August 2009 Archives

I think I have found a new vision, a new paradigm, a "New Story of Learning" in the 21st Century. It is creative and innovative. It is passionate and kind. It is natural and real. It leads me down a path to the truth and beauty of learning and the beauty and truth of humanity. It describes for me how we can learn to know, do, be, and live together. You will find all this in a book written by Stephanie Pace Marshall, The Power to Transform. Dr. Marshall is Founding President and President Emerita of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy®.

Dr. Marshall's language is so powerful and universal that is it not a story for educators only. It is a story that invites conversations, conversations among educators and people from every discipline and field of inquiry or human pursuit. The more perspectives the better.

So this post is a little different. It presents you with a digital tool called a VoiceThread. Many people, including students, teachers and other educators, are using this platform to invite participation. You have to register to use the VoiceThread at their website, but that is easy and although using it is fairly intuitive, there are tutorials on the website.

In the VoiceThread I've created below, you'll find seven quotes from the book, The Power to Transform. One quote per VoiceThread page, or "slide," is presented for you to read. Here's an example of what it looks like.

The 1st arrow points to the button you click to add your comment (text, audio, video, or file uploaded to the page). The 2nd arrow points to where you click to "turn the page" forward or backward.

You can participate in this "New Story of Learning" conversation by

- reading this VoiceThread,
- commenting on one or more pages,
- visiting Dr. Marshall's website for more information about the book and her work, and
- reading The Power to Transform.

Dennis Richards
Superintendent
Retired, but still a Learner & Teacher
dennisar at gmail dot com
innovation3.edublogs.org

This is cross posted on innovation3.edublogs.org.

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 6:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

School Administrators: As I am sure you are aware, hiring the best and brightest teachers for our schools is one of the most important responsibilities we have. But, hiring good people is really just the beginning. For our new, and often inexperienced teachers to be successful, we need to devote a lot of time, energy, and patience to ensure that they reach the potential you saw during the interview process. Below is a letter I have written to all new teachers out there who are excited, anxious, and scared out of their minds to start the school year.

Dear New Teachers,

Congratulations! You have survived the monotonous resume-writing and job application process, the nerve-wracking interviews, the reference and background checks, and the signing of a multitude of forms and papers. Now, you officially are a teacher! It is your dream come true. So what are you going to do to start off on the right foot and have a successful first year at your new school? Here is my top 10 list of ways to get you started toward a successful first year.

1. Learn as much about your new school and the community as possible. Search the internet, read local newspapers, and talk with people working in the area. Understand the needs, issues, problems, and strengths of the community. (Actually, you should have done this prior to interviewing, but if not, get going!)

2. Ask your principal or another administrator for a tour of the school. Don't be shy; ask questions. Then, spend some time alone in your new classroom. Just sit for a while and look around. Take pictures of the walls, furniture, technology, closets, shelves, and anything else you see. After a while, force yourself to go home. You can only spend so much time staring at blank walls and empty desks.

3. Start a list of questions, organized by the person who can best answer them (principal, mentor, teammate, department chair, secretary, custodian, etc.). Continue to add to the list and check off when you get answers.

4. Now start thinking of how you want to set up the room. Where will your desk go? How should the students' desks be arranged to best meet your style of teaching and the needs of the grade level? What should go on the walls - Teacher created stuff and/or student created stuff? Once you are back in the room, play around with the furniture and try different configurations (just don't scratch the newly waxed floors, it makes the custodians angry). Picture yourself teaching from different areas of the room. Envision students sitting in their desks. Where are they looking and what can they see? Ask yourself, "Is the room designed for teacher-centered instruction or for student-centered learning?"

5. In my opinion, you must have the classroom set up before you can focus on the lesson planning. Once the room is ready, a big weight will be lifted from your shoulders. Then, it will be time to dig into the curriculum. Start by collecting as many teaching materials and curriculum guides as you can find. Also, try to meet with one or all of your new teammates or your assigned mentor. Ask them questions related to teaching, but don't focus only on you. Get to know them personally as well as professionally. Meeting for coffee or lunch is a great way to get started.

6. For new elementary teachers, acquire a class list as soon as possible, and learn as much as possible about all of them before school starts. Find out who are on IEPs or 504s, who are in a gifted program, who are dealing with difficult issues at home, who are talented in activities outside of school and so on. Read through the cumulative files, old report cards, portfolios of work, and speak with other staff members. Most schools have some type of directory that lists the classes from the year before. Find out who your students' teachers were last year. Then, before the start of school, make a personal contact with each student. Either call them all or send a personal note in the mail. Don't send a form letter, make it personal in some way. Communicate with their parents, too!

7. For middle school or high school teachers, you probably will not be able to make a personal contact with each student, but you certainly can learn about them in the same manner as the elementary teachers.

8. As you start to plan for the first week of school, remember that your most important job is to establish effective routines and procedures in your classroom. The routines you set at the very beginning may stay all year, and negative or bad habits are very hard to change after the first few weeks of school. Clearly articulate what you expect from your students regarding their behavior, effort, work, and attitudes. Never assume that the children know how to be respectful and behave in your class. Teach them exactly what you expect, and then reteach and model it often, just like you would with an important curricular concept.

9. As you plan specific lessons, don't attempt to plan too far ahead until you really know your students and the curriculum. There will be a lot of adjusting and readjusting of lessons at first, so it is OK to plan one day at a time for a while. You still need to see into the future, and have goals for what you want to accomplish, but take the lesson planning slowly. Make your lessons very detailed and specific, and clearly spell out your objectives, guided and independent activities, and assessments just like you did in college. Eventually, you will be able to write shorter plans and still know exactly what you need to do, but it will take time and experience to get to that point. Finally, it never hurts to over-plan. Be prepared in case the lesson goes faster than you expected, or you need some back-up activities.

10. Finally - HAVE FUN! Be yourself, and let your students see you as a real person. Share some personal experiences you have had, and let your students into certain areas of your life that you are comfortable sharing with them (e.g. pets, family, hobbies, etc.). They will respect and appreciate you more, and they will be more willing to share themselves with you. Effective teaching is all about relationships. Build positive ones with your students.

Teachers, be ready for the realization that your first year of teaching (or the first year in a new school) will be nothing like your student teaching experiences. Accept that, be ready for successes and failures, and continue to learn along with your students every day. Remember, teaching is about "The Will and the Skill." Retain the will to be the best you can be and work hard to develop the skills necessary to be successful in the most important of professions.

Have a great school year!

Sincerely,

Dave Sherman

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 10:00 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

In today's tumultuous economy, we can hardly go a week without hearing of economic stimulus. We hear about the Cash for Clunkers  bill, U.S. bank bailouts, and corporate bonuses. The U.S. government even started a website called recovery.gov where a user can play with an interactive map to see where money was invested, peruse inspection reports, and explore tracking of funds.

For better or worse, it is fascinating to watch how the government has been when trying to address, deal with, and solve the crisis. Imagine if we, as a society, had this same sense of urgency about our education system. What types of stimulus efforts could be imagined and implemented if folks realized the crisis of the American education system? Here are some of my proposed bills:

• Create a set of pilot schools whose charge it is implement innovative uses of handheld devices like the i-Touch.

• Create a set of pilot schools where no websites are censored. This involves a educating students on finding appropriate sites and effective searching skills. Perhaps if hard research were available schools would realize how off the mark they are with blocking websites. (I know, imaging a world where kids can really access information at schools that is freely available to the rest of society.)

• Create a set of pilot schools to implement innovative uses of basic cell phones in schools. An easy idea is using the cell phone as a student response system. Sure some teachers are doing great things with this technology, but it is not widely accepted.

• Start a cash for clunker computers programs where schools get a rebate for turning in old, outdated computers for the purchase of new, powerful computers. The computers could be recycled to less fortunate families if they met minimum requirements.

•  Every school is allocated a technology coordinator for at least 2 years. This person would help teachers incorporated technology into their classes.

•  Provide funds where every superintendent and principal engages in professional development about technology, 21st Century skills, and global education. Perhaps a stellar set of online courses could be developed with the assistance of the best minds in the country and the world.

• Provide funds for educational games that engage students. This idea is based on Scott McLeod's blog post titled Do most educational games suck?

• Support and build on grassroots educational stimulus projects. There are so many interesting stories about grassroots economic stimulus projects. My favorites includes the 3/50 Project and the 10% Shift. What if every community business gave back 1% of their sales to schools and/or educational initiatives? What if community members donated 2 hours a month to local schools and local school initiatives? What if we, as a society, made concerted efforts to give back to the education system?   

I am sure there are tons of innovative ideas out there that need a 'stimulus' to get off the ground. How bad do U.S. schools need to fail to convince the government that our education system is in a recession? Do we need to wait until an entire generation of students graduate without the necessary skills and dispositions to contribute to a knowledge and innovation society? What will be education's stimulus to innovate?

Jayson Richardson
University of North Carolina Wilmington

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 6:00 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

The potential of emerging technologies and the philosophy behind web 2.0 to transform the learning environment continues to excite me, but there is a need to create new mindsets instead of presenting examples, ideas, and presentations based upon traditional and old mindsets of their use, a retro-fitting or "old way, new tool" approach.

As Knobel and Lankshear (2008) state, "it is very easy to find examples where teachers and administrators approach new technologies in ways that constitute these new technologies as simply more recent forms of established tools, rather than as constitutive elements of new ways of doing things and new ways of being" (p. 54).

It is exactly those types of examples that we must avoid using as models, and the reason we should value collectively discussing and building principles and guidelines that allow user to maximize the potential of these emerging technologies. However, there are numerous concerns often expressed when this collective approach is raised: There are no rules, Stifle creativity and innovations, and Just starting points.

There are No Rules!

One argument is that emerging technologies in particular web 2.0 in education have no rules or one right way. Sure! Use the technologies in any manner that makes sense. Use a blog as a discussion board? To post assignments? To have students respond to prompts? Use a wiki for document storage? as a class website? Fine!

As professionals, teachers makes choices based upon classroom and student needs, which is to be commended.
However, these shouldn’t be modeled or celebrated as revolutionary as many fail to capture the soul of participatory learning and the philosophy of web 2.0.

Think of this from outside the realm of technology such as cooperative learning. We honor and value that teachers utilize this instructional strategy in many different ways, but we also recognize effective, less than effective, and poor uses of the strategy. In fact, if we compared effective cooperative classrooms versus less than effective classroom, similar themes and approaches would emerge that set the two apart. Should we not leverage these themes and approaches? Should we scream there are no rules and thus not use our findings to formulate guidelines and ideas for teachers new to the approach? For me, Johnson and Johnson along with a master teacher who excelled at cooperative learning that made the difference between me just putting students in groups and calling it cooperative learning, and facilitating the creation of a collaborative environment.

Saying and accepting there are no rules removes the responsibility of quality and places the focus on quantity.

Don’t get me wrong. We don't need rules or standardization!

However, we need to work collectively to create learner-centered models as well as core principles that maximize the potential of emerging technologies instead of settling for entry level, tool centered and sometimes teacher centered uses of emerging technologies. After all, aren't we striving to create new, more powerful learning environments?

Isn't it time to create fluid and flexible principles that serve as guides towards powerful uses of emerging technologies? Isn't it time to stop being afraid to challenge thinking, ask difficult questions, facilitate discussions, debate successful strategies, define current trends, showcase complex uses of emerging technologies? Isn’t it time to leverage research, theory, and practitioner narrative?

Principles Prevent Innovation and Creativity

In college, Dr. McBride used discussion boards to extend the depth and breadth of our thinking. His excellent approach was a model and provided guidelines for my classroom. While the asynchronous approach of the discussion board was meeting many needs, I still wasn't seeing the changes within the physical space that I hoped would occur from the confidence gained in the digital. Thus, wired discussions were born!

Did I follow guidelines, best practices (gasp!), rules, and models when I started using discussion boards. Sure! I explored transformative uses, modified for my students, and tweaked with practitioner (students/teachers) feedback, current research, and theory. This allowed me to start with a powerful experience.

However, these guidelines didn't prevent me from thinking what could be done better. It didn't stifle my creativity and innovation.

Finding new and better ways of doing things is part of being a thinker and an innovator. In the future, we surely will use emerging technologies in ways we have not considered. These advances should be embraced and encouraged. That is why tbe development of models, guidelines, and principles should be less fixed, more fluid and open to ensure these evolve with society, innovations, and the technologies.

Teachers Need Starting Points

Most emerging technologies are deceptively simplistic and offer easy entry points. There are those that claim many teachers fear technology so letting them do anything just to get them using technology is the best approach. If that entry point is retro-fitting past practices and teacher-centered, we need to think closely about this approach and its low hanging fruit.

Is this entry point needed to move forward? Probably.

However, what are we doing to push and pull teachers in order to shift their mindsets and get beyond this entry level? Are we helping the teachers to understand the full spectrum of possibilities? Or, are we leaving these teachers to proclaim their use of web 2.0 technologies and remain at that starting point?

We do a disservice to those we hope will infuse said technology into the classroom to transform learning when we provide entry points as models of excellence and allow those to serve as the guidelines to follow in the classroom. Should these options be provided? I guess. But, I'd present these as an early entry point but be sure to focus their and my energy on transformational and innovative uses of emerging technologies as strategies and classroom foundations not isolated tools.

We should embrace these entry points but speak honestly that it is just that, a starting point not models of effective use.

So?

While the use of emerging technologies is increasing, the focus needs to be on the difference it is making in student achievement and engagement. Thus, how are emerging technologies being infused within the classroom in connection with social practices and notions of current/future generation of learners? How are you developing principles and guidelines for emerging technologies using research, theory, and practitioner narratives? Are we perpetuating the old rather than engaging these technologies as means of reinventing education in a powerful manner? When will powerful models begin to develop for others to use as inspiration and motivation?

Networks and communities should consider collectively building fluid principles, creating new mindsets, and providing guidelines for establishing powerful learning environments that maximize emerging technologies. It is easy to avoid these conversations using rationales like the ones here and because it requires honest, difficult discussions. Is it right to avoid these conversations? Are we being too nice or simply afraid to be honest professionals with a common goal of student achievement? After all, the real potential of the digital in schools will be realized when emerging technologies and the current social phenomenon are leveraged in a learner-centered, multi-dimensional learning space NOT when the emerging technologies are leveraged in a traditional, teacher or tool-centered manner.

Just Thinking Out Loud,
Ryan Bretag

Reference

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2006). New Literacies. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As leaders, we often know what is the right thing to do. Just to pick a few examples…

• We know that ongoing, formative progress monitoring is more appropriate than ‘data days’ or ‘data retreats’ for yearly summative data, and yet many schools still only do the latter.
• When it comes to positive organizational and/or academic impact, we know that the ‘sit-and-get’ professional development model typically is a complete waste of participants’ time and organizational resources.
• Under any reasonable scenario planning forecast, it’s quite clear that the world is going to be quite technological and globally-interconnected, yet we continue to ignore that fact in most schools.
• Under any reasonable scenario planning forecast, it’s quite clear that schooling and/or learning and/or assessment are going to be much more personalized and invidividualized than they are now, and yet few school organizations are preparing themselves for these new ways of doing things.

We’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to be out in front, leading the way. And yet the organizations that we supposedly ‘lead’ are so very far behind in so many areas. We like to point fingers; it’s easy for us to do so and ignore our own culpability.

As leaders, when are we going to own the fact that much (most?) of it is us? Why is it so hard for us to do the right thing?

Scott McLeod
Dangerously Irrelevant

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 11:44 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

I checked the Houston Chronicle website this morning as I always do on Sundays and I was pleasantly surprised to see an article/interview with one of our local high school principals who achieved great success with her school this year.

Jane Crump, the principal highlighted in this article, is also one of my closest friends and I know that the success of the students and teachers in her school are a reflection of her leadership style. She was selected last summer to lead the 10th-12th grade campus at a high school that the state had designated as being in need of restructuring after several years of unacceptable academic ratings. As the article on the Houston Chronicle states, in one year she took the campus from "unacceptable" to "recognized" -- completely skipping the "acceptable" rating and earning the second-highest academic rating given to schools by the state.

I can't begin to list all of the things that she did this past year to get the school to move up two ratings, but I can tell you the leadership qualities that she possesses that enabled her to achieve this success:

-- She has sincere love for children and for their individual success
-- She believes strongly in supporting teachers and doing everything to help them be successful
-- She hires strong leaders for her leadership team
-- She knows what good instruction looks like and feels like in the classroom (she was an excellent classroom teacher herself)
-- She knows how to create a positive and nurturing school culture and climate
-- She sets high expectations for everyone -- including herself
-- She relies on a support network of other strong school leaders (her own PLN)
-- She views the students as if each one were her own child and she works hard to create a learning environment that she would want for her own child
-- She celebrates success often
-- She "feeds" her faculty and staff (literally and emotionally)
-- She works hard to maintain a positive attitude even when the odds are against her
-- She mentors and supports others on her staff to be leaders and she supports shared/distributed leadership

I am sure that many of those qualities are familiar to all of you who have read any of the books and resources on effective leadership. The difference for me is that I rarely see ALL of these qualities in one person, and I rarely see these expressed through genuine actions rather than just through words and "mission statements." She lives these qualities. I truly wish we could clone her for the many schools that need effective leadership.

Jane -- my hat is off to you and your successful students! All of you worked very hard this year and it paid off. I wish you the very best success and continued improvement in the 2009-2010 school year!

Stephanie Sandifer
Blogs: Change Agency and Young Readers
Author of “Wikified Schools”

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 3:14 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend