Build Out Excuses

How much information is too much?

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.

Cross posted at Techlearning.com

Worth Spreading Around

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.

The Embedded Curriculum

(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.