ASCD: From Two Angles

I just stopped into the Convention Center here to pick up my media kit, and I immediately noticed a big shift from last year’s conference in New Orleans: tech.  Flat screens, laptops, live streaming of sessions, and a dedicated Technology Corridor (that’s going to be a separate post).  All things that had they been here last year, I wouldn’t have stuck out so much sitting all by myself in session rooms because the only viable electrical outlets for people with laptops were on the fringes of sessions.

Seriously, there is a decided effort on the part of ASCD to be visible, to pull in “21st Century Skills,” a word that the world has claimed as its buzzword du jour, and if you look through the session descriptions, there is a huge focus on these topics:

• Visual Literacy and infusion of Visual Art into the classroom
• Using assessment wisely to allow students to show they understand
• Web 2.0 and its use in the classroom
• 21st Century Skills and their broad definition

Over the last few days, I’ve spent some time looking at the sessions that immediately call out to me as valuable in what I do on a daily basis.  If you’ve been following some of the thoughts here lately, especially the dialogue between Scott McLeod and on a recent links post, you’ll understand that there has to be a marriage between teaching “soft skills,” and making sure content knowledge is sufficiently understood.  There is a balance we need to strive for in our work over the next few years in curriculum writing.  Scott really hit it here in this reference:

In Built to Last, Collins & Porras describe how visionary organizations do not “oppress themselves with … the ‘Tyranny of the OR’” (i.e., citizenship preparation v. employment preparation) but instead “liberate themselves with the ‘Genius of the AND.’” As they note, yin and yang are “both at the same time, all of the time.” Why is this so hard for educators to do?

I’d like to find some examples here at ASCD that show me this is happening, or at least show ways in which I can move forward to help teachers create learning environments that are innovative for students and teachers alike, yet provide a solid academic foundation for the future.  As I have said before, it never was an Either/Or.

The second major focus I have this weekend is to leave here with more actionable content which I am taking to mean both teaching strategy and assessment strategy.  When I work with teachers, especially in light of all the buzz about the influx of creativity and innovation ideas into the NJCCCS, they often ask me how they are supposed to teach these skills.  The sessions I have chosen center around giving teachers strategies for stretching student minds within their content areas.  In my own personal practice, I always fall back on the Kagan Structures and other forms of cooperative learning (and it just so happens, Kagan is presenting on Sunday).  With that creativity in how we approach teaching, I’d like to explore some innovation in how we assess our students.

Be sure to pick up the twitter feed also, which you can find here and here.

There is a Growing Demand for Meaning Among Teachers

At least that is what I am seeing from my limited point of view.

Today was marked by our annual New Teacher Induction meetings where we work with our first-year staff on method and practice.  It’s always an eclectic bunch, as we always have a nice mix of veteran teachers who have changed districts mid-career and recent college graduates.   The perspectives range from those blinded by the frustrations of working with students for the first time to those who’ve been through their share of the trenches.

Today’s theme was supposed to be Non-Linguistic Representations and how we can use them to aid students in accessing learning via more than the traditional input of chalk, talk, write and remember.  As usual, when a lesson goes the way I want it to, or better yet, in a direction I did not anticipate, it leaves me with more to learn than those who were originally considered the students in the equation.

In introducing the theme, I asked them to read and discuss (we used body voting to have them split the room apart–which do you prefer Starbuck’s or Dunkin Donuts?) a recent post on Scott McLeod’s page in which he quoted Robert Fried’s The Game of School:“

What sprang out this small quote from both veteran and new teacher alike was an overwhelming sigh of relief that someone had verbalized this in such a manner as this.  From pre-school teachers to senior level math teachers, the value of the three key words in this quote: curious, confident, enthusiastic, drew response.  Whether that passion from the students was for math, writing, reading, or science, did not matter to them.  They wanted the gestalt for their students, and they really wanted it.

I can’t say I was surprised, as getting our teachers out of the classroom is difficult to do–they are passionate and committed to what they do; they common phrase among our high school staff is “you’ve got to be in it to win it.”  What surprised me most was the demand they placed on making sure we help them teach students meaningful things that they will use and that make sense in their lives immediately.   Breaking away from this discussion was difficult, and it ran way over the time we allotted for it in both sessions, but we knew there would be more time for this discussion.

Sir Ken Robinson’s work has been making the rounds lately, and I am a sucker for his 2006 TED talk regarding creativity and education.  This group, I was sure, had not heard this yet, so I paired it with a short excerpt from Pink’s A Whole New Mind, and asked them to do some synthesizing: take Robinson’s contentions about the role of public education in regards to creativity, take Pink’s assertion that we need an integrated mind for the future, and come to a new understanding about your own practice and your own understanding of what your students need.

What we got never materialized into a whole group discussion, but in moving between the groups, I caught people talking like their hair was on fire in some instances.  This day struck a chord, at least with me, and I’d love to solicit some feedback about the day in the form of an exit card (probably should have thought of that beforehand).  How did it relate to non-linguistic representations?  Not as cleanly as I would have hoped, but in discussing the need for students to access information visually, use mental imagery, and portray their understanding of concepts in visual as well as verbal/linguistic forms, our groups were able to see the need for strong non-verbal learning.

This Rut We’re In

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 challenge many educators face today in trying to improve learning
is not one of technology or information access. The most significant
need is to begin envisioning a future reflective of the affordances of
technology now broadly available.

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’s englishcompanion 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.

MIT students build mobile applications in 13 weeks – elearnspace

From Scott McLeod

I am really digging the work that Scott McLeod is doing via his blog.  Over the last few months he has recognized great commentors, blogs that deserve a bigger audience, and sponsored a button making contentst for NECC.  But what really grabs me is his call to leaders in our field to “get it,” and do so quickly.  This button sums it up for me.  How are you making something happen?

The Fastest Growing Segment

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

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

Counting Down to EduCon 2.0

What a whirlwind month and a half it’s been in my little world. The shift from technology coordinator to curriculum director has brought about tremendous changes, ones that were predictable and ones that took a while to surface. Add to that the fact that I agreed to give some presentations lately (Turning On Learning, Franklin Lakes School District, TechSpo), and my time to reflect and write has been hampered considerably. And where I used to use late hours or early morning hours to write and reflect, those times have been taken up, rather gladly, by falling asleep with my son at his bedtime (if you have children, going to sleep with your child at their bedtime is such a guilty pleasure). So now on most nights, I am crashing at close to 8:00pm. Say goodbye to any late night reflection.

One of the most immediate changes I noticed was the natural progression from focusing solely on technology and its integration to focusing on issues of teaching methodology and long-term planning of instruction. In a perfect world, one that we are trying to create in our district, the two, technology and teaching methodology, curriculum planning, and long-term planning for success are all seen as one job. However, I am thinking more about aggregating that whole now than I ever did before, and the solutions to the problems will take much longer to sort out than those that I ran into as tech coordinator.

I must say thanks to several of you out there, like Kim Cofino, Barry Bachenheimer, Robin Ellis, Kelly Christopherson, Darren Draper, and Scott McLeod for pushing my thinking on the topics of school change, idea management, and coalition building. It took me a while to see just where my thinking was taking me as I was reading their writing over the last few months, but as I look at the different challenges that are put before me, I see more clearly that a good deal of my “quality ideas” have come through conversations on their blogs or with them directly.

Konrad Glogowski posted recently about his relief that he is able to approach the upcoming EduCon 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia with a focus on reflection. I couldn’t agree more, and while my reflective space has change, as has my ability to commit time to it, this conference is something I’ve been looking forward to for some time. I remember hearing and reading from people throughout the summer (post-NECC and BLC) that there was a need for more conversations about what really needed to happen in our schools. EduCon 2.0 is a step in that direction.

As the days get closer, I am sure I will be linking out to some of the venues for virtual participation.