Unto Each, His Proposed Last.

We long for moments of exquisite clarity, where vertical forests separate and reveal their lost horizontal path and fog lifts long enough for you to arrive safely to where you are headed. It is in these moments that we find our true selves, the person we have dreamt of becoming–the leader, the visionary, the one who others look to when they don’t know the way. All of our systems are in flow, our shots are falling, our decisions ring with confidence, we know which way we are going.

This is how we would like to feel when we decide to change our lives. The odd part is, life doesn’t care how you want to feel. When external factors force your hand, the decision-making process rarely looks like the description above. Rather, it looks bedraggled, chaotic, forlorn.

And the looks of the process pale in comparison to how it affects the human heart.

I’ve spent the last 6 years of my professional life in a town called Sparta. My kids haven’t known me with any other job; it was in my first year there that I was called out of 5th period to be with my wife as my first was born.

In more ways than not, I’ve grown up here. I didn’t start here, but I arrived here with the full mindset that I’d work here forever. That’s what I felt you did as a teacher. You got a job in a district, got a classroom, and stayed there until you retired 25 years or so hence. Within the six years I have called Sparta my home, I’ve managed to completely reconfigure that mentality within myself.

I’ve worked hard at creating change over the last few years. I’ve moved cheese, I’ve “made the switch,” worked within a construct of rough-ready, and lived in a state of constant beta. “Change” and me, we are down. I’ve failed more than I’ve succeeded, I’ve pushed more than I’ve conceded, and I’ve agreed with decisions not because they were decisions I would have made if given the choice, but because either consensus ruled, or because those that had deeper understanding won out.

Now I am leaving, and so much of me tells me that I am not ready to do so. But, nonetheless, I am leaving. Bittersweet. That’s really all.

There are questions I’ll ask of myself as I move on:

What if I wasn’t ready? What if there were still things to do here? What will happen to all of the things I started?

Yes, I’ve known for a while that I would leave Sparta, and I’ve stated as much here, but when we leave something we’ve dedicated much of energies to, there exists a need within us to have some control over that exit. Finances sometimes dictate to us what we must do, and our options are limited. No one likes being the guy that had an idea and then left others to make it happen. We’d all much rather be the guy that had the idea that changed everything and hung around to make it work. Now I won’t be here to see whether or not that will be true.

There are wonderful people who I will miss. There are things we’ve created that may or may not last after I am gone, and much of the “me” that is moving on to the next segment of my career has been forged by what I’ve learned in my time at Sparta.

Tonight I watched as the last group of students I had the privilege of teaching graduated as seniors. The slender faces I remembered them as five years ago have long been replaced by their matured countenances, confident gazes and hopeful demeanor. They’ve grown and changed. They’re moving to what they’ve chosen as next.

And so am I.

All these things we do in education, they matter. They matter because we put ourselves, our whole selves, into them and they have direct impact on the lives of children.

Louis, one of our graduates tonight, said to me as he as being herded into procession line-up: “Higgins, you’re here,” and turned to smack his constant companion (still to this day) Dave in the chest. “See, Dave, Higgins always got it.”

And that’s how we know.

Grey Matter, Grey Areas.

Jenna asked a poignant question of Drs. Hammond and Miller:

Outside of test prep, does the traditional 5-paragraph essay have any place in learning today?

It was great question to ask those who deal with our students and their writing once they leave us, and its answer is inherently obvious.  However, what can we learn about our system of teaching thinking from holding the despised format up to scrutiny?  I particularly liked Paul Hammond’s response when he proclaimed “how the hell did we get here?  We have seen the tool become the end.”  We have, indeed, seen the means to start students on the path to clear thinking become the end product.

Dr. Miller chimed in at this point in the discussion with a great anecdote about the history of the format.  His thought was that the five paragraph format is

driven by an anxiety about clarity.  You have to be able to be clear.  But it’s more than that.  You have to have something to say.

What followed next was nothing short of an epiphany for me:

Let’s not refuse to go into places that are not clear.

To repeat:

Let’s not refuse to go into places that are not clear.

That one struck me as squarely as did Jay Rosen’s Talk at TEDxNYED (see his entrance to “pragmatism” at about the :50 second mark).  These are the problems I want students stuck in the mire of—the types where they must reason their way not only out of their own thought-morass, but also of the writing quicksand they’ve stumbled into.  We have the honor of helping them figure out that there is a lot of thought and meaning that goes into the use of a semicolon in the midst of an argument.

We think it is our job to be teachers not of subjects or disciplines, but rather of curiosity.  It is our job to present really good problems to ourselves and our students, and go like hell to solve them.

I Have Become That Student.

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.

Dr. Eric Davis, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, came to our district to engage any of us interested in a conversation about how to teach our students to better understand terrorism, its root causes, and a means to combat it in an enlightened way.

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.

Returning the Favor

Over a year ago, I wrote about a unit I designed at the first public school I worked at.  It was a unit on Burma and the struggle for democracy being led by Aung San Suu Kyi.  The post was originally aimed at recognizing a call to the blogosphere to write about Burma on a particular day.  What ended up coming through was the lessons  I learned while planning it.

I was a second year teacher in an assignment that had me teaching several different subjects in several different grade levels.  Our building principal had this informal practice he like to employ with his second year teachers, a year he viewed as pivotal in a teachers development within a school.  He picked one each year to work with on creating a unit of study for whatever curriculum they were teaching.  For me, it was social studies, world geography most specifically.  He spent the better part of two weeks with me in class and out of class designing and helping me carry out the implementation.  I learned about essential questions, timing of resources within a unit, and, my favorite, cognitive dissonance.  Being a new teacher, I had little understanding of what running a building entailed, I just thought he had time on his hands because he was shirking some of his discipline responsibilities off to his VP.  It turns out that he was staying until all hours to complete his normal duties so that he could work with me.

To make a long story much shorter than it could be, I’ve taken that example and decided to pass it on to the teachers I work with.  The experience of having someone give you feedback continuously while you plan and implement a lesson truly changed how I looked at my students needs and my ability as a teacher.  It did matter when and where resources were delivered, and it did matter that they left my class wondering what was going to happen tomorrow.  I met with a teacher in one of our buildings last week and asked if he’d be interested in a similar project.  He agreed to give it a go.  It’s a non-evaluative situation, and we’ve already been bouncing ideas off of each other.

What am I hoping for out of this?  I hope that this becomes a tradition for me as well.  I gained so much from an experienced educator taking an interest in my career and my craft that to be able to even provide some modest feedback to a teacher who is still finding their way would be rewarding enough for me.  I’ll let you know.

I need to nail this stuff down on the local level.

I love writing and sharing, and while I don’t profess to have a “great process” for getting it out there, I willingly share my practices, both success and failure, with anyone who cares to listen. That being said, and after listening to Clarence and Darren on Friday morning as they laid out the real possibilities that our teachers and students have before them, I know I live in perpetual beta. What that means for me is that, yes, I will continue to write about my personal struggles and successes with motivating today’s student and helping teachers understand changes that can help their instruction and effectiveness, but I will keep things close to my vest too.

Before I get up there and share like mad and give it away, I want to run it through the ringer here. I went to BLC with our administrative team, and my focus was on finding ways to make the goals we had set work well. That meant that we worked together almost exclusively. I missed sharing with some of the people there, but I felt the conversation pieces were lacking (or not built into the conference like at EduCon). My first priority in all of this is to the people I work with and for, the students, teachers, and parents in my district. Until I feel a sense of accomplishment within the audience of that crowd, I am finding it difficult to begin to share our practices. In other words, I don’t want to just get in front of people and talk about the cool things we do with this tool or that tool. I want to give the people I am fortunate enough to share with solid methods and practices they can go back and share with their students, teachers and parents. That hasn’t arrived for me yet.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve accomplished some wonderful things, and we are really trying to up the ante this year with our staff at every building; however, where’s the proof that what we are doing is better? or at least creating fascination and wonder on the part of both teacher and student? I need that before I jump out of beta and into limited release.

Image Credit: “Goatopolis-v2 (beta:Matthew Broderick)” from Goatopolis’ Photostream

BLC Preparedness

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.

Digital Literacy/Leadership

In looking back for Jeff’s post above, I came across one of my earlier posts regarding a conversation I had with my Uncle Bill in early Spring regarding the effects of changing systems and the workplace.  He posed a question that is apropo here as well:

“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

Using Cooperative Learning Structures to Teach Teachers

from animoto.com posted with vodpod

Each month, we meet with our first year teachers in the district to help them adjust to the expectations and the rigors of being in the classroom everyday. I have spoken about this before, but the program uses Marzano, et al’s, book Classroom Instruction That Works as a framework for teaching strategies that are research-based and effective. More than anything we do instructionally, the workshops always help the teachers come together to discuss success and failure in their classrooms; it provides them with a support structure in which they can reflect on their practice and share their uncertainties about what they are doing.

Last month we spent some time with cooperative learning structures and how to use them to help students take responsibility for their own learning through collaboration. The feedback we got from that meeting was really positive, so this month we decided to use the structures as a means to teach the next theme in the book: Goal-Setting and Feedback.

One of the most significant parts of my own learning this year has been to make every attempt I can to be a practitioner of what I teach. You have read it here before: “Be the change you want to see in others.” So when we were planning this month, Dan and I created the sessions entirely around learning structures and reaching as many intelligences as we could. Here is a list of what we did and the accompanying structures:

• Clock Buddies: as soon as they walked in we handed them appointment clocks on paper and asked them to make appointments at 12 (with someone not in your building), 3 (with someone in your building), 6 (someone in your subject area), and 9 (random). We used these throughout the session to organize ourselves.
  • this got them moving and engaging and really set the tone for their activity level for the day.
• RAFT: Sternberg created this concept based on his three intelligences. What we did is ask the teachers to write an entry on their blog using the idea of choosing a Role (object in their classroom, a student in their classroom, an observing administrator), an Audience (a parent, an administrator, a reluctant c colleague, etc.) a Format (classified ad, instruction manual, letter to the editor, observation narrative, etc.) and write about a Topic (why should we use cooperative learning structures in the classroom?).
  • immediately it got them thinking differently because we asked them to reflect via a different modality then they were used to. A little cognitive dissonance is a good thing!
• Walk and Talk: They read a section of the book on their own, then we used our 12 o’clock buddies and asked each group to do some guided reflection using a graphic organizer. However, we asked them to do it while on a Walk and Talk. Since yesterday was a gorgeous day here in New Jersey, we allowed them to walk anywhere on the school grounds, inside or out, and asked them to discuss the reading and fill in the graphic organizer as they strolled.
• “Wows and Wonders:” More reading was done independently and then we used our 3 o’clock buddies and paired the groups up to form larger groups. Since we were talking about goal setting, we asked each teacher to write a brief statement about how they use goal setting in their classroom. We then used a Round Robin format where they passed their statement to the left. Each person was responsible for writing a “Wow,” on the page and then passed it along to the next person in the circle until eventually they all received their own page back. We did the same again, only this time we asked each person to write a “Wonder,” statement on each other’s page.
  • This allowed everyone to get positive feedback, but also framed the constructive feedback in the form of a suggestive question, which works a lot better than a “you should have done this” statement.
• Four Corners: After reading the feedback section in the book, we asked the teachers to pick one of the four research points made in the reading as the one that they would like to have a discussion about. Each corner of the room represented a different point. They moved to that corner and were asked to use a graphic organize to lead their discussion about that point.
• Numbered Heads: as they discussed, we walked around and gave numbers to each group member. When it came time to wrap up, we picked numbers randomly and asked that that person tell us what their group discussed about a certain point within their topic.
  • this gave everyone time to add additional information to their organizer and hear points that pushed their own thinking.
• Parking Lot: also as they were discussing feedback, Dan and I circled the room and distributed a blue and a yellow post-it not to everyone. We asked that on the yellow they tell us something about their own learning from the day’s session–what did you learn today? On the blue, we asked that they help us with our learning–what could we have done differently today? As they left the room for the day, they put the yellows on one wall and the blues on another.

We are in the process of sorting our notes out and going over the feedback (it was just yesterday), but I could already see that the teachers were engaged with one another at a level that we’d seen glimpses of before but couldn’t sustain. Also, on a selfish note, I did so much less talking, used so much less tech, and spent so much more time listening than I had in any of the the previous meetings.

If we are truly about changing the way our schools work, about reforming our practices to meet the needs of students, modeling said practices and methods should be the first order of business. Think of your next factulty meeting. How much will you move about the room to discuss an issue or concern or theory (trips to the food area don’t count)? Will the dialog be one-way, two-way, or circular and constant?

I realize that all meetings and sessions vary, and that decisions about presentation and lesson design are germane to the material itself, but when we can we should use what we know to produce lessons, meetings, professional development courses that we would want to sit through. Ask yourself, would you want to be in your class?

My Writing Idea

With all credit to Bill Ferriter who posted a link to his Pageflakes page that he uses with his students, I created this iGoogle Page to begin to flesh out an idea I have for a writing class that I am thinking about for a future pet project.

Inspired by all of the work Justin and Dennis, Jeff, and Kim have done in Asia, as well as a host of the other wonderful people in my network, I’ve decided to begin to craft the vision of what I think a writing class should look like in the grade 6-12 setting. Here is my short list of adjectives/descriptive phrases for what it should look like:

• Connected: our students and their writing should be done in conjunction with some other, larger project that connects them to other classrooms and work being done in their community or another community somewhere in the world.
• Reflective: our teachers should be striving to teach their students to understand how they are learning, not just what they are learning. By asking them to discuss their learning and their progress, failures, and processes, we allow them the freedom to think out loud and open their thinking to the world.
• Archival/Portfolio-driven: students need to be shown visual representations of their improvement, and shown often. Being able to pull out writing from September to view in June and show growth and depth will change the way a student looks at their writing.
• Driven by student-interest: I keep hearing about student apathy from the teachers I work with. I want it to stop, and I want to know how you can drive student interest through the roof. Tim Tyson made Mabry Middle School “Irresistible;” why can’t I?
• Public: Hearing Chris talk about how SLA was a walled garden, yet so full of connections made me think hard about my definition of audience. Yes, I would like our students writing to be global, but I would also like it to be intensely local as well. Regardless of where it’s seen, I know it needs to be seen. Students need audience in order to shape their voice.
• Vibrant: I didn’t grab onto writing for myself until I got to college, and many people don’t ever or won’t ever. Clay speaks often about taking his high school students into the fray by helping them find their writerly voice. It’s difficult, it’s going to be marred by failures, but I want these students to find the spark, the one piece that generates interest–the one that keeps them coming back to the page to try again.

I am in the early stages of creating this class, but it’s exciting to do this. My appeal to all out there who might come across this is simple: what would you include in a writing class that spans all academic disciplines in its content?

How do you spell MIT?

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On a quiet day here in Sparta, when everyone is geared up for the long weekend full of Thanksgiving meals and shopping, Ryan Lollgen and Steve Schels had something else in mind for their United States History Classes.

Ryan had made contact with Dr. Pauline Maier, the Dr. William R. Kenan Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after having read some of her work. A simple email and phone call to the contact information she supplied landed Ryan and Steve, and more importantly, their students, access to one of America’s preeminent historians.

On Wednesday morning at 10am, we used Skype to phone Dr. Maier at her office and conducted an hour-long interview with her with questions generated by the students. The podcast of the event is available for your listening above, and while not the cleanest audio in the world, it is well worth a listen by anyone interested in a unique conversation about the American Revolution.

Maier was featured prominently in PBS‘s documentary Liberty a few years back, the ebullient style with which she exhibited in the documentary really came through in the phone interview. Her enthusiasm for the topics the students brought up was refreshing for us to hear, and her perspectives were poignant and insightful.

Perhaps the greatest part of the process was that she was genuinely interested in not only the topics, but why the students wanted to know these things. Her answers to the questions the students asked were above and beyond what we all expected, and reflected her desire to help the students view history as a dynamic and changing process. Here is a quote from an follow-up email she sent to Ryan:

Ryan,
Congratulations again on getting your students so involved in American
history. There’s nothing like encouraging them to ask questions to avoid
the sense that history is a boring collection of dead facts arranged
chronologically rather than an exciting inquiry into human experience. My
hat is really off to you and the other teachers I have known who, like you,
are doing good work preparing students to think and, not incidentally, be
informed citizens of the American Republic. What was the line attributed
to Franklin (perhaps mythically)? I think as he left the convention,
someone asked him what kind of government the Americans would have, and he
supposedly said “a republic, if you can keep it.” We need to know what a
republic is and what it demands of its people if we want to keep it.

This was a unique event for us to participate in, one that showed how we can easily bring experts into our classrooms just by reaching out to them and extending the invitation. Much like Dee Peselli did with Kyle MacDonald a few months back, all it takes is a teacher who wants to provide a memorable experience for his or her students.

Cross-posted at Tech Dossier.

Technorati Tags: sparta, skype, MIT, expertvoices

Strike the Match

Last year, I workshopped until I was blue in the face, talking about RSS and social bookmarking and whatever else I could to help teacher efficiency while researching and planning. This year I backed off and let things go in their own direction (slightly).

This post just appeared today on Tech Dossier, our district technology blog, from Angela Deluccia-Davis, and it really made me smile. Now, truth be told, Angela is an early adopter, and one of our biggest technological evangelists, but she is also a realist, and an AP teacher. Her margin for error with experimentation is very low. Her post details briefly the introduction of Google Reader into the AP position paper that she does every year.

One thing I love about how she introduced it is that she clearly states that not all of the students are using it—it’s a tool. Some will use the tool, others will not. No grades will suffer if you choose not to use it. I would like to see where this goes.

Flickr image credit: “Aha,” by Jason Pinker

Technorati Tags: google, sparta, techdossier, rss, education