Battling One-Size-Fits-All

We’ve all been there.

It’s the annual or semi-annual professional day for staff, and you are dreading it.  What will I have to sit through this year?

We know it’s the wrong thing to do, to have the entire staff go through the same “training,” yet inevitably it happens.  What we know is that sustained, job-embedded professional events work.  We know that working with colleagues whose opinions we trust and feedback we value has lasting effect on our practice as teachers and leaders.

The problem lies in the design.  Why just one day?  Why make it “destination” PD, like we’ve arrived at this time of the year and it follows that we should have one day for “training?”

We’ve just completed ours, so these thoughts are fresh in my mind, and I am trying to think about what I’ll do differently going forward.

These days are not without merit, I should say, in that various groups that don’t often get to plan together can.  For example, world language teachers from various levels can gather together to discuss their program, and we can arrange the day to include FedEx type events.

But what if we could do this whole system much differently?  What if we could do it so that days like this are days where we spend time celebrating the work we’ve been doing all year as professionals?  If we embrace the PLC idea and model, can we use days like this to share the findings and work that we’ve spent the past year creating and researching?

Today, I was in charge of planning the day for the district, and I attempted to do that in a small way.  I asked several of the staff to share things they were “experts” in.  Here’s the list of choices that staff had:

• The TED Series: Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” 
• Tablets, Tablets, Everywhere: A Preview of the Tablet Grant Program 
• Extending Your Classroom Using Edmodo
• Online Grades: Good Idea or Bad Idea? 
• Web Tools from A to Z
• Using Socratic Questioning and Fishbowl Dialogues in Your Classroom
• The TED Series: Daniel Pink “The Surprising Science of What Motivates You“ 
• Using Literature to Educate About Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying

Each staff member that was not involved in a curriculum project could choose three sessions to attend in the morning, and they had the option for the afternoon of these two sessions:

The Holy Grail of Teaching

Regardless of where you turn, the topic of education and educational reform seems tobe there. People from all walks of life are typically not shy about sharing their feelings on this subject. Ideas range from class size, standardized testing, ability grouping, the number of computers in the classroom, homework and the home environment, just to name a few. Research has shown, however, that teacher effectiveness has, by far, the most powerful influence upon students and student learning.In this workshop, we will explore the very powerful effects that a teacher has upon his/her students. We will take a close look at some of the research compiled that clearly delineates what has the most dramatic influence upon student achievement.

or

Learn Like Our Students Do

Background:  Have you ever seen a kid taking a technology class or reading a manual for a new gadget?  Of course not.  They learn as kids these days do: on their own, “playing”, and if needed, asking a buddy for advice. When it comes to technology or learning how to use new tools, they generally don’t need an “expert” or a workshop to attend.

Most adults are a little different. We have always had a consultant (“expert”) come in or have an administrator lead a session for staff on an initiative, program, or curriculum. Adults listen, hopefully engage, and it is hoped that the skill is applied for student learning.  Does it work?  Sometimes.

As we have for the past three years, we are call it “Learn Like Our Students” day. Staff otherwise unassigned to the previously listed activities form themselves into groups of two or more of their choosing. At the conclusion of the day they will complete an outcomes review.

Educators often say that there is never enough time to learn or improve skills, ideas, or instructional strategies.  Here is an opportunity for over two hours to teach yourselves something new, improve a skill, or gain new knowledge in a collaborative way.

While I cannot take credit for either of the two session titles or content (one was my predecessor’s idea, and the other my colleagues’), I feel both begin to drive our staff towards the type of day I would envision for them going forward.

A New Year, A New List of Trends

As has been said elsewhere, it’s list season, and being that I am working through some serious writing muscle atrophy, I’ll use this opportunity to join the fray.

Each year, we dig up what we’ve thought a lot about over the course of the past year, what we noticed, and what we feel will make the most impact on our lives, and our schools in the new year.  In looking through so many of the posts that have been written on this subject, I can find none better, in both honesty and clarity, than Larry Cuban’s, which you can read here.  Larry’s honesty about what is coming down the pike is refreshing amid all the talk about the demise of American public schools.

There are myriad pitfalls we run into when we jump too soon into the latest and greatest when it comes to educational technology.   Someone  finds the hottest item out there, the idea catches fire and before we know it, we now have it in our schools.  Oftentimes, sadly, very little thought is given to how well that gadget will impact student learning, or if our staff/IT Department/infrastructure is ready to leverage the gadget to really impact the outcomes we are looking for.  

Larry points out two in his post:

• Digital Texts
• Online Courses

both of which are incredibly interesting to me, and both can easily be wrapped up into one package.  Last year, I worked with a social science teacher to produce an online textbook for United States History I, and what we found was that it became inherently easier to have the students writing where they were reading, and not having the students reading their material online, and writing their responses/reactions to the reading on paper to hand in.  Housing the reading and responses in the same place led to the type of dialogue around primary and secondary sources that we wanted to see.  We ended up using Moodle, but this could have been done using so many different, free platforms.

Also, what we found was similar to what Audrey Watters wrote about over at Edutopia a while back.  By moving away from the traditional textbook for the work we were doing, we had the opportunity to pull in multiple points of view on subjects without abandoning the commitment to the content.  We also had the ability to draw from other talented teachers who had taken the leap to create their own textbooks (we relied pretty heavily on Hippocampus, but also looked at Flexbooks, and some of the content in places like Shmoop and OER).

We have talented staff members in each of our districts who are more than capable of producing digital texts and courses for our students and for students in other schools.  Let’s hope this year is one in which we all begin to leverage that ability.