Tag Archives: Education

Subtle Differences

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I had the good fortune of listening to one of my favorite educators talk to a group of pre-service teachers about discipline and classroom management. I asked her to give this talk because she deals with some of our most challenging students, yet has very few attendance problems and almost never has a discipline issue.

I don’t even think she realized the power of what she said this morning because she kind of glossed right over it, but she told the soon-to-be teachers that as soon she sees a possible attendance issue emerging with a student, she will pull him or her aside and say (in her best tough-love delivery):

You know if you get to six absences, you and I are going to have a talk.

Consider just for a minute the difference between a statement like that and:

You know if you get to six absences, I’m going to send you to your administrator.

The difference is subtle, but it’s there. If you’re a student, one of those says, “We are going to work this out,” and the other one says, “I’m going to make you someone else’s problem.”

Guess how many of her kids get to six absences.

Now That's Leverage

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Michael Wesch blogged recently about “How to get students to read 94 articles before the next class.”

Essentially, each student in his class had to find, read, and summarize five articles before the next class. The summaries were consolidated using Zoho Creator, and, well, according to Wesch:

By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles.  This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation.

I hear the term “leverage” used quite a bit – mostly as a fancy (read: incorrect) synonym for the word “use” (E.g. “Students leveraged their cell phones to call GCast…” or “The principal leveraged technology to show a PowerPoint presentation…”). As a former physics teacher, the word “leverage” has a specific meaning in my mind. It implies compounding resources to gain some mathematical or mechanical advantage.

Leverage is like mechanical gestalt. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. You know – like having 15 students collectively read 94 articles before the next class.

Such a simple idea with so much potential for use in the classroom and in professional development.

(Don’t even get me started on the use of the word “potential.”)

Raising the Bar on Professional Development

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[Cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I blogged earlier this week about the potential for collaborative technologies to have a significant impact on the way we deliver professional development in our schools. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that we are right on the precipice of some really powerful transformations in the ways that schools have traditionally handled staff development.

The PD Spiral

Think about professional development and you’ll often think of what I’ve heard described as “drive by staff development.” We’ve all been there. We talk about something (or we bring in a highly-paid consultant to talk about something), we spend a day or two on it, and then it’s forgotten; vaporized into the ether like the opaque projector and the mimeograph. No one knows how it will be implemented or even whether it will be implemented. There was little or no discussion on how it will look in practice. It’s just gone.

Worse, we meet after the students have gone home for the day. Everyone is exhausted and time is limited. But before the actual PD can begin, we have 87 announcements and a mess of administrivia to get through. That leaves roughly 11 minutes for the planned inservice session, by which time everyone is transfixed by the clock on the wall and ready to go home.

The Perfect Storm

I can’t help but think that everything is coming together. Online tools available for free or cheap are sufficient in features and quality to deliver a powerful learning experience for teachers and administrators. Further, in our current economy, it’s safe to say that districts will be scaling back on bringing in high-paid consultants to “teach us” something. Finally, the trend toward building-level instructional coaches means there are dedicated teacher leaders on campus who can support classroom teachers in implementing new teaching strategies.

Vox Populi

At my school we’re not just talking the talk. When our new administrative team came to the building last year we heard the complaints loud and clear. Rather than talk about making PD meaningful, we put together a simple, online survey that took teachers less than 5 minutes to complete. We asked them rate themselves on a 1-5 scale of proficiency in several different areas that were part of the district’s initiatives. We also asked them to give the top three PD topics they’d like to see as well as the one (or two) that they hoped they’d never see again.

While it now sounds forehead-smackingly obvious, how often have we as administrators taken the time to ask the teachers what they wanted? OK, maybe we’ve asked, but have we listened? Have we delivered? Or did we ask because that’s what some seminar on shared decision-making told us we should do and then just do whatever we thought was best anyway?

No More Secrets

Using the data we gathered from our faculty, at our next pre-determined PD time, we didn’t jump right in. As the resident presentation guru (gratuitous link), I prepared for the faculty a brief but comprehensive overview of the survey results so that everyone was on the same page. This way, when we announced that we would be doing a session on a particular topic, it was obvious that it wasn’t just The Suits pushing their agenda, it was what people wanted.

For example, if 85% of our staff felt comfortable with accessing our district’s data warehouse, we knew we didn’t need to spend 4 hours on it. We offered an optional session for our new teachers or for those who wanted to refresh their memories about the site.

Bringing it Together

So now we have the data on what people want and it’s pretty clear that one-size-fits-all is not going to work all the time. Sure, sometimes there are initiatives and mandates and new software that make an all-staff meeting necessary, but more often teachers’ and administrators’ staff development needs are pretty individual.

This is where virtual PD fits perfectly. If four people have a desire to learn best practices for digital storytelling and ten are jonesing for more info about Lexiles, you can meet those needs without subjecting every single staff member to some one-size-fits-all inservice activity that may not even make sense to them.

If we put the pieces together, it’s simple. We need to honor what our teachers already know and find out what they want to learn. Collecting data, aggregating the results, sharing the results with the faculty, and using them to build a comprehensive PD plan can not only change the culture of the school, but it can raise the level of quality and engagement in your school’s professional development.

On-Demand Personal (and Professional?) Development

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As a PhD student I spend too much of my time pondering what topic I’ll eventually tackle for The Dissertation. Naturally, I’m interested in leadership and leadership development, but I’m also interested in learning. Specifically, the way we learn when we leverage the power of collaborative technologies that, right now, we’re barely even scratching the surface of. How do these technologies empower educators to educate and, maybe more importantly, to be educated.

Most of the learning that I see happening online occurs in what have come to collectively be called “Personal Learning Networks.”

Coffee Talk

I’ve wrestled quite a bit lately with this idea of a Personal Learning Network (or “PLN”). While creating a PLN is all the rage, discounting their significance could be grounds for excommunication (twexcommunication?). Initially, I wondered how this had any sound, educational value as it seemed to me akin to meeting some friends at the local coffee joint, talking a little about work and a little about the Broncos and calling it professional development.

But then it struck me exactly how many times I’ve done exactly that. And how many times I’ve said or heard someone else say something to the effect that, “Hey – all professional development should be like this!”

Consensus, Conshmensus

As with many things “21st century,” the notion of a PLN is vague at best. What are they? Do we start our own? Join one? How? What’s the protocol? To get some idea of how difficult it really is to pin this concept down, think of the last time you tried to explain to someone that you learned about something from someone on Twitter.

“Yeah – I heard about it from this guy I know. Well, not ‘know, know.’ I know him from Twitter. It’s this website where you can tell everyone what you’re doing. Well, I guess they care since they’re following me, but anyway – he had this great idea…”

If all of this is a little too abstract for you, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach has assembled some resources for people interested in finding out what the heck a PLN is and why they should care. My interest is really in watching these things develop. In the two years I’ve been blogging and Twittering, I’ve already seen conversations around social networking in general grow from the fringe, early-adopters (“Hey, this is cool!”) to becoming more mainstream, at least among forward-thinking educators (“I learned about this resource from someone on Twitter.”).

A New Era of Online PD?

Even though there is little specific agreement on exactly what a PLN is, I think that even the doubters may have to grudgingly accept the value of these tools when it comes to connecting with others to share resources and ideas. Has the time come when using Facebook and Twitter for a few hours can be counted as “professional development time?” Probably not. But as the significance of creating virtual learning communities gains acceptance by those higher up the chain, I think we will see more and more structured, high-quality learning opportunities become available to those willing and ready to embrace them.

Practicing what I preach

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Posting intermittently as life and work allow has freed me of the “must post everyday” mentality that I think is the bane of many bloggers. I particularly enjoyed writing my most recent post about spending my time leading the people who matter, but after I published it here and on LeaderTalk, it occurred to me that I didn’t give any examples of how this applies more directly to leading the adults in the building.

Leading for the majority means that I…

  • …avoid like the plague addressing the entire staff or an entire department about the transgressions of a minority. No one likes receiving the all-staff email that starts out with, “It has come to our attention that several of you are not showing up for your assigned duty in the cafeteria…” Nonsense. If Mr. Jones isn’t cutting the mustard, I take it up with him. Sure it’s uncomfortable the first, oh, hundred times, but that comes with the big, fancy office.
  • …use policy as a guide when making decisions, but not as the Gospel. There is always a chance it was written by someone in the late ’80s who retired years ago who had a particular axe to grind. (Seriously? “Students may not use the pay phones during class time?”)
  • …focus on what is best for kids, not what is easiest or most comfortable for adults. Yes, I know that having your prep during block 1 is more convenient, but you’re the only person who teaches Nuclear Physics and that’s when it best fits most kids’ schedules.
  • …communicate with others if there is a chance that they’ll feel like their “power” was undermined. For instance, if I opt to give a student back his confiscated cell phone prior to 3:00 (per policy!) because he has to leave to pick up his little sister at elementary school.

So it’s tricky, this “leading for the majority” thing. But I can tell you that in the end I’ll sleep better at night.