Now that I'm a 'seasoned' administrator (I have two years in already!! :)), I've decided that instead of trying to fix everything, I'll pick a few goals to really focus on this next year (see how much smarter I'm getting?!?). I want to focus on literacy in our school, especially reading. We are an alternative school, K-12. Our students have come to us, for the most part, because their behaviors got in the way of their learning in their home school and so they were sent here. Many of our teachers are young and inexperienced. The new principal I hired a year ago, just completed his first year in administration. We are trying to build positive relationships with our students and change the negative behaviors that occur. That has been our main focus and we now have many positive classroom and school-wide incentives in place. I now want to focus on reading.

I want us to know the reading level of every student. I want us to know it when they come to us throughout the year, and I want us to know it when they leave. I want us to do more formative assessments so we can do interventions and help students with their reading skills. I want us to look at the data and make informed decisions based on that data. I want us to start a library. I want us to have software for our computers to help with reading skills. I want us to have audio books and podcasts for kids to listen to while they read along. I want to build time in the schedule where everyone reads.

So, what's the problem you ask? Well, I'm not EXACTLY sure where to start. I don't have a reading specialist to rely on and I don't have a curriculum director to plan with and because we are a small school, we have classrooms with multi-grades and abilities. I want to make sure that I'm not burning out the new teachers as we try to meet the state reading standards for each grade and prepare for the statewide reading tests (let alone the other subjects with state standards and don't forget working on those inappropriate behaviors that got them here in the first place}.

What would you do? If you could give me one piece of advice on how to set up a quality reading program, what would it be? You are starting with no K-12 reading program, curriculum or series in place. There are no classroom libraries of books. There is not a building-wide library. You do have enough computers for students, but little, if any, software programs for reading. You have state reading test scores and you now have a more formative assessment that you will adminster three times a year for benchmarks and monthly, as needed, for progress data. What would you suggest next? What has worked for your school? I appreciate any thoughts, ideas or strategies that you are willing to share. Thank you!

Reggie Engebritson

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

I caught Secretary Duncan on NPR this week talking about teacher evaluations and other key issues surrounding education reform. Secretary Duncan talked about several studies that were recently featured in Education Week. The studies major findings that teacher evaluations reflect a Lake Wobegon effect. Almost 99% of teacher evaluations studied reflect teachers were at or above average. In other words, all of the teachers being evaluated are meeting or exceeding standards. Sec. Duncan's question rings true - if all of our teachers are meeting or exceeding standards then there is little to no variation in teacher distribution. Another more distrubing question is this - if all of our teachers are meeting or exceeding standards, then why are many students failing or dropping out of school.

About the same time Sec. Duncan was talking about teacher evaluations and the need to improve evaluations, I was having end of year reviews with principals in our system. Our school system deployed new teacher and principal evaluation instruments this year. During the end of year reviews, the conversation focused on performance of the school in the areas of student learning and how professional development impacted student learning. Also, I asked a great deal about how the principals used the teacher evaluation instrument to analyze the variability in student learning among and between teachers at the same grade level and subject. What I discovered was our principals needed more coaching and support to have these conversations with teachers.

Also, last week I was working with leaders from several different states and discovered that some states do not allow the connection of student learning data with teacher evaluation data. While NC does not prohibit this use, it is certainly only one part of a comprehensive teacher evaluation instrument.

While Sec. Duncan seemed to focus on the need to evaluate teachers and find out those who are low performing, I would prefer we focus on an improvement instrument for teachers and principals, By connecting the key instructional strategies that impact student learning and then providing focused professional development, coaching and support, I believe that 95% or more of our teachers can be successful. Why 95%? That is the core philosophy of a systems based approach. In most cases, it is not the people that are the problem. It is not the people that are creating the variation in a process. It is the system and the process itself. For our system, we will focus on the process of teacher evaluation and provide principals with the coaching and support needed to continue to improve student learning outcomes. NC has focused standards for school boards, superintendents, principals and teachers that are systems based and focus on continuous improvement.

Terry Holliday
Superintendent - Iredell Statesville Schools
2008 Baldrige National Quality Award Recipient

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

As the largest educational technology conference, National Educational Computing Conference-NECC, is going on, I started to think about the different vendors I work with, the relationships I have with them, and the characteristics that help me choose some venders over others.

As a former athlete and coach, I decided to use the analogy of a team. When it comes to this part of the profession, I have two teams: an internal and an external. To be successful, I must have a strong internal and external team and I am fortunate to have both.

My internal team is made up of the instructional technology facilitators that work in each building. They are an impressive group of professionals. All of them, without exception, contribute significantly to the success of technology infusion into the curriculum. They are a great resource to all their teachers and they are all intrinsically motivated to learn and grow as professionals. When Jim Collins talks about having the right people in the right seats on the bus in his book, Good to Great, I am extremely appreciative with who is sitting on my bus and the seats that they occupy. This would not be possible without the "owner" (my superintendent), who is the kind of "owner" of which most professionals can only dream. Not only is his understanding about the role of technology in education profound, but he is a reputable leader, a confidant, and allows me to grow as an administrator.

However, to be truly successful in educational technology there must be a strong external team as well. The vendors that I have partnered with are people that I trust implicitly; they are people who are willing to listen and allow for constructive feedback about their product. To be a good leader in this field, which is still relatively new, it is imperative that leaders treat the relationship as as a partner-vendor relationship and not as a client-vendor relationship. Administrators should view the relationship with vendors as one that is critical to the learning environment of their students. After all, they are putting the tools of learning into the hands of students and teachers.

This summer, while previewing products, look at the people that are selling the product and ask the tough, yet essential question, "How can I partner with this company to increase the learning and ultimate success of my students?"
James Yap

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

During the last several months, our school district has worked to identify areas of strategic importance to dramatically improving life opportunities for our students. Our focus is squarely on student achievement, and we are approaching this focus through four key areas: Leadership, Engagement, Data, and Collaboration. While we are moving forward in each of these areas, I want to highlight the work we are doing in Leadership.

As we assessed our leadership needs in the district, we determined that, like many other K-12 districts, we had a critical need for leadership development. As we planned to meet this need, we committed to expanding the traditional view of school leadership to include classroom, school, and district levels. Too often we've seen phenomenal plans from school or district leaders, but the real classroom impact was missing. We knew we wanted to lift up the experience of classroom leaders and provide models for others in our district. We really wanted to incentivize the role of classroom leader. In considering school and district leaders more specifically, we wanted to prepare real change agents for current and future leadership opportunities.

Our efforts to address this leadership need have resulted in a partnership with Brown University in the form of the Learning Leadership Cadre. The Cadre is composed of teachers, academic coaches, counselors, and current administrators who will begin intensive study around the areas of Leadership, Engagement, Data, and Collaboration. Each participant was selected after a rigorous application and interview process. One of my colleagues called the process "heartening." He was referring to the powerfully positive impression many of our applicants left on him. Each Cadre member will identify, develop, and deliver on an action research or change project for a school or the district.

Much of the power of this model comes from non-traditional thinking about K-12 education needs and how best to meet them. The spirit of collaboration evident in this work is also key to the effective design and delivery of such an option. While our sense is that the Cadre is an effective design for meeting our leadership development goals, the work of an outside evaluator will really help quantify the results we see through this fairly unique partnership. I invite you to visit the Learning Leadership Cadre website and look more closely at the model as we work through this first year. I believe this is another example of how K-12 educators across the country are thinking more about "how we can" rather than "why we can't."

Dave Dimmett

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 25, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Confessions of a Paper Chewer

In 1988 I was a 5th grader in a typical Ohio elementary school. It was a day like any other and my cousin and I were bored. The teacher had decided to teach social studies that day by reading to us out of the 8th grade textbook since there was more detail than our 5th grade text. Now, you may ask how I remember this… He used the 8th grade book a lot. Without any words exchanged I can remember he and I engaging in the super bowl of paper eating contests. The goal of course was to see who could get the most sheets in our mouth. He quickly took a two sheet lead, not due to his athleticism, simply because I started laughing. And that’s when it happened. My laughing induced a chain reaction causing him to get the uncontrollable giggles, which forced the paper out of his mouth and onto the poor female student in front of him. Thus, quickly ending our training to become world-class paper chewing champions. We ended up in for recess.

Twenty years have passed since that 5th grade year and now I find myself trying to solve the same problem that forced me to chew paper. Student engagement has become a passion for me as an educator and administrator. In my experiences I have become certain of one thing. Students who do not feel entertained or challenged to learn, will entertain and challenge themselves in any way they can. Kids don’t naturally look to adults for wisdom and knowledge. There must be something about the adult, the environment, or the challenge that entices the learner to be engaged in the experience. If that “it” factor is not available it is near impossible to sustain the attention of the student.

A great example of this is grand kids heading over to grandpa and grandma’s house. The moment they walk in they know exactly where to head for entertainment. My son knows exactly where every model tractor and toy farm implement is located and that is immediately where he heads after entering the house. That is until grandpa says the magic words, “I’ve got a job in the woods that I could use help with.” Like a lightening bolt my son is up and getting his shoes on. I know what you are thinking, what 5 year old doesn’t like being in the woods with grandpa. Exactly, and grandpa knows that the woods serves as the engaging environment, the job the challenge, and the relationship the entertainment. Because of these 3 necessary factors my son is able to learn from the experience. At 5 he can identify more plant and tree species than his father.

Improved student engagement is a goal for any educator at any level. Although I can’t always take students to the woods to learn about plants, I can still be cognizant of the learning environment, the challenge, and the relationship. Keeping these three pieces of the puzzle at the forefront of planning will greatly improve the experience for both the teacher and the learner.
Gary Kandel

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What a compelling confluence of events this week:

• California in near collapse as they face a $25 BBB-illion deficit!

• A Stanford University concludes that students in charter schools are not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.

• California Charter Schools Association invents a new scheme to hold charters more accountable.

• California's highest performing school, a charter school, emerges as a beacon of light in an otherwise dark and tempestuous storm. Or not.

So how do these seemingly separate events connect?

A change is gonna come.

I am inspired by Tehran and the passion of the people there. I have been reading "iranelection" tweets from Twitter's Trending Topics. The courage is there. The hope for a better future. The vision of a better way. The leadership. The synergy.

So I wondered how we capture the energy of this historic moment and bring it home from Persia. My state, California, is reeling. The proposals coming from our Terminator on how to bridge the mind-boggling deficit are absolutely disastrous as they apply to our children:

• Cut $4.5 billion from K-12 public education
• Cut Healthy Families (health insurance!)
• Cut CalWorks (aide to families)

Simultaneously, Stanford University determines that charter schools aren't the answer... or more accurately, they are not consistently the answer. According to the report issued on June 15: 17% reported academic gains that were better than traditional public schools and 37% showed "gains" that were worse. Perhaps that inspired the California Charter Schools Association to come out a few days later with their own scheme to "hold charter schools more accountable for their academic achievement."

As if we could be more accountable. My students families are being moved around the community like they are on roller skates. Their homes are being foreclosed. Their parents hang on to their jobs with that white-knuckled fear that the worst of the economic damage has not run full course. 1/3 never had health insurance to start with and now the potential cut to the programs that link children to pediatricians and optometrists and dentists are on the chopping block. Collateral damage.

Then, for a fleeting moment, it is not all doom and gloom: I discover an LA Times article about a charter school that is "spitting in the eye of mainstream education." Hope? One of California's very highest performing schools is actually a charter school! It sits in a low income community in Oakland and has managed to defy all Stanford odds and achieve an Academic Performance Index of 967!

But wait. Not so fast. This school... the one that every school in America should emulate... the one to whom we should run to analyze and replicate; the one Governor Terminator called "a miracle" and the Koret Foundation determined was the "model for public education in California"... may have soared to its amazing heights on the wings of Icarus.

So now I am processing this whirlwind of events that have played out on multiple levels. I scale in and out of them as easily as manipulating Google Earth. First the 20,000 foot satellite view and a crisis a world away. Then the street view. I can see the economic realities come home to roost; I can see them parked in the driveway. But there are no easy answers, no quick fix solutions. Anywhere.

It is Saturday and the first full week of summer vacation for our students.

I am watching, out of the corner of my eye, as motorcycles burn on Tehran streets. The video is shaky but what do you expect from amateurs running through chaos with cell phones and downloading history on CNN IReports? Freedom finds its throat in the fury there.

Next week promises to be at least as interesting. There is only one outcome we can predict with any confidence or accuracy-- somehow, some way...

A change is gonna come.

Kevin W. Riley
El Milagro Weblog

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s cute, it’s hip, it’s a cartoon, and it’s Internet safety but, do they get the message? During the last week of school we had an educational writer from NetSmartz® Workshop come to conduct focus groups with 30 of our third through sixth graders to get their opinions on their new Internet Safety videos for their NSTeens site. NetSmartz® Workshop is a company specializing in safety education for youth, parents, and educators. Created by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC), NetSmartz set forth to spearhead a movement towards safer and more responsible use of the Internet by kids and teens.

The writer showed each group of students, grouped by age (8-9 year olds, 10-11 year olds, and 11-12 year olds), the same three videos, each with a specific message on Internet safety. The videos for NSTeens are targeted to the tweens, between the ages of 8 and 12. After viewing each clip, she asked the students to summarize the message, what they liked, what they disliked, and what was confusing about the video. The younger students spoke up far more than the older ones, which, I found out, was typical of focus groups across the United States.

After watching the videos and listening to the discussion, it was evident that most of the students got the gist of the message of each video, even though all of the students felt that the characters in the videos were much older than they were. They missed many of the nuances regarding what led up to the message, but they were able to broadly identify the “lesson” each video was attempting to get across to kids. We did not look at NetSmartzKids, which may have been more appropriate for the younger group.

To summarize the educational value of NetSmartz from the source itself:
NetSmartz offers a wide variety of multimedia educational resources for children of all ages and their trusted adults to help foster positive choices on- and offline. Parents and guardians, educators, and law enforcement can utilize innovative tools such as animated videos, community PowerPoint presentations, safety pledges, object lessons, and classroom activities at no cost from NetSmartz.org. Many of our materials are also available in Spanish to help meet the needs of Latino communities.

NetSmartz educational resources are specifically designed not to function as a traditional curriculum, but rather as adaptable tools which recognize the demanding curricula in today’s schools. Feedback from educators using NetSmartz in the classroom confirms that many prefer the flexibility of our program over other Internet safety curricula which require integration plans. Furthermore, our program resources adhere to nationally-mandated educational standards and utilize a variety of activities such as writing, role-playing, and drawing which appeal to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles all at once. NetSmartz is also aware of the evolving risks and issues to children on the Internet; therefore, our materials are constantly updated to reflect current trends and generational learning styles.

While television used to be the entertainment of choice for kids, particularly in the summer, it is now the Internet. As more and more kids access the Internet at school, and some with very little adult supervision, and we as educators take on more of the responsibility for disseminating information to students, this is one site that I would recommend to help promote Internet safety.

By Nancy Flynn 6/19/09

Resources:

Michelle Menillo, Educational Writer for Netsmartz Workshop.

You can view this website at www.netsmartz.org.

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This post is simply an open thank you to all of the teachers and those who work with children in public schools. This past week, we watched our youngest walk across the stage for high school graduation. Hers was a large class (over 500 graduates). As is the case with almost all graduations, we had to get to the site early and I got the chance to sit and watch the different parts of graduation unfold; from the band director leading the school orchestra, the JROTC color guard, and the exciting bustle of pregraduation activities.

I thought about how fortunate we are to be in a country where, even in this very difficult economic time, where we still have public schools, available to all children. Public schools where no matter what one's background, one is welcome to come learn, and prepare for one's life's work. This struck me when I read the names of the graduates, who, thankfully, come from many different backgrounds and areas of the world. I contrast that with discussions I have with friends who are in the military who are busy helping build schools and public places in some very difficult environs; where school is closed to many.

As I stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, I thought of all the teachers, school secretaries, school nurses, teacher assistants, custodians, bus drivers, and "food ladies", who work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that each of our children get the very best they can offer. I'm blessed by the fact that I have had the pleasure of watching both of our children grow up and flourish in public schools. Thank you to all who have directly and indirectly touched our children.

I watched our child walk quickly across the stage (after all, there were 500 plus graduates and they had to move quickly), and my mind raced through all of the people who have worked with her, pushed her, encouraged her to find her interests, nurture those interests, and supported her as she thought of the different options she had as a result of her hard work and studies. I smiled. She's decided to be a teacher.

Thanks to all,
Chris

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a whole post ready for my "official" LeaderTalk day last Friday but in the end I just couldn't bring myself to click "Publish." I was a little frustrated when I wrote it and I think it needs to simmer for a bit before it's ready for prime time.

Fast-forward to this morning and a great keynote from Karl Fisch about literacy in the 21st century. Karl said a lot of great things and challenged the thinking of a lot of people in the room. This led to some great conversations throughout the morning and throughout the day.

But Karl's talk got me thinking about my "unpublished" post. I've been spinning a lot of half-formed thoughts around in my head all morning and this is my attempt at putting them together in some quasi-cohesive form.

Most of us reading LeaderTalk and publishing our blogs are basically in agreement that school, in its current iteration, leaves something to be desired in terms of its ability to meet the individual needs of students in a way that doesn't look like an assembly line. Though the methods proposed to address this deficiency vary from blog to blog and person to person, there isn't a lot of disagreement that something needs to change.

The question I'm left with, then, is that with all of this ideology around how things should look, and all these great conversations "out there," how do we carry these conversations back to our schools? If we (the schools) are supposed to "be the change [we] want to see in the world," then how do we start talking about this change at the micro level in one school?

More pointedly, how do we have a real discussion about these real ideas that doesn't somehow degenerate into (a) "If the school/district would buy me a projector/computer/document camera, then I could do this stuff," or (b) "Let's talk about tardy policies and consequences for cell phone use..."?

Is this the majority of teachers? Probably not. Are these equipment and policy issues important? Sure. Are they the most important? Not to me.

Nonetheless, I would love to get beyond them in a way that doesn't sound like I'm minimizing the concerns of the teachers for whom these are the Big Issues Of The School.

My struggle right now is trying to frame these big ideas in a simple, straightforward way that is accessible to everyone and doesn't alienate any particular group of teachers. On the other hand, part of me feels like waiting around for buy-in from everyone means we're wasting a lot of time when we could be moving ahead.

I guess don't have a lot of answers, but I sure have a lot of questions.

--

Scott Elias
http://scottjelias.net

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It was recently reported that California Governor Arnold Swarzenegger has created a plan to phase out school textbooks and adopt digital textbooks. This notion is getting some traction in the United Kingdom.

Here is 17 year old high school student talking about just that. In the video, the student talks about creating ischools based on the iTouch. This kid's idea includes adopting digital textbooks among other things.

Ray Schroeder has a great information blog called Recession Realities in Higher Education. This is a great one-stop shop to stay updated on how the "global recession is changing realities for students, institutions, and faculty members."

Maybe the current financial crisis will force our pk-20 schools to become more creative in how we deliver content, how students interact with the content, and the teacher's role in the education process. Will there come a day when we look back at pictures and videos of students sitting in brick and mortar classrooms with textbooks in hand, listening to the teacher, taking notes (OK, maybe even some students throwing paper airplanes) and wonder 'what were we thinking?' Or will another 20-50 years pass and the experience Mr. Winkle will continue to be relevant.

Bill Moseley, the 2008 NECC button design winner had it right....who is here for this learning revolution?

Jayson Richardson

Posted by LeaderTalk at June 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)