No One is Coming for Us!

One of the largest frustrations that I have with regard to pedagogical reform (involving technology or otherwise), is related to the perspective with which many teachers think about leading the change. Many teachers are looking around wondering where the leaders are, who will ‘allow’ them to implement their big ideas for change. The thing that I have come to realize, people, is that NO ONE IS COMING FOR US.

Now I don’t say this to be inflammatory or contentious, but rather to point out one of the basic stumbling blocks that many reform minded teachers trip on in the great march to more/better/faster in pedagogical reform. The leaders in many schools are not reform minded. The leaders in many state houses are not reform minded. Although the word reform is tossed around as though it is a fore gone national policy conclusion, much of the ‘reform’ policies look just like more of the same: testing, standardization, and then more testing. I have to let you in on a little secret, more standardization and testing is not reform. Real reform, that takes into account the shift from an era of information scarcity to one of information surplus, is harder to come by, its nebulous. But, much like the constitutional definition of pornography, I know it when I see it. And I think many teachers also know it when they see it on the faces of their students, in the work they do, and in the words they speak. We know.

Hence, when you find yourself saying, “I wonder when (fill in the blank here with your school/workplace/district) is finally going to get it and start adopting more ‘21st century’ friendly pedagogical reform”, my suggestion is to stop asking that question because NO ONE IS COMING FOR US.

The leadership that we all crave and seek is really already here. We are it. Those of you trapped in places where the leadership is abysmal/lacking/stultifying, start taking classes to be the principal, or the curriculum director or, IT director, or, or, or….. Build common cause with community groups, universities, and non-profits. Get moving. Lead. We must stop waiting for someone to come and save us all from the big bad bureaucratic machine that crushes innovation and creativity because, well, you know why.

SLA goes to AZ/UT

The trip was a smashing success and we are only hours away from our return trip on Southwest! Huge thanks to all the people that made this trip possible…
- Megan, Dave and Heather for picking us up from the airport and setting up camp on the first night!
- Shane for hooking us up to stay at the Saguaro Lake Ranch
- Megan and Dave for allowing us to use the Patterson Hostel as home base for the duration
- Graci for her wonderful hospitality at Grand Canyon
- CHS teachers, students and parents for graciously hosting us on the midpoint of our trip.
- Dave Roth, principal of CHS, for letting the SLA kids sleep at CHS in order to save a little cash.
- Katie, Walt, Brin, Jerry and Mark for guiding us expertly down the San Juan River
- Emma, Chantal and John from the GCY office that rose from the ashes of the warehouse fire to pull our trip off without a hitch. The manner in which they all recovered from a devastating fire is nothing short of miraculous and speaks to the perseverance, hard work and tenacity with which this crew can rally.

I was sad to see the San Juan River valley floating off into the distance yesterday and then to have a blustery snow storm almost hastening our departure from Flagstaff… I miss this place, this space. There is something about that river how it cuts through history, geology and lore. Tomorrow I will be back in Philly, but must admit that a piece of me stays with the southwest. More pictures, blog posts and stories to follow!

Richard Rothstein – PFT

Backchanneling the (not) State of the Union

Goal:
Student engagement with and reflection on the (not) State of the Union
Means:
Moodle Chatroom backchannel for the live broadcast of the address
AND
Personal response to the ideas/issues presented using GCast channel and cellphones*

Results:
20 students participated in the live backchannel**
AND
1-2 minute student reflections recorded on GCast

*For directions on how to set up a gcast channel to use with multiple users

**Kyle Stevens and I are toying around with having a TX/PA joint chatroom next year between his students and my students

Feels like Home.

At some point in the last seven days I finally synthesized my decision making process for picking up from a place I adored to join in the fun at SLA. The days leading up to the EduCon kick off were nothing more than a blur of constant activity and thought focused on organization, doing, cleaning, constructing, moving and every other action verb you can imagine. It was delightful.

However, when education professionals started pouring into the school on Friday morning one question kept popping up. It came in different forms and slight variations on a theme, but really people wanted to why SLA works, why I would move across country to join in. When I left Flagstaff last spring, I wrote:

The visit to EduCon2.0 and SLA solidified within me a certainty that I think I had been coming to for quite some time. I needed to work in a place with people that ‘get’ it with regard to students and learning. Although many of my revelations and connections were at tech conferences and online, at the end of the day I need to be in a real space with educators that approach education with a similar philosophy and curricular approach. By walking through the door of the Science Leadership Academy I literally opened a new door on my career path.

All of that is still true, however I realized a more subtle and significant connection in this whole choice to be here and it connects to another theme I find myself returning to time and again. I grew up in the smallest of farming communities in western Wisconsin, in the 80s. Glamorous it was not; hard work, struggle and perseverance were at the top of the list for descriptors. I would not change a bit of it. Nothing. Not one moment.

The school I attended was not progressive, traditional in all those really traditional ways. Lincoln High School was phenomenally important to a bunch of farm kids in the Midwest. Our teachers pushed us to be prepared to get out and do more with our lives. The people in the community pushed for it, the students reached for it and the result was a singular effort striving for opportunity that only college offered at that time. The high school held 160 students 9-12, but has cranked out a Ph.D. from Berkeley that works for the National Institutes of Health, a member of the CIA, a top account in a major firm, a vice president of Ericsson and who knows what else. Small farm towns do not tend to have this kind of success rate for their students. What my hometown did was unify behind the success of its young people in the most consistent manner. Communal, unyielding support and expectations for success walked with us everyday.

Since I left the cozy security of rural America 16 years ago, I have tried to create that feeling of community I left in the rolling hills of Wisconsin. And on Friday when I was being asked over and over again, why does SLA work, why did you choose this. The answer was the same for both questions: SLA epitomizes all of the good pieces of a community of care I was carefully raised in as a child and after all these years teaching all over the US, I am home again.

Grading Education

During our decadent snow day today, I began reading Richard Rothstein’s Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right . If anyone else has read or is reading this particular piece of writing, please let me know as I would like to process some of this as I go. The Economic Policy Institute has the introduction posted.

Some introductory ideas/assertions from Rothstein that caught my attention:

–In education, “accountability,” as described here, requires schools and other public institutions that prepare our youth to pursue the goals established by the people and their representatives through democratic processes, and to achieve these goals to the extent possible by using the most effective strategies available.

–Yet none of these proposals commanded sufficient support because none addressed NCLB’s most fundamental problem – although tests, properly interpreted, can contribute some important information about school quality, testing alone is a poor way to measure whether schools, or their students, perform adequately.

–State accountability systems should ensure that schools and supporting institutions promote all these traits in a balanced fashion, because accountability for only some outcomes will create incentives to ignore others.

–One reason, perhaps the most important, why No Child Left Behind and similar testing systems in the states got accountability so wrong is that we’ve wanted to do accountability on the cheap.

–The chapter describes how an accountability system organized around achieving a fixed proficiency point leads to excessive concentration on students whose performance is slightly below that point and ignores students who are either above or far below it.

These are just a few of the quotes from the introduction. I am perpetually intrigued by the idea that standardized testing, as it is currently employed through NCLB, is a false path for a successful educational model. In the attempt to wrap my brain around relevant research, I picked up a few books over the last month to dig into. This is the first one into which I am digging.

The last few sentences of the introduction really hit home after this past weekend’s conversations.

But first things first. Before detailing this accountability program, we have to ask, “accountable for what?” What are the goals of American public education? Certainly, good test scores are part of the answer, but should schools be accountable for more – say, good citizenship, or good judgment? If so, is it possible to measure these broader school outcomes to know whether educators are performing satisfactorily? It is to these questions that we now turn.

Now onto page 13.

Where I come from…

My great-grandparents on the Laufenberg family farm

Anyone who knows me, even a little, knows that I grew up on a farm in west central Wisconsin. Even though I left the farm at 18, it has never left me. There is one thing that stands out to me after all these years away from the farm, that I try to replicate everywhere I can, and that is a sense of community; and not community in the digital, 21st century, ubiquitous kind of way.

Today when I called my parents they relayed a story that best epitomizes the sense of community that still exists in small, rural towns. The Hagens, Julie and Jewell, live up the road, and have done so since before I was alive. Their son, Terry, was a year older than I in school. The father and son team run a dairy operation with 150 head of cattle, machinery, etc. The business supports two families and is pulling off what few families have in the last few decades on America’s small farms; the family farm.

Friday night, just after midnight, my Mom bolted out of bed, unsure of what had woken her, but knew something was wrong. A few minutes later there were sirens coming from all directions down our little road that scarcely sees a vehicle after midnight. My father, hard sleeper extraordinaire, slept through all the commotion. Knowing that my father would want to see what was happening and help if he could, my mother woke him up. As my father turned west out of the driveway, the cause of the commotion was abundantly clear.

The Hagen’s barn was on fire. This was not a small fire, burning machinery, hay, straw, equipment and worst of all, 44 head of their best milking cows. Four volunteer fire departments responded with probably close to 100 people up and out of bed to help in the middle of the night. My dad buzzed back to the house to pick up the cattle trailer to help get the remaining cows to a nearby pasture. Almost immediately, one of the men present remembers that a local farmer just sold off his cows the previous week and there was a barn still set up for milking, about 15 miles away. The only thing missing was a compressor, as that had been sold off already. A local electrician, and close friend of the family, chimes in with, you get the cattle there and the compressor will be in and ready. Men and women spent the bulk of the night trying to make sure the fire didn’t spread to the rest of the buildings and stand in support of the family. No one received a dollar or compensation or anything but the knowledge that if it was their home or barn or livelihood, the same would apply.

In the recent political season, the scene is one that I almost can’t bear to watch anymore with the spewing of anger and the skewing of fact. But, as I listened to my mom tell me the story, it occurs to me that none of that matters if we don’t have communities like the one I grew up in, continuing to help when help is needed and celebrate when the good times come. It may be a little overly simplistic and/or Pollyanna’ish’ to say so, but I think that America is really in trouble when we cease to be the kind of place where neighbors help neighbors, let alone know their neighbors. Living in the city is really unreal with fabulous opportunities and wonderful events… but I am not sure that the sense of community that exists in these rural pockets of America translate well in our cities. The loss of that feeling that your neighbor will get out of bed in the middle of a Friday night to help salvage your life’s work… is one that America can’t stand to lose.

It is in my classroom that I try very hard to help students to feel that sense of community, that sense that someone will help you because it is the right thing to do. SLA is an easy place to foster such a feeling because the community is already so strong. But I often think about what it must be like to live a life without the strong sense that your network will support you when you stumble. To have grown up in it makes me a better person, to know that it is still alive and well, gives me hope.

Rebranding History

Rebranding History

Woke up this morning and heard ‘crackdown’ again…this time on NPR.

While having a conversation last night during the Olympics Opening Ceremony, a friend expressed disappointment with NBC for the treatment of Tiananmen Square in the historical overview of China. The word NBC employed to describe Tiananmen was: crackdown. Webster’s definition of crackdown: as to take positive regulatory or disciplinary action. If that is the correct definition of Tiananmen, I must have watched different video footage when I was 15 years old. If you want a refresher…there are endless videos and readings online. But make no mistake, there is nothing positive about what you will see. Tiananmen was a time when ‘democracy was sweeping the globe’, the Wall was crumbling, perestroika was working and the people of China were ready to have a voice. As the days clicked by in 1989 and the people began to crowd into Tiananmen Square, I remember thinking that this could be their moment. But all of that came to a halt on June 4th when the tanks rolled down the street.

Fast forward fourteen years when I had the extreme privilege of visiting China during the summer of 2003. We traveled to many places in China but I knew that when I got to Beijing, I wanted to see one thing for myself. The city was quiet that morning and I wanted to get there without the crowd I was traveling with, to have a moment before the hawkers and tourists and lines rolled in. I needed to be there, I needed to stand there. At one point I turned around and looked back towards Mao’s tomb and my mind flashed to the scene of the military coming down the street. It was unchanged, I could see the tanks in my mind, and I was frozen. This was a place where a generation of people tried to fight against oppression of action and thought, and lost. This was the scene of a massacre, not a crackdown.

Possibly most upsetting about the media’s word choice in using crackdown is that it adopts the Chinese government perspective of Tiananmen, rather than the perspective from the rest of the world as we watched. When the media starts to adopt the language of the Communist government to describe a catastrophic violent action against free speech and action, we should all take notice and question the re-branding of a staggering human rights nightmare.

Words can be incredibly insidious in changing the memory of an event. The use of the word crackdown is one of those moments and, although I wholeheartedly want the Olympics to give the Chinese people their voice, I think much would be lost if the global collective culture began to actually think of Tiananmen as nothing more than a government action to bring order, rather than the massacre that it was. Could be an interesting moment to parse out in the classroom with students about the ’smoothing’ of history over time by using vocabulary differently… this unfortunately is not the only example.

Growth, transitions and new challenges!

Tomorrow I attend yet another technology conference and once again I will present.  To be completely honest I started presenting at these conferences because if I presented I attended for free.  This seems like somewhat of a silly reason to present at conferences, but, the fact remains that in the years of limited budgets and no money to pay for such extravagances, I wanted to go and presenting allowed for that to happen. 

My technology use prior to 2005 was primarily at the classroom level using tools and producing projects with my students.  Technology was certainly a part of the classroom as a learning tool, but not as a tool for my own professional growth as an educator.  Then in 2005, David Warlick came to Flagstaff and he did what he does best; assure a crowd of people that there is this really powerful collaborative network of blogs and wikis just waiting to be used for a plethora of learning and creativity.  I started an RSS feeder that day.  The learning curve became steep from there and I was on a new path, wasn’t exactly sure where I was going all the time, but there I was nonetheless. 

The next year I am at the AzTEA conference in Flagstaff, I met Hall Davidson and he did what he does best; amaze a crowd of teachers with the power of media and expression of ideas through a multitude of technology tools and gadgets.  Shortly after, I became a STAR educator with the Discovery Educator Network.  The fast forward button on my life has been on ever since that point.

One of the blogs that was added to my feeder early on was Practical Theory by Chris Lehmann by way of Christian Long’s think:lab.  For the better part of a year I read, I commented, I thought and thought and thought.  Then the connections started to get closer and more meaningful.  Real connections developed between these people I had only known online and in small pictures next to bios and names.  Last August when the first inklings of EduCon started to come to light, I knew I was going.  It didn’t really matter when exactly it was or how much it was going to cost me.  I was going.
   

The visit to EduCon and SLA solidified within me a certainty that I think I had been coming to for quite some time.  I needed to work in a place with people that ‘get’ it with regard to students and learning.  Although many of my revelations and connections were at tech conferences and online, at the end of the day I need to be in a real space with educators that approach education with a similar philosophy and curricular approach.  By walking through the door of the Science Leadership Academy I literally opened a new door on my career path. 

This summer I move to Philadelphia and to the Science Leadership Academy.

The move didn’t have to be to SLA (although that was my first choice , but I need to be in a place that is more true to the teacher that I am striving to become.  You see I have much to learn, I need to grow and I am hoping to a find a ‘ripe environment’ at SLA.

The point of this little trip down memory lane is to say that this is all possible because of my network.  Sitting in Flagstaff while playing in the mountains, I was able to reach out, build connections, make friends and learn a ton.  There are no excuses for staying hold up in your classroom with the door shut or feel like the struggles you feel in the classroom are yours alone.  There is a dynamic, enthusiastic and resourceful group of people just waiting for you to join in on all the shenanigans. 

For me, this is only the beginning and it is all thanks to my network.

Personal Economics

As a part of my teaching philosophy, I believe strongly in empowering students to discover their learning, developing life skills and encouraging positive decision-making.  Keeping that in mind, several years ago my teaching team wanted to come up with a method for developing a yearlong program that bridged the distance between all of our classes and reinforced the basic team-wide goals for the students.  Our result was not revolutionary or all that original, but we developed something that was manageable and well designed for our particular situation that also reflected our overarching educational philosophy.  This was intentionally crafted to be very straightforward and simple as this is used with four different teachers  and 130 middle school students.

Goals
1.    Reinforce the habits of being a responsible student.

• Credits
  • Money earned for good grades – quarterly 
  • Money earned for having perfect attendance – bi-weekly
  • Money for a parent signature in agendas – weekly
  • Money for books read
  • Money for participating in special community service events

• Debits
  • Money deducted for being tardy
  • Money deducted for losing checkbook register
  • Money deducted for a hall pass   

2.    Introduce the concepts of a personal economics.

• Credits
• Debits
• Consequences for overdrawing account
• Benefits of saving money

3.    Provide incentives for supporting the greater community.

• Throughout the school year we have community service events in which we encourage students to take part.
• For instance, during the food drive, they would have the possibility of receiving credits based on the number of food items they collected.

Process

1. Each student staples a blank ‘check register’ into his or her student agenda.
2. The first of every month one teacher would ‘pay’ the students a credit.  At that time, the balances were checked and if any student had lost their agenda or overdrawn their account, they were assigned a lunch detention. 
3. Bi-monthly the students receive payment for two weeks of perfect attendance
4. Quarterly the students received a bonus for getting good grades.
5. Extra pages of the check register available as needed.  It is important for each teacher to have copies of the register pages on hand.
6. Balances are verified the last week of school.
7. At the end of the year students gather in the commons area for a large auction.

Challenges

• Teacher transience
• Consistency of use/implementation
• Students fail to bring the student agendas to school or lose them
• Use of instructional time for salary, checking balances, etc.

Since we are a multi-age looping team of students, there are both 7th and 8th graders on the team.  Often times the 7th graders are irresponsible with the registers and use up all the money on hall passes or lost registers.  The 8th graders are much more tuned into the balance in the register because they sat through the auction the previous year and know opportunity awaits them.  It became evident is that the benefits of the program were best seen in year two.  My proposed solution if I only had the students for one instructional year is to conduct two smaller auctions to instill that saver mentality.

The concept of money is slippery for students.  When conducting this activity one can really start to see what the natural tendencies of a student are with regard to long term goals.  Most students want to have a large balance going into the auction, but do not seem to make choices that will yield that result.  The students that are the savers in the group use their hall time wisely and make sure to get the easy money, like the agenda signatures.  In addition, when a student wants a hall pass, it takes the pressure off the teacher to let the student go or not, because no money means no hall pass.  If they have forgotten their agenda or have no money, they have no flexibility for hall passes.  This mirrors the real life reality of being out of money and not being able to do whatever you want. 

The credit crisis in America should give rise to a larger conversation about teaching and practicing the skills of personal economics in a much more deliberate and meaningful way for students.  The lack of money sense and restraint has contributed to the current national money debacle.  There are some very simple but effective ways to bring basic concepts and habits of practice to our young people.  This has to be one of the most relevant lessons that can be taught to all students and KNOW that they will need it as the years pass.

*** The Personal Economics program was developed by the fabulous teaching team of Barry George, Kathie Quigley and Amy Smith (and me of course).***

***This whole post came out of a great twitter conversation with Wes Fryer this morning about economics education.***