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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
For some time now Encyclopaedia Britannica has been at work transforming Britannica.com, our main product for consumers, into a place that will feature more
participation and collaboration both from our expert contributors and
the public. The aims of the new site will be to expand and improve the
coverage we provide both in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
itself and in other features on the site; and to provide our
contributors and users with an online community that’s valuable
and beneficial to them in a variety of ways.
Holy smokes!
That was my original reaction, but in looking at this a little bit closer, why should I be surprised? Even the bastions of and hangers-on of the canon are beginning to see the value in the wealth of knowledge, experience, and joie de vivre of the populace. Contributory learning and active reading, especially in the model that Britannica is offering here
Users whose editorial suggestions are accepted and published entirely or in part will becredited
by name in the section of each article that lists contributors. For
that reason, people who want to edit articles will be asked to
register, providing their first and last names, which will be used to
credit them, and an e-mail address where we can contact them with
questions and acceptance notices.
is valuable and that fact is being acknowledged by the media. Why not our schools next?
Yesterday I found the “Quotes” Flickr Group that was put together by Dean Shareski, Scott McLeod, Darren Draper, et al. The power of the image to change and inspire is a tool that I need to use more of in my work with teachers. In looking through the offerings and the work of the 11 members of the group on Flickr, you see the passion with which a great majority of us in education act with on a daily basis. That passion, I must admit, has been missing from what I’ve been doing lately. Not to sound trite, but it’s as if I’d lost my mojo, and with it any of the passion I was attacking my work with.
As usual, my wife sat me down and straightened me out. She told me some very basic things:
“If you can’t find someone to buy into your ideas, look somewhere else. They are good ideas, backed by someone who is passionate about what they do.”
From that conversation, I’ve noticed an uptick in both productivity, and focus. The WTF attitude is starting to return, and ideas are beginning to grow legs. I love that woman.
From shareski's photostream on Flickr
In that light, I found this item from George Siemens to be of significant import in my thinking lately:
The biggest problem we face is not lack of access or technology or filtering, but rather lack of imagination and vision. What can we do with what is available to us? What can our students do? A word I heard at Jim Burke’senglishcompanion Ning site (which if you are interested in helping build community with anyone in your English department, you should visit and invite them to it), is “withitness,” and that what every teacher needs to possess is the drive not to be cool, but to do cool things–things that make your students say something in response. Whether they loved you or hated you, you want them talking about what they did in your room on any given day.
I think we are stuck, at least in my locale, on imagining the same things we’ve always done because we haven’t been brave enough to imagine what it might look like in the future. I, for one, am going to start using my hands and my brain to create this vision.
Call me a word geek, but I think these two items are worth taking a longer look at. The first is a video of Erin McKean, editor of The Oxford American Dictionary, which sparked my interest in that she appeared to be way too young to be an editor of a dictionary. However, the content of her sixteen minute video is engaging in that she discusses the lifespan of words, and the creation of new ones in their stead. It’s a great look at how the world of the dictionary, which I feel is something people are waiting to disappear, has found a new niche.
The second is something that, although McKean doesn’t make direct reference to, is alluded to in her talk. The Open Dictionary project is a study in the creation of new words to fit the changing world. Now, not many of these make it into our official dictionaries, but several have already cracked our lexicon. Words like “staycation” which appeared several times over this past summer (referring to those people who, due to high gas prices, chose to stay at home rather than travel to the beach or mountains), are becoming more commonplace. The Open Dictionary allows people to try their hand at word creation. Go play.
This image, passed to me via Coolinfographics, is exactly the type of divergent thinking I envision our schools fostering now and in the future. Oh. It was created in 1823. What are we missing?
Our Connections class is predicated on this idea. We process and recreate information in ways that are meaningful to us and others.
One of my favorite little miracles about social technology is the aspect of tagging. How unbelievably beneficial it is to have a folksonomy to fall back on in times where I need resources to pull from. I tag resources constantly, often many more than I will ever use–I have this vision of these tags in my Diigo account becoming the equivalent of space junk, just orbiting mindlessly waiting to bumped into by a future idea of mine, or someone else’s.
Tonight, that scenario played out perfectly as I pulled together the presentation I am giving at Tech Forum Northeast on October 24th, in Palisades, NY. I had tagged the resources I needed for this presentation with the tag techforumny08, and thought nothing of them. Today when I began to pull things together, I used the search feature in the Diigo toolbar, but forgot exactly what I had tagged them with. In my search for the right tag (I tried techlearning08, techforum, techform08) I came across some gems that had been locked away from as long ago as last year. Posts from Ben Wilkoff about the Ripe Environment, some rants from David Jakes, and even the sites I was actually looking for.
This modern folksonomical system a great number of people are using would have saved my hide in high school and college. I had enough skills to pull assignments off with shoddy effort and sometimes fudged resources, but it wasn’t for lack of getting the resources. I had them. I just had no idea where I put them. Tagging and social bookmarking are a perfect match for those of us who remember the odd parts of what we read, the idiosyncratic elements that make us tag them with a moniker that only we would recognize, or others like us. The beauty of this system is that it also works for the type A personalities of the world who tag with the most likely tag for an article. It’s those people I rely on when I set up del.icio.us tag searches and monitor them by RSS. They are much smarter than I. The number of resources I receive in my Reader that come from those searches is staggering, and 100% worth it.
Our history and English Departments at the high school held a joint meeting today regarding research and writing. For the first time the idea of tagging was brought up by someone other than me. Little tears of joy welled up in me when I was told of this. Now the larger question is whether or not that type of information is being passed on to the students. That’s tomorrow’s question.
You waver, sometimes, about the elements of your life you think are transient or fleeting. For me, earlier this year I wondered what place Twitter had in my PLE; I was busy, rarely had time to contribute to what was happening on Twitter, and often felt like when I was joining conversations for the few moments I could, I was just acting as noise for others who were truly using it to their benefit.
What occurred tonight, via both Election 2008, and my own network was phenomenal. The engaging nature of both candidates, and I mean that in the sense that they are infinitely more intellectual than was “Dubya,” and the commentary by my network was phenomenal. I truly appreciate the views of expats like Clay Burell, whose insight into the nuance of candidates’ statements were spot on. Has it taken online election discussion for me to see the full benefits of life in a democracy? Gawd, I hope not.
My months are rigidly divided into three parts: elementary school meetings, middle school department meetings, and high school department meetings. These are my set dates for which I prepare for. Each department that I supervise has unique (and often pressing) needs by the time I meet with them each month. This morning I met with the world language department at the middle school, who, due to a change in schedule is now meeting with all of their students on a daily basis, whereas beforehand they saw 6th grade every other day and 7th and 8th grade every day. Needless to say, there is some adjustment going on and emotions are high. Their new schedule has them teaching 30 minutes instead of 40 minutes, yet on the whole for the year their student contact time is higher–confusing, I know. What they had expressed concern over was that loss immediate class time. And, if you add in student passing time between classes that 30 becomes 25 or less.
My approach to them was simple: how can I give you back more class time? The reality is that I am not involved at the building/scheduling level; I can’t physically give them back more time. I showed them how to create screencasts using Jing. The thinking behind this was simple in that if they were losing up to five minutes of their class time to passing time and administrative tasks, was there a way that they could ensure that students had the resources to reconstruct that missed time?
There were a few assumptions here:
That teachers will create the screencasts: I was asking them to give up “outside of class time” to create these.
That students will watch them.
Both assumptions are not mutually exclusive. Teacher buy-in and student buy-in go hand-in-hand when it comes to the success of any change in the norm. If I didn’t wrangle the teachers today in some capacity, there is no way the students will ever see these things. Here’s how I ran the class:
I showed them what was familiar to them on their tablets (our world language department all have tablet pc’s): Word, PowerPoint, and Journal.
I showed them how to ink on those programs.
I launched JIng and screencasted.
I played it back.
I asked someone to verbally repeat my steps.
I asked them to begin the download process for Jing (slow network).
I asked each of them in turn to come to my tablet and create a mini-cast and publish it.
We laughed at each other.
Lots of “I’s” but also plenty of “we’s.” There were many times throughout were I would have succumbed to dwelling on what is not possible in the classrooms, but for now, I wanted to focus on something they could do to be pro-active to increase their instructional capabilities. Screencasting allows them to say that there are resources available to the students at ALL times.
“Now that we’re aware ChaCha exists, I can assure you that we will begin
discussion of a formal policy to prohibit cell phone use in classes,”
said Gerard O’Sullivan, vice president for academic affairs at Neumann
College in Delaware County, Pa. He said most professors already
prohibited cell phone use in class.
Let’s rule out something before it is examined. Sounds highly anti-academic to me.
Over the course of the last few months, I have been writing about the creation of a new class in our middle school called Connections which focuses on critical thinking and problem solving through multi-disciplinary writing. Last week our middle school opened and the Connections classes began. Below is the initial reaction from several of the teachers after that first day:
-I had a great day! The kids are very curious about the Connections class and the use of technology within the class. I was floored to see that I would say that about 90% of them said that they have cellphone. I think it’s going to be a great year!
-Things went well, students are highly interested in Connections, although not completely sure what it is yet. They enjoyed learning about the Web 2.0 applications we will be using and can’t wait to use Google Apps for Education. I am glad we prepared in the summer for the first 2 weeks, it is making the beginning of the year much easier.
-The kids seemed really interested in the course. The idea of podcasts and other multimedia projects definitely seemed to go over well. I think some of the students were a bit overwhelmed, but I’m hoping that a gradual transition into our first unit will ease their anxiety.
-I totally hooked them with the pollanywhere.com survey! When I asked them to explain what the Connections class was, they really got it! They said they’d be learning how to think, use what they already know, use technology to demonstrate their understanding and other stuff I can’t remember because my brain is fried.
-They were initially hooked by the “no homework/no tests” aspect. Once they heard a litttle more they still seemed eager to begin. There was a mixture of excitement and fear, which is exactly what I wanted/expected. I think they are ready for the freedom, challenge, and responsibility that Connections entails.
We are now a full week beyond these initial reactions and I have been popping into the rooms to see how things are going. Initial reaction? It’s difficult when you know in your gut that what you are doing is the right thing to do, but not too many people have tried it on such a large scale, so to see it in action was frightening for me. Here’s what I saw:
The legs knocked out from under them: The students were confronted with a class that focuses on writing, yet does not grade for mechanics and spelling, only content, clear ideas, and connection to other subject areas. In one class, the teacher was using Socratic Questioning to continually force the students to challenge their own assumptions and habits. They were so uncomfortable! Their cognitive dissonance was palpable and then she made them write about it. Thinking through writing.
Ubiquitous technology: We really tried to hide the technology behind the purposes of this class, and so far it is just that. They are using Moodle in spots, Google Apps in others, but all for the purposes of being connected to each other. As the year moves on, and I try to keep connecting the teachers to others of you out there doing great things, I am hoping that our students will see that too.
Excitement: This feeling is shared by both the students and the teachers. Our schedule rotates so that the teachers teach 5 classes, but only see them 4 times in a week. On that drop day, we have students complaining that they miss what happened in Connections that day. I hope we keep this up.
My wife dropped the big bomb on my yesterday. We were talking about the cell phone issue that seems to be surrounding the educational world lately–something akin to “I Love You, You’re Beautiful, Now Change,” replayed like “We love them, We all Have Them, Let’s Ban Them.” She asked me how I would use a cell phone in a classroom situation. I ran through my Polleverywhere.com deal and my Flickr email address picture thing, and mentioned how Liz Kolb said this and showed that. And then it came. The words I have been expecting for some time:
“But you are not in the classroom anymore, and you think ‘in theory.’ How do I make that work for 90 kids over the course of 8 periods in a day?”
In actuality, I loved the question, because it occurred two days ago and I haven’t gotten it off my mind (which tells me it was a keeper, as is she). But man, it stung slightly when it was originally posed. I miss the classroom. I miss kids and their messiness as they figure things out. However, what I am doing now challenges me in ways that I am not ready to give up.
Classroom teachers are asked to do an inordinate amount these days. Between knowledge of IEP’s for students and the push to differentiate instruction AND infuse technology into their practice, there is little time for some administrator type coming in and saying that cell phones are the savior. I get that. I get that there has to be some example, some established practice that shows results.
My response to not only my wife, but to everyone who would have reacted that way, is simple. What are you doing to engage your students? What is making them talk about your class and what happened in your room in third spaces? It happened when I was in school, so as Barry says, it’s not about the technology. But it is about their motivation.
I taught history. Some teach math. Any subject area teacher, aside from anything associated with the present day, struggles with relevance. I spent the majority of my time creating references and comparisons to present day situations so that my students could see the relevance in the events of the past. This is what we do: we find ways to reach our students and motivate them to learn about things that normally would not garner notice.
Recently, Jonathan Glater’s article in the New York Times, “Welcome, Freshman. Have an iPod,” spoke of how universities are beginning to leverage mobile technology to both lure students to their schools, but also to engage learning:
“We think this is the way the future is going to work,” said Kyle
Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at
Abilene Christian University in Texas
I agree, and Liz Kolb’s recent projection of mobile phone capabilities backs that up: smaller, faster, even more ubiquitous. I don’t know about the lot of you, but as for me, I’ll take anything that engages my students in learning. Tech or no tech. This just makes sense to me.
Thanks to George Siemens for highlighting this one. I would love to get my hands on something like this. I understand that you can do something like this with DrupalEd, but I don’t know if I have the chops to tweak it, so to say. Some of Rheingold’s points about literacy being more important than technology are priceless.
Before I left for vacation, I posted a link to Motoko Rich’s article from the New York Times titled Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? to the high school’s English Department Google Group. I’ll do this occasionally with interesting articles that I’d like to share with my colleagues in the various departments I work with. This one really struck a chord with the teachers, and several of them responded passionately. Here is my response to some of their comments.
What a great dialogue. I was away for a while and came back to read
all of your responses. Many of the thoughts you all expressed echoed
my own, and I pulled some of the quotes that resonated with me from
your responses to comment on.
Brooke wrote:
“It takes time to immerse oneself in a novel and once done
effectively, the reader isn’t even reading anymore. They are seeing
and interacting with the novel on a completely different level of
consciousness. That, one of the most compelling reasons readers read,
is lost on the Internet reader who doesn’t have the opportunity to go
through whatever cognitive process allows it to happen. The novel has
the opportunity to move students through vicarious experience and
changes who they actually are the way experience does.”
Brooke’sdescription shows the nearly spiritual side of reading that we hope our
students can learn to go through. We introduce them to great works of
literature, often types they would never encounter through their own
volition, and then teach, discuss, analyze, oppose, share, empathize
and hope that they emerge on the other side of that novel changed in
some way. The very nature of reading on the internet, as it appears to
me (as someone who does the majority of their reading on the internet)
is cursory. I read much more than ever before, but my choice of to
read longer articles or books is more rare than in the past. Reading
newspapers from around the world, reading magazine articles from
hundreds of magazines a day, or reading blogs written by people in the
education and design field, can be done with much more ease than if I
had to go out to a newsstand and buy them, not to mention the cost
associated with all of my daily reading is zero.
I don’t think our students read online for the reasons they would read a
good book; as Brooke stated in her post, it’s a different animal.
Carol’s respons to Brooke took my thinking in another direction
entirely, however.
“grazing on the Internet is a very different set of skills that our students are now automatically
acquiring on their own. Although we do need to help them hone those
skills, it still remains our primary job as English teachers to expose
them to the rigors, the complexity, the challenge, and, yes, the
beauty of literature–to the “best that has been thought or said in
the world” (to quote Matthew Arnold)– where they will develop and
exercise their powers of analysis, critical thinking, and empathy.”
The ideas she brings out here, those of analysis, critical thinking and
empathy are crucial to the success of our students in their college
years and beyond. One of the books on my summer reading list was “A
Whole New Mind,” by Daniel Pink, which I recommend to all of you (I
have a copy if you would like to borrow it). The premise of the book
is that the abilities that dominated the Information Age, which were
primarily those of left-brained thinkers, will not be enough for our
children. They need to become able to recognize patterns, find deeper
meaning, see complexity and manage it, have a sense of design and
flow–all skills that we strive to foster in the study of literature.
With those skills, we often find it necessary to push students “To rise to the challenge, to work for something, to feel achievement in
the accomplishment, and to work that brain to figure it out,” as
Carol said. To which I say there may not be a more important set of
things we show our students than these three. And I love how she ended
the paragraph:
“If we aren’t going to guide them through this in the English class room, where will
they encounter it? Internet Age or not, these are not skills that we
can allow to leach out of our common psyche!”
We are not “teachers of technology,” but rather can use tools that
transform the ways in which we allow our students to meet challenges,
think critically, empathize, and connect with ideas larger than
themselves. Our desire to lead them through the processes of critical
thinking and analysis of literature need to be connected to something
within themselves. What is their connection to it? What motivates
them to access these skills?
Andrew expressed a sentiment in his reply about students and the technologies they use:
“Technology, with all its pros and cons, has emerged alright, so why do we have to go out of our way to expose our students to it. They get it just fine, especially for
them.”
This raises the question of literacy in general, the definition of which has
expanded greatly over the last twenty years. Our students, and
ourselves, for that matter, are inundated with information whenever
they open their computers. The ability to sift credible information
from sources they read, view, or listen to is essential. While they
may “get” technology in the sense that they understand how to entertain
themselves, they often struggle with its ability to make their academic
life richer and more simplified. That is where we come in. Just as we
helped them navigate the world of the Dewey Decimal System,
peer-reviewed journals, and the like, we must now do the same for the
systems that are making information accessible from everywhere they
are. We need to teach them how to ask the right questions, find
things, evaluate them, and synthesize them into a credible whole. That
part hasn’t changed. The tools that get the job done most efficiently
have.
What types of research skills should we be teaching our high school students?
We recently sent home a survey of our 2007 high school graduates, and one of my primary aims was to find out how they are conducting their major research projects in college. The method we teach currently, which is similar to the one I was taught in high school in the early 1990’s, is the standard research format taught in American high schools: Select topic, narrow topic through cross-referencing and research, select sources, write source cards, craft an outline of your paper, write notecards, categorize your notecards into where they will fit into your outline, write draft, revise, create works cited list using current MLA formatting rules, write 2nd/3rd/4th draft (if necessary).
I am in need of some assistance from the collecitve mind:
Do they need to do notecards?
This is one I struggle with, if only because I understand the need for students to be taught a method for categorizing information. We often complain that while our students today are able to entertain themselves online in myriad ways, their ability to cull information from larger sources and categorize that information into useful chunks is lacking. Let’s face it, to a 15-year old, Facebook is infinitely more appealing than tracking an online debate series on The Economist and pulling quotes into your Google Notebook titled “World economic issues.” Broad generalizations aside, the majority of students I have worked with can handle themselves academically within systems that they view as academic: MS Office, Email, Google, but when we require them to go further into areas in which they need to transfer skills and apply them in unique ways we often hit a wall. My question here is what now? Do we use the system that we have known and trusted forever to prepare them for a world that may not use that system? Will they ever use it again? Or, do we give equal footing to other systems which we are experimenting with now? We have teachers on both sides of this issue, and due to limited access to computers during the school day, teaching the students how to use online research tools becomes an issue. But wait, the power of the screencast!
Do they need to know MLA style and APA and what the citations look like?
A large part of our research guide, last revised fully in 2005, but updated once a year to include changes, focuses on how to cite sources at the end of the research paper. Because the pace of the change of the information landscape and the new types of media available for research, MLA and APA change often. Are these the types of ideas that authors like Friedman and Pink have talked about: if the machine is more efficient, shouldn’t we let it be? Will this free us up to do better quality thinking and writing?
Is the ability to use digital tools to synthesize and record information more important than using print sources?
and
Does our ability to do research hinge on our changing reading aptitudes?
There has been a lot of buzz lately about Tim Lauer’s NY Times article from this Sunday about the nature of reading today, especially in the youth. Carolyn Foote wondered aloud about a few things that I really enjoyed:
So my question is, where do these findings leave us? What should we be doing differently?
Trying to engage students more in printed texts?
Engaging more with the types of online texts they may already be reading?
Teaching more evaluative skills?
Teaching more “connections” between texts–so that whether students are reading online or offline they are focused on how things connect to one another?
Helping students slow down sometimes in their reading so as to have the “back burner” time to ponder things?
And the last point she makes in this bullet series got me thinking:
Creating a mixture of methods for students to engage in all sorts of texts by bringing them into connection with printed texts via online tools?
The more I look at where the solution to this problem lies, it’s not going to be an “us or them” issue, an “old school v. new school” issue, but rather one in which we blend the thinking and categorizing we have always taught with a tool or set of tools that matches the need. We need to categorize and sort, what can do that? How can I avoid the boxes of note cards that are inevitably spilled in the hallways and thrown into color-coded confusion?
I would like to know, if you don’t mind sharing, what your opinions are on conducting research in 21st Century classrooms. Are we preparing our students for success by teaching them in the ways in which we were taught?
“We should see ourselves as all being in research and development.”
That line, or something strikingly close to it came from Ewan McIntosh’s keynote address last Wednesday at BLC. It’s not the first time I had heard a speaker ask that we all focus on our own development, or transforming our classrooms into teacher-researcher laboratories, but it was the first time where I heard it as an administrator. Oddly enough, just the semantic shift in title changes the meaning behind McIntosh’s statement for me. In our notes, a few of us remarked about the statement, and later on in the day I took it upon myself to synthesize some of the bigger ideas we had all been having in our debriefings at dinner. Here is what I came up with for the R and D idea:
Teachers as researchers: one of the things we all see the need for is to create a culture in our buildings where our teachers see themselves, to quote McIntosh, as “in research and development.”
What makes that happen in your school?
one of the things I keep thinking about personally is the use of pilot programs that last only a few months.
Screencasting: ask teachers to incorporate Eric Marcos “kids teaching kids” methods for 3 months and then have the selected teachers share their experience with other teachers in their building.
Promote open collaboration between classrooms within the building and around the nation/world through getting the teachers into other rooms to observe, and through connecting our teachers with others outside the U.S. Have them pitch their idea to the building principals, execute the plan, and have them present their product to the staff.
Showing teacher work and student work off
there is a theme running through a lot of the workshops here that incorporates the idea that we should promote the teachers that “get it.”
Which teachers get it, and I don’t mean technologically only, but which teachers will look at something new and attack it, refine it and make it their own? Find them and ask them to show how they do it. Do this often.
Let students show teachers how things work. Have you heard Alan’s quote: “always bring a student to a technology conference?” Let students show their teachers what they are actually capable of (from Eric Marcos’ presentation, and Ewan’s keynote: “-Give a button to a teacher and they ask what to do with it, give a button to a kid and they play with it and discover“
District-wide PD conference
We have been sitting in workshops for a day now and at some point or another we have all remarked that we have teachers doing this or doing that. Can we pull them together and run our own “in-house” conference?
The willing and able can present what they do to the rest of the staff and we go from there.
School-wide or grade-wide Custom search engines
we can use Google Custom Search to enable teachers to create their own search engines based on the links they already provide to the students for research. They can still limit content to the sites they want, but it is an incredible time saver if all of the staff combines their resources into one search engine.
It gives them exposure to the collaborative nature of the web.
Everyone is in R and D.
I’ll be brutally honest here: I went to BLC not wanting another tool to add to my belt (although I did get a few); I wanted answers to questions from teachers who don’t see value in change. I wanted to be able to return and say, “look, here is my magic bullet, and it’s wireless.” Truthfully, I set myself up for some disappointment, but I did walk away with several fantastic ideas worth taking action on immediately.
Among other things, I realized, thanks to a few pushes, that it’s time to get out there and share what we’re doing here. Not that it’s earth-shattering, but we have inertia, and I think that might be valuable to some people. We have been pushing and pulling on what we know and understand about teaching and learning there, getting a lot of feedback from our staff, and it’s time that we also looked at ourselves as researchers and developers. What better lesson in humility than to fail in public and try again? I think we are ready for what’s next.
So, there I was, watching this great advertisement from Nokia:
during Darren and Clarence’s presentation at BLC (third link to both of them in three days–I promise I am not link-stalking), when things began to unfold.
I needed data for this.
We are opening the school year with our Connections class, a second language arts class focused on problem-solving and writing as a thinking tool. What we are really having difficulty with is the fact that the students may struggle with the format of the class; getting an “A” will require strong habits of mind and a focus on proving that your answer has merit. We’ve stripped out grading for grammar and spelling, we’ve focused our assessment on process thinking, cooperative group discussion, portfolio defense, and for lack of a better word, “out of the box” thinking. Getting the students on board immediately is imperative for any class, but for this one, which they are already viewing as “2nd English,” is crucial not only for the success of this year, but also for the success of the program.
There is a part in the video, which I hope you took the time to watch, where the narrator talks about how the 3rd screen privatized our lives and learning, but the 4th screen freed us to venture outside and do the things we love. My gears were cranking. I’ve admired the work Darren has done with the use of imagery in math, but what really struck me about him was his outsourcing of the legwork of the photography to his students. Two of my favorite things right there: atypical assignments and student-created content.
What could we do with this information? Well, here was my hook: How many of your students have cellular phones? How often do you text per day? Does your phone have a camera? Video? Does your phone have the ability to access the internet? What do you use more often in the course of a normal day: cell phone or computer? How could you use your cell phone to help you learn?
The idea would be to have the students compile data using a survey tool like surveymonkey, surveygizmo, or our in-house survey software. Once the data is collected, a whole slew of possibilities open up:
Use the texting data to demonstrate how we communicate most and discuss reasoning behind this. Compare this to a survey of the teaching staff.
What does the data comparing the computer v. cell phone usage say?
What ideas do students have for the use of cell phones in class?
The ability to have students create the data, analyze the data and then let it “incubate” as Ewan McIntosh stated, make this one a go for me. Very beta right now and as I look at the questions there, they are in sore need of some higher level revision. The power of what is in their pockets is, as I remarked to my colleagues in our notes, game-changing. Again, as I sit here and write this, I can’t help but think of the almost Draconian rules that exist in some parts of our buildings regarding the use of mobile devices. This idea, aside from the student inclusion in the creation of the lesson, may serve to break down some barriers for us. One can only hope….
In a few hours, myself and a team of administrators from my district will be boarding a plane for Boston to attend the Building Learning Communities conference. If you are a somewhat regular reader of this blog, you may already know how often I reference Alan November’s ideas and what an influence he’s been on my practice. When I pitched the idea for us to attend, way back in April, I didn’t anticipate all of the us going, but I am glad we are; it will be nice to see the reactions of my colleagues to some of the ideas that will be circulating.
The last few days have been interesting for me here. On Saturday, I had the great opportunity to talk about new teacher induction programs with Steve Kimmi (the conversation was recorded and can be found on Steve’s blog or on the EdTechTalk site). When Steve emailed me and gave me the list of topics that we might get to, it was a big one, and my preparations for the conversations led me to do some deeper thinking than I had done in a while–nothing like a deadline to get you motivated. Steve’s idea was this:
We will be discussing how to prepare new teacher’s for today’s classroom and 21st century skills. There are a lot of resources that attempt to define 21st century skills, so I will list the one’s that I am privy to. However, this will also be discussed.
21st Century Skills:
Digital Literacy
Global Awareness
Collaboration/Communication
Problem Solving/Inventive Thinking
So I knew I needed to formulate some ideas about them, and it coincided nicely with the direction I was heading in as we approached BLC.
New Teachers and 21st Century Skills
When I saw this heading, I thought immediately back to some of Jeff Utecht’s posts about interview questions for hiring of new staff. What should our incoming teachers be versed in technologically v. what can we expect to teach them in the induction programs and in working with them over time? This dichotomy gets at a few things I feel are important. When new teachers arrive at our offices and classrooms, we expect them to have licensure and credentials as certified by the state and have passed through a teacher training program at a university. I know nothing of what teacher training programs look like these days, only what the products of those programs, the new teachers we hire directly out of college, show us when they arrive for interviews or as new hires. As Jeff stated in his post from last spring, we need to be a bit more stringent in what we are asking of our new teachers. This is much easier said than done when we consider the amounts of schools out there that will open in September without a full staff due to the inability to find qualified applicants; however, for my own personal experience, I don’t think it’s enough to expect that a teacher have a basic understanding of the trends in education, rather, I feel they should be on the cutting edge having come from a teacher training program. They should understand the power of networked learning, of the use of mobile technologies, and the utmost importance of critical thinking skills and collaboration among both their students and their colleagues.
“If you believe in changing education, who are you working for now, the students and teachers of today or the students and teachers of tomorrow?”
In the conversation with Steve on Saturday, I mentioned a story I heard via a comment on the “Uncle Bill” post in which she relayed a story that Alan November told audience at the Learning 2.0 Conference last year in Shanghai. In it, Alan spoke of how Plato struggled with ideas espoused by the current educational system in his day and railed against those in control of it in order to have it changed. In the end, his conclusion on how to change it was simple: wait for all of those in control to die.
That’s not exactly an option we have; I think of all of the students that would exposed to new pedagogies, all of the teachers that would not come to know the power of a network that can be tapped into constantly and one that can be added to at the same rate. Steve said it best in the discussion when he referenced the fact that we cannot give up on trying to help teachers develop lessons steeped in 21st Century literacy because what if students have a teacher that uses new methods successfully and exposes them to the use of new tools and transforms the way they learn, only to have a teacher the following year who does none of that. Does that put the child at a disadvantage? I don’t have that answer–reason being is that I don’t exactly know what the variables are yet. What does good teaching with new tools and new pedagogy look like? Are we at the point yet where one way trumps the other. I have visions of Dan Meyer floating in my head here: are we trying to re-invent something that is already invented?
What this calls for, this change we keep referring too, is a change in the vision of our educational leaders. I am excited to meet up with David Truss this week and get into his head about leadership, and with Dennis Richards to look at what type of vision for schools of today we can forge.
More to come as the week progresses.
Image Credit: “lead type” on jm3’s flickr photostream
Our summer administrators book group is rounding into shape, aside from Barnes and Noble’s policy of claiming something is “in-stock” and if there is one copy, yet letting you order 12 without telling you that you’ll only get one. Our first choice was Moral Leadership, but B&N decided to only send us one copy. That’s OK, we’ll share.
For learning to take place with any kind of efficiency students
must be motivated. To be motivated, they must become interested. And
they become interested when they are actively working on projects which
they can relate to their values and goals in life.
How do you find what it is that motivates and interests your students? What are some methods that work to find out what makes students tick?
When I look at the situations in which I have interacted critically with both students and teachers, I often find it difficult for both parties to tell me what interests them, and further, how it relates to what they teach. Index cards as they walk into the room at the beginning of the year? Is that feasible for 120-150 students? If so, how do you manage that?
Some of the other questions I came up with regarding the first section of the book:
Can we train people to think using both hemispheres of the brain? Is R-Directed thinking something that can be learned?
If we ask that our teachers come into this system (the education system, classroom, school environment, etc.) with right-brained skills in addition to the traditional left-brained skills, are we setting them up for failure?
this was in the context of looking at how schools haven’t physically changed in over a hundred years. Those of us in education tend to be successful products of the system, meaning that we did well in the system that we went through, thus we tend to re-create the system we are used to.
If that is the case, does it make sense that we hire teachers expecting them to think “outside the box” only to put them back into an environment that is exclusively “in the box?”
How do we respond to this statement: “We don’t have time to include R-directed thinking; we are trying to prepare our students for taking these standardized tests (NJASK, SAT, HSPA, etc.)”
Does this statement have merit: “The changing world is leaving the SAT behind?”
Should these three statements (from page 51) drive the decision making in our building regarding what we are creating with our students?
Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
Can a computer do it faster?
Is what I am offering in demand in an age of abundance?
Are we wasting our students’ time by teaching them skills that are irrelevant anymore? If so, what are they?
I’ll admit that my inner geek drives the direction of my reading lately; I tend to read Techmeme as often as I read Edutopia. However, one of my all time favorite reading topics has always been the direction and drama associated with mainstream media and its delivery to consumers. Odd, I know. Most people would say they love to read trashy novels, or scan baseball scores (which I often do), but not this guy. Give me an opinion piece about the future of participatory media, the changing of the guard in the newsroom, or something like this one from the New York Times:
For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year
is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in
advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of
some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.
and I am like the proverbial pig in…well, understood.
I don’t know if this story piques my interest for the usual reasons, but I know that it makes me begin thinking about the world that I am helping teachers prepare students for. It’s topics conjure up all kinds of reminiscences from last summer when we were all struggling to shrug off Andrew Keen’s attacks on connective writing and citizen publishing, and it calls to light the profound changes in literacy many of us have been discussing for several years.
Connection to Teaching and Learning
Often, I’ll find myself looking out at the vast expanse of my RSS reader and see similar topics being bandied about, and articles debated back and forth between individuals much smarter than me, and I’ll wonder where my connection back to the classroom teacher is–where is the correlation between George Siemens and the work he does, and the elementary teacher I work with who wants to differentiate instruction? Many times I find myself at a crossroads wondering how to find common ground for the theoretical applications I see, and the practical situations that teachers live through.
This article in the Times, amazingly, though obscurely, shows me a connection. When we look at the trends, just in the last two years (ad revenue dropped 8% last year, and is already down 12% from that number), that tells me that the sellers/advertisers are following their buyers/consumers eyes. With that, come so many negative consequences:
assimilation of major newspapers or ownership groups perhaps taking away a decidedly local flavor
massive job losses in the printing industry
ink-stained elbows on Sunday mornings
The last bullet above, while in jest, does reflect some sentiment that, if you dig on Nicholas Carr, you might agree with. We aren’t interacting with print media as often as we used to, and what effect will this have on our ability to read deeply? Moreover, the real impetus behind my writing this tonight was to truly ask myself what are we preparing our students to consume? Is literacy solely the manipulation of a texted page, or does it involve, as the article hinted at, the ability to decipher and decode the “vastly more choices” that online advertising offers to sellers?
So, I look at the classrooms I’ve been in this year and wonder, are we doing all that we can to prepare our students for a world with decidedly less printed paper than our own?
Positive Consequences:
Here’s another discerning thought that rises from this: how can we pull positives out of this development? As with any technology, it’s social ramifications are natural offspring. In this case, I see a lot of good coming out of the move to online news consumption:
greater opportunity for dialogue between writer/publisher and reader through comments and forums
Erica had just reminded me of Pink’s book yesterday as she wrote about being able to finish it on her way out to San Jose for the Google Teacher Academy. What this exemplifies is the shift away from one mode of production, to another that will involve some creative thought processes and a distinct need to train people in how to produce this new product. It’s examples like this one that really make me analyze what we are asking our students to do in our classrooms; are we preparing them for the classified ads of the future?
Having one of those lack of focus days where I cannot even begin to plan what I need to do with myself. This video doesn’t help matters as its got me thinking about bigger questions. I am trying to form a response to Ryan Bretag’s meme, and I think this will have something to do with it. I need to take some notes while watching it, however. Enjoy.
OK. I’ll admit it. I came to find all of these fabulous social media and international collaborative project opportunities at a point which I had limited access to classes, only via other teachers. That being said, I often feel like I would like to sink my teeth into some hugely collaborative project, or even just be associated with one. There’s been a lot of talk, or maybe I should say, I am reading a lot of writing about:
Rigor: How do we allow students to achieve flow-the right balance of challenge and stress to optimize learning in our classrooms?
Relevance: Are we teaching with the values, thoughts, feelings, and experiences of our students in mind?
Relationships: Are we respecting students’ lives and cultures?
Results: Do we have measurable, tangible results that represent our ideas and goals?
as they relate to individual student motivation. A truly collaborative, either locally or globally, project stands a great chance of really getting at those four elements if done well.
So, in an effort to further my selfish aims to be associated with a collaborative project, I offer this: one of the teachers with whom I am working on designing curriculum for our new writing and critical thinking class sent me the following email:
I am interested in incorporating the idea of a global classroom into several of my units. I know there are sites that are dedicated to hooking up educators so that they can participate in these kinds of exchanges with their classes. I just don’t remember what they are or how to get them. I kind of remember someone, it might have been you, providing us with some links that let classrooms from various corners of the world work together on a common project. I am very interested in reaching out to several teachers across the globe and linking up. At minimum, I would like to give our students access to the differing perspectives that naturally arise out of geographical differences.
Question Authority: Media Literacy: How can I identify the underlying messages in mainstream media?
Disconnected: I Text, Therefore I am: • How have humans communicated throughout history?
• How and why is communication different throughout the world?
• What is the impact of human communication on a given society?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks to different forms of communication?
• What might human communication be like in the future and what factors will influence these trends?
First off, you can’t imagine how jealous I am of this group of teachers to be able to teach a class that lets them answer these types of questions, but also how jealous I am of these students that they get to wrestle with such cool content. If you are interested, or know of someone who might be interested in some form of collaborative project under these unit topics or others like them, please drop me a line in the comments below. This is a 7th grade class (12-13 year old students).
Over the course of Thursday and Friday, I am working with a group of 75 teachers, 9 at a time, to evaluate the first year of our tablet PC pilot program for our high school. We asked them to sign up for some time slots to discuss how the tablet has helped them instructionally this year. On several levels, it’s teaching me quite a few things.
Firstly, the teachers were not eager to come together, especially this close to finals, to discuss how they use the tablet instructionally. That initially gave me pause, but then I thought about it from their perspective: these sessions are evaluative, and regardless of how we try to spin it, they feel like they are being evaluated. Over the course of this year, this group has received over ten hours of professional development directed at using the tablet instructionally and on creating a 24/7 learning environment, and in the session before these, they generated a list of characteristics that they would expect to see from teachers who use the tablet effectively to create “on-demand” learning environments for their students. So, at least they were responsible for planning the evaluation criteria, and that went a long way towards easing their trepidation.
Secondly, I am discovering that if we don’t have these types of share sessions more, we are doing a major disservice to our teachers and ultimately our students. On many different occasions within the sessions today, teachers who had always wanted to try something with their students heard from teachers who had done it. We heard about pitfalls and successes, ideas for next year, and modifications to ideas on the fly. In some cases, presentations turned into group thinkalouds for the presenter. Yes, there were pats on the back, but also some serious questions about practice and application. What I love most about some of the presenters was that they gave us great feedback about the viability of using tablets instead of laptops. We asked for unfiltered feedback, and we got it.
Perhaps the thing that has most stood out, and we are only halfway through the presentations, is one given by a high school English teacher in which she elaborated on all of the things she did this year, including blogging and digital storytelling, that did not work for her or her students. She finished her presentation with a demonstration of how Google Groups fit her needs exactly and how her students became so much more prolific in discussing novels when they were responding to each other on the group page. For me, she exemplifies the type of teacher and students we need to see more of: those that try and fail, try again and fail again, and continue to try until they find the solution that works for their problem. I made a point of telling her as she left how amazed I was at her willingness to take risks and that she should be proud of giving that model to her students.
Regardless of your spiritual persuasion, it is difficult to deny the serendipitous nature of life as it affirms you at just the right moments. Entering what I view as one of the most pivotal stretches of my career, albeit still abbreviated, doubts and some other scions of stress have been creeping into my mind lately. Is this the right decision? Can this be done without alienating some of the stakeholders? I am struggling with questions that don’t have exact answers.
Then this email arrives on Sunday from a former student of mine, who is now a senior in high school. Granted, since I’ve jumped around in the last few years, I don’t get many of these, so some of you might find this commonplace, but for me it landed in my inbox at the most opportune moment.
I actually am writing to thank you, because it was your class that showed me
what I want to do with the rest of my life. If you remember we did a huge unit
on human rights and the Burmese conflict. Ever since then my eyes have been
opened to the world. I’ve developed a passion for human rights and developing
countries and just plain helping people. I’m graduating this year, and in the
fall I will be enrolled at The University of Chicago as an International Studies
and Arabic double major (and a softball pitcher). One day I want to work in the
field of economic development and human rights. I’d want to work in Southeast
Asia (the Arabic is just because I love languages—I take French, Spanish and
Latin in school) and also join the Peace Corps. I hope to one day help further
the peoples’ struggle for democracy in Burma and similar conflicts all over the
world, anyway I can. In fact, this summer I’m going to Thailand, Cambodia and
China to volunteer at refugee camps, schools and orphanages. I’m very excited
since for four weeks I’ll primarily be working with Burmese refugees on the
Thai-Burmese border. Last summer I went and worked in Thailand for two weeks; it
is the most beautiful and peaceful place I have ever been. So basically, I
wanted to let you know that you were my favorite teacher ever and that you’ve
really made a difference in at least my life and indirectly made a difference in
the lives of those people you’ve convinced me I need to help and hopefully will
succeed in helping. Supposedly teachers like to hear that sort of thing, so I
thought I’d track you down and let you know.
Often we forget role we play in the lives of students, and the wonderful thing about them is that they often don’t forget that role. I couldn’t be more proud of this student, and after reading this letter. Proud that she’s looking at her future as a connected and global undertaking; she’s looking “big-picture,” and proud that I had the ability to be a part of her growth as a learner.
Barry Bachenheimer started this on a whim today, and tagged me with it to get it going. Most memes have very definitive rules for passing along or posting certain material, but Barry has given this one some really free “legs.” It’s description is simple:
National Public Radio does a piece called “This We Believe” where individuals share essays they have written that enumerates their philosophies. With this concept in mind in terms of curriculum ideas, (with apologies to the National Middle School Association and National Public Radio), “This I Believe”:
I believe that assessment and grades are not the same entity.
I believe the purpose of schools is still to “turn the lights on,” but not in the sense it meant for our parents; schools should never cease to inspire, challenge, and engage students in ideas and topics they might otherwise have missed on their own.
I believe the driving force behind curriculum should be the essential understandings behind the content.
I believe that we teach students first, and content second.
I believe in creating multiple outlets for students to demonstrate understanding. As long as we are committed to differentiating instruction, we must also be committed to differentiating the way we allow students to show us they’ve learned.
I believe that the best way for students to learn from our teachers is to see them as practitioners; model learning and curiosity for them in your own practice and you will soon see it in your students.
I believe our social technologies that allow for anyone to publish require that we create curriculum that maximizes the role of audience. Today’s students will grow up in a world where the content they create will be accessible by far more people than solely their classroom teachers.
I believe that when it comes to information overload, we need to educate our students on the difference between what is noise and what is symphony.
I believe in erring on the side of depth when writing curriculum, rather than breadth; fewer topics covered critically are far more meaningful than many topics covered in brief.
I believe that students in high school should have the same enthusiasm for learning that students in 3rd grade do.
So, now for the requisite tagging part. To continue this meme, I tag:
As I am catching up on my reader lately after relying solely on a delete or star ranking system, I am finding gems that some of you have penned in the last two or three weeks. This one, from Scott Elias via Leader Talk, aptly titled R-E-S-P-E-C-T, hits home as I really dig in to look at creating new culture in our schools. At SLA, I remember hearing Chris talk about how his teachers first and foremost must “teach kids, not content.” Scott brings up this in context to classroom management. Rather than butcher his list, here it is in it’s entirety:
They chat students up at the classroom door.
How Harry Wong of me to notice, but these are the teachers who make it
a priority to be in the hallway during passing times. One of our
veteran teachers high-fives every student who enters his classroom.
They are willing to “take one for the team.”
So you taught all three of your classes today only to be told by a
student in your last class of the day that your fly is down. Decision
time: Freak out and toss the disrespectful student out of class, or
play it off. If you’re willing to be humble — to laugh at yourself –
you’ll improve your cred. Trip and fall over a desk or a student’s book
bag? Think twice before spazzing out at the student for not following
rule #19, paragraph b: “Classroom aisles must be free from clutter at
all times.”
They engage kids in the content.
This looks different for everyone. Some use technology if it’s in their
comfort zone. Some bring the clicker system. And still some are
supremely engaging lecturers who have a gift for making world history
come alive for their students. Engaged kids don’t have time to get “in
trouble.” Bored kids, on the other hand…
When it’s necessary to talk to a kid about a behavior, they do it in a low-key way that is not punitive.
Before you launch into a tirade at a student who has frustrated you and
pushed you to your wit’s end, remember that lashing out and throwing
your weight around may get what you want (compliance), but at what
cost? You will have effectively ruined the relationship with the
student which, arguably, may not matter to you. But you’ve also shown
the other 20-30 kids in that class that your buttons can be pushed to
their limit.
They’re nice people. This
is so often overlooked. There is a quote I like from the movie, “You’ve
Got Mail.” (I could lie and say my wife makes me watch it, but I’m
going to own my manliness and say that it’s a good movie…) When Tom
Hanks’s character, Joe Fox buys out Meg Ryan’s “Ma and Pa” bookstore he
tells her, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” To which she replies,
“It was personal to me. What’s so wrong about being
personal? Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being
personal!” Students want to know that you’re more than just Mrs. Math
or Mr. English.
I love technology and its potential in the classroom and in learning over the course of my lifetime and my children’s lifetimes. However, more than anything else, I want them exposed to the power of caring and fairness in dealing with people. Seeing Scott’s list makes me think of all of the missed opportunities I had to make a difference by asking questions of my students on subjects that perhaps did not relate to history or technology, but to their own lives. Also, I want back some of those situations where I didn’t handle a particular student with rational and calm discipline.
Darren Draper recently responded to Mark Prensky’s call to administrators in Educational Leadership by saying that we need to be spending more hours talking to students about their learning each day. Scott’s and Darren’s reactions are indeed related through that need to be involved with as many of our students as we can. From personal experience, the simple act of greeting them at the door, combined with the others in Scott’s list (like being a good person because, seriously, who is going to like to be greeted at the door every day by a miserable wretch of a teacher), sets a tone that is conducive to learning.
I think it was at EduCon, but it could have been from somewhere before that, or even in a twitter discussion, but Joyce Valenza was given credit for coining the phrase “I want to be a widget in your learning space.”
That got me thinking, and since I have been playing around with using iGoogle or Pageflakes as the hub of a class I am creating, I told myself to try to find out if that is possible: a teacher with a presence in their students learning space. This is the closest I have come. I built it using something called Sprout, which was fairly easy to navigate. Go check it out and see what you think of its potential.
I know I took the quote literally, but the ideas coming out of this are pretty intense:
marketing classes designing page-specific ads
running for student council? Why not insert widgets into your friends pages on Facebook or Myspace?
use the RSS feed aspect of the widget to have pertinent class information displayed immediately on your widgets (edits follow the widgets wherever they are placed).
A while back, I sat down with a teacher whom I believe truly makes a difference in the minds of students. His concern was a one that I, too, struggled with while in the classroom, and even now when I present:
Depth v. Breadth
Those of us in public education are faced with a set of standards that we must teach our students within a certain time frame; in fact, we are legally bound to do so. But what does that mean if in the process of covering said standards, little time is given to deep inquiry or study of material in an academic manner?
Last week over at Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds put his musings on this topic together in this way:
…I have wondered for the longest time if teachers — especially
college professors — attempt to cover too much ground (and not
enough depth) per semester. That is, do too many classes sacrifice
depth and understanding for scope? Yes, it depends on the subject I
suppose, but is it better to learn, say, only six core ideas deeply and
repeatedly or is it better to cover as much ground as possible and go
for the greatest breadth in the time allotted? Great scope certainly
makes for an impressive syllabus and perhaps even a feeling of
accomplishment for those who pushed hard and got the highest marks. But
how many of the students who got a ‘C’ or better will actually remember
what they studied a year later?
My downfall as a teacher was never making it through the prescribed curriculum in the allowable 180 days of school; the real hope is that there is a marriage of the two, that the teacher will be able to engage and explore areas of student interest deeply while still managing to satisfy the state requirements. How likely is that? Looking at the range of time, the range of topics, and the fixed time that teachers have with students, it does not look promising. If you ask teachers the reasons why one area is covered and not another, invariably the issue of time comes up.
Just for nostalgia, here is Barry’s analysis of “time” in a school year:
I am beginning to think that time, in the most commonly thought of manner, is not the answer. We are tasked to present material to students in a given frame of time and of context. What they do with it when they leave our classroom is entirely up to them. We don’t know when they will think about what we discussed, when they will process it, mash it up, connect it to something else in their lives, or even have a conversation with someone else about it.
However, what if we gave them that chance to revisit it. Someone in one of my first Web 2.0 classes brought that up about discussion boards on wikis. She called it the “drive-home effect;” your incredible contribution to the classroom discussion that day happens several hours later in the privacy of your car and to an audience of no one. We can give them that space. We have the tools to continue conversation online, and to archive it, retrieve it, and bring it back into the present so that it has relevance again.
So, to recap, here is my answer to the depth v. breadth conundrum in public schools: teach mightily and try to manage depth within the required curriculum, but provide a space where your topics are debated by those who so choose to do so. Don’t hold onto the learning, let it go and let your students play with it in a secure environment. Make it real, and engage the hell out of ‘em.
TOWARD A DEFINITION OF 21st-CENTURY LITERACIESAdopted by the NCTE Executive Committee February 15, 2008
Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and
communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As
society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has
increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the
twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide
range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These
literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in
virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in
the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life
possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups.
Twenty-first century readers and writers need to
• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
The timeliness of this statement is not lost on me as I begin to craft my idea for what a 21st Century writing class should look like. “These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.” How great is that?
Yet, somewhere within me there is the skeptic heart that tells me the same reaction I got when I proposed the idea of teaching visual literacy to our English Department will greet me with this new class as well. The same questions of time (there is not enough of it to add anything new), student apathy, and clinging to what was done in the past will be brought up.
I need the statistics and rationale to back up what this will be about. I need your success stories. How are you effectively teaching writing these days?
If you could create a class, perhaps one that exists in the schools you are all talking about at Clay’s post, what it would be structured like?
I ask this for a very specific reason: we are creating new classes and we’d love to push the envelope a little and create them based on the ideas of the 21st Century Collaborative. We want this:
“I’m a firm believer that the students that are up and coming are the ones that are driving the adoption, because they’re coming with a set of expectations,” explained Joanne Kossuth, the chief information officer and vice president for development at.
Above, this graphic shows the devices that students own, and at what percentages. Taken in isolation, it isn’t that shocking, but taken in context with this bar graph which details the change over the last three years, it’s astounding: Look specifically at the change in students using a “Smart” phone, or the percentage change in desktops owned v. laptops owned in the three years. See any trends?
Now, as with any blog post worth its salt, the real juice is in the comments. To find some comments, I took myself to Inside Higher Ed’s article, Student’s Evolving Use of Technology, and drilled down into some of the responses to the article. The ones that struck me most, of course, were those that called for an ease up on technology, much like that of the Liverpool, NY removal of it’s 1:1 program from a way back, because students won’t use it correctly anyway, that it will distract from the real business of classes. That’s a class management issue, not a technological issue. What’s abundantly clear from the comments in this article is the need for conversations about what our classrooms, k-12 and university level, should look like, and real, concrete examples of what authentic learning and through authentic teaching looks like. I am feeling that January 26-27 in Philadelphia might be the portal through which I really begin to see this. Buty why wait…
As best I can tell, the most popular and successful professors are still those whose teaching style is simple, direct, and enlightening. A classroom of plugged-in 20-year-olds will sit mesmerized by a good teacher, without any need for bells and whistles.
Salaway, Gail, Borreson Caruso, Judith. “The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007.” 12 September 2007 17 September 2007 .
How do keep students from turning us off as they arrive in school? If you have walked through an American high school recently, you have seen the clandestine use of mobile devices and you have probably seen your share of disaffected students. If you spoken in front of a group of them, chances are, unless you were 100% compelling, you saw at least one set of eyes roll in the ubiquitous sign of adolescent lassitude: “whatever.”
I should rephrase that–that scene could have been any time within in the last twenty years, but after reading Roy Wenzl’s article “Are We Losing our Boys?” from the Wichita Eagle, a confluence of recent ideas began to identify itself as a pattern within my head.
Thanks to Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant for pointing me towards this article in the first place, and his final thoughts on the post set off this chain for me:
As educators, we are in a battle for eyes, ears, and brainwaves. So far many of us are losing (and, as a result, so are our students).
This has been the trend for several years, and I can easily recall scores of conversations from either graduate school or in new-teacher meetings in districts I have worked in, where the complaint was that we were expected to “perform” in order to compete with everything grabbing the students attention. I may even have been guilty of uttering those words as well. The idea was that we had to sing and dance to keep the attention of the student. George Siemens points out that the idea of sitting through a lecture is not an evil one, and I think that in the whole scheme of a curriculum, it will always have a place. But if that is all you are offering, you have the wrong mindset, and I think that is obvious. That competition is long since over.
If it’s a battleground we’re looking for, Ron Matson, chairman of the department of sociology at Wichita State University, when speaking about reasons for the “checking out” of adolescent men, had this to offer:
“They are playing video games,” he said. “Or withdrawing from society, and with computers and television, you can do a lot of withdrawing.”I look at my kids and grandkids and think, holy smoke, what kind of world will they inherit?”
That’s entirely up to us, isn’t it? If we choose to persist with the lecture, the “drill and kill” so many of the students in Wenzl’s article talked about as par for the course (and as so many students across the U.S. can attest to), and fail to use the same “distractive” technologies that Matson earmarks as contributors to student malaise, then, yes, our future is bleak. But what about flipping the script and using the mentality of the group over at Epistemic Games? The very same technologies that are forcing kids to power down when they enter school will be our avenue to power them up and keep them charged long enough to become the lifelong learners they will have to be.
Passion is the key to all of this. Will Richardson is noted for telling educators to jump into the read/write web by finding something they are passionate about and immersing yourself in the resources available through Web 2.0. Identifying those within students has long provided educators with portals into tough to reach students, and now is no different. Our passions will direct our learning, both teacher and student, in School 2.0 (and life, for that matter); rarely is a student, male or female, passionate about worksheets, lectures, or passive learning. Students today and tomorrow need to interact with, remix, and create content.
Trent Watta, one of the students profiled in the article, states:
“When you find something you’re passionate about, it no longer becomes work. You don’t even realize you’re working.”
Thanks to Chris Sessums for drawing my attention to this:
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. Dir. Michael Wesch. 2007.
A link of David Warlick’s post to Julie Coiro’s recent work got me motivated. A lot of my thinking lately has been directed in not only digesting the power of connectivism and the potential of Web 2.0 as it applies to school, but also how to sell it to educators. My job is to facilitate the use of technology in classrooms and to support the staff as they implement it.
It requires a little more when we begin talking about an entire pedagogical shift. It becomes a matter of first making it meaningful to the staff. I would never want to ask a teacher to stand in front of a room of students, especially the digital natives that we have in class today, and have them teach using Web 2.0 tools, unless that teacher had bought in themselves.
Coiro uses the Miss Rumphius Awards as an example for steps that teachers should take when integrating technology in a meaningful way. I like them for what I want to do, and how I want to approach my staff. Taken directly from her site, here they are:
1. Start out small and move through stages. 2. Take a few risks along the way. 3. Take a proactive approach to learning. 4. Encourage your students to share their expertise. 5. Never underestimate the power of collaboration. 6. Seek authentic learning opportunities. 7. Be prepared for change.
Every district has what I term “rabbits,” and this term was bandied about at the conference with Will Richardson on Friday. This morning, I listened to his podcast with Rob Mancabelli regarding how to implement social networking technologies into existing schools and the idea of passion and meaning in regards to selling districts on these ideas matched up succinctly with the idea of the “rabbit.” We need these tools to mean something to our staff before we ask them to take it to the students. They have to buy in and see the value for themselves as learners, before they use them as teachers.
I was pointed in the direction of Christian Long’s “Future of Learning Manifesto” and its subsequent additions and expansions by visitors and commenter to his blog. One part of it really stands tall for me and lends itself to my work:
10. Nobody Knows the Answer. Get Comfy with the Questions.
One of the most difficult things to do in life is to cede control of a situation for fear of ceding control of our classrooms. A common theme coming across the waves is that in order for us to provide a relevant assessment and a “school 2.0″ environment, we have to provide environments that are not controlled in the traditional sense that educators have come to know it. (See also remote access “Chaos Theory”)
And I get it on both sides of the equation. On the traditional side, in order to do what the “Manifesto” points us to do, entire curriculums would need to be re-written, staffs retrained, and students empowered in a way that they have not been before. In my personal situation, the logistics behind doing that are overwhelming. I can’t imagine viewing the directive from the standpoint of someone who has been in the classroom for 20 years or more. This would be just another pendulum swing in the world of educational reform and theory. They have seen it before in the way of phonics v. whole language, or inquiry-based learning and PBL’s v. standards-driven curriculum. and any other of a host of attempts to change the environment in a classroom. How does that teacher become convinced? How does that teacher see value in giving up control in favor of becoming the driver of creative questions? And also, what if the students, they feel, are not capable of asking meaningful questions, or lack a solid enough foundation in basic terminology or facts to conduct relevat research?
What is happening in terms of the read/write web and collaboration is intense and unbelievably mercurial in nature. To be tied down to one method for too long is missing out on 4 or 5 others that pop up to supersede it (see del.icio.us v. diigo v. Google Notebook–diigo for me). And therein lies the key. There are more questions than answers now. Which is best of research?(digging on Grokker right now) What method can I use to find primary source material on a topic? How can I find relevant, credible resources out of the plethora of hits I get back on Google? When I saw Long’s #10 on the list, I sighed because I knew this was the way to go. Get cozy with the “I don’t know, let’s play around and see,” approach. That’s where we get the skeptics; Create a possible task and give them tools that make doing it unbelievably easy.
Malcolm Gladwell spoke about the ideas and actions that lead to a radical shift in social policy, design, and consumer power. That is what we are looking at here. Is it podcasts? Blogs? Wikis? Pink or red iPods? No.
What it will be is something that makes accessing information for classroom teachers accessible and safe, something that makes them fearless and confident in front of a roomful of connected students, and something that lets them be comfortable with “I don’t know.”
A few years back, when I really began this journey, 
“We should see ourselves as all being in research and development.”
That being said, I often feel like I would like to sink my teeth into some hugely collaborative project, or even just be associated with one. There’s been a 
