studied.
One piece that I noticed this year was that our students, although truly engaged in the work they were doing, remained disconnected from the people they were helping. Often was raised, a check was written, and off both parties went in their separate ways. Elias points to these elements that as teachers we must inherently design into these service learning projects:
direct collaboration with the recipients of the service
should be genuine and personally meaningful
generating emotional consequences that can build empathy and challenge preexisting ideas and values.
That last piece there is one that I’ve harped on before–the need for a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance infused in all that we do. I’ve seen great teachers do this with students and the effect is profound. Let’s build the relationships between students and community so that rather than just a service relationship, we foster one that is of mutual respect and obligation. Too often our community service projects end the moment we are no longer physically bound to the cause, but if we can begin to create emotional ties to projects, that will go a long way towards creating the democracy we all want.
Please be sure to check out Maurice Elias’ article. He has linked to some excellent documents surrounding the creation of service learning projects in schools.
I have been spending so much time with the art teachers in my district lately putting together their curriculum, and beyond the fact that my vocabulary is increasing exponentially (terms like gesso, tragacanth, brayer, and fresco are now commonplace for me), it’s been an incredible insight into a very different view of education. They differentiate by default, and the rest of us struggle to change to it.
In many ways, I am beginning to see the realities of what people like Daniel Pink and Sir Ken Robinson keep talking about. Art is essential to how we behave as citizens and as society.
So when Marcy Webb posted this the other day, I had to put it up here too.
The more powerful our reach, the more important the question.
Since I came to education a while after she made huge headlines in the 1990’s, I didn’t know much about Liz Coleman and the work she had done at Bennigton College. When the title of her TED Talk came up on my iTunes account today, I didn’t truly understand the history behind the iTunes generated titling “Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education.” What followed was another one of those serendipitous moments that I hope will begin to shape what I help create over the next few years.
Coleman in the 1990’s was viewed in many ways as Michelle Rhee is now, only at the college level. When she assumed the post of President of Bennington College, she immediately began the abolition of tenure, elimination of departments, and the firing of many professors. Her aim was to radically reshape how liberal arts education functions. As I look at various writings that have come my way, some from enlightened folk like Ryan Bretag, whose statements of belief about curriculum and supervision are so right on the money I want to steal them outright and call them my own, and some from the minds that are greatly influencing the direction that the state of New Jersey is heading in, I hear what Coleman talks about as being equivalent to auditory gold.
There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.
A while back, I read this Wall Street Journal article by Mark Taylor. Coupling the ideas within that article about the over-specialization of academic disciplines with the ideas that Coleman has put into practice leads me to one conclusion: I want to design curriculum that is centered around big problems and the search for those solutions. While I don’t know how that looks yet, in a public high school setting, I see it as being an undercurrent for students to study: a humanities curriculum that allows them to focus on problems within one specific area, but attacked from the perspective of several disciplines. Solving suburban planning through good design. The politics of environmental activism. The science and mathematics of the credit crisis. The affect of global food production on the economy and the environment. The language and rhetoric of mass media.
The problem with this, as I see it, is not falling into the trap of seeing how we can do this in the existing model. I want teachers to begin seeing themselves not as English, history, science, or math teachers, but rather as leaders of thought, of solution, and of growth. The end result of all of this should be action. If you have been a reader of this blog in the past, you may know that I value actionable curriculum over that which is static. Make those that learn with you move to action. It’s not always a reality, but it is an ideal worth striving for. A redesign of this magnitude would require that the curriculum ask those within it to be actors in towards the solution of the problem.
Coleman’s last line provides me with more than enough motto to go on. After I finish typing this, I am going to bust out some really big paper and start sketching this out. I can’t wait to see where it goes.
You have a mind and you have other people. Start with those and change the world.
Often, in school, students write only to prove that they did something they were asked to do, in order to get credit for it. Or, students are taught a single type of writing and are led to believe this type will suffice in all situations. Writers outside of school have many different purposes beyond demonstrating accountability, and they practice myriad types and genres. In order to make sure students are learning how writing differs when the purpose and the audience differ, it is important that teachers create opportunities for students to be in different kinds of writing situations, where the relationships and agendas are varied. Even within academic settings, the characteristics of good writing vary among disciplines; what counts as a successful lab report, for example, differs from a successful history paper, essay exam, or literary interpretation.
This is such a loaded statement–in a great way. I feel that our teachers are scared away from teaching any type of writing that is not academic or testable. Likewise, I feel our students are often robbed of original voice because they are not allowed the freedom to explore other media, or the opportunity to see other forms of writing as legitimate. – post by pjhiggins
Graduation season around here has come to a close. The skies parted for a brief moment, and the final piece to our annual graduation lineup was able to be held in its intended setting: outside under a June sky. Throughout the day, each speaker, and there were quite a few of them, touched on the pre-requisite graduational topics: friends, opening doors, closing doors, opportunities, blazing paths not following them, and myriad quotes from men and women more wise than us all. However, one idea permeated all of them: change. Not just simple change, but rapid, constant and continuous change.
Apropos?
Whether or not we buy into the changing nature of how students can learn now, or whether or not we choose to wait for the research to come back that tells us that giving students access to content and learning when they want it and how they want it, is immaterial. It’s here. And it’s apparent to everyone–even graduation speech writers.
Over the last month, I have received more pushback from the teachers I work with, both constructive and destructive, about the way in which the business of curriculum is run. Which direction are we going in? Are we driven by the AP test/state report card/U.S. News and World Report Rankings? What is the vision you have for us? When will this relentless change stop or at least slow down?
There’s that word again.
It’s great to work with people who have been through situations like this before, situations in which those that work with you are frustrated and feel like they have no voice. My boss, when I relayed some of the information and sentiments that I was fielding in my meetings, responded with this:
Listen to what they are saying, not how they are saying it.
It’s now three weeks since those meetings and those conversations with the teachers. What have I taken away? What were they saying?
Voice.
We need to have one. We need to know that what we are feeling and what we are dealing with is going to be acted upon in some manner. We also need to know that what we say has value and that we are heard. We want to be a part of the change process.
Relevance.
We need to be working on ideas, plans, materal that is relevant to what we do on a daily basis.
Access.
We need to see what everyone else is doing. Common planning time plus observation of other teachers within this department is essential to our growth. How can we develop that?
How I respond to these ideas is a huge part of my summer plans.
Romanowski urges teachers to support students in critiquing their textbooks and exploring perspectives beyond that of the texts. Teachers can ask their students, for example, to answer this question: “Whose viewpoint is presented, whose omitted, and whose interests are served?” Teachers can have them explore reactions of various Americans to a historical event, such as the attacks of 9/11, including that of the U.S. president, a member of Congress, a relative of a victim, and an Arab-American. Lastly, Romanowski recommends, teachers can use writing assignments to develop students’ critical thinking.
For some resources regarding how to do this, see George Mason University’s Historical Thinking Matters, or Questioning Textbook Authority. – post by pjhiggins
This is a question I have struggled with for a while, ever since I began teaching in public schools. What are the elements that are consistent among writing we deem excellent by our students? I think finding the answer to this question is essential for a group of teachers working as a team, as a school, or as a department. It’s important to have a common language among the group as to what qualities students must strive for.
This week, I met with a group of teachers who will be teaching our Connections class next year. Aside from brainstorming about the overall success and failure of the class, we also began the process of identifying what we think are the characteristics of excellent student writing. What I asked them to do over the summer is to work on getting more concrete definitions to the list they came up with . What I ask of those that read this is to think about the characteristics we came up with and tell us if you think we are right on, or way off. What makes work from students stand out above the rest?
I feel more connected to family and friends because of social technologies.
There, I said it. It felt a little dirty, I’ll admit. That statement, in some circles and according to some pundits is completely off-base. Social networks, while revolutionizing both mainstream media and our own personal connection to media, are shouldering the blame for a lack of interpersonal skills exhibited by students in our schools. The video game industry is breathing a collective sigh of relief now that Facebook has become the main target of these barbs.
Granted, I am not basing this on any scientific research, just conversations among teachers over the course of the last few weeks; however, the verdict among the teachers I speak with is clear: social networks are changing the ethics and definition of the word “friend.” What we share within our online networks, be them Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, MySpace (does anyone still use this?), or in any other of the numerous networks, is much more than we have ever been able to share in our face-to-face networks. Is that bad? Is hyper-social a negative? Is it that the opportunities for us to share have never been so numerous or easy, and we would have done this generations ago if our parents had simply let us talk on the phone all the time instead of the 10-minute chunk of time we had per evening?
But that’s not the real issue that I’ve been hearing about. It’s the questions of what they are sharing and should they be sharing it at all. Call it what you will: digital citizenship, new literacy, digital ethics, digital footprint, the fact of the matter remains that students ages 5-22 are doling out personal information to people they consider “friends” whose very inclusion into said category would not match the traditional standards of that term by their parents’ standards. So we need to get a working definition here. What is a friend? How do your students, colleagues, or close personal contacts define the term? Google says it’s these:
a person you know well and regard with affection and trust; “he was my best friend at the university”
ally: an associate who provides cooperation or assistance; “he’s a good ally in fight”
acquaintance: a person with whom you are acquainted; “I have trouble remembering the names of all my acquaintances”; “we are friends of the family”
supporter: a person who backs a politician or a team etc.; “all their supporters came out for the game”; “they are friends of the library”
Taking these, the third one looks to bear the most resemblance to what most students are using as their defining criteria. Are our student tossing around the moniker of friend when they really mean something more akin to acquaintance? The difference, while subtle, is huge in the connotation of the word. Friend is deep, acquaintance is shallow.
Personally, since I have been a participant in the networks I have created, I’ve noticed deeper connection to those individuals in my life whom I would call friend in any context, and I’ve been able to acquaint myself with many individuals with like interest in the areas I have rooted interest in. In the chances where I have had to meet individuals from the networks I am a part of and share a conversation, it’s added a dimension, or should I say removed a barrier, to that relationship. We’ve had a chance to converse in some form before actually meeting, or even speaking in most cases.
We lament the ease with which our students share information about themselves and to whom they bestow the title of friend. But to what extent are they doing much the same things that we are, only in a manner that speaks to their rooted interests? Understandably, we need to make sure they are being safe and they understand the rules of the “game” but has this become a question of mere semantics for them? Is a friend a friend, or is it not?
It’s the end of the year, and with that, we are running into the usual pressures associated with a year of impending change. For some reason, June gives educators an amazing amount of stress. I was reviewing some posts from this time last year, and was amazed to find that there were odd similarities between what I was noticing then and what is happening now.
This summer is going to be an incredibly busy one, and an incredibly short one. It has the feeling already of one that will be fleeting. If that is the case, I’d like to begin by setting a few goals for my own growth this summer:
Read. Here is the short list that I’ve put together for the summer:
Re-Organize. A year in which I either ran or helped plan over 10 meetings a month can lead to a lot of paperwork and notes that need both organization and reflection. Pulling all of that back together will take a good few days.
Re-Focus. As I indicated in the paragraphs above, the month of June has been crazy, but wit that crazy has come some good dialogue. I’d like to take part of the summer to craft goals that I have for each of the departments I work with and the elementary schools I am involved in. I’ve had many meetings this month where it was apparent that I am getting very little buy-in from the departments I work with. As with everything in education, the factors that go into producing that are only partially controllable by me, but that which is under my control, I’d like to sharpen and hone. I need to have goals regarding what I’d like to move towards with each of the departments, and then combine those goals with those of the members of the departments I work with. A shared vision; yes, I think that might work.
There is probably more, but it’s getting light out, and the kids are waking, which brings me to another goal for the summer. Leave work at work, and make the most of the daylight hours with my family.
I have said, “We must be explicit about what we want students to know, understand and be able to do.”
What some heard was, “You are not doing a good job.”
I have said, “We will be more effective [if] we collaborate and work together to figure out how to best meet the needs of our students.”
What some heard was, “You are not doing a good job.”
I have said, “The responsibilities of public education have changed; we can learn together how to be successful in this new environment.”
What some heard was, “You are not doing a good job.”
I have said, “I believe in the ability of teachers to reach and teach ALL children.”
What some heard was, “You are not doing a good job.”
Ouch. But I think we’ve all been in this spot before when working with teachers and introducing change. We enter a room and immediately people feel their competence is in question. Starting from there, how do you build? – post by pjhiggins
I saw this exchange between Gary Stager and Miguel Guhlin late this evening after returning home from the senior awards dinner:
Last year at this time, I was doing a lot of writing about the creation of a class calledConnections, a writing class aimed at critical thinking, analytic reading, and centered around the idea of transfer. We had been working with teachers for a few months on the ideas behind it, but had no model for what it would look like. During the last few weeks of school here, I am going to be meeting with those teachers to do some exploratory surgery on the class after one year of implementation.
One element that all of the nine teachers who taught the class this year seemed to center on, and something they all indicated generated the most interest from the students, was that of service learning. What gave me pause was that most of the service learning projects we did all had to do with raising money or buying materials for the causes we employed (one group did raise money to make a series of Kiva loans, which was an interesting process). Is that what our students are viewing as service learning?
Gary and Miguel’s brief conversation brought this out again for me, and in conversations with my boss lately we have been wondering if there is reason to shift any service-type project away from raising money, and more towards raising awareness. Timely enough, ASCD released a brief meta-analysis of research on service learning projects. According to the studies examined, projects with
the strongest effects have generally been found for service learning programs that have the explicit aim of developing active citizenship, in contrast with those that emphasize community service and character building.
So the question as I go into helping the teachers redesign their process is how can we capture the motivation that the students showed this past year for raising money, and harness it in some project that is civic-minded and has little or no connection to raising money and sending it elsewhere. It jives very well with Gary’s line above. Let’s see if we can take care of our own house in the hopes that it will make those around us better for it.
This year, as we wind to a close around here from the student side of things, amid all of the chaos of the crescendo that is the end of a school year, all I want to think about is transparency.
I don’t usually get parent phone calls in this position, but when I do, it’s almost exciting in a sick sort of way. The best are when there is a little time to prepare, as in when someone from one of the schools passes me a heads up so that I can prepare some resources.
The few calls I have received as of late all point to one of the most puzzling problems we have: (to quote) “I don’t see anything coming home. I have no idea what is going on in the classroom.” Our teachers are excellent and among the hardest working I have ever been around, but why was I hearing about this so frequently?
Puzzling? Extremely, and here is why.
Look at this example, and this one, and this one. There are teachers who are leveraging the power of their students to produce evidence and examples of what is occurring in the classroom if not on daily basis, at least a weekly one. This idea, of course, did not arise with the Google’s purchase of Blogger, but rather has been around forever; however, as our children rise out the elementary school and leave the trappings of the elementary classroom behind, the practice of the “Friday Folder” appeals less and less to them. The neatly typed and clip-arted newsletter just isn’t making it to the refrigerator in 6th grade.
Use the technology to increase transparency. These four organizations, long considered bastions of rigid secrecy and privacy, are far more likely to divulge information about what is going on within their walls than a good percentage of classrooms around the country. Why? I think we should be proud of what is going on in our classrooms and schools, and we should invite discussion and dialogue into them around student work.
Going one step further, the rebirth of the student portfolio has me intrigued within this format. Teachers who have worked with their students to create a blog often run into one big problem: what do you do at the end of the year when those students no longer are yours, yet they still have an account in your class blog? Does their work permanently reside with you? Several schools around the world are using platforms like Moodle, WordPress MU,Google Apps for your Domain, or even local server tools available through the Mac OS X server to house student work in a manner that it follows them through the course of the years within a district or school. Let’s promote that! Let’s talk about having easy access for students, and parents, to student work as it’s in progress. How many conversations have you seen occur on-line between students who would never speak to each other in class? Will the same be said for parents and children who cannot relate to one another well in person? Will their on-line interaction over their published work help them relate to one another at the personal level?
Perhaps I am taking it too far, but there is merit here, and I am actively looking for examples of how schools are doing this type of work. Please add yours!
Discover pop culture references, a sports almanac, new literature guides and more in this list.
Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead: Keep track of which famous musicians, performers, actors, athletes and political figures are alive and which ones are dead.
AllMusic.com: Search by genre like rock, jazz, pop, world, rap or blues.
Encyclopedia Smithsonian: Browse topics like Japanese art, astronomy, horticulture, popular entertainment, domestic life, conservation and more on this authority site.
Blog Them Out of the Stone Age is the finest example of the application of a historian’s passion and tradecraft in the new medium of blogging. It combines research, analysis and pedagogy issues with a keen desire to engage with the broader public.” — from the
@chuckpalahniuk – Chuck Palahniuk is best known as the author of “Fight Club.” His other novels include “Lullaby,” “Choke,” and “Snuff.” He’s also written three non-fiction books, including “Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories.” He tweets about his life as a writer and his work. A sample tweet:
When you do come in to work, your boss will know. If anything can be measured, it will be measured. The boss will know when you log in, what you type, what you access. Not just the boss but also your team. Internet technology makes working as a team, synchronized to a shared goal, easier and more productive than ever. But as in a three-legged-race, you’ll instantly know when a teammate is struggling, because that will slow you down as well. Some people will embrace this new high-stress, high-speed, high-flexibility way of work. We’ll go from a few days alone at home, maintaining the status quo, to urgent team sessions, sometimes in person, often online. It will make some people yearn for jobs like those in the old days, when we fought traffic, sat in a cube, typed memos, took a long lunch and then sat in traffic again.
This sounds an awful lot like how we hold students accountable via things like Google Docs or wikis. Their work, and when they did it, is public knowledge, therefore can be used to hold them accountable to the group. – post by pjhiggins
Time’s annual series on the future of something. This year it’s work and the workplace. Especially interesting is the notion of where will work will occur.
Kim Cofino’s outstanding post about innovation and where it comes from. I’d like to couple this with Ryan Bretag’s post about technology integration that focuses on similar ideas.
1. Inspired me and never let me settle for anything less than my best (10)
2. Compassionate, caring, made me feel important and welcomed, made a personal connection with me (7)
3. Were demanding, pushed me hard (4)
4. Had a great sense of humor (3)
5. Knowledge of the subject matter (3)
It’s coming to that time of the year for school districts around the world where we begin assigning our summer reading to our students. In the next few weeks, PTO’s and other fund-raising groups will be competing with one another to raise money through the sale of every district’s summer book lists.
Concurrently, students and teachers are pondering the merits of the titles on the lists. Students are wondering if there are Spark Notes or a movie for the books in question, and teachers are wondering which of the titles they have chosen, if any, will resonate with students.
I am wondering about the reasons behind summer reading.
My office receives more calls about summer reading than we do about just about any other topic within curriculum, including honors placements. Surprisingly, half of the calls are complaints about the fact we actually assign summer reading (students need a break), and the other half of the calls are just the opposite: that we don’t assign enough (sharpen the saw). How do you win?
For some reason, summer reading has become the bane of my existence in that I can’t determine its role in our curriculum. In looking at it, I see it as playing one of two roles:
Addendum to the curriculum, meaning that these are books within your curriculum that you cannot get to during the year, but are necessary to the successful completion of the course. This is truly only applicable in courses where the curriculum is external to the school district, as in AP or IB.
Demonstrating to students that reading is not solely an academic endeavor, but a lifelong skill. This model is not to prevalent in our schools today, but exists in communities that show the value of reading through their actions.
I’ve been looking at various models of summer reading, and I’ve asked the question several places, and what I’ve come up with is that in order for summer reading not to fall back on the drudgery associated with it, both from the students standpoint of reading (or Spark-Noting) the books, or the teachers who spend time assessing the work of the students in the first weeks of September. I don’t know which is worse: having to write a paper about a book that meant nothing to you, or having to read a paper from a student about a book that obviously meant nothing to them. What’s the solution? I’ll present two that I liked from the many responses I got out there. The first is employs the use of social media, the second, not so much.
As I said above, I asked this question of several people, both on Twitter and on the English Companion Ning, and the responses I got were insightful. Kristin Hokanson gave me this bit of transition, which matched my thinking very closely:
Her first post, which is the bottom image, shows how I view the traditional summer reading process, but the second one shows how her district is toying with the idea that there has to be something more to what the students do with the text; we have to allow them to read together. In his Wall Street Journal piece from a few weeks ago, writer Steven Johnson describes that the future of reading will involve us reading together and having discussion write on the pages of the texts that are on our e-book readers, so that at any given moment I can discuss with colleagues, or look for discussions that others have had right on the very page I am reading. Distracting, perhaps, but as an alternate assignment for some sub-groups of students it may work. Seriously, if I had the ability to take time out and get some clarification while slogging through Jane Eyre as a sophomore, I would have jumped all over it. That book nearly destroyed my desire to read. Thank goodness for Holden Caulfield, who arrived swiftly in September.
Others, too, are turning to social media to help them facilitate discussion around summer reading as it’s happening, and leveraging the technology to make the assignments richer. The English faculty at Fredericksburg Academy have all spoken up about their use of social media with their summer reading as a means to increase engagement.
Late last night, I received this from Candace Follis in response to some prompting:
and it changed some things. Should summer reading include summer writing, and should that writing be in such a form that it builds communications skills around the text? Can you have informed dialogue around why a novel is not in your top five? Simply, can we tell a student that if they don’t like the book, they need to illuminate for us in some capacity why they didn’t love the book? I am sure several hundred thousand English teachers have done this, but I like how Candace phrased it; it changes the way I see what we ask students to do in the summer.
Lastly, Dana Huff is really the impetus behind this thought stream, and her description of their program is below. If you look back at some of the posts I wrote during the ASCD Conference this year, you’ll see that I hovered around one idea specifically: modeling expert thinking. Dana’s school, The Weber School, includes an element in their September evaluation of summer reading that I feel does just that:
Students in grades 10-12 have the opportunity to read books selected for study by faculty members. Students will select which novel they will study prior to the end of second semester the previous year. During the first week of school, students will participate in seminar discussions led by faculty based on these selections. Students will be evaluated by faculty, and these evaluations will be part of the students’ grades for English during the first semester. Faculty members may request that students complete pre-discussion activities. Our goals are to encourage students to become life-long readers who read critically, insightfully, and enjoyably, to give our faculty and staff an opportunity to model the behavior of life-long readers, to familiarize our students with authors and literary works that include a range of genres and universal themes transcending time and place, and to challenge our students to grow, to reach, to stretch, and to broaden their experience of what it means to be human.
In the next few days, I’ll be posting about what we plan on doing here in our district, and appealing to all anyone who has ideas about making it work well. Whatever we decide to do on the assessment side of summer reading, if we decide to do anything at all, I am going to use Brian Smith’s post as my guiding principle:
“summer-reading-533.jpg.” Online Image. New York Times. August 7, 2008. May 13, 2009 <http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/recommended-reading/>.
This is a big attempt to get in the habit of more regular writing, so these are some very loosely connected ideas and things I like:
Announcements
In the last two months, I have picked up two more blogs on which I’ll be writing. Twice a month, I’ll be posting at Tech and Learning. I’ve joined a fantastic group of educators there, a group of people who I truly admire and enjoy reading. Look for those posts on the first and third Wednesday of every month. Also, one of the people I met at ASCD this year, Jason Flom, has invited me to post whenever I’d like over at Ecology of Education. While I am not too familiar with a lot of the writers over there, I’ve been impressed with what I’ve read so far. Jason and I were both covering the ASCD conference this year as media, and were flabbergasted at how well they treated us and the access they gave us to the presenters. I look forward to reading and writing over there.
InfoGraphics
I’ve fallen hard for the emergence of data visualization as a high art form. I’ve said often to the teachers I work with, especially those in the social sciences, that those individuals who can translate the amount of data that we now have in our possession, and will continue to accumulate, into meaningful images will be very powerful people in the future. The folks over at Cool Infographics and Flowing Data have recently been blowing me away with their ability to visualize statistics in illuminating ways. Be sure to check them out if you can.
We are always on the hunt for ways to find intelligent and informed sources of video to show to our students. This list from Open Culture is an incredible list of “smart” videos found on the web.
Frank Baker’s Media LIteracy site. Full of amazing links and resources for teachers and students. I plan to use this for a couple of classes at both the middle and high schools.
Project in which students create a media outlet in the Arab world. Great application of essential question to a project. Could this fit into the Cont. Issues Curriculum?
In my house, we are huge fans of Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel (we call it “Yucky Jobs”). I saw his name pop up in my iTunes library the other day in my TED Talks subscription and I wondered what this was going to be about.
Rowe speaks of two elements that arrived in his mind at a moment that no one can likely relate to. These elements, anagnoresis and peripiteia, which I am sure I once used in a literary analysis back in the day, both deal with Aristotelian tragedy. Anagnoresis, which is a literary device used to show how the protagonist moves from ignorance to discovery, Rowe used to describe the awakening he had at the moment when he was illuminated by his faulty reasoning, and peripiteia, the point in a tragedy whereby the tragic lead realizes the irony of the moment he or she is in (think Oedipus realizing that his wife is not who he thinks she is), he shows us that there may be a whole string of faulty reasonings that underpin his belief system.
Heady, I know.
The idea that it takes a moment of unexpected clarity or irony to show us our flawed assumptions is scary, in that we could last a long time in our own rut until that moment occurs. Rowe’s ultimeate discovery is that he feels he should challenge all of his “platitudes.” For example, in the talk, Rowe points out that if people took the advice and “followed their passion,” we would have a whole lot of economic difficulty within this country. See this pig farmer’s story. Rather than follow a passion, what if we just “looked and saw which direction everyone else is moving in, and moved the other way.” What if we just analyzed situations to find where the needs were, and acted upon that?
His ultimate understanding was this:
As I watched the talk and gained a new appreciation for Mike and the show, I did what I always end up doing–I related it to my own work. What if the ideas I hold dear in education, the very things I have been focusing on over the last few years, are wrong?
It made me go back to my notes from BLC last summer. I’ve mentioned this before, but on the last day of the conference I hadn’t planned on attending Dr. Pedro Noguera’s keynote, but I ended up there. Three things I wrote in my notes were triggered by what Rowe talked about:
Too often we use this equation: Talking=Teaching.
We shouldn’t be asking what does good teaching look like, but rather what does good learning look like.
We need to connect the way we teach to the way they learn.
I hadn’t thought about Noguera’s ideas that much lately, and hearing Rowe talk about anagnoresis and peripiteia brought them back. What is it about education that causes you to lose focus on the big ideas that should be driving you? I’d like to shift the focus onto student learning; I’d like to be listening to students the way Ryan has been and getting feedback from students on how they learn best, and I’d like to share that information with teachers that will act on it. These are the types of discoveries that lead to real change.
I am guilty of trying to find out what “good teaching” looks like through my observation of teachers. Perhaps I should have been looking at what the students were doing.
For example, Rowe tells us about a pig farmer in the United States, who managed to amass a fortune ever since he started transporting and feeding his pigs the leftovers from restaurants in Las Vegas. The farmer knew that the discarded food was rich in protein. When the pigs ate the protein rich meal they would grow faster and bigger which meant a bigger turnover. The farmer jokes of how he turned down an offer of $60 million for his farm recently. Who would have thought there was so much money in pig farming?! Did you?
questions that draw from personal experience, not abstraction
open to anyone (minimize cultural bias)
Here is a great example of principles from one discipline making sense in another. I am looking at these questions and thinking that they make great descriptions of what we want to see in the essential questions we create for curriculum. – post by pjhiggins
Earlier this week I wrote a post for TechLearning which I posted here and at Ecology of Education titled “Open Letter to the Teacher who said ‘I Hate Technology.’” Sarcasm is not my strong suit, but it just felt like the right mode to match the way I was feeling. I’d like to turn this post over to the commenters at each of the three places that post appeared because of the conversations that sprang from it.
From TechLearning:
Veiled sarcasm and disguised insults and insinuations are not productive tools in diagolue. Nor, are they good tools for persuasion. Yes,it is difficult to leave your comfort zone, however, it is necessary for growth.”
– Roxann
While it is tempting to poke fun at those who resist technology, these teachers are often (but not always) the ones who have many of the other skills and talents necessary for good classroom instruction. They have the learning strategies, classroom discipline and understanding of curriculum down cold. When we honour these skills and abilities and provide on-going support many of these “resistors” are encouraged to use technology and change their teaching. When we belittle them, they, just like our students, retreat, resist and defend. Too often, when we “train” these teachers they feel overwhelmed as they struggle to see how the software connects to what they are doing in the classroom. And so they continue doing what they’ve always done.–Kendra Grant
From Ecology of Education
We might do well to also hate technology for its ability to shed light on assumptions and render the teacher’s knowledge authority obsolete. What’s more, when students understand technology better than us, it only serves to illuminate our own ignorance, further eroding our positions of authority.
What are we left to do? Level with students? Learn alongside them? Or worse, admit we don’t know something and learn from them?! Blasphemy, Patrick. Blasphemy.–Jason Flom
There are many good examples of how teachers are using technology with their students, both in and out of the classroom. It’s important to make those connections so teachers can see the value. Problems arise, though, when some teachers refuse to even participate in the discussion. They don’t need technology, and nothing anyone can say (or show) will change their minds – they’ve closed them tight. I think those teachers are in the minority, but they definitely present a challenge.–tcervo
Think there’s a deeper, possibly more discouraging aspect to this. The teacher who hates technology communicated a hesitation to learn and grow. Technology just happened to the target of the moment. And if that’s the case, this teacher needs to find a job where learning and growth aren’t the actual reason for the job to exist. We all resist change, and perhaps that’s more the motivation here. But failing to recognize that growth = change, and that to continue being a relevant teacher I must grow, and that to grow I must learn, and that technology may be the thing needed to be known at this point in history—that’s a sad commentary. Sure, our teachers did it without technology, but technology (other than filmstrips—BEEP!) was not an option.–Kevin Washburn
Chalkdust101
I’m not sure if your response is to a hypothetical person or not, but I wonder if the tact you take in this blog post will be a constructive addition to the conversation. Rant is certainly an appropriate tag for the post, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone an occasional rant. However, if conversation is what your looking for, why not ask questions.–msstewart
Patrick, I too hate technology. That is, I hate technology simply for technologies’ sake. On the other hand, I love learning and I love teaching kids how to learn. If I can use some digital tools among the other tools I’ve acquired over the past 17 years to help kids learn, I love that process. The more tools I have, the more effective I can be, as each tool may not be relevent, useful, or timely in every situation.–Barry Bachenheimer.
Thanks to everyone for truly pushing my thinking on this.
We are in the middle of a huge curriculum writing season here, if there is such a thing. The list of courses we are either writing anew or creating from scratch is mind-boggling. One of the newer course we are adding to our high school Social Studies offerings is Contemporary Issues. Today was the first day we really got down to discussing what we want to do with the class.
Our idea was to marry a few areas together into this class:
applying the lens of historical inquiry to the flow of information we call news
learning how to recognize how media is manipulated
manage to trim the deluge of information present in the media to a manageable and intelligible framework so that it “works” for you.
Here is what we came up with for our introductory unit:
The idea of creating a “current events” class kind of turned us off. We didn’t want the class to turn into an academic version of TMZ every day (although that idea will rear it’s head somewhere in the design), so we we’ll begin this class withe the election of 2000. A watershed event to help the students understand the true workings of a contested election. It’s also a great jumping off point for the discussion of the role of modern media propaganda. We want to walk the thin line between historical analysis and modern themes.
We haven’t really begun to forge our assessments yet, nor have we ironed out the tech backbone for this class, but a good deal of that will depend on the comfort level of the teacher I am working with. Thoughts?
Something that might be worth having. But, I have to admit, buying books like this is often sketchy because I feel like I could find all 250 online somewhere and save the $12. Then again, it’s only $12.
First of all, I want to thank you for your candor and your willingness to openly share your opinion regarding the use of tools for learning. I am a firm believer that we should all have an open forum for expressing our opinions about our profession and the factors that influence it. That is why I am writing here.
Rather than do what most readers of this letter are expecting me to do and refute your claims, I have to admit that I concur–I hate it too. Yes, I must admit, that comes as surprise, I am sure, but something tells me that our reasons for this shared loathing will not be the same. Let me share mine with you and then we can have an informed discussion to compare and contrast.
First, I cannot stand that I have had to give up hours of painstakingly annotating papers with carefully crafted comments and editing marks. I’ll miss that fullness of self when I return the essays and research papers back to the students and they scurrilously thumb to the last page, jettisoning any comment or edit I made, to find out their total score on the paper.
Secondly, the fact that there will be conversations about topics in my class that occurr UNABATED and not in my presence is inconceivable and incorrigible. Thoughts about the content of my class that do not occur during the sanctity of my 50 minute class period belong either as one-on-one conversations with me in the hallway, clearly stated on their homework papers, or held onto in the working memory of the student until the next class period or hallway conversation with me.
Lastly, the assignment of group projects should be a rite of passage that includes several if not all of the following situations for students: one student should do most of the work including but not limited to: writing, researching, organizing, and assigning ancillary roles to other team members, one student should lose the flash drive that has the slide presentation at least once during the assignment duration, one student, most likely the one who pulls down 30+ hours at the local burger joint, should not be able to meet with the rest of the group at any time outside of school, provided the other group members athletics and extracurricular activities schedules do not preclude any outside of the classroom meetings. Additionally, I should not be able to see the extent to which each of these students worked on the project until the very end of the process.
As you can see, my role as a teacher is being compromised by the intrusion of tools that render aspects of my daily goings-on as obsolete. This I won’t stand for. Plus, adding to my ire is the fact that there is all of this talk about new definitions of literacy. Reading is no longer just the deconstruction and reconstruction of text, but now I am being asked to help students make sense of rich media, data sets that are visualized, and more streams of immediate news and information on a daily basis. If you ask me, there is just a whole lot of noise. What do you say we just don’t listen to it?
We had teachers growing up who were able to teach us the finer points of composing, of calculation, of geography, and the greater literary works of both North America and Europe, yet their technology was limited to chalk, and blessed be, an overhead projector. Can’t we do as much or more with the same?
So I am with you, I think, in resisting this move, and I’ll do just what’s mandated of me by my building principal. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go close my classroom door…
Park City High School teacher Paula Baltzan is holding daily reviews for the AP world history test over Skype, a free Internet calling service. She held her first 90-minute review on Friday and her second on Monday for a handful of students. The students read review notes posted on Baltzan’s school Web page and then
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discussed and asked questions over Skype. Baltzan said she can hold reviews for up to 23 students at once using the service.
This very well could be another tipping point for tools like this to make their way into the mainstream of education. For anything to become part of a learning culture, it has to be easy to use, and the ROI has to be high. Skype for review sessions when the other option is no review for AP exams is a very high ROI.
Notice that the focus of the article is on higher achieving students. Would this hold true for students who are in regular or college prep classes? – post by pjhiggins
Good Magazine’s graphic showing local law inforcement’s perception of the drug problem. With the amount of data available out there to the public, we will more and more be relying on those individuals who can create this type of infographic to help us make sense of it all.
As always, I tend to look at the recommended changes for higher ed as a means to shift what we think about K-12. Not always the best way to think, but this article brings up some salient points about collaboration and change within departments.
Vicki recently wrote about Jerram Froese’s lament over a colleague’s reaction to a professional article that teachers would be asked to read. The response from the colleague? “This is too long. Teachers won’t read it.” Like Jerram, I take offense to that reaction. Teachers, as a rule, will default to professionalism, and as an administrator, I have to accept that there will be a segment of the groups I am working with that will disregard any “extra” reading they are asked to do. However, there is the segment that will read, and that is where I want to focus my energies. Jerram’s thoughts spurred some wonderful points from Vicki about how we should treat our students and teachers:
If we don’t want to sit in a 10 hour session with someone lecturing to us about project based learning — neither should we turn around and lecture to our kids hour after hour.
If we want engaging training and MEANING in what we do for professional development, we should do the same in our classrooms.
If we want kids to read things and be inquisitive – we should do the same. When is the last time you took a new idea to the curriculum director.
We want our students to have a positive attitude about things they don’t want to do – will teachers have a positive attitude about doing things they don’t like?
When I look at these I see play and the willingness, as Sir Ken Robinson says “to have a go.” After reading Vicki’s and Jerram’s posts, I began to reflect on the English Department meeting I referenced above.
I asked the department to read Yancey’s piece on writing for two reasons: to have a professional conversation centered around the future of writing in the world, and to gauge what they were feeling about the proposed changes from the NCTE that have been forthcoming since its annual convention a few months ago.
(As a brief aside, hats off the NCTE for its forward-thinking stance on media literacy and the changing nature of its definition. Few organizations have been as pro-active with their membership in helping to move into new territories.)
Yancey calls out three challenges for teachers of writing in her piece:
developing new models of composing
designing a new curriculum supporting those models
creating new pedagogies enacting that curriculum.
The question that my colleagues had after reading through all of this was simple: we know we have to change what we do, and we are willing to do so, but what are we changing into? What does it look like? Yancey leads us close to what it will look like in her paper; however, in hearing the question come from them, I immediately begin to think of Jerram’s point (via Vicki’s Four Points). Their question to me–truly a “so what now?” type question–caught me off guard initially. I left that meeting thinking to myself
If you are going to ask your staff to read this and take into consideration for our profession, you’d better have read it too, you’d better be prepared to put into practice yourself, and you’d better facilitate conversations to help its application.
Essentially,
be the change you wish to see in others~~Gandhi
But I’ve since turned it back around. This street is going both ways. We don’t know where the future of writing is going, but we do know that it’s rapidly changing and while we prepare for these “new models” of composing that the NCTE is calling for, they are being created all around us in the form of connective writing, of digital citizenship, and of participatory media. I understand the need for definition in regards to what we are supposed to be teaching, but let me take us on a short side trip, one that is inspired by my wife.
We are the adults, aren’t we? When I lose sight of how to effectively parent my 4 year old, my wife always steps in and asks me a very quick question that sets me straight: “He’s 4. You’re not. Who’s the adult here?” Now let’s apply that to some of these new models of composing that we are wondering about. Larry Ferlazzo posted “The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience” in which he dug around for some emerging trends in online writing. Note some of the sites he selected for inclusion: What Percent?, RecipeSnap, Shelfari, The Art of Storytelling (this one is truly fabulous for stimulating some deep writing), Moment Tracker. Audience is no longer a single teacher poring over your personal narrative with a micro point Sharpie. Audience is amplified to the power of 10 or more if we want it to be, and our role in the process is often immaterial. To a large percentage of our students, publishing is something they do daily–just outside of school. Our new modes of composition are going to be the marriage of the composing students do outside of school with content-related material we help them craft. We are the adults, where are we writing? Are we showing them how we use collaborative technologies to be effective citizens? Effective teachers? Effective learners?
As leaders within our buildings, how much importance do we place in modeling expert thinking for our students and teachers? As teachers of writing, how much writing are we allowing ourselves to do to be the models our students need us to be? Look at all of the opportunity we have to affect how our students see the world, and more importantly, how the world sees them through their writing. On all levels, in regards to the teaching of writing, we must be the change.
MKA’s Irish Studies page where they will chronicle their trip to Ireland this May. Great use of social media to allow students and parents to remain in contact while they are traveling.
“A lot of youngsters who saw that on television thought it as a
game in which the towers would just rise up from the dust, whole again. It
really is that frightening.”
While I am sure she has some data to back this up, why include it here? It’s just throwing gas onto her own fire. – post by pjhiggins
How would one learn that by simply interacting with a
computer screen?”
Who in their right mind would advocate this anyway? – post by pjhiggins
This project, TeachingwithTED, has really taken shape. This page shows how some really bright people are using visualizations to manipulate data and create some stunning conclusions.
Tuesday marked the first meeting of a group of teachers that signed up for the “School. Different.” sessions I am leading. To prepare for the day, I asked them to examine the following list of materials:
To course them through the discussion, I used this slidedeck.
One of the slides, the one I used to get them split into their first cooperative group, featured the question that so many have debated this year: Is Google Making Us Stupid. What I noticed in gathering the material for this class is the vehemence with which people responded to Nicholas Carr’s July article. Google, what people referred to lightly only a few years ago as a project by some college kids, has truly changed how we find things, and how we expect our information delivered. In reading this post from Trent Batson, I dug down into the comments and found this gem from John Vieth from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville:
To say that Google and the Web make us stupid because we don’t have to work as hard to do research and find information is like saying books make us stupid because we no longer have to arrange an interview with an expert to gain some of their knowledge–we only need to read the information in a book. Nicholas Carr’s article is just more negative sensationalism a la John C. Dvorak. It’s noise. Ignore it. Come on people. Let’s put our critical thinking hats on. Google and the Web are equalizers. They give information access to people who never would have had it otherwise, and they free our time to focus on problem solving and thinking instead of information gathering.
The equalizing affect of something as simple as a search engine, coupled with increases in internet access via smaller and cheaper devices, is no small matter. The unsettling fact for many is that information is no longer the property of a select few. It’s like the Gutenberg effect on HGH. Jon Becker dropped these three coincidences into the knowledge base the other day:
(CNN) — The Rocky Mountain News, gone. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, gone…At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008, according to Paper Cuts, a Web site tracking the newspaper industry. More than 21,000 jobs at 67 newspapers have vaporized in that time, according to the site.
The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital…Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it’s time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. “I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken,” said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. “Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty voted unanimously March 18 to make the school’s scholarly research available for free on the internet, joining other noted universities that hope to encourage more scholarship and expand researchers’ audiences…The open-access movement aims to put peer-reviewed research and literature on the internet for free and remove most copyright restrictions. Advocates believe this will invigorate more research across academia.
We are likely to see more of these types of shifts as the nature of how we read continues to change. This point of Google being a double-edged sword was brought up in the Moodle discussion that has gone on since Tuesday morning’s class. One teacher has likened the nature of Google and the internet at large to that of the rainforest. While it contains secrets both known and unknown, it also hides potential dangers in its richness. How we leverage its offerings is going to make all of the difference. That’s true whether we are talking bits or bark.
(1)College and university sports teams have nicknames. (2)Most
are common, such as the Bears, Lions, and Tigers. (3)However, some are unusual. (4)For
instance, the University of California at Irvine is nicknamed “Anteaters.”
(5)The University of Washburn’s sports teams are called the “Ichabods.”
(6)Richland College sports teams are called “Thunderducks.” (7)And perhaps the
strangest of all belongs to the University of California at Santa Cruz. (8)Their nickname
is the “Banana Slugs.”
Explanation
What is the main idea of the paragraph? No one sentence expresses it. When this
happens, you must consider the topic of the paragraph and then look at the details to try
to piece together the “missing topic sentence.”
This paragraph starts talking about college nicknames. But it does not focus on common
nicknames. The signal word “however” at the beginning of Sentence 3 tells you
that the paragraph is changing directions, and will focus on “Unusual college
nicknames.” This is the topic of the paragraph.
Sentences 4 – 8 are detail sentences that provide the following examples:
1. The University of California at Irvine is nicknamed “Anteaters.”
2. The University of Washburn’s sports teams are called the “Ichabods.”
3. Richland College sports teams are called “Thunderducks.”
4. The University of California at Santa Cruz team nickname is the “Banana
Slugs.”
This is a great resource for differentiation of content. This online text reads very easily, yet doesn’t skimp on content. The links alongside the main reading passages offer students the ability to drill down into specific areas of interest.
In the wake of our President’s latest address to the American people, I found this via an email from a friend. It’s hard to forget how we all felt at that point in our lives at the moment when we were about to enter into what we felt was the real world: life after high school. To be making that leap at this point in history is especially harrowing, and you can hear that in the voices of these bright young students from California. Something tells me these kids have a good chance of making that leap.
Do kids learn to think by reading great literature, doing difficult math and learning history, philosophy and science? Or can they tackle those subjects on their own if schools simply teach them to problem-solve, communicate, use technology and think creatively?
This comment appeared in my email inbox the other day, submitted by a teacher I work with in regards to my Attention, Engagement, Learning post from ASCD :
I really liked your “transfer of responsibility” model. But to a degree I disagree with the idea that students speaking/ interacting is a panacea for learning. I remember in my teaching classes we were drilled with the mantra “leanring is social”. But I think that’s just a new myth. I think instruction has to be differentiated. SOME kids are social learners and some are not. I frequently do partner assignments in Russian at the high school, and one of the consistent comments I got back on my survey was “less partner work”. My other class there ( I have two sections) seems to love it. I’ve also seen partner/ group work devolve into BS sessions or one person giving the answers to the other and the other kid not learning a thing.
So: not a panacea, just another tool to use appropriately.
I was blown away that anyone in my district actually reads this, but psyched to have some push-back from a local level where, to me, it matters most. Here was my quick reply:
Thanks for checking it out; it was a great weekend where I was able to really get into excellent discussions about things that matter. Here’s my take on your reaction.
Yes, some kids are social learners, some are not. Some kids draw pictures, some are like me and cannot even begin to attempt that. What the GRR model advocates is not “all social all the time,” but rather a mix of various types of collaborative and cooperative work. Some of that will involve talking, some may not.
Plus, when you take a close look at what Kagan believes about the brain and what he believes about how we learn, the structures make a ton of sense. In the model you gave me for your classes, how do you hold each student responsible for what goes on in the discussion? If, as you say, it devolves into a BS session, what can be done to deter that? The structures Kagan created all are built with a combination of group and individual accountability whereby, if done right, there is equal responsibility on the part of all cooperative partners.
From my perspective, we as teachers work very hard. Can we begin to look at what we do not from the standpoint of teachers, but from the standpoint of learners? If we did, I think we would agree that there is a lot of responsibility that can be transferred to the learner. This is not just a tweak here or there I am talking about, but a whole paradigm shift in practice.
And, that was not all. He came back today with another great insight:
My observations and criticism were directed more toward the PET scan and the concept that “the person doing the talking is the one doing the learning”. For me to buy into that model I would need to see more context for what specific events were occurring during the PET scan. For example, I”m sure that parts of the brain involved in registering the facial expressions and emotional reactions of the person one is speaking to are lighting up in that scan. But does that necessarily mean that that person is “learning” more of a particular content? What if we took two individuals and asked one to write a summary of Romeo and Juliet and asked the other to retell it? Which brain would light up more? And what needs to be lighting up to demonstrate learning? To be mildly flip: I bet my brain would light up pretty brightly if I was about to be in a car accident. What am I learning (except that I”m screwed …:)
My point simply is this: I need more evidence to buy the notion that the “one doing the talking” is the one who is learning. This may be true for some social learners in some contexts but not necessarily in others (again, returning to what we both agree is the need for differentiating instruction).
I like and accept in principle the GRR model, especially in the broad principal/ thesis of moving the student from dependency to independence. I think that some of the failures I’ve seen of cooperative learning was that it kept students stuck in being dependent on other students for the answer/ learning, rather than using it as a means to wean them to a level where they can demonstrate/ perform a skill independently. So I think the concept if I do it-we do it-you (plural) do it-you (singular) do it is a good one. (Although not all kids will need to do the you plural one all the time in all situations…
These are the kinds of discussions that we should be having, and whether or not they are in person, at this point, I don’t care. Eventually I would love that, but we have to start somewhere.
This graphic is telling about the state of the newspaper business model. What I question, a little, is the rise in profits shown at the bottom for the NYT.
I’ve posted this before at some point, but in reference to my conversation with Greg Mortenson on Saturday at ASCD, it popped out in my mind as something I should revisit. Mortenson points out that there are 110 million children in the world that are illiterate. When you view this video, it begins to take shape mentally. Much like Chris Jordan does with his work on visualizing waste, this truly pulls the illiteracy problem worldwide into focus.
When you get into school either today or tomorrow, whether it’s on your prep period, or during a walk through the halls, take note of who is doing the talking in your schools. Is it the students? The teachers? Take this one into consideration as well:
Brains are more engaged when people are interacting with one another.
Are students interacting in your school? Are they placed within situations that promote safe conversations and high-yield accountability? What happens when these answers are “no?”
Kagan shared with us this image that clearly shows the activity within the brain when various learning tasks are going on. What do you see?
Here’s what I see.
The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.
Yes, I understand that I just wrote that on Saturday in reference to another session, but it is so much more telling when looking at these PET scans.
Try taking your next lesson plan, your next department meeting or faculty meeting (please do this there) and incorporate some cooperative learning structures into the process. In looking back at this weekend, I am noticing a connection between two specific ideas: the Kagan structures and the Gradual Release of Responsibility model espoused by Fisher and Frey. Here is that image once again:
Notice this: your direct instruction is not lost; you can hang onto your chalk and talk. It just lives in a smaller space within your overall lesson or meeting structure. That area where Fisher and Frey delineate at Guided Instruction and Collaborative Instruction is where the learning structures of Kagan reside. So the flow goes “I-We-You(plural)-You(singular).”
Just a heads up: these next few posts are going to all deal with my time spent with Dr. Spencer Kagan. His generosity in sitting down to answer my questions led to a bunch of information that would be irresponsible of me to put into one post.
For the second time in two days, I’ve been fortunate to sit down and have a truly transformative conversation. Dr. Spencer Kagan, a psychologist and author of hundreds of books about using cooperative learning structures in schools, sat down with me after his session and we talked about the primitive needs of our brain and how they wreak havoc on modern learning, embedded curriculum and the lack of a separate curriculum for “21st Century Skills.”
Kagan’s session was based on this idea:
“unstructured interaction does not lead to equity in the classroom.”
and it forces you to think for a minute about what equity is, and what it means to decrease the gap in achievement in your classroom. For me, when I begin thinking of that, or when I listen to a teacher talk about a class with children of widely varying abilities, I think of how difficult it becomes to make sure that beyond helping a child reach a year’s growth in a year’s time, but also making sure that the gap between the high-achievers and low-achievers is minimized. In his session, Kagan showed us some examples of data he’s collected in which classrooms that had a huge achievement gap and were given direct instruction aimed at raising everyone’s test scores actually did work, only the gap between the high achievers and low achievers remained constant. He then showed the same situation with an experimental group of a classroom that implemented true cooperative learning structures, and that gap nearly disappeared within a year’s time.
Positive Interdependence – occurs when gains of individuals or teams are positively correlated.
Individual Accountability – occurs when all students in a group are held accountable for doing a share of the work and for mastery of the material to be learned.
Equal Participation – occurs when each member of the group is afforded equal shares of responsibility and input.
Simultaneous Interaction – occurs when class time is designed to allow many student interactions during the period.
Again, and I apologize if this is becoming a trend in my writing, this session focused on a lot of doing, coupled with some amazing information on how the brain worked. Doing, rather than just sitting hearing about the theory, makes all of the difference in learning. This was Kagan’s message overall. Throughout the hour and half, we interacted in several ways with both those we did not know and those we did. We used touch, interview, and most of laughter, to get ourselves in a ready state for learning to occur.
Whether you are an advocate of this theory, which I am, or not, it was hard to deny that the activities we engaged in: Sage and Scribe, Celebrity Interview, Hagoo, Take-Off/Touchdown, and a quiet signal, did not focus our attention and put us in a position to be receptive to learning not only from Kagan, but from our new colleagues as well.
Kagan, S (2007, February, 8). Simple Structures to Reduce the Achievement Gap. NCCREST, Retrieved March 16, 2009.
A couple of days before I came to ASCD, I gave some real thought to what I view as my weaknesses as an educator. Not only those that I have now in administration, but also those I had in the classroom. One glaring element that always makes me cringe to think about, in that I realize that I never did it well, is the use of assessment in the process of learning. Too often, I fell into the category of solely using summative evaluations, and then not taking the information those summative tests, quizzes or papers and acting on them. It wasn’t until the last few months I spent in the classroom that I really began to look at how I used formative assessment and misconception analysis to drive instruction. Then, of course, I moved out of a full-time classroom.
If you are teaching them about using a strategy in the classroom, teach them by doing the strategy, and then have them do the strategy in front of you.
Reflective Assessments: many days, deliberate ways
Rigorous: some days, thought-provoking ways
From the start of the session, they had us engaged and interacting with one another using some cooperative learning strategies and some questions from Sidney Parnes. We were given the task of viewing this video, a clip from The Simpsons called “How the Test was Won. Then we stepped into a “Three Musketeers” activity where we got up and walked around with our hands up until two other people met our hands. We then became a quick group. The two questions were simple, but connective:
How can you connect this to something you already know?
How can you use this in the future?
Any chance I can get to push my thinking, I’ll take. Their statement that followed listening to some of the answers from the groups crystallizes a lot of the buzz I’ve been hearing at this conference:
THE PERSON DOING THE TALKING IS THE PERSON DOING THE LEARNING.
If I can go back to my district and put that into my own practice more often, I can’t think of any better improvement I could make that would transfer the responsibility onto my learners, and give me a glimpse into what they are thinking and learning.
Another element they introduced today was the idea of using the “one-minute challenge” to push learners to write with purpose and meaning for only a minute, which was interesting because they preceded that minute by a full minute of complete and motionless silence. What a settling event that was. I didn’t look at twitter, didn’t write down any notes, I just sat. When it was time to write for a minute, I was calm and ready to think. From that minute’s writing we again shared with a partner and set goals about what we’d like to do in the next minute to improve our thinking.
Goal-setting in a micro way. I liked that too.
While I didn’t walk away from this session an expert on assessment, I did begin to see how easily we can set up formative assessment systems that give us the information we need to see how our students are doing. By breaking the classroom down into these three categories:
what do we want students to know?
how will we know that they know it?
what will we do if they don’t?
it gives me a plan of action when I work with teachers. The question becomes how to model that for my teachers, because the goal is to get them thinking at this level about their instruction.
Firstly, wifi. What a shift from last year in New Orleans. In much the same light that I’ve been talking about the shift in what type of student I am, attendance at this conference is no different. Being able to broadcast out and pull in others to this conference is a huge upgrade.
Secondly, the conference center here in Orlando is enormous, almost too big for the amount of people that are here. Coming from much smaller conferences this year to this one is a little daunting. I’ve never been to NECC, but what I have read of those who did, it’s similar in scope. This year’s attendance at ASCD is (including exhibitors): 8,132 and total registration (minus exhibitors): 6,955, and it’s very roomy.
Thirdly, there is a Poland Spring Water cooler in every room, so you don’t have to fork out the $3.25 for a bottle of water or lug around a bottle from outside. I am big fan of being properly hydrated.
Lastly, the staff from ASCD are fantastic. Whether it was opening up media credentials to bloggers, giving access to presenters, the quality of presenters, or the scheduling of the presenters so that each session time slot has something to offer for nearly every interest, they have done an outstanding job.
This came across my reading/viewing list a while back, but it means more today after having listened and spoken with Greg Mortenson.
Mortenson, recently nominated by the U.S. Congress to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, was an one of those figures you just jump at the chance to meet and talk to. What strikes you immediately about him is his supreme lack of urgency about his time. Here he was, scheduled to catch a flight to take him to a flight to Afghanistan, yet he sat and gave pictures and autographs, a 30 minute interview with three educational bloggers, and then signed over 50 books for people at the conference. He joked to us that he is notorious for missing flights, and I can see why.
His chronicle of his life since 1992, the New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, continues to change the mindsets of those who read it. It details his experiences after a failed attempt to summit Mt. Godwin-Austin, known more commonly as K2. Upon his descent and exodus from the region, he happened upon a village name Korphe. After resting and taking in the hospitality of the villagers, he discovered the schoolchildren there both lacked a school and a teacher. He described the moment in which an elder of the village had passed away and he was visiting his grave site. That elder had given him one piece of advice before dying: “Listen to the wind.” And so he did.
What he heard were the voices of the children in the village of Korphe, and that changed everything. He promised those villagers and those children that he would return and build them a school.
That same wind carried him back to build that school, and several others since then.
Individuals like Mortenson astound me. Meeting him and finding him so relaxed, calm, and giving was a revelation. I had fully expected him to be full of energy and movement–I would expect that from someone who affects as much change in the world as he has. Yet, he was placid and warm, truly concerned about what his message was.
He spoke of girls. He spoke about why education and empowerment were crucial to creating change in the world of our children. He spoke of the real importance of schools, and not once did he mention any of the words we often use when we talk about how we want school to change here in the United States. His message involved community empowerment and the need to be patient enough to wait for change in education, or anything for that matter, because the affect may not be visible for a generation or two. That is why, he says, education is a hard sell to politicians and community leaders.
If you haven’t heard of his program, the one that ultimately worked to raise the money needed to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s called Pennies for Peace. Please visit the site, or if you have already heard of it, donate your little Abraham Lincoln’s to help change the world.
It’s not lost on me that for the longest time I did not think deeply about geo-political issues in the Middle East and the effects of terrorism on the world at large. Now, twice within the last week, two very influential thinkers and doers have pointed at very similar solutions to combating terrorism in the world.
And they both begin and end with two words: Education and Empowerment.
Doug Fisher had a profound affect on my outlook today, and I’ll likely spend the next few days putting together some more of my thoughts that came from his shared session. At this moment, I’ve got this one stuck in my craw:
We need to model expert thinking for our students.
All too often, he states, we see too much “explaining and interrogating,” and not enough of modeling how we think through a text, how we go about finding information when we really need it. My standard line when it comes to this has to do a lot with Penny Kittle’s book Write Beside Them and our work with the National Writing Project in that if we are teachers of writing, we must be writers ourselves. We need to show that there are processes and skills that even we as educators, who have already done this thing called school, still work hard to figure things out.
He works in a high school with his colleague Nancy Frey, called Health Sciences High & Middle College and the shift to the Gradual Release of Responsibility has helped that school make incredible gains in learning and literacy. What it took was a huge shift from investing in the “magic bullet” programs to an equal or greater investment in teacher ability. For those of us who are in charge of providing professional development or making sure it is available to our teachers, that’s a huge shift. Amy Sandvold asked “why is it that teachers feel that the Professional Development expert have to be 50 miles away from your district in order for teachers to believe what they say?”
I’d like to see what we could do in our schools if we did invest in our own abilities rather than rely on some external force or program.
Last year, I used a book on assessment from Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in a study group with teachers. When I saw their name attached to this morning’s panel discussion on Literacy in the 21st Century, I was intrigued. My thinking was that they would have some great foundational elements to add to the what I’ve been thinking lately.
What happened was much more than what I thought. Amy Sandvold, a colleague of Angela Maiers, was also on the panel as well. Here is what I pulled out.
A few years back, when I really began this journey, I saw Alan November present about the need for teachers to outsource what they do to the students to prevent them from being the only voice in the classroom. What they advocated and described here is exactly that. Focused instruction, according to Fisher, is pointed modeling of expert thinking and behavior. It’s in this mode of instruction where we help students build the requisite background knowledge and vocabulary they need for success in higher level tasks. This argument, which is raging throughout the educational world right now, about content v. skills, then becomes moot. Is there direct instruction in this model? Absolutely, but it is followed by gradually removing the emphasis on what you as a teacher do in front of your students. Once you model and instruct, move into more collaborative and shared modes of teaching and learning, until the end result is full on student responsibility.
And this from Frey:
Students and teachers must know stuff in order to do stuff.
Teachers now stuff.
Students know stuff too
Teachers and students learn from one another by interacting and collaborating.
I truly believe that learning takes place in many forms and through many processes. One that I will recommend to anyone is that of conversation and communal learning among students and teachers. Even today, sitting there discussing our greatest learning experience we ever had (my partner had a great one where she remembers finally being able to move from snow-plow skiing to parallel skiing), I didn’t realize my own until we began talking to others in the room and listening to the stories of people learning. Collaboration is a powerful tool for learning.
There is so much more to come out of this session, but I am finding that it’s hard to process, especially in light of what occurred directly after this session. That’s coming too.
My English Dept. says I gather way too many Shakespeare resources, but I just find them to be so prevalent on the web. This one is from one of my all time favorite websites.
I just stopped into the Convention Center here to pick up my media kit, and I immediately noticed a big shift from last year’s conference in New Orleans: tech. Flat screens, laptops, live streaming of sessions, and a dedicated Technology Corridor (that’s going to be a separate post). All things that had they been here last year, I wouldn’t have stuck out so much sitting all by myself in session rooms because the only viable electrical outlets for people with laptops were on the fringes of sessions.
Seriously, there is a decided effort on the part of ASCD to be visible, to pull in “21st Century Skills,” a word that the world has claimed as its buzzword du jour, and if you look through the session descriptions, there is a huge focus on these topics:
Visual Literacy and infusion of Visual Art into the classroom
Using assessment wisely to allow students to show they understand
Web 2.0 and its use in the classroom
21st Century Skills and their broad definition
Over the last few days, I’ve spent some time looking at the sessions that immediately call out to me as valuable in what I do on a daily basis. If you’ve been following some of the thoughts here lately, especially the dialogue between Scott McLeod and on a recent links post, you’ll understand that there has to be a marriage between teaching “soft skills,” and making sure content knowledge is sufficiently understood. There is a balance we need to strive for in our work over the next few years in curriculum writing. Scott really hit it here in this reference:
In Built to Last, Collins & Porras describe how visionary organizations do not “oppress themselves with … the ‘Tyranny of the OR’” (i.e., citizenship preparation v. employment preparation) but instead “liberate themselves with the ‘Genius of the AND.’” As they note, yin and yang are “both at the same time, all of the time.” Why is this so hard for educators to do?
I’d like to find some examples here at ASCD that show me this is happening, or at least show ways in which I can move forward to help teachers create learning environments that are innovative for students and teachers alike, yet provide a solid academic foundation for the future. As I have said before, it never was an Either/Or.
The second major focus I have this weekend is to leave here with more actionable content which I am taking to mean both teaching strategy and assessment strategy. When I work with teachers, especially in light of all the buzz about the influx of creativity and innovation ideas into the NJCCCS, they often ask me how they are supposed to teach these skills. The sessions I have chosen center around giving teachers strategies for stretching student minds within their content areas. In my own personal practice, I always fall back on the Kagan Structures and other forms of cooperative learning (and it just so happens, Kagan is presenting on Sunday). With that creativity in how we approach teaching, I’d like to explore some innovation in how we assess our students.
Be sure to pick up the twitter feed also, which you can find here and here.
I have not been a student in the traditional sense for some time. I have not sat in a classroom, at a desk, and listened to a teacher or speaker discuss and run a class centered around a central topic. Everything I have done over the last few years has been focused on my own learning and those elements that I deemed necessary for me to focus on: technology, school change, leadership, curriculum, educational theory, methodology, state mandates, assessment, differentiation, learning styles, visual literacy, Web 2.0, or any other of the most current buzzwords the field of education. In the last seven years, that time that has passed since I have last entered a graduate school classroom where my primary role was that of “student,” a lot has changed in me. Never was this as evident as a lecture series I sat in on Monday and Wednesday of this week.
I was an anthropology major in college, and took enough history to obtain a dual degree (have to check on the status of that one). It’s my bag, and I am lucky to work with a department that is rife with history junkies. So when one of our teachers arranged for Dr. Davis to speak with us about his work in the Middle East, we were all excited to work up some intellectual sweat.
Dr. Davis ran his class like many of our classrooms are run: he used a slidedeck laced with his overarching objectives, followed by rationale, example, and explanation. He also, at any moment, took questions or requests for further clarification from us. No different than many of the history lectures I attended in either high school or college.
What was different was me. In those previous situations, the only source for information I had was Dr. Davis, his syllabus, and the recommended books on that syllabus that I was to have read for that day’s class. In Monday and Wednesday’s class, I had all of you, I had video, I had Flickr images, I had Amazon’s recommendations.
As Dr. Davis spoke about Fareed Zakaria’s work on how to win the war on terror, I popped out and linked my notes to his book on Amazon. The same with obscure texts like those by Olivier Roy. As he talked about and showed us startling images from the looting of the Iraqi National Museum and the treasures that were lost, I realized I wanted those images too, so I pulled them into my notes from Flickr. He discussed the use of Iraqi student blogs with his undergraduates; I conducted a quick scan of my twitter network and of Davis’ own resources and and found several examples.
We all asked questions and contributed to the discussion. I chronicled it in a way that I never would have. My notes look vastly different and more robust than anything I could have done ten, even five years ago. His lecture, his class, took on a whole new life in my notes. I dropped in questions to myself that I’ll look back on and that will help me go in new directions later on.
The best part, for me at least, is that I shared them with everyone in the seminar via Google Docs, and I asked them to drop in their notes and thoughts as well, or to just use mine to springboard even further.
I am now that student–that student that wants more than just what is front of me, and knows how to get it. We had all types of students in this seminar: those that listened, those that talked, those that hand-wrote notes, and me. The best part about it is that it doesn’t matter at all if no one shares their notes with me in the collaborative document. Their interactions in engaging Dr. Davis became part of my thinking and my documentation. They contributed to my learning, and the least I can do is give back to them this document.
I love what Ryan and David and the rest of their staff have done with this conference idea here. We are definitely trying to emulate it in some form here.
Instead, we must fundamentally realign the curricula and instruction that occurs within our schools in order to produce the workers and citizens that we need
Is our job as teachers and administrators to produce workers? – post by pjhiggins
These are dark days for the newspaper business. Advertising is plummeting, and papers are going under with alarming regularity. In December, Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, filed for bankruptcy. This year, Hearst said it might sell or shut down the San Francisco Chronicle, and Philadelphia Newspapers, which owns The Philadelphia Inquirer, filed for bankruptcy. Just a week ago, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver published its last edition. Even the New York Times Co. (NYT), which owns one of the country’s strongest papers, has suspended its dividend. The Zacks publishing stocks index is down 80% from its 52-week high
These stats, while alarming, signal something for me as someone who has been looking at his district’s curriculum for journalism. How do you teach about print journalism in this climate? – post by pjhiggins
Later on this week, I will be leaving for the ASCD Conference in Orlando, and thanks to Scott McLeod and the generous group over at ASCD, I will be covering the conference through this medium. With that responsibility comes some pretty cool benefits, one being that I can pop into ticketed sessions that I otherwise would not have been able to get into.
In that light, I thought I might throw it out there to the readership here (whatever that number might be) and ask if there were any topics that might be of specific interest to you. I am sitting down to plan my conference over the next two days, so here are the main headings that ASCD gives out:
Creativity and 21st Century Skills
From Research to Practice
Networking Opportunities
Urban Education
Navigating the ASCD website is proving to be a little tricky, but the sessions are all available for browsing if you are so inclined. On a personal level, my focus is going to be on visual literacy, critical thinking, assessment, and reading strategies. Yes, I know, rather narrow. If there is a session you see that might fit that bill, or something you would like some firsthand knowledge of, drop a comment and I’ll do my best to gather some firsthand info for you.
Take this video, put it into the context of your latest classroom reading, be it novel, short story, poem, what have you, and ask yourself if your students could get into this. It’s like video sparknotes, only much much better. Summary isn’t always writing…
Using cell phones in class but some students don’t have unlimited texting? No problem. Google simulator allows them to use the SMS feature to do simple queries and research.
We are really pushing summarizing and paraphrasing in our schools this year. The ability to take relevant information and boil it down to its essentials, and to represent that information in language and terms that have meaning to the individual is a skill that, regardless of century, people need to have.
From this, all sorts of ideas begin to spring up. If you read Tom Barrett’s collection of the 32 uses of the Flip Cam in your classroom, this project makes even more sense. I think that taking a tome like Jane Eyre and asking students to do it in this format, with similar constraints, is a beautiful idea. I’d love to hear of other examples where people did this, or something similar.
Now does it ensure that the students pulled everything out of the novel that they should have? That’s up to you and how you assess it. But for me, this project, coupled with some other more traditional assessments would be more than enough.
I like Elgan’s perspective here about why local is the new global, or vice versa. I am imagining small town media outlets becoming larger voices making sure that there news matters to global audience–almost like Lake Woebegone.
The debate over 21CS skills should not be one between one set of curricular goals versus the other. This isn’t core knowledge versus soft skills. No, our focus should be on how we teach those core subjects that are necessary. How do we teach math and science so that we better integrate technology and critical thinking skills? How do we teach the social sciences in a manner that focuses on project-based learning and team-based activities? How do we ensure that a 21st century student is not being forced to unplug when they enter the classroom, and instead uses the technologies and interests that drive the rest of their life to boost their interest and achievement in core academic subjects? And most importantly, how do we ensure all students are graduating with the content knowledge and skills needed to truly achieve in the 21st century economy?
This one is the goods here. One does not go forward by jettisoning the skills with which we gathered. To me it’s not about introducing new content, but rather how we engage students in content using the “soft skills” that we need them to develop. The ability to have a lasting understanding is our goal here, and providing relevant context to what we do in the classroom is a great way to get there. – post by pjhiggins
This week I have spent a good portion of my time working with teachers in grades PK-2 talking about creativity and innovation. Due to the changes that New Jersey is proposing in the new draft standards, which came about through their membership in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (among other factors as well), the elements that are stressed in the P21 manifesto have populated themselves into the new standards. Themes such as:
Global awareness
Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy
Civic literacy
Health literacy
and skills like:
Creativity and Innovation
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Communication and Collaboration
are all now written into our standards from PK-12.
If you come from middle or high school teaching into an administration position in which you work with grades PK-5, you will understand how stressful it is to work with elementary teachers. They are wonderful people; I should know, I am married to one. But when you look at all they have to do in a day and the limited time they have to do it in, having them sit in an afterschool meeting to work with curriculum is daunting. To introduce these ideas to our elementary teachers, we used our good friend Sir Ken Robinson. We took a page from the P21 Framework that centered on creativity and innovation and had the teachers use it as a backbone for writing down ideas that struck them while watching Sir Ken’s TED talk from 2006. From there, we had them answer two prompts in groups of 4-5:
Identify the structures in place in your classroom that promote creativity and innovation either in your students or yourself.
So what? What Now?
The responses were phenomenal, especially in relation to the areas where Sir Ken spoke about finding creative capacities and working with them instead of educating them out of them. However, one thing I have learned in administration in regards to any kind of meeting is that you have to be ready for the “don’t waste my time question of the day,” which is the part where you have to make it matter to them. A teacher asked the question very bluntly:
“where is this going? How are we to fit these ideas, which by the way we all believe in, into what we already do?”
My answer wasn’t great, I’ll admit, and it had a lot to do with explaining where the ideas behind the new standards revisions came from, but it stuck with me.
Last night, in my reader appeared an article from Patrick Riccards at Eduflack in which he debated the mode of delivery that the P21 people have chosen. This gem was smack in the middle of it:
The debate over 21CS skills should not be one between one set of curricular goals versus the other. This isn’t core knowledge versus soft skills. No, our focus should be on how we teach those core subjects that are necessary. How do we teach math and science so that we better integrate technology and critical thinking skills? How do we teach the social sciences in a manner that focuses on project-based learning and team-based activities? How do we ensure that a 21st century student is not being forced to unplug when they enter the classroom, and instead uses the technologies and interests that drive the rest of their life to boost their interest and achievement in core academic subjects? And most importantly, how do we ensure all students are graduating with the content knowledge and skills needed to truly achieve in the 21st century economy
One does not go forward by jettisoning the skills with which we gathered. To me it’s not about introducing new content, but rather how we engage students in content using the “soft skills” that we need them to develop. The ability to have a lasting understanding is our goal here, and providing relevant context to what we do in the classroom is a great way to get there. So my answer to that question is not to change the content of what you do, but to use the same skills you are trying to develop in the students in your own practice. Be innovative, be creative, be prepared to fail often, collaborate, model the behaviors you want to see in your students.
Moulton makes some great points here about “any-century skills.” I see his point in that balance needs to be achieved b/w so-called “new” skills and the traditional elements of literacy.
The first has to do with my TED addiction. Maria Popova has created a remix of some of the more passionate TED speakers in order to create a singular TED voice. I love it’s simplicity and message.
The second is called Street Art Locator. If you are anything like me, you stumble randomly into some amazing art on your travels. I would, however, like to plan that out a little bit more so that I can be a little more prepared. This may help.
Listen to the message Don Tapscott leaves here in his brief plug for his new book:
When I was a freshman in high school, an odd, yet charismatic senior ran for student council president. Jake John Robert Hast was his name. I did not know him, never interacted with him, or even saw him much after that year. However, his speech contained an element I never forgot. He began his speech with this quote, stating that it was from an earlier generation:
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.
Upon hearing it, I could hear my grandparent’s voices in it, and I could sense it came from a generation that sacrificed much for the liberties of my own future.
Jake then revealed that it was in fact from ca. 700 A.D. by a Roman poet and rhapsode named Hesiod. That moment made me forever suspicious of judging youth at media’s face value, and of resistance to change.
What do you feel about today’s youth? Do you agree with Tapscott, Hesiod or neither?
Beginning on March 23rd, I will be leading a discussion with teachers and administrators in my district about ourselves and our professions, but most importantly, about our students and how they learn. What I want to know is this: are we teaching with their learning in mind?
Here is the description I gave for the workshop:
In this conversation we will examine our goals as educators in the face of a rapidly changing climate in American education. We’ll look closely at the shifts that need to occur in our profession and the very question of what it means to be well-educated today. Each group will meet three times: one online session, and two face-to-face sessions.
Essential Questions:
• Who are the students you want leaving your classroom every day?
• What do you hope they know how to do with that they’ve learned?
• What do you hope they care about?
Essential Understandings:
School should be less about preparation for life and more about life itself.
-John Dewey
We must connect our students with information, people and real world contexts that will inspire and engage them throughout their curriculum.
We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowledge is a process, not a product.
-Jerome Bruner
When our students know how to evaluate media and make sense of its complex messages, they are better able to use it as information for learning.
Our rapidly changing society, both nationally and globally, demands a change in the way we view education and the teaching profession.
This idea was originally inspired and adapted from Jeff Plaman’s LrNing site where he has gathered international educators from around the world to participate in an online class centered around the movements and changes that our students and the profession of teaching is undergoing. I asked him if I could modify it slightly for my district and he was all for it.
In looking at television lately, I caught this commercial, or should I say, it caught me:
Oh, I worry some time that we get bogged down in the minutiae of this standard and that standard, and this score and that score, and we forsake the true goals of education: learning to live well.
“It’s pretty clear that all human beings experience attentional fatigue,” Dr. Faber Taylor said. “Our attention has to be restored from that fatigue, and there is a growing body of research evidence that nature is one way that seems particularly effective at doing it.”
I remember my Freshman theology teacher telling me that he kept his homilies to 5-7 minutes because after that, you just lost people “unless you asked them to run around the pew.” I get that now after working with both students and their teachers. Change their state. – post by pjhiggins
The other day in our New Teacher meeting, we used one of my favorite “tricks:” we asked them to move about the room once or twice within the session. Movement is often the antipathy of teachers within cramped classrooms, and having traveled to buildings within my district and others, I can see that schools are becoming increasingly full of “things” and “stuff.” It’s time to clear a path and let the students move about the room.
One of the teachers who was present at the meetings on Monday forwarded me this article from today’s New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope: “The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess”. Parker-Pope points to several studies conducted within the last year about the overall effect that play, specifically scheduled recess time, has on academic performance and on behavior. While she may be preaching to the choir in my case, I still appreciated the fact that one of the teachers in the session found this and thought back to what we did. Someone pulled something from the day, thank goodness!
I have spent many sessions at this keyboard pouring my energy into writing about the shifting of our pedagogy to include the connective capabilities of social technology, and not for naught; it is essential that we engage our students with meaningful and actionable content, and there are myriad ways to do that now. However, when we think of dynamic and lasting educational experiences and the types of classrooms we will need to do achieve these new learning goals, I think of rooms that are open, and able to encourage movement. I think of teachers free to station themselves in several points in the classroom, not chained to one area where the laptop plugs in. I think of students with seating areas able to be joined and separated into many configurations. Our spaces need to be opened up, and our students need to be moved around in them. My wife tells the story of sitting in district meetings for eight hours at a clip, in a room with no windows, and never getting up to move for the duration. I would be angry, or void of emotion. But I certainly would not retain half of what you asked me to.
So the next time you are with your students, incorporate some form of physical movement to “change their state.” Have them at some point perform a function that you need them to do anyway, but add something physical to it. We want them to discuss the theme in the novel. Have them do it as they walk around the building on a nice day. Bring them back to the room and ask for a pair share, then whole group discussion. Or use some body voting to lead to discussion of a current events issue (Do you agree that bailing out major banking institutions is the right thing to do?) See what you get.
This is taken from an article from BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow where he details the work of grammarian Garth Risk Hallberg. Hallberg took the following sentence, a rather long one, from Barack Obama and diagrammed it.
My view is also that nobody’s above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
Some of his conclusions about Obama’s use of the language to cushion his harsh points are interesting and the obvious work of a practiced public speaker.
At least that is what I am seeing from my limited point of view.
Today was marked by our annual New Teacher Induction meetings where we work with our first-year staff on method and practice. It’s always an eclectic bunch, as we always have a nice mix of veteran teachers who have changed districts mid-career and recent college graduates. The perspectives range from those blinded by the frustrations of working with students for the first time to those who’ve been through their share of the trenches.
Today’s theme was supposed to be Non-Linguistic Representations and how we can use them to aid students in accessing learning via more than the traditional input of chalk, talk, write and remember. As usual, when a lesson goes the way I want it to, or better yet, in a direction I did not anticipate, it leaves me with more to learn than those who were originally considered the students in the equation.
In introducing the theme, I asked them to read and discuss (we used body voting to have them split the room apart–which do you prefer Starbuck’s or Dunkin Donuts?) a recent post on Scott McLeod’s page in which he quoted Robert Fried’s The Game of School:“
What sprang out this small quote from both veteran and new teacher alike was an overwhelming sigh of relief that someone had verbalized this in such a manner as this. From pre-school teachers to senior level math teachers, the value of the three key words in this quote: curious, confident, enthusiastic, drew response. Whether that passion from the students was for math, writing, reading, or science, did not matter to them. They wanted the gestalt for their students, and they really wanted it.
I can’t say I was surprised, as getting our teachers out of the classroom is difficult to do–they are passionate and committed to what they do; they common phrase among our high school staff is “you’ve got to be in it to win it.” What surprised me most was the demand they placed on making sure we help them teach students meaningful things that they will use and that make sense in their lives immediately. Breaking away from this discussion was difficult, and it ran way over the time we allotted for it in both sessions, but we knew there would be more time for this discussion.
Sir Ken Robinson’s work has been making the rounds lately, and I am a sucker for his 2006 TED talk regarding creativity and education. This group, I was sure, had not heard this yet, so I paired it with a short excerpt from Pink’s A Whole New Mind, and asked them to do some synthesizing: take Robinson’s contentions about the role of public education in regards to creativity, take Pink’s assertion that we need an integrated mind for the future, and come to a new understanding about your own practice and your own understanding of what your students need.
What we got never materialized into a whole group discussion, but in moving between the groups, I caught people talking like their hair was on fire in some instances. This day struck a chord, at least with me, and I’d love to solicit some feedback about the day in the form of an exit card (probably should have thought of that beforehand). How did it relate to non-linguistic representations? Not as cleanly as I would have hoped, but in discussing the need for students to access information visually, use mental imagery, and portray their understanding of concepts in visual as well as verbal/linguistic forms, our groups were able to see the need for strong non-verbal learning.
This is just great.
This is a question I have struggled with for a while, ever since I began teaching in public schools. What are the elements that are consistent among writing we deem excellent by our students? I think finding the answer to this question is essential for a group of teachers working as a team, as a school, or as a department. It’s important to have a common language among the group as to what qualities students must strive for.
Her first post, which is the bottom image, shows how I view the traditional summer reading process, but the second one shows how her district is toying with the idea that there has to be something more to what the students do with the text; we have to allow them to read together. In his 
A few years back, when I really began this journey, 
classrooms, comments, discussion, ecologyofeducation, rant, techlearning, technology
sarcasm= saying it-not meaning it
In change on May 8, 2009 at 12:47 pmEarlier this week I wrote a post for TechLearning which I posted here and at Ecology of Education titled “Open Letter to the Teacher who said ‘I Hate Technology.’” Sarcasm is not my strong suit, but it just felt like the right mode to match the way I was feeling. I’d like to turn this post over to the commenters at each of the three places that post appeared because of the conversations that sprang from it.
From TechLearning:
From Ecology of Education
Chalkdust101
Thanks to everyone for truly pushing my thinking on this.