Eduholic

I’ve been invited to give the talk of my life in eighteen minutes to a group of 36 teacher researchers at Annandale Terrace Elementary School on the topic of teachers writing for publication.

Serving grades PK-5, Annandale Terrace is a Title I school with 675 kids. 85% are English language learners and over 50% are eligible for free or reduced lunch. In some ways, this is the opposite school from where I teach now. So why me?

It’s Josie’s fault. (Loyal readers will recall that I taught a class for George Mason a couple summers ago to help teacher researchers and other educators write for publication. “Voices from the Classroom” was a short-lived but fruitful attempt to help Emmet’s Eleven tell teacher tales. Josie, a Gifted and Talented specialist from ATES, ultimately published a story about “Why Johnny Can’t Persevere – Using ThinkFun Games to Develop Strategies and a Can-Do Attitude” in a math magazine for teachers. )

Josie, like other teachers at this school, is highly motivated to make a positive difference in the lives of needy kids. Judging by many indicators including meeting “adequate yearly progress” goals, they are successful in doing so. One reason is that more than 60% of the faculty does teacher research.

When more than half your teachers regularly engage in a systematic and rigorous process of inquiry about their own teaching, using the kids in their room and the work those kids produce as evidence, something’s up.

The instigator and the guy who invited me to present is Mark Smith, the school’s technology guru. In addition to helping teachers learn to integrate technology into their lessons, Mark has nurtured a culture of reflective practice in and beyond his school by supporting teacher researchers and maintaining a wiki called clairvoy that lets teachers share their best ideas.

Mark doesn’t just tell teachers, “First push this button.” Instead he gives hoopla tent revivals (his words) about how idea-mapping software like Inspiration can be used, then sets them loose. How come so many teachers at your school do TR? I asked Mark.

It makes them better, he explained, and provides the tools for research-based interventions. Research begets research, which after a while changes the tenor of copy room chat. It becomes easy to get 5 articles on a topic because everybody knows about databases and current research. This let’s people fix the hardest problem in their classroom, which might otherwise get ignored. “We have a great relationship with the professional library at Sprague center,” he adds.

When I asked Mark for more details about the sort of presentation he wanted, he pointed me to TED.com. Apparently, every year a bunch of smart people get together in Monterey to talk about the Big Picture. A good example is this speech by an innovator named Ken Robinson from the 2006 conference in which he speaks about creativity and how schools squash it.

Sir Ken (knighted, apparently) argues that people are afraid to take risks and make mistakes, and schools reinforce this by teaching us to worry more about being right than creative. He laments that academic ability has become our definition of intelligence; consequently, creative people who aren’t good at school are stigmatized.

With a delivery as understated as his plain but probably really expensive sweater, Robinson challenges us to rethink intelligence based on the idea that it’s diverse (visual, sound, abstract, movement, kinesthetic), dynamic and not compartmentalized (he defines creativity as having original ideas that have value), and distinct (asks how people discover their talents).

I’m sharing all this because it made sense, and because I’m still trying to figure out how to give a “TED.com kind of speech.” Mark asked me to “go to the 60,000 foot level” on my topic. “Give the GMU course in 18 minutes,” he clarified. Not just how to publish, but why publish? Beyond a pat on the back, or moving your career forward, what is it good for? Include where to find the info that you need to start, Mark says. Not phone #s to editors or low-level how-to, but more the topography of the landscape.

Easy, huh? Stay tuned. I’ll let you know what I see from way up there. And what happened when I jumped.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I thought teaching only two English classes a day would give me more time, but somehow I feel twice as busy as when I taught a full load. Here are a few things that keep stealing my attention away from the partially graded stack of mock application essays on my desk.

International Day Rehearsal
103 flags in a row, and a kid to go with each one (in most cases, one tall enough to hold the flag unfurled so it doesn’t brush the floor). Then a cadenced march across the gym floor to stand in orderly rows spilling off the stage. Next, run throughs for fashion and talent shows, complete with a slightly frantic teacher, a semi-functioning sound system, and a gaggle of cross-legged kids fidgeting on the hardwood until it’s their turn to morph into whirling Indian dancers or musical savants at piano.

Website redesign
Enter a darkened office where the rep from the company that’s going to give our online presence a facelift sits along with a changing cast of school characters, all of us staring at the projected screen of his laptop as he tours sample sites and clicks through an endless array of forms to define the specs. The high end talk is cool: what sort of experience does a student, a parent, or an alum want at our website? What do we wish we could do online that we can’t do right now? The nitty gritty boils down to details like, “3.34.3. Number of Search Columns… okay, you can have 1-5 columns here. I recommend 3. Is everyone okay with 3?”

Fire Alarm
Montage (thoughts and walkie-talk): Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a fire drill scheduled? I’ll sweep the first floor, you sweep the second. Wait, this isn’t a drill? All clear on the lower level. Why did this have to happen today? Is the fire department here yet? Is that worker running into the building? Hold on, I’m checking the boiler room. Man, it smells steamy in here. Confirmed, we had an issue in the boiler room. Glad this guy is okay! On my way to the alarm box now. Should I have reset this thing or will this fire captain do it? All clear, everybody back in.

New Uniforms
Skorts, Peter-Pan collars, front-button cardigans… a world of gradeschool chic has opened up to me as I select and codify a new school uniform for next year. Sharpening our brand on the school’s 70th anniversary has turned into a far more challenging task than I originally anticipated. Fashion forward planning is only half the battle: there’s the pitch to parents, coordinating the roll-out, rewriting the handbook. And all that’s before the first kid shows up with his new shirt untucked. One unexpected benefit is that our Director of Development and I have both mastered the document review function in Word 2007.

New Languages
Strategic planning committees are looking at what we do well and where we can improve, and one of the answers to both is foreign languages. My colleague, Suzanne, and I speakerphone with a board member to brainstorm. Can we offer foreign language instruction in grades before 1st ? What other languages, besides the French and Spanish and smattering of Latin we have already, should we consider offering? Is the IB Middle Years Program for us? How about Mandarin immersion for summer school? By the end of the conversation, I’ve got a page of scribbled notes that look vaguely like English, and the task of writing up a proposal for an upcoming board retreat.

Kid Stuff
In the midst of my busy week, kids keep doing silly and not so silly things like getting their feelings hurt, planning a school-wide mock election, skipping homework assignments to play in the big soccer game, making tombstones for a character from a book in English class, spraying Axe in the locker bank, and… well, you get the idea. The stuff kids do at school, day in and day out. Never a dull moment, that’s for sure. If there were, I’d get the rest of those essays graded.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

This morning one of our second grade teachers was sick, and I had to cover her class for an hour. After a rushed tutorial from the other second grade teacher I found myself in front of a class of people a lot littler than the ones I’m used to teaching.

“Good morning, boys and girls,” I said. They looked at me expectantly. “Do you remember my name?”
“You’re Emmet Rosenfeld, Dean of Students,” said one rather observant boy, eyeing the red nametag on my lapel. “We met you on the first day of school!” It was true that I had addressed the student body at convocation.
“Where’s our teacher?” called a few others.

I explained the situation, and told them that I might need a little help to do things the right way. Their morning work was to finish up pumpkin poems using their best handwriting. The boy who knew my name helped me find the laminated card to change the day on the board, and told me that when they were done with their work it was handed in on the orange chair in the front of the room.

While they were working I called roll from the pizza list. Each student told me how many slices of cheese or pepperoni they wanted this Friday. Then it was time for language arts.

The other teacher had pulled up a few slides on the smartboard for today’s topic, consonant blends. First, there was a blank screen with draggable letters at the bottom. Volunteers came to the board to create common blends, pushing t’s and h’s together with their fingers. This turned into a bit of game in itself: What letter can you add to “ct” to make a word? Act became actor, then action.

That was it! Next was a word list. Instead of just reading them out loud, I paired the kids up and whispered a word from the list to each pair. They had to think of a way to silently act the word out, and the rest of us would guess. Stripe, scrub… skit by skit, partners shared the spotlight.

Two boys who sat near each other in the front and hadn’t seemed all that interested in their pumpkin poems took the stage. One started lifting his arms like a monster, the other teetering around on an imaginary cane. Grand!

Next came a couple slides with brain teasers: What word starts with /tr/ and ends with the vowel sound from “cool”? Calling out answers instead of raising hands was a challenge here, but again it was clear that the figuring out “True” was the fun part.

On to “grab a scrap,” where all the kids filed over to the recycle bin for something to write on. The teacher’s manual offered a list of words that started with “sand.” Beneath it was a column of words created by replacing consonants at the beginning or the end of the word above. Another chance for a game.

“Please write ‘sand’ at the top of your scrap,” I said.
“Now, below that, turn the ‘s’ into a consonant blend and write a word to describe what I’m doing right now, and you’re not.”

There were a few raised eyebrows. I was near the orange chair at the front of the room, so I sat in it for a minute, and then stood up as I repeated the clue.
“OH!” said one or two kids, and scribbled the new word under the first word. Evie raised her hand so energetically she almost came off her chair.
“STAND!” she exclaimed, to a chorus of “Oh, yeahs.”

“Next,” I said, “add a consonant blend at the end, to make a word that I need to mail a letter.”
Another round of hemming and hawing, excited scribbling, and frantic hand waving.
“Stamp,” asserted a shy girl in the back. And so went the game, with several more clues and lots more ahas.

By this time, my shift was almost done. “I understand you have book buddies coming to visit,” I asked the class. “How do we get ready?”

As the name tag reader explained the drill, most of the kids were already on their way to backpacks or shelves to get the stories they would read with little pals from Junior Kindergarten. In the excitement of their arrival, I slipped away, back to my dreary office to clear the stack of emails from the inbox.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)