I want to spend my $.02 today talking about choice. It's Independence Day in the states, with an emphasis of freedom, but an underlying message that this gives one the ability to choose. It does not, however, provide the motivation to do so. And today, I specifically want to respond to Scott McLeod's call for leadership in technology because what I see all too often is a lack of leadership in this area. There is no choice to be professional.

Shall we talk about what it means to be a professional educator/role model in the 21^st century?

Does this include reflection on one’s practice? Does it include collaboration with other educators? Would the description entail something to do with continual professional development and intellectual curiosity? Staying current with best practices? Might it involve the integration of technology into lessons? Does being “professional” mean that you do whatever it takes to help students reach the standards---putting student learning at the heart of every decision you make, from the posters on your walls to the words you use in talking with students about their work?

I am fortunate to have developed an extensive personal learning network over the last few years. I’ll have tens of thousands of visitors to my site this year who will help me shape my personal reflections on my professional life. I have regular daily contact with superintendents, principals, technology leaders, teachers, and others not only in Washington state, but around the world. These contacts supply me with a constant stream of updated information for the classroom---whether they are new technologies or new applications for the classroom. In this ongoing collaborative network, kids come first. There are continual questions about how best to meet the needs of all learners and a supportive attitude of making things happen.

The real world of my school district is not so “professional” in this sense. If reflection is important, then where are the blogs of administrators? Why is it okay for one of our building principals to refer to those who use social networking as "freaky." To our district technology "leaders"---I don’t see you on Twitter or a Ning. Do you not believe in the technology you represent? Where is your role modeling for others? When will there be trainings available for teachers on social networking tools as opposed to just Microsoft wares?

Where is your leadership? How do you justify to parents the inequity of access to 21st century skills you are developing in their children? No wikis, no blogs, no nings, no cell phones, no GoogleDocs, no streaming media, no right-click options on computer mice. The big list of "No!" goes on and on. When will you realize that technology is not just "stuff" like document cameras and projectors used as no more than glorified overhead projectors? When will you step up to the plate and be leaders?

I know how easy it must be to dismiss these tools. You think you have the very convenient excuse that you're too busy...that there's no time. And yet I see evidence of other administrators in the US and Canada making time to blog, participate on Twitter or a Ning, or use a wiki to support professional development. I applaud their interest in choosing to be professional...in choosing to model intellectual curiosity...to do what's best for kids. I know our "leadership" attends various conferences and meetings, but so far, there are no district leaders here who create content and present to others. How do you expect those who work for you to believe that you are learning when you only absorb what you can from others and do nothing to show your thinking and application? We don't accept this level of effort from kids in our classrooms---why should it be okay for you to model that it is?

Has anyone else notices the lack of district level information services people in Classroom 2.0 discussions? I see blogs by school board members, teachers, building principals, state leaders, students, and district personnel. I see none by school IT people. There are one or two of these gatekeepers in most districts who ensure 21st century tools stay out of the hands of teachers and students, yet they do not seem to participate in any sort of way with the rest of us who are on-line. I find it odd that there is no apparent interest on their part. Is this what leadership in technology should look like?

The graphic for the post today comes from Married to the Sea. They published it earlier this week and it seemed fitting to use it today. And while this post has become a rant of sorts, I can't emphasize enough that those who are in leadership roles have made the choice to be there, with all of the associated responsibilities and privileges. Maybe it's time you stepped up and showed that you should earn the right to be called professional.

Labels: technology

One of the things I like best about the internet is the diversity of readily available source material. I look at lots of information everyday from blogs to news items to Flickr pools. And while there is an author behind each piece who is trying to make some sense of a particular idea, from my "user" state, I get the fun part of seeing connections between the disparate pieces. And this week, it was an article in Newsweek (US) and the London Times (UK) that had the nice jive. In this case, both are about children and how adults (at least in western cultures) are reacting to them.

Newsweek poses the question Does Having Children Make You Happy? And the answer, which is likely not a surprise to anyone, is No. In fact, one study found that "no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

Is it possible that American parents have always been this disillusioned? Anecdotal evidence says no. In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose—to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison's Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive.

It is not a far stretch to assume that parenting itself has changed, as well as how we view children. We don't look at toddlers now and wonder how soon we can get them out doing chores. But the London Times thinks that we are treating our children too much like Little Emperors. Perhaps children are too much seen and heard these days. Now, there is a "backlash against the all-must-have-prizes culture that has produced children used to getting their own way. As parents, we are encouraged to nurture our children’s sense of 'self,' but are we unwittingly doing them more harm than good?"

It’s a wonder more teachers aren’t driven out of the profession by parents bombarding them with e-mails, phone calls and requests for meetings. “Students told me what they ‘felt’ about a novel,” he recalled. “I tried, ever so gently, to tell them no one cared what they felt. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to – but did not – write, ‘Too much love in the home’.”

Both articles are focused on home and family, but I wonder what the lessons are for schools. There are some examples of schools going overboard on self-esteem concerns (certificates for toddlers who sit still, school plays where everyone gets to be Snow White and no one has to be the witch, nursing schools which offer counseling in case it is stressful for students to come in contact with sick patients), but I have to think that these are few and far between. One hears or reads the odd story in the edusphere which supports this. Those are mostly limited to the rare helicopter parent or the awards assembly where everyone gets something. Kindergarchy tactics do not seem to have deeply infiltrated public schools. At least not yet. I'm not sure that in a standards-based environment that they will. No matter how much praise you give a child, if they can't read or do math, they're not going to graduate from high school...even if it hurts their feelings. Still, I have to think that educators---especially at the elementary level where most examples seem to be---need to be vigilant about what is reasonable for developing children.

Labels: parents, students

Last year, I worked with a school that was in the midst of re-centering itself. It's all too easy in the midst of the Death by 1000 Mandates governing us to remember why it is that we choose to be in the classroom---much less think about the future and what we want our schools to be.

I asked the staff to consider three questions: What happens? What matters? What matters most?

They wrote their answers into three concentric rings like this:




The outer ring contained all sorts of ideas about the school day (what happens). The middle ring was meant to focus ideas a bit---our of all the things that happen in a given day, which of those matter? Finally, the center ring was to capture what mattered the most out of everything. People from all walks of school participated and, as you might imagine, a range of answers were generated.

With their permission, I organized the information for them. I chose to use tag clouds. I could have used a graph instead---we could have counted how many people mentioned "parents" or "data." But I don't think it would have had the same impact as the clouds. I used TagCrowd for generating the visuals because it allowed me to put in my own text (most cloud services use URL or other on-line data).

Here is What Happens:


Here is What Matters:


Here is What Matters Most:



You can click on any of the graphics to make them bigger (and more readable). If you're unfamiliar with this sort of graphic representation, all you need to know is that the bigger and bolder the font, the more times the idea was mentioned by the staff.

I have to say that "What happens?" is my favourite. It's this delightful snapshot of a school day---everything from the pledge of allegiance in the morning to kids tipping over chairs to the after school safety patrol groups. There is a certain sense of cacophony to visual. You get a real sense that life in the school is "noisy" and that you are pulled a hundred different directions. It's also interesting to me to see how not only does that noise get dialed back as you progress through the visuals, but the things which garnered the most attention for "What happens?" are not the same things that matter the most. This served as a great jumping off point for talking about why there was this disparity and what we could do about it.

I have to say that it was one of my most favourite staff development activities that I've ever done. I think the visual was powerful in allowing everyone on staff to have a voice in the process and to see it reflected in the work they did together. I am hoping to have an opportunity to use a similar process in the future. There are so many new ways to visualize data, from microcharts to infoporn (safe to click---it's just about where the calories are in grocery stores) to motion graphs. We need to find ways to bring these to the classroom and staff room. They make the stories of our schools come alive and are more than worth 1000 numbers in what they communicate.

Labels: staff development, technology

I have a friend who was courted to become part of the Dark Side and be paid to work part-time in a supporting role for secondary science. He is a fantastic and passionate teacher who cares greatly about standards and good instruction. You'd be hard pressed to find a better role model for other science teachers. But he is also smart enough to realize that he can do more for kids by being in the classroom. That until district administration is willing to have guts enough to insist that science teachers teach to the standards in a high-quality way, there's no point in him talking to anyone. People will do as they please (which is what happens now) until someone holds them to their obligations.

When I read Teaching on the Titanic over at Elbows, Knees, and Dreams, I was reminded of the situation here. Over the last few years, I've seen plenty of good teachers who opened their doors and minds to greater collaboration and collegiality only to discover that it was not as rewarding professionally as just doing the best they can within their own classrooms. The level that they are willing to give to others was not returned in kind. They thought they were reaching out to support more students by working more closely with peers...only to discover that differing levels of commitment doomed it all. They opened their doors. Now they're closing them. As a teacher, you only have so much energy. You can only "save" so many kids. You make the classroom your lifeboat and hang the rest because it's too frustrating to have uninvolved peers and uncaring administration. If you have to make a choice between kids you can make a difference with and peers that you can't, it's easy to see why they've picked students.

Labels: teachers

Two different blog posts caught my eye last week and got me thinking once again about the perfect storm of factors that leads to student achievement. First up is Jenny D., who---much to my delight---is blogging again now that her pesky PhD is out of the way. She points the way to some Good Research examining why some small school programs have led to better results than others. She notes from the study that "a good small high school also needs the right type of leadership and a cohesive and collaborative group of teachers interested in working to improve instruction" and wonders if the "small" part is really that important of a factor. Meanwhile, over at Joanne Jacobs, it is noted that it's the culture of a class, not its size, that makes a difference for student achievement. Her source is based on anecdotal evidence, unlike Jenny's, but they are both getting at the same idea: it's the "right" mix of people in a classroom that make magic happen.

This is all well and good to note, but my question is, "Can it be replicated?"

I've had close to 90 different groups of students over the years. And even if I think about those groups which were studying the same thing (e.g. "biology"), I can't think of any who were identical in nature. The dynamics of every class are different. I'm different every year and every class period as my energy ebbs and flows. Probably every teacher has a story of how the presence of one single child could completely change the tone of a classroom---either for better or worse.

Educational research will likely get better at describing the general classroom level factors which lead to improved student achievement, but no one is going to be able to determine the recipe for bottling and selling it. We can do all we can to implement best practices, use strong curriculum, and valid assessments...but at the heart of it all are people. And small people at that. Young people with their own home lives to make sense of and development to deal with. That doesn't excuse schools from providing the very best they can and holding high expectations for every child. It's just a recognition that at some point, we have to acknowledge the limitation in all of our research is that we're talking about human beings.

Labels: schools

Many edubloggers are in San Antonio this week attending the NECC conference. Perhaps next year I'll make my way to the extravaganza in D.C., but this year, I'm going to content myself with watching the discussion on Twitter and participating in a fringe way. First up is Blocked Blogs Week. It begins today and runs through Saturday, July 5.

If you're reading this, count yourself lucky. In many school districts, blogs and other web 2.0 tools are blocked. It doesn't take much time looking around the edusphere to gauge the continual frustration teachers have.

The purpose of Blocked Blogs week is "To promote awareness of the need for more informed filtering of the Read/Write Web for all learners. We recognize that some material on the internet is not appropriate and in some cases is harmful to children and adolescents. However, we are opposed to blanket bans on all Read/Write Web resources such as blogs, wikis, and some social networking tools. Read/Write Web resources provide valuable and necessary experience with 21st Century communication and collaboration tools, and we believe that it is in the best interests of our learners if we take the time to TEACH them how to use these tools appropriately, safely, effectively, and efficiently rather than just block their use altogether."

Does this describe you? Do you believe that information literacy is important to our children? Do you find the ignorant use of filters in your district to be over the top---especially knowing that other schools and districts are better serving the children in their classrooms? Post your thoughts this week. I would especially encourage you to participate in the leadership call-out scheduled for July 4 and headed up by Scott McLeod.


Want a button for your blog? You can find them on the wiki for Blocked Blogs Week or you might use another graphic from Adrian Bruce like the one at the right.

In a recent comment on this blog, someone mentioned that we don't merely warn our children about the dangers of street traffic and then send them out to cross a highway. We hold their hands. We walk with them. We show them how to be safe. The same should be true for internet traffic.

You might have seen a recent study about the Educational Benefits of Social Networking Sites:

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university's College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential."

Isn't this what we should want for our classrooms? The NEA and AFT recently worked on identifying the gaps and gains in educational technology. Their findings revealed "that although all educators and students in public schools have some access to computers and the Internet, we have few assurances that they are able to use technology effectively for teaching and learning." The use of filtering software is creating serious issues of equity for students across the United States. Have a look at these examples of Classroom 2.0 in practice? Can you do these things with your students in your classrooms? I can't. Which of our kids are going to be better prepared for the working world in a few years? When will purposeful reflection by teachers be seen as professional and not scandalous?

Will a series of posts about greater access to technology cause a tear down of filtering software akin to the Berlin Wall? Not likely. However, it's time to start raising general public awareness. It's time that business owners and corporations realized that one or two people in school districts are impeding skill development of future workers. It's time that parents and families realized that a Big Brother mentality is eroding the rights of our students to share their thoughts with authentic audiences. It's time to let politicians and policy makers know that their intents for equitable education are not being realized in all places due to uneven use of filtering software. It's time to get loud.

Labels: blogging, technology

No matter how tech savvy I get, I don't believe that paper and pencil will ever be replaced. There is something about the experience of writing with those tools---the way the paper looks, the feel of the graphite sliding over it, the smell of the cedar in the pencil. Although typing allows me to convey my ideas (once formed) more quickly, I almost always need that concrete experience of writing first as a way to just brainstorm ideas. Paper captures random thoughts better than other media. I have a little Levenger notebook like the one shown at the left. It's small enough to carry in hand or slip into a purse so that it's always available. I always have so many projects going that I like the idea of being able to jot down ideas and reminders as they come. I never know when I'm going to have time to think, much less organize those thoughts.

I really liked this article on The Paper Version of the Web when I saw it earlier in the week. Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr Places, and more all started out as sketches---simpler communications as people shared and refined ideas before building them. But, we rarely see this part of the development process. On the right there is a sketch for the proposed word processing program for the one laptop per child project. There are many more interesting photos of sketches posted with the article. It is the modern version of a cabinet of curiosity: relics and whimsy all mixed together.

Most of my original notes wind up in the trash because, really, who cares what they were? But perhaps there is something metacognitive I could do with them. Might they convey how to move a process along? Below are my stages as I prepare for my grading workshop a month from now. The first is just scrawls. These were my original notes, scribbled as I thought of things. This page was intended as no more than a place to capture ideas over a few days...a holding tank of sorts. Perhaps as my students worked on an assignment and I had a thought about the presentation, I would jot the information here. (If you're interested in getting a closer look, you can click on any of the images to enlarge them.)

At the next stage, I'm a bit more serious. When I'm not in a hurry and am making a concerted effort to plan, my handwriting actually becomes legible. The next two pictures represent my attempt to take the random thoughts I'd had and make something useful. The little numbers to the left of some of the bullets represent the time I planned to allot and the circled numbers represent the final order of the agenda I chose. You'll see that there are some "Activity?" queries in the margins. This is meant to remind me that I want participants to be doing something with these ideas here---it shouldn't be me yapping at them. I have other notes in the margins. They are things I thought of later and wanted to include in the final version. You'll even see my notes about the graphs I shared yesterday. The only alterations to these pictures that I have made is to "paint" over two student names. As these were my notes, I included them as reminders to me. Now that I am sharing them with a wider audience, I need to protect my kids.
























Finally, we have a further refinement of the first parts of the workshop. It contains more details for me regarding discussion questions to use. There are more pegs to hang ideas on. Even the elements on this page are likely to change in the final draft; however, once I get to this point in the process, I'm able to set the ideas aside and focus on other things. I know that if something happened and I didn't get to have one more iteration of revision, I would still be able to take this and make it work just fine.

























There you have it. A bit of my own process for you. What are you using to organize your ideas?

Labels: technology