Month: September 2013

144/365 In a Rush to Help, Perhaps We’re Missing the Opportunity to Serve

It’s rush week in Boulder as I’m guessing it is or recently was on college campuses around the U.S.

Given the recent floods, this means the flood relief stations are filled with fraternity and soroity members and potential members.

I’m sorry, did I say flood relief stations? I meant Starbucks and beer pong tournaments.

To be clear, I have no beef with the Helenic system or any of its offshoot. One of my sisters joined a sorority when she was in undergrad, and I have no doubts her sisters were a support mechanism when life got difficult.

Still, I cannot shake the coincidence and lack of overlap of these two events.

Curious, I’ve started looking at the webpages of local chapters and their national organizations. Though I haven’t reviewed them all, I’ve yet to find a fraternity or soroity that doesn’t profess a committment to philanthropy. Taken together, they provide a laundry list of charitable causes and events, many connected to national non-profits.

I wonder, though, what it might be like if these brothers and sisters replaced this year’s rush events and said, instead, to their potential pledges, “We are doing away with the pomp and circumstance this year. Our community and its neighbors are in need, and we are about family and service. We are about pulling together in times of need.” Instead of some of the events I’ve seen around Boulder, what if these organizations carpooled to those areas most affected by the recent floods and said, “You have all the time we can spare.”

I can think of no greater test of the mettle of those hoping to join, and no greater example of the kinds of organizations they hope to attend.

Of course, this is no different than those systems with which I’m most familiar.

A student arrives at school, is tested in a subject, say reading, and found wanting. The school moves to act in the ways they’ve planned in the flowchart of approved interventions. “This kid needs to read,” they say, “We will follow our plan to help the reading occur.”

Perhaps, though, there are more immediate needs than can be accounted for in the standard interventions. Perhaps this child has a home in which he barely sleeps through the night. Perhaps it is not that he cannot read, but that he cannot focus because of the hunger he carries with him as he falls asleep at night and that greets him when he wakes in the morning.

These interventions, like the honorable and planned philanthropy of the fraternities and sororities, are not the problem.

The problem is seeing the needs you are meeting as the only needs that matter. While this may be true to you, it is often furthest from the truth from those you seek to serve.

Improvisation is not only best, it is necessary as well.

143/365 It’s Raining, It’s Pouring (Repeat)

When I was around 13, a tornado hit the small town where I grew up. School paused for a bit because the elementary school was damaged by the storm.

When I moved to Florida, several days were missed across the years due to school closings brought on by the threat of hurricanes. This is when I became intimately aware of the phrase “hunker down.”

To this day, there’s nothing else that I can think of that would lead me to hunker down other than a hurricane.

In Philadelphia, ice storms, blizzards and extraordinarily hot days caused school closings.

When I moved to Colorado, I figured my best bet was a snow day or two. Even that seemed a pipe dream given the infrastructure’s response time when snow falls and the fact that the snowfall melts so quickly after it falls thanks to sun’s nearness.

Then there was this morning when I woke up to a text message alerting me to the closing of the local university.

“That’s weird,” I thought and decided just to check to see if my district might have made a similar surprising move.

They did.

School was canceled today because of water and its tremendous fortitude and destructive power.

The last I heard, at least one person had lost their life because of the rain that continues to fall on Boulder County. This is to say nothing of the roads that are now washed away, the homes with unspeakable water damage and the now-unsafe water supply of a nearby town.

The street one block away looks like a mud-red river. Cars have been carried downhill, basements are flooded, and families are trying to figure out what to do next.

All the while, it continues to rain. We’ve seen more rain in the last few days than all the summer combined.

A few days ago, Apple announced two new phones that harolded our further command over information, communication and connectivity to one another.

About an hour ago, I lost my Internet connection, and cell phone reception in my basement apartment is consistently spotty.

We’ve been beaten down…by water.

It’s a humbling reminder.

142/365 Teachers Know What They’re Doing, and We Shouldn’t be Surprised

EdNews Colorado has this piece up today reporting on the results of the pilot of Colorado’s new teacher evaluation system. For those outside the state, CO’s legislature passed Senate Bill 10-191 which structured evaluations around professional practices for 50% and the other half based on student scores.

We could go ’round and ’round on the weight of scores. (And, I’m happy to do that.) What struck me about the article was a tone I’m sure we’ll be seeing as this new initiative and others like it across the country come online.

“More than nine out of 10 of Colorado teachers evaluated during a pilot test of the state’s educator effectiveness were rated proficient or higher on the system’s five-step rating scale,” the reporter Todd Engdahl writes.

What follows is a general tone of incredulity that this could be true. It includes a not so subtle subtext of “surely more of our teachers have to be crappier than that.”

This is worrisome.

Statistically, it’s perhaps improbable that the pilot study is fine-tuned enough to determine what the final product will show.

This, though, is more a conversation of expectations. We should be expecting our teachers to be proficient. We should expect their professional practices to show our teachers are qualified to be working with our children.

Each time we imply differently, we do harm to education. We lower the status of teaching. We send a message of lowered expectations to teachers in the classroom. And, we say to those considering becoming teachers that the bar is low and they probably couldn’t do any worse than what is expected of those already in the classroom.

Such a tone also keeps the focus on the wrong elements of the work of our schools. Instead of altering assessment so that it “reveals” more teachers to lack proficiency in their practices, perhaps we could agree that the majority of teachers have the proficiency we should expect and start looking to other factors – health care, poverty, hunger – as contributing to lower-than-hoped-for student achievement.

I’m not surprised by findings that show teachers to be capable of doing their jobs. Sadly, I’m not surprised by those who are dedicated to believing the opposite to be true.

141/365 Every Classroom is the Place for Discussing Net Neutrality

For most folks in the U.S., the closest they’ve come to thinking about Net Neutrality was last year’s brief yet loud protest against SOPA and PIPA.

This is a shame.

As a classroom teacher in two 1:1 laptop schools, Net Neutrality has been a key issue in my thinking about how anyone in a learning environment accesses information. When my students log on with devices at home, I want them to have a free and open web to provide them with the tools and information they need.

Any threat to neutrality threatens their ability to do just that.

The topic is in the courts again with the FCC’s regulations of the neutrality at issue.

If you’re boggled by the term, here’s an easy answer to the most basic of questions.

For a more detailed conversation, the folks over at Public Knowledge have put together this series of blog posts to flesh it out just a bit.

And today, they sent out this timeline of net neutrality. Any classroom discussing free speech, any classroom discussing technology, any classroom hoping to help students understand the world in which they live has a responsibility for including this conversation in their room.

We are surrounded by information and have come to rely on the open access to that information in our daily lives. The loss of net neutrality means we lose our ability to independently filter and compile the information we use to navigate the world.

For folks who want to read an accessible, nuanced explanation of the issue centered around the rise of Comcast, I highly recommend Susan Crawford’s Captive Audience.

140/365 In Improving Teaching & Learning, it Turns Out We Need to Do all the Work

Children working, playing, and learning on art projects, writing, and a laptop computer

As is my wont, I’ve been having a (figurative) conversation with Jim Knight as I work my way through his Unmistakable Impact. Like many before him, Knight has narrowed down the qualities of the best schools to a list of 5:

The professional learning occurring in Impact Schools is built around the following five concepts: humanity, focus, leverage, simplicity, and precision.

Five is an interesting number. It avoids the vague simplicity of 3 without taking on the complexity of a list of 7, 11, or some other prime number.

And I don’t disagree with him. In that list of 5, there’s not a concept with which I disagree, and I’d imagine that’s by design. Keeping the list safe keeps the book marketable.

Not long after we’ve encountered the 5 concepts behind impact schools, though, Knight introduces the 7 principles of the “partnership approach”:

(1) equality, (2) choice, (3) voice, (4) reflection, (5) dialogue, (6) praxis, and (7) reciprocity.

He goes on to say, “These principles represent the theory that underlies professional learning in Impact Schools.”

This brings the list to an almost unwieldy 12. Twelve! Here Knight runs the risk of losing the leaders of education organizations. The book is no longer presenting a silver bullet like so many that have come before it. Knight begins to present a more complex picture of what must be done to create quality learning spaces and teams functioning in such a way that supports that quality.

This is, beyond all of the citations of other sources and vignettes, what I am appreciating as I work through Knight’s book. As he attempts to offer guidance and strategies for improving schools, he adds to the complexity of the work.

It isn’t just five or seven things that need be done to improve the lives and learning of students and teachers. The list is potentially infinite.

As I come to each list of qualities schools must have to make an unmistakable impact, I picture the principal or district leader who’s picked this up as the tome to lead their organization for the next year angrily crossing out the list from the last chapter and saying to themselves, “OH! These are the things we should be doing. Got it.”

If anything, I’d say Knight doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the importance of paying attention to all of the qualities he’s listed. At. The. Same. Time.

As I consider the systems and procedures he lays out, I realize they create a balance and that each is important (if fairly innocuous on the ground-breaking scale of ideas).

From that initial list of five, it is not difficult to imagine the type of leader who decides to make focus, leverage, and precision the watch words of their school while leaving out or downplaying humanity and simplicity. The opposite is true as well. I’ve met many school and district leaders who are all about the people and streamlining.

If we are to improve teaching and learning, we cannot cherry pick the pieces of the system we wish to improve. We cannot simply change the things that are cheapest, easiest, or most urgent.

We must see the whole board. We must lean in to the hard work, and we must accept the complexity of meeting the needs of a system composed of people who walk into our buildings with equally complex lives.

If doing that takes a list of 5, 7 or 12, then so be it. Let us make sure that we honor each one and not only those that fit our style or our comfort zones.

Image via intrepid teacher on flickr

139/365 I’m Learning to Think Mathematically, and it’s Not What I Thought #edchat

Because learning how online, open programs work feels relevant to my new job, I’ve enrolled in two classes and jumped back in to a free online learning environment as well.

I’m signed up for a skillshare course as well as a Coursera course right now. I’ll talk about the two of them in more depth later. For the moment, there’s a piece of learning from my Introduction to Mathematical Thinking course I’d like to share.

I went ahead and ordered the optional text from the professor. My expectations were low because (1) he wrote the book, and (2) he self-published the book. In my experience, this doesn’t do much to shore up hopes of quality.

I started reading last night, and I’m excited to jump back in tonight.

One sentence sold me on it:

The algebra that the Arabic-speaking traders developed in the eighth and ninth centuries (the word algebra comes from the Arabic term al-jabr, meaning “restoration” or “reunion of broken parts”) to increase efficiency in their business transactions remains as useful and important todat as it was then…

I put the book down for a second after I read that to think about the meaning of the word. I’ve had algebra as part of my formal education for more than a decade and a half, and no one has ever explained what the word mean and how it fits with what we’re trying to do.

I remember the explanation of how to do it. More to the point, I remember that it was explained. I remember drills, homework, and tests. I do not remember anyone saying, “This is algebra, and this is what it does.”

I’m sticking with the course because (1) I’m genuinely interested in mathematical thinking and (2) The sentence above gave me a sign that we’ll be thinking not just about the how and the what, but the why as well as we learn.

That, as it turns out, is important to me.

138/365 Teachers will Learn when Teachers Can Play

LEGO blocks

In our conversation around Jim Knight’s Unmistakable Impact, the following question has come up:

What does it look like when we provide an environment where our teachers are “energized, thrilled, and empowered by learning?”

My gut answer is to look toward kindergarten and pre-school. Our earliest, intrinsically-motivated learning comes through play. The students I got to observe briefly yesterday at Spark! pre-school were playing through their ideas of what pieces of the puzzles they were working on went where and could easily fail without worry of reprucussions from their peers or their teammates.

In his investigation of play research with Christopher Vaughan, Stuart Brown outlines what more advanced players do when they realize they could easily dominate the field – they pull back enough so that they still find the activity enjoyable and so that those people they’re playing with are not overwhelmed. The activity remains fun because those playing are doing so to play and learn, not to win. This is what I saw when I noted something not going quite right for the Spark! students. The teacher didn’t jump right in to correct, and the surrounding students offered suggestions, but didn’t feel the need to take over and show. Everyone realized playing is more fun when you get to do.

Knight sees this too, writing, “When we take the humanity out of professional learning, we ignore the complexity of any helping relationship, and we make it almost impossible for learning to occur.”

In a professional space, where the organization has an intention of moving in a certain direction, there is certainly the challenge of feeling as though completely open and free play is not an option.

To this end, I’d turn to Dewey (of course). When he spoke of creating educational experiences for students, Dewey was not advocating a completely hands-off approach such as you might find in an open school.

Dewey recognized there were certain things schools needed to do to accomplish their mission. The key in moving toward these missions is to provide experiences that build on the pasts of learners and accesses what they’re already curious about.

Teachers will be “energized, thrilled, and empowered by learning” when there is space to play aligned with institutional goals and driven by their personal learning experiences and curiosity.

The trouble here is finding the balance and trust necessary to remember the humanity Knight speaks of. If we can remember his “simple plans, with clear goals.” We will move in the right direction.

LEGOS work because the rules are simple and clear: Build something with the blocks by putting them together. The more restrictions we place on what you can build, the less you will be interested in learning what you can build. The more we trust you to follow the simple rules, the more likely you are to build something we’ve never seen before for the benefit of deepening our understanding of what is possible.

Flickr image via Slack pics

137/365 As We Begin the Year, Here are Some Things to Keep in Mind

The start of the school year is overrun with beginnings. At the basest level, it’s the beginning of a group of people joining together for the first of 180 days dedicated to the idea that they will be learning from one another in their time together and each person seeking to find his or her place in the mix.

This convening makes me think of two things. The first is the invocation profered by Ze Frank as he launched his newest incarnation of show. It includes some language I’d save for high school students, but that is entirely appropriate for faculties starting this journey together.

The second is a video clip I showed initially to my storytelling class and eventually to all of my students. Part of a set of four clips from an interview with Ira Glass, the clip was meant as a tutorial on storytelling for the now-defunct Current TV. I keep Glass’s words with me whenever I start something new as a reminder that my ability and my taste will start further apart than I’d care to admit and that I need to work at whatever the thing is to bring my ability closer to my taste.

While teaching isn’t exactly the same as storytelling, the rule stands, and when you stand amongst whomever you’re charged with helping to find the better versions of themselves, your taste and your ability in that act will be further apart than you’d like.

They always, always, always were when I was working with students, and they continue to be when I work with adult students. One of many keys on the chain of improvement is trying again the next day after realizing the crap you created the day before. You learn from the crap, try to make better crap the next day, and don’t let what should be learning start to feel like failure. Showing up is a starting point for success.

136/365 It’s Gamified Learning (and I think I like it)

It’s entirely possible that I’m learning Spanish.

A week or two ago, I was listening to the Good Life Project podcast and the episode focused on the idea of expertise. If you’ve read any book with the word “expertise” in it in the last few years, you have the now-common knowledge of being able to become an expert at anything with 10,000 hours of practice (or so the research has been portrayed.

The episode’s focus wasn’t on how you can rack up the 10,000 hours, but how you can get really good at something in 20 hours. You can listen for the details.

For me, the experience played out like this:

Brain: Hey, Zac, didn’t we want to learn another language?

 

Me: We sure did, Brain.

 

Brain: Maybe we should commit to 20 hours of learning another language and see how things go.

 

Me: That’s a good idea, Brain.

My formal training in ASOL (anything as a second language) consists of Spanish for two years in high school and three semester of Latin in college. Neither really stuck.

I started looking at Rosetta Stone because it’s omnipresent in any conversation I’ve heard around learning a new language without actually interacting with another human. I asked some friends, and they agreed it was worth a shot (though expensive). The price tag hadn’t escaped my gaze.

Abby also suggested I try out Duolingo. I told her I had, but was looking for something a little more robust. Then, that night, I returned to Duolingo. Before I was going to put a few hundred dollars in Rosetta, I wanted to make sure I’d covered my bases.

I’d interacted with Duolingo while they were in beta, and I liked the environment. I was also a grad student at the time, and taking on a self-directed, beta, online language program didn’t seem like the best of ideas.

Now, though, the site has gotten its act together. I’ve been logging in for almost a week now and my Spanish knowledge is re-awakening and strengthening. Plus, I’m having fun.

I’m not sure if, from a second language acquisition standpoint, I’m developing along what might be a traditional academic path, but that’s not really my interest.

I didn’t know Spanish and now I know a little more. Tomorrow, I’ll know a little more. It won’t be the complete cultural immersion I’ll likely head to eventually, but it’s a great primer so far that’s helping me navigate grammar, vocabulary and syntax.

The thing that’s funny to me is the worry about whether or not teachers would approve of what I’m doing. At the end of each level or set on Duolingo, it asks if I’d like to share my achievement on social networks. Thus far, I’ve declined. The thing is, it’s not because I don’t feel as though I’m learning in the course. Moreover, I worry that what I’m doing will appear as thought I’m doing the kiddy version of learning. To be sure, Duolingo is gamified, and I have to admit kind of liking it. A little green cartoon owl weeps when I have to begin a level again.

Because of my own skepticism of the gamification of learning, though, I’m assuming who sees on twitter or facebook that I’ve just earned a new level on Duolingo will also view my learning with skepticism. This worry exists side-by-side with my knowledge that I am actually learning, and the tension is alarming.

Perhaps the middle ground and safe space for me is the fact that I’ve chosen this game. I’m seeking out this learning and this platform. I’m here because I want to learn Spanish, not because I want to play the game, and it just happens to be trying to teach me Spanish.

This leaves open and complex for me the question of what happens in kids’ minds when we show them the game first and hope the learning will sneak in after.