Category Archives: Education

Spreading the Word

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I am both excited and nervous about tomorrow.

Over a year ago, I pitched an idea to one of our district-level tech folks to do a hands-on, immersive day (or series of days) where school and district leaders could just… play. We spend a lot of time debating the theory of this or the data supporting that, but too many leaders lack the fundamental knowledge and skills to move forward with using technology to facilitate communication and collaboration in their schools and departments. And unfortunately a few are afraid of looking “dumb” and therefore not comfortable in their ability to support their staff in jumping into this stuff.

They really want to know. They’re hungry to know. But some just don’t know where to start.

It’s taken me a while to bring this to reality (huge thanks to our Director of C&I for actually thinking I was onto something with this idea…), but tomorrow I will be hosting our district’s first ever Leadership Technology Bootcamp. The format for the day was inspired by the bootcamps that Scott McLeod and his posse at CASTLE present to leaders in Iowa. The agenda is very aggressive for the time we’ll have (I doubt we’ll get past podcasting), but I’d rather keep it that way and leave folks wanting more.

My biggest concern going in is the diversity of proficiency in the group. I plan to do a little show & tell, followed by some hands-on time. I’ve also dragged a couple of my fellow TSD Twitterati along to help facilitate small groups.

My greatest hope for the day is that my colleagues see a lot of different tools and, through some experimentation, find one or two that they can see themselves using in the 2010-2011 school year. I also hope that by exposure to some of these tools, they will be in a position to better support their teachers — not necessarily because they know everything about Google Reader or WordPress or Etherpad, but because they know enough to steer a teacher in the right direction when they think something might be a good fit.

And it would also be nice for all of us to continue working together to improve our skills. A true community of practice. A Twitter colleague said it better than I ever could.

As it stands, I have close to 50 school and district leaders signed up to spend the day learning and collaborating. Quite a nice start, I think.

Wish me luck!

My Commencement Address to the Class of 2009

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The end of the school year is fast approaching. Last spring, I was honored by the class of 2009 who selected me as their graduation speaker. It occurred to me that, though many had asked, I’d never posted anything about what I’d said. I’m also selfishly afraid that if I don’t post this somewhere it might get misplaced in my digital “filing” system.

What follows is the rough crib notes that I spoke from at Commencement on May 30, 2009.

Good afternoon Dr. Cabrera, Dr. Dreier, distinguished faculty, proud parents and families, and soon-to-be graduates of Loveland High School. I am so humbled to have been asked to speak to you today on one of the most important days of your lives. In so many ways, I feel — maybe not so much like a proud father — but maybe more like a proud uncle to all of you. After all, this is the first group of graduating seniors I’ve sponsored at Loveland High.

Graduates, look around. These are the people who have not only come here to share this day with you, but who have supported you in all that you’ve done to get here. I’d like all of you to look around and give these people a round of applause.

Once the incredible honor of being asked to deliver this address started to wear off, however, I started to get a little bit nervous about what to actually talk to you about. What would the class of 2009 want to hear?

We had a commencement speaker at my graduation, too, and though I don’t remember who he was or what he said, I remember he talked a long time. But I didn’t hear him. As it turns out, the whole time he was talking I was thinking to myself, “What in the world am I going to do now?”

Here you are, about to walk through this metaphorical door, and you have no idea what’s on the other side. It’s almost never what you expect it to be, though. It’s a balance between things you try to make happen and things that happen to you. What I can tell you, though, is that the more crooked and winding the way, the more interesting your life will turn out to be.

With all that in mind, deciding on a message for this momentous day wasn’t easy. After pleading with Rachel, Peter, and Owen not to give the “same old graduation speech,” how could I have lesser expectations for myself? So I set about on an inquisition of sorts. I did what everyone else does these days: I posted about it on Facebook.

One of my students informed me that no commencement speech is complete without a reference to “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost… So we’ll talk more about that in a bit.

But before we begin, I’d like to clear the air. I’d like to share with you some of the things that you won’t be hearing from me this afternoon.

First, I won’t be suggesting that any of you “spread your wings.” You won’t be hearing anything about “seizing the day,” or how you have “so much more to learn.” And, sadly, we will not be discussing how the hallways at Loveland High – the ones that seemed so large and foreboding only four short years ago – seem much, much smaller today.

Oh – and I also won’t be welcoming you to some scary-sounding “real world.” What I would like to talk to you about, though, is YOUR real world and how important it is for you not to just stand by passively watching what’s happening, but to be engaged in it.

You’ve got a very unique challenge ahead of you. You are going to have to figure out how to be authentic human beings in a world that is changing more rapidly than at any other time in our history. The good news is that the deck is stacked in your favor. The biggest advantage you have, Class of 2009, is that this is the world you grew up in.

The rest of us? Try as we might to fit in, we’re still outsiders.

I don’t want to disappoint the language arts department, but think about it — in your four years of high school, you’ve read more email and more Facebook profiles than you have textbooks or novels. You’ve typed more words with your thumbs than you’ve written in essays.

In fact, one of the most dangerous jobs I have as an administrator at Loveland High is standing at the 200/300 intersection between classes… No one’s looking where they’re going. …

There is a lot of information out there. There were 31 billion Google searches last month alone. And the best part is, everyone has access. The playing field has been leveled. Anyone who wants information can have it.

It’s no longer what or how much you know that will make you truly stand out. What will really set you apart from the crowd is that you get all of this stuff.

Unlike the rest of us in this building today, you’re already there. Think about it — lots of you are heading out to graduation parties this weekend. Odds are, you text messaged everyone you know to decide on a date and time, sent out a few dozen “evites,” and started taking RSVPs — all while the adults in the room were still trying to decide on flowers or balloons.

More so than ever before, you have the tools and the skills to connect with the world. A much bigger world than any other generation that has come before you. Your thoughts and ideas have the ability to extend beyond your neighborhood or your college campus. You have a chance to reach out, to connect, to share ideas. I say, “chance,” because it’s up to you. You don’t have to take it.

The tools that empower us to connect with the world can, ironically, allow us to disconnect from each other as well.

Unlike in your Civics class at Loveland High, there is no community service requirement for life. No one will force you to care or to engage with the world. You can walk across this stage, grab your diploma, and go chasing after the nice house and new car. And no one will blame you.

Of course, I hope you don’t do that. On your way to continued success, I hope that you’ll take the time to be grateful to those who continue to support you every day. Your family and friends — the people packing this event center to be here for you.

I’ve talked a little about Google already, but I really like their corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.” As you leave here today and get busy living your life, I hope that you will take time to believe in something that’s bigger than yourself. Find your cause and pursue it passionately. Be real.

Book smarts will take you so far. But if your goal is to experience true happiness and satisfaction, you need to find your passion. Then you need to use what you already know about networking and creativity to unleash your passion on the world. I believe that your passion is what will eventually solve the problems facing the world today. Act without passion and you’re just making noise. Or, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, it’s a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A few weeks ago, on a stage much like this in Arizona, our nation’s president challenged the graduates of Arizona State to follow their passions, regardless of whether they lead to fortune and fame. He challenged the graduates to do more, to build more, to achieve more, and today I’d like you to consider this advice as well.

How will you use what you’ve learned and what you’re passionate about to make your mark on the world?

As any good Aerosmith fan knows, Steven Tyler said, “Life’s a journey, not a destination.” Now this is where I think speeches about journeys and paths and two roads diverging can get cliché. We tend to assume we’re trying to get somewhere.

But consider the alternative. T.S. Eliot wrote, “In my end is my beginning.” In another poem in the same book he said, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” So maybe the journey isn’t about getting somewhere so much as it’s about trying to find out who we are and how we fit in a world that is both bigger than it’s ever been, but smaller at the same time.

So, Class of 2009, you have the book knowledge that you picked up along the way, but you also have an understanding of the world that the rest of us will never fully grasp. What you’ve learned in school is important, but it’s not the most important. What you need to do now, graduates, is unleash your passion on the world. Use what you know to do good, not evil.

Congratulations, Class of 2009. And thank you for choosing me to speak to you this afternoon.

What you need to know when you’re done with teacher school

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Actually, this should be called, “What you need to know before your first day as a teacher” since the original title, while pithy in its similarity to the title of a recent post, assumes (a) that every teacher went to teacher school (I didn’t!), and (b) that something you learned there may have some relevance to your actual job. Your mileage may vary with (b).

  • Be interested. No, that’s not a typo. I don’t want you to worry too much about being interesting because that’ll take care of itself. And, let’s be honest, you just can’t force that. So start out your first year in the classroom by being interested — really interested. And please, for the students’ sake, show them that you’re interested in more than just your content area. You’ve got a passion (presumably) so don’t be afraid to let it come out in who you are in the classroom. In one of my all-time favorite blog posts ever, Russell Davies says, “The way to be interesting is to be interested.” Sound advice. See also.
  • Be a learner. Unless your content area is “literature of Ancient Greece,” things in your area are probably changing with the times. When I took Earth Science, for example, Pluto was still a planet. More than that, the ways that we interact with our students are changing. And the ways that students interact with the world are changing. You’ll likely never catch up to where your students are in terms of comfort with technology, but the best teachers are the ones who are the Lead Learners in the classroom. They take what kids know and think they know about technology tools and help them use it as an effective tool to do more than update their Facebook status with what they had for lunch that day. Note: The best way for teachers to learn is not necessarily through one-size-fits-all professional development sessions. Read a lot. Create an account on Google Reader or Netvibes and subscribe not only to education blogs, but blogs about what you’re passionate about (remember the first tip I gave you?). And also, keep it in balance and subscribe to blogs that you don’t necessarily agree with. Preaching to choir is always fun, but it can be a dangerous habit. Network with colleagues who have been doing it longer and who are doing it differently. Find an administrator you trust and see how he or she is willing to help support your professional growth.
  • Avoid like the plague negative people and their efforts to recruit you. Misery loves company. This is true at all levels. You’ll find negative teachers in the lounge and negative administrators in the front office. You’ll know the ones as they’re fairly easy to spot. Their attitude is generally that students are a nuisance to be dealt with and they view their job as laying out a buffet of knowledge from which students can choose whether or not to partake. Their syllabi usually read like the state penal code. You’ll see a lot of “Do nots” and “No exceptions” in their classroom expectations. In fact, you probably won’t see a section called “Expectations” so look for the section called “Rules and Consequences.” The administrators may have cute, witty things in their offices like an urn on their bookshelf that oh-so-humorously reads, “Ashes of Problem Students,” or an old-fashioned paddle engraved with the words, “The Enforcer.” Forget any discourse about the messages these “jokes” send to students, parents, or community members who may have occasion to see them and who may not share their owner’s sense of gallows humor… Negative people want nothing more than to perpetuate their negative energy. Seek out teachers and administrators who enjoy working with kids and have a positive world view. They’re out there, and more common than you think, but they’re usually doing something good for kids instead of complaining about how no one else is.
  • Have fun. Don’t confuse this with “be funny” because they’re not the same thing. And by “fun,” I don’t mean pizza party or Friday Free Day. You’ve chosen a very serious job with a serious responsibility. You’ve accepted the challenge of teaching the next generation. They will have to go out there after you’re finished with them and make the world a better place. So take the job seriously, but not yourself. Show a funny YouTube video, sponsor the sophomore class, smile, and love your job.
  • Just because you can do something with technology doesn’t mean you should do it with technology. Do you need a wiki intervention? You know who you are.

It’s not an exhaustive list, but that should get you started. You’ll notice I didn’t include anything about where to find discipline referrals or how to access the copier. You’ll get all that stuff from your new boss on your first day of orientation. I also didn’t share my philosophy on discipline and how you work with kids, but that’s been done before by me and others. This is some of the other stuff that’s been on my mind for a while. And spending time with new and preservice teachers, I’m sure there will be more that follows.

Coming soon: What you need to know before your first day as an administrator…

Making things happen

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[This post also appears on LeaderTalk.]

A month or so ago, Twitter colleague Dave Meister (@phsprincipal) sent out a tweet wondering if any of the educational leaders on Twitter would want to attempt a “virtual” meet-up sometime this summer. Being a generally social person who enjoys exchanging good ideas with smart people, I thought this would be great. Dave threw together a quick interest survey on GDocs and over 40 school and district-level leaders expressed interest in the event.

Being fresh off the modest success of the Learning 2.0 event at my school, I volunteered to help out. We’d gotten pretty adventurous with the online portion of Learning 2.0 so I wanted to see how much farther we could push the virtual conference paradigm. Being that all of our districts are cutting back on PD money and that we all have other things we like to do in the summer, we thought that a virtual, half-day event would be ideal.

Dave and I spent a lot of time DM-ing and emailing and collaborating to determine an appropriate format for the event. We wanted a format that would provide a loose structure, but not too much structure, and that would allow participants to network, share what they’re passionate about, and form learning groups organically.

After a couple weeks of planning, I am proud to invite your participation in LeaderCamp 2010 on Thursday, June 24, 2010. Naturally, you can follow the event updates on Twitter.

The theme for the day, “Making Things It Happen,” was inspired by this Tweet from Dave. We talk about change a great deal. For this event, though, we hope to focus on action; on leaders who are – well – making things happen in their school or their district. Big successes or tiny victories, we want to learn from them.

We’ve attempted to structure the event in the spirit of a Barcamp or Unconference. We are exploring WebEx Event Center as a possible vehicle for collaboration, and will probably open up the agenda-creation phase the Monday before the event. We will not be calling for proposal submissions or anything so fancy or sophisticated as we really want this to be as open as possible. We wanted to create a space and time where everyone is welcome and anyone can claim a session and share a good idea, a powerful tool, or a success story.

We’ve created longer session slots for big ideas, as well as a pair of 10-minute “micro-sessions” that would be perfect for showing off a tool that you use in your practice. We’re also building in some “networking” time as well and working on an opportunity for participants to submit a 2-minute video on a topic of their choosing which we’ll string together to create a session in the style of “TED” or “Ignite.”

I hope that if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll at least mark your calendar and plan to spend some time with us this June. It’ll be a first of its kind event and I am very much looking forward to connecting with colleagues I’ve never met and sharing more than the confines of Twitter allow.

What you need to know when you’re done with high school

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I had a great experience working with a group of teachers and leaders in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a couple weeks ago. While I like to kid about them being a “tough crowd,” the truth is that they were an open-minded group who asked great questions.

One of the participants (I can’t recall her name – sorry!) challenged me during my session to identify the Top Ten Things Every Graduating High School Student Know or Understand. Since I enjoy a challenge, I told her I’d work on it and post a response here. I’m not sure it’s what she had in mind, but it’s the best I can think of.

  • Know what is valuable. The value of factual information is either at or quickly approaching zero. What you need are skills. Skills that will allow you to learn and re-learn will be more important than factual knowledge. Now, don’t read this to say that factual knowledge is never valuable or that it shouldn’t be taught — all things in moderation will create balance — but if all you take away from science class is that you memorized the Periodic Table, then we may have a disconnect between what we do in school and what you’ll do when you’re done in school.
  • Learn how to learn. In our information-rich, always-on, instant-access world, the winner isn’t the one who knows the most, rather it’s the one who can do the most. So how do you learn? Do you read a book or watch a video? Do you find a mentor or expert tutor? Do you throw your search at Google and click “I’m Feeling Lucky”?
  • Tackle interesting problems, and be OK with messy solutions. Find an interesting problem and solve it in a unique way. But know that the answer will rarely be found in the form of a 5-paragraph essay or a nice, round integer.
  • Be a connoisseur of information. Anyone with a computer or cellphone can do a Google search. But you need the information literacy to make sense of the results. The trade-off of having all this information a click away is that you’ll need to be able to read and assess it for possible reliability and validity issues.
  • Be conscious of your digital footprint. It’s never too early to start being aware of your online presence. You will be Google-able and you will be Googled. I suggest that you be certain that you’re in control of what people find when they Google you.
  • Give back. Share. Contribute. Help out. It doesn’t have to be monetary.
  • People are more important than technology. Technology is awesome because it gives us the ability to break down barriers. We can share and collaborate in ways that, even as recently as 5 years ago, seemed like the exclusive domain of the crew of the Enterprise. So use the technology to build and strengthen connections, but always remember that technology is only one tool in relationship-building.
  • Find something you’re passionate about. Life is really going to stink if you can’t find something you love to do.
  • Be nice. One effect of all this technology is that everyone who’s anyone has a blog or a Twitter account or a Facebook account. That’s swell. But what I don’t particularly care for are those who use these platforms as a soapbox to pop off about anything and everything simply because now they can. And because there are no short-term consequences, people uncork with things they’d never say in front of actual people for fear of getting punched.
  • Play. It’s not just for kids anymore. Play is an important part of learning. It helps us think.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m not sure if it’s what she expected, but that’s that I think our kids need to know when they leave high school. I sure hope you weren’t expecting me to say they needed to understand the electoral college or how to change the amplitude of a sine wave. They can look that stuff up when they need it.