Month: October 2013

153/365 The Agenda Book is Dead! Long Live the Agenda Book!

Who knew it would be getting rid of something that helped herald the coming of mobile devices the most?

Starting last week, our team at work has been holding initial meetings with middle school principals in our district to discuss the coming 1:1 iPad mini distributions in their schools. Teachers are receiving their devices a semester before students so that they can become accustomed to the new tools before they need to help entire classrooms of folks shift their learning and making.

The conversation that’s come up in almost every meeting – Schools won’t need to buy agenda books for next year.

For the uninitiated, agenda books are a catch-all in middle schools. What others might call planners, these spiral bound beauties do so much more. They are the base of much home correspondence, hall and bathroom passes, and finally the place for collection of deadlines on homework assignments.

The coming of the iPad, complete with students’ Google Apps for Education accounts will do agenda work better and more efficiently.

It was in one principal meeting that I realized a key component of the professional learning we’re building for teachers as they move to these new devices is an introduction to how Google Calendar can work for them. More than putting dates on class homepages, teachers can have students subscribe to calendars. If they create groups of contacts, they’ll be able invite students to events like, “End of Quarter English Project Due,” and students will be able to set reminders via email, text, message, etc.

All of this will live in one space and be a more active alert for students than the passive thinking of, “I’m going to ask you to write this down, knowing many of you will not look at this again until I ask you to write something else down.”

As for hall passes, teachers will be able to quickly shoot an iMessage to whomever the destination teacher is alerting them to the fact that Student X is on his way – complete with time stamp.

Bathroom passes are a bit trickier and my unfamiliarity with them makes me tend away from solving this problem. In my last few schools, we didn’t have bathroom passes. If a student needed to advocate for himself and seek some relief from the classroom, I just needed a heads up in the case of a fire drill or the like.

I’m convinced asking to go to the bathroom throughout my school-age years is the reason I still, as a professional working adult, feel the compulsion to let people know, “I’m going to the bathroom” when I leave the office to do just that. Not healthy, right?

The point here? These mobile devices are going to allow teachers and students to learn, teach, and create in new and exciting ways. They’ll hold the most advanced field notebooks and multimedia studios in their hands each day. To start, though, to act as an in-roads to the value we see, they might also have to be sold as the best agenda books EVER.

And that might be okay – to start.

Image via Jacob Haas

152/365 Striking a balance between the public and private of schools

 

From Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

The more common choice in cities, where people are faced with the choice of sharing much or nothing, is nothing. In city areas that lack a natural and casual public life, it is common for residents to isolate themselves from each other to a fantastic degree. If mere contact with your neighbors threatens to entangle you in their private lives, or entangle them in yours, and if you cannot be so careful who your neighbors are as self-selected upper-middle-class people can be, the logical solution is absolutely to avoid friendliness or casual offers of help. Better to stay thoroughly distant. As a practical result, the ordinary public jobs – like keeping children in hand – for which people must take a little personal initiative, or those for which they must band together in limited common purpose, go undone. The abysses this opens up can be almost unbelievable.

As is, I’m sure, not surprising, I’ve been reading Jacobs through the lens of education and schooling. This lens lends itself nicely to seeing the city as a metaphor for the life of thoroughfares of schools – hallways, restrooms, cafeterias, common areas.

To engender the cultures and climates of healthy, sustainable, supportive schools, we must strike the right balance of public and private. Students should know they are seen, but not feel they are watched or expected to share all the details of what they are doing outside of the day-to-day of schools.

It reminds me of growing up in a small town. My friends and I knew that our teachers knew and saw our parents. We also knew that there was a margin of freedom we were afforded for experimentation into who we were becoming.

The schools we need, like the cities we want, find that balance of private and public and let members of their communities play in all the spaces.

What does this look like? How do we get started?

151/365 Something more than students of studenthood

Experience Design Consultant Laura Keller has an interesting column over on uxmatters. Drawing a comparison between the medical field and user experience design, Keller walks through an argument similar to those I’ve heard relevant to education in recent years.

In the ed sector, the argument is more about an approach to patient care as it could influence teacher practice. If, like doctors, teachers were to build a profile of practice that relies on a set of symptoms (indicators of learning), they would be able to design a treatment (teaching) that leads to improved health (learning). Such is the usual comparison of teaching and medical practice.

This, however, isn’t the overlap Keller is seeking to establish between experience design and medicine. Instead, she asks readers to play along with the following thought experiment:

Doctors and staff come in to see you and go out. They’re polite, but answer your questions curtly, and you don’t know exactly what’s going on. You wonder, What is wrong with me? What are they testing for? Will I be okay? When will I go home? When they discharge you and you’re ready to leave, the staff finally give you your diagnosis, along with written instructions explaining what you need to do. As the hospital staff proceed to treat other patients, they leave you to figure it out on your own, and you head home.

Keller, points out that this would (or at least should) be an inappropriate exchange that perhaps solves the problem in the short term, but opens the foor to a repeat development and does nothing to empower patients to own their own health and wellness.

She points to three possible approaches to improving client and consultant relationships:

  • Client as team member
  • Client as student
  • Client as colleague

Ironically, Keller wraps her argument in a need for greater education of both patients and clients in working toward the improvement of these relationships.

When we do school we think about teaching and learning, but we rarely think of educating our students as to what we are doing, why we are making the choices we are making, or helping them to learn to make choices on their own.

If anything, we will talk about data or explain our actions as preparing students for the next grade or school level or the more-distant-still work world.

While it might seem these reasons, this well-leveraged use of data, align with Keller’s suggested approaches, they do not.

Educating students in my English classroom toward building relations as team members, students, or colleagues meant walking through the choices I was making and hoping to help them make as readers, writers, speakers, and listeners.

It meant working with them as students of communication, letters, stories, and understanding. It did not mean working with them as students of studenthood. Saying things like, “You’re going to need this next year,” or having “data chats” with kids eliminates any last vestiges of the real world lingering in neo-modern classrooms.

I approach teaching English as a writer, reader, and thinker. While it took several years to choke back the teacher voice I thought I was supposed to have, I was eventually able to respond to students as a fellow writer, and talk to them about books as a fellow reader. When we discussed current events or the big ideas of life, it was as fellow travelers on the path to thinking more deeply.

While all of this is wrapped within my experience within a given discipline, it was also how I saw my colleagues in science, history, etc. approaching their practice as well.

There is overlap between education and the medical field. While a portion of it may lie within the role of diagnostician, the bigger, more exciting, more important portion lies in helping to be curious explainers of the world in which we live and through which we move.

Image via Claremont Colleges Digital Library

150/365 Make Tufte Proud

I’ve been sitting on this for a few weeks, unsure as to whether or not I’d publicize it. I’ve decided to go ahead because cool stuff is cool, and you like to play.

If you’ve seen any of Hans Rosling’s TED talks, then you’ve likely thought to yourself, “I’d like to make something like that.”

Well, it turns out you can. The folks over at Density Design have put together a fairly seamless infographic tool called Raw that is as easy as copying and pasting data and then throwing a few switches.

The price? Free. Well, it’s free if you don’t count opening the gates to bad design the same way Google Forms made everything look like a form was the perfect hammer.

Anyway, watch the video below, and give it a try. What uses can you find for it? What about your students?

Raw – Basic Tutorial from DensityDesign on Vimeo.

149/365 Help me Think about MOOCs

After reading this piece from EdWeek guest blogger Michelle Davis, I’ve more questions than answers around MOOCs.

They’ve been a bit of a mystery to me since I first hear about the massive open spaces a few years ago, and they have only gotten more so as they’ve developed and grown more popular.

In the piece, Davis describes “K-12 Teaching in the 21st Century,” a MOOC effort from Michigan Virtual University and Kent State University to help current and aspiring teachers navigate the technological landscape as it exists today. Aside from wishing the title were “Teaching Now,” I’m not quite sure how I feel about this course and others like it.

Are we doing what we didn’t like before, but bigger?

As I look at MOOC efforts, they strike me as the big box stores of education. This makes it feel strange when the same folks who champion connecting with students, the values of being able to build a network across time and space, and other humanist lines of thought also champion MOOCs.

Don’t these spaces present greater likelihood of anonymity and leave the forging of strong personal connections to chance? I’ve signed up for four MOOCs in the last two years and finished neither of them. Contrary to the views presented here, my intent on each registration was to finish the course, engage with its material and connect with other participants. With the exception of reading the recommended book for one of them. I did exactly none of that for any of them, and often left because I wasn’t interested in performing tasks that weren’t immediately relevant for teachers who would never know I’d left.

In each course, I saw a way to do the work without getting recognized, to slip through the course as a number, user name or email address, and to step away from the course without feeling as though I’d given up, stopped, or left something undone.

Shouldn’t I at least feel like I’d walked away from worthwhile work, missed connections with fellow travelers, or that my presence would be missed? Aren’t these the same questions we’ve been asking about standard classrooms where we’ve been trying to operationalize relevance and relationships for years?

Do we need to organize the Internet this way?

Am I wrong in feeling like the advent of Google and other search engines established the best version of a MOOC? Isn’t the Internet exactly a massive open course?

Part of the beauty of what I see in finding resources online is the manner in which I can curate exactly what I want to get my learning or a given task completed. I can cull multiple forums, jump to vimeo and youtube, throw together a google doc, and invite tweeps in to help me brainstorm. And, I can do all of this in a moment with any topic. Don’t MOOCs limit that open curation of tools, answers, and immediate assistance in important ways?

With a library card, an Internet connection, and a social media account, wouldn’t I have the same affordances of a MOOC without the limitations of playing by someone else’s structure?

Is this all in the service of data?

The language of most any formal school environment these days is replete with mentions of data. Decisions, discussions, and direct instruction are all driven by it. If the comments of the last section are true, and I can complete the learning of MOOCs without MOOCs using any number of free resources, does it stand to reason that we like these courses because it’s a way for schools and other organizations to be able to present data about the Internet?

Whereas I could learn something on my own before and no one but me would be any the wiser, does the construction and subsequent completion of a MOOC provide the satisfaction of gathering data that drives us to construct more MOOCs?

Rarely do I read articles about MOOCs that go beyond reporting on the course title or subject and the number of people who have enrolled or completed the course. The data points more interesting to me take longer to explain. They are the explanations of what people built as a result of participation. What shape did the expression of learning take within the course? What was the diversity of artifacts created? What depths of understanding are marked by certificates of completion?

Rarely, if at all, do I read explorations of these data points in relationship to MOOCs. This speaks, I fear to my first point above.

I’m still not sure.

I list the questions and concerns above because I need to know more about MOOCs and because I worry whenever millions of dollars of education funding start sliding toward any effort. It usually means they’re sliding away from something else.

As a result of MOOCs, it’s easier for me or someone a world away to access the thinking of people I’d not otherwise have had access to. In the name of MOOCs professors from leading institutions have had an impetus to do what millions of us were already using the Internet to do – share.

Is there more there? What are the unintended consequences of moving toward MOOCs? What possibilities, solutions, and learning environments are we ignoring as we pay attention to this model?

Help me think?

148/365 Let’s Begend

20131008-183921.jpg

I’ve been on the road the last five days, crossed three time zones, and had innumerable conversations with educators of all stripes.

As it sit in the Minneapolis airport, waiting for my flight to board, this feels like the right time to start to reflect on the slam of excellent idea exchanges I’ve had the good fortune to experience over the last several days.

My handy dandy notebook is full of seeds of posts, so I’m expecting this space to be informed by those seeds for the next few entries. I hope you’ll join in my reflection and participate in the conversation. My understanding is always more fully formed when informed by the voices of others.

What strikes me now, though, is the difficulty I’ve had in the last few evenings trying to get my thinking out as I experience things.

More than once, I’ve sat down with the intention of capturing at least a piece of the day’s thinking, only to be confounded by the notion that I was still in the experience, still living the things about which I wanted to write.

The will was there, and the head space was lacking.

Each time, I started to wonder about how this feeling is embodied in the experiences of students across our learning spaces each day.

A math student is cold called amid a lesson to explain his thinking and freezes because his grain was busy buffering the new material and constructing the connections to what he’d learned previously.

The history student finds herself up against a deadline to write a reflective blog post about her work curating primary sources for a display to be experienced by younger students only to find that she’s more consumed with determining how best to achieve flow in the presentation than she is able to coherently spew her thoughts online for others to read.

In the same way that learning must happen in its own time and students must have the space to connect ideas and build artifacts of learning, we must remember that the artifacts of reflection (the metacognitive learning) must also come at its own space.

I will need a few days to process some of the more powerful conversations of the last week. Some require distance of time and space before they can be externalized.

This I will take with me as I help others in their learning. In the classroom, a frequent practice is to ask students to reflect on their learning immediately after a project has been completed or an assignment has been submitted.

Beginning reflection, I’m understanding, required more distance than our immediate or arbitrary classroom deadlines often allow.

Let’s begend.

147/365 So, what I hear you saying is…

Moving around a meeting room today examining the products of a group chalk talk activity, I notice someone has written, “‘So what I hear you saying…’ is a sign of active listening.”

I pause.

I write, “Does it always?”

At some point, when I was likely in middle school, my mom had a conversation with me about active listening. She told me this phrase, or one quite similar to it could be deployed in conversation to make sure we were on the right track.

From then on, I had the keys to the conversational kingdom.

People responded differently when I dropped this paraphrasing gem into conversations.

“Oh,” their faces seemed to say, “You really were listening to me.”

And I was…sort of.

Largely what I was doing was listening to the words they were saying so that I could cut out a few adjectives, adverbs and prepositional phrases and turn their last sentence or two back on them.

In an attempt to make them feel heard, I wasn’t really listening.

This paraphrasing technique forgoes the whole in favor of the part. It’s akin to hiring highly-qualified teachers without considering all the other factors that might contribute to students’ learning.

Real paraphrasing, if we were to attempt to check in with folks on the messages they’re sending might look more like this:

So, what I hear you saying is, “INSERT ABBREVIATED SENTENCES HERE.” Plus, you’re standing with your arms crossed, which I interpret as you not feeling comfortable speaking your whole truth. This is in addition to the fact that you checked the clock on the wall twice during your last statement. All of this, taken with your friendship with the chair of the committee that spearheaded the initiative that caused the problem we’re attempting to solve, leads me to believe…

It becomes apparent that repeating what we’ve just heard might not be the check-in we mean it to be – not the whole check-in, anyway.

Paraphrasing, pausing in a conversation to seek clarification so that everyone involved remains on the same page is a helpful and necessary piece of communication.

I worry, as with any other helpful tip, that doing a thing can start to pass for doing THE thing.

146/365 Do we want what our students want or what we want our students to want?

Unmistakable Impact by Jim Knight

“Not surprisingly,” Jim Knight writes in Chapter 2 of his Unmistakable Impact, “when the thinking is taken out of teaching, teachers resist.”

Knight is correct. It is not surprise. While he discusses partnerships throughout the chapter, though, it is refreshing to be reminded of the need for equity of partnerships.

“A Simple Truth About Helping: People aren’t motivated by other people’s goals,” Knight writes a few pages later.

I struggled with this one when I returned to my notes. I like to think that I am motivated by other people’s goals. As a classroom teacher, I was always asking my students what they wanted to do, be, answer, etc. Wherever possible, I would then find ways for thinking, speaking, reading, and writing to help them accomplish those goals. I realize now, I wasn’t motivated by their goals, not immediately. I was motivated by my goals of developing their skills as they related to English Language Arts through the lens of what they wanted.

Even now, it’s how I work with teachers and others in the district. It’s my most common answer to the question, “How do I get folks to use X?”

My answer: Find the the thing about what they do that is the most frustrating, most broken, most inefficient; and show them how X can make that better.

In the questions for discussion as our district’s Learning Leaders consider this chapter, we are asked, “Many of our schools and teachers have been successful, so why change?”

I suppose that’s easy from the outside and difficult from the inside. We change because there’s always something on which we can improve. We are resistant to change because we feel have gotten where we need to go. Maybe there’s a middle ground. Maybe we resist change because we simply need a break to collect our faculties, consider our resources and plot the course. Stopping at good is often really pausing to plan for great.

 

 

145/365 Early Adopters Don’t Wear Name Tags

Adoption Timeline Graph

I’ve had the graph above (or some iteration thereof) in my head for the last few weeks.

As our district preps for rolling out a massive infusion of technology into the hands of teachers and students over the next four years, I find myself wondering if each person I sit down with at a meeting is an innovator or a laggard or somewhere in between.

We are developing plans for helping first the teachers and then the students become used to having these new devices become the way of doing business. Part of my job in all of this has been developing the foundational course we’ll be asking all teachers to complete before they receive their first devices. It will include the rudimentary explanations of functionality – power, synching, applications, etc. It will include new guidelines outlining expectations and commitments for the teachers for and from our department and the amazing team that handles the wires and switches in the district.

Building the course, I’ve started to consider the early adopters, the early majority, and the other segments of the population, and I find myself wishing they would identify themselves not by their approaches to the machines, but to how they approach what these machines can do.

When planning the course, our team wanted to make clear that the basic operational instructions were optional so that those folks who knew where the power buttons were could move on to the new equipment.

Now that I’m building the thing, I am becoming aware of the differences in adoption. A teacher can be the earliest adopter of a device or technology. They can know the scripts, the codes, and the apps that make the thing do all the whiz-bang things it does.

This doesn’t mean, though, that they know how do adopt the device (whatever it may be) as a portal for shifting the practices of learning and teaching within our schools.

Those people are out there. Our district, and any other, has its own population of early thought adopters who see not only the devices but the possibilities. These people would likely see the possibilities without the devices, it’s just happy serendipity that both are arriving at the same time.

It’s likely these early adopters of practice find themselves in a distribution similar to the one pictured above. What I’m striving to remember is they will not wear name tags. Nor will they necessarily be the ones first in line to pick up their new tech. They find themselves stationed throughout the district.

What will make the difference, what is most important as we introduce this new technology across time and the district will be recognizing when the innovators and early adopters of ideas and practices also happen to be the innovators and early adopters of stuff. Those are the people to whom we will be able to turn to improve education for all children and adults in the district.