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

14. March 2010 · 11 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags: , , , ,

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

12. March 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags: , , , , , ,

[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.

Raising the Bar on Professional Development

12. February 2009 · 6 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags: , , ,

[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

11. February 2009 · 3 comments · Categories: Communication, Education, Leadership · Tags: , ,

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.