Pick your popsicle?

This past week, my daughter caught some kind of viral bug. At one point, I offered her a choice of popsicles as part of the campaign to keep her from getting dehydrated. Her response left me nonplussed. She looked in the box and mused aloud "Well, I threw up a green one. I saw some orange in my puke the other time, so I guess I'll pick purple."

Fortunately, the purple stayed down.

Lately, I'm collecting stories that happen in my life and trying to think how I can use them or make them meaningful. This one got me thinking about faculty development. How?

All to often, teachers approach faculty development "choices" the same way my daughter approached the popsicle box. Which ones haven't already been, well, nauseating.

Why? That takes me back to Dan Pink's Purpose, Mastery, Autonomy.


The experiment I did recently with unstructured time for faculty developmentwas well-received, but I'm not sure what the results are going to be. That's okay. For a while. The waiting is tough. But, that's what I'll have to do.

Wouldn't it have been easier just to make everyone "learn" about something I picked for 3 hours with a series of moderately engaging or entertaining activities? Then I wouldn't be waiting. . .

Look out--PD coming!

Tonight's inaugural #isedchat addressed the question: "What does successful professional development look like at your school?"

I missed the chat--7pm with two little kids in the house is just not twitter chat friendly. So, I perused the thread tonight with a goal in mind. What should we do at school for our next scheduled PD time?

Periodically we have a half day for professional development at our school. I've been thinking about our upcoming day for a while now, and here's what I've come up with. This stems in part from the thinking that led to the "why are we teaching this stuff" post.

Now, what with being a fan of stealing, I mean researching, others' ideas, I went looking for someone who'd tried this and blogged about it. Bingo! Lyn Hilt, a K-6 principal in Pennsylvania who blogs at The Principal's Posts gave the teachers at her school time for self directed learning. Not a free day, but a day with purpose and accountability, and autonomy. Her description of how she organized the day inspired me.

Here's part of the email message I wrote to the other deans and the division director:

I've been thinking about this day. Here's what I'd like to propose:

Implementing a form of the Google 20% time. There's been a lot written
about this since Dan Pink mentioned it in Drive and his speech. We
could ask folks ahead of time what they needed to learn more about.
Some groups might naturally emerge. I would work to provide resources
for those who need them. We could also put together a "sit and get" for
those who insist. The big part is that 20% time still has some
accountability. Participants are supposed to DELIVER at the end of
their time. What would that delivery look like at Cannon? I am
thinking the delivery would be in small groups spread throughout campus,
with one of us in each group.
Sarah

I suggested some reading on the concept of 20% time:

From Dan Pink:

One school leader's experience:

Let's see what they say!

Why are we teaching this stuff?

I follow with avid interest the musings and ideas of leaders in the Independent Curriculum Group. The NY Times article about changes to the AP.

Great--I'm reading good stuff. Now what am I going to do about it?? That's the question I'm asking myself. Because if I'm not doing anything about it. . .

On Connected Principals, Dave Truss wrote a brilliant post Less is more. Teach less, learn more. I left a comment and he wrote me back--causing that thrill that happens when a nobody like me gets a comment from someone who is a somebody. DT is the creator of the Brave New World Wide Web Video seen by just about everybody.

In our exchange (I had an exchange w/ Dave Truss!) I thought of something that made me realize it was time to blog. We must be wary of teaching kids that the academic grindstone is the way to ensure life-long success. That is clearly not true for many now. But, to break that grindstone for students, we’ll have to free the teachers first.

What are the essentials?

Give teachers time to collaborate and learn. I can do that. But it isn't just about time. Given time, even good teachers will often fill it with the tasks of teaching rather than expanding their own thinking. "There are so many papers to grade. If I have more time, I can read each draft as well as the final copy to help students be better writers." What do we need besides time? How do we create an expectation of learning and collaborating in that time?

Access to resources that expand teachers' worlds and provide tools for collaboration. I admit it, I'm a professional media junkie. I want to drag more folks into my world. I need to make sure that I'm not neglecting other realms though. Why on earth do teachers have to buy books about learning with their own money? Where are the professional libraries at most schools? How old are the books in them? Do teachers read and discuss books as part of their professional day or is that supposed to be done "on your own time?"

Authentic accountability. What if each teacher set some indicators to show how s/he has grown as a learner at the beginning of the school year and was evaluated with those in mind? Some schools approach teacher evaluation this way, how does it work?

Finally, that 20% time Daniel Pink espouses (see video below). Started (?) by Google, educators have been talking about it. we keep hearing about. Do we give teachers and students 20% time? How about 10%? 5%?

Hathaway Brown Innovation Summit

I am absolutely determined not to feel overwhelmed by my experience at Hathaway Brown's Innovation Summit this weekend. Why? Because that leads to passivity. Bill Christ, the head of school at Hathaway warned attendees that what matters most is what we do after we leave.

@Sedson was at the conference and I am now following her on twitter, which led me today to this video:



In today's paper, I read a post-election editorial that referenced the Bloomberg poll that showed the majority of voters believed that middle class taxes had been raised during the last two years, when, in fact, they fell. Those asked also believed that the economy was shrinking, not growing.

The article blames Democrats for not making the message clear to voters.

Not me--I blame education. How did we get to the point in this country where being informed means listening to infotainment that echos what you already think? Why don't adults in this country ask questions and do research with the primary documents readily accessible online? Could it be because we don't teach students to ask questions in school? Because we use textbooks to teach them instead of primary sources? Yes, primary sources are harder to read. They don't have reading guides or comprehension questions already prepared. Who read the health care bill? Who read even extracts of it? (Confession, not me either).

What does school look like when we decide to prepare students to run the world instead of prepare them to have a job/go to college?

So, tomorrow, I start. First up? The kids. They need to know that I'm counting on them to be able to solve some of the pretty big problems they are about to encounter. I also want to talk with students about motivation. Both Pink's autonomy, mastery, and purpose along with the success and fun they are apparently seeking. We'll see how it goes.

Why social media for educators?

Cross-posted (and better looking) at NCAIS Innovate. Not sure why I'm struggling with Blogger and succeeding with Wordpress, but I definitely am.

Once upon a very hot August almost-back-to-school day, I came upon a tweet. A tweet that traveled across the country, from North Carolina to Oregon (and maybe beyond) in a flash.



I was not the only one. . .




Within a few days, at least 10 (and I suspect far more) teachers asked the same two questions of the fresh faces gathering in front of them: When do you feel most engaged/interested/curious in school? and When do you feel most checked out/bored/uninterested in school?

The result? You can see my class's responses here:







They resemble, but are not identical to the responses Ms Stewart's students gave.

Sharing ideas among teachers is nothing new. Back when I began teaching, it sometimes (often?) took a semester or more for an idea to make it down the hallway. This shared question went from North Carolina to Iowa to Utah in moments. Next, the questions, along with their accompanying images, sparked a spirited conversation on the English Companion Ning, as well as a less feisty but just as heart-felt series of responses on Ms Stewart's blog, In For Good. So what's the value of this rapid spread of an idea?

First, every teacher who asked the questions spent a some time thinking about knowing the students they encounter a little better as learners. Which means that a few hundred students learned that their teachers care how they learn.

Second, a few teachers engaged in a lively conversation that involved debating the value of pedagogical methods, sharing professional resources, and critiquing said resources with intellectual vigor. Teachers are busy this time of year with activities that can seem decidedly unintellectual. To have teachers engage in visible intellectual discourse can only be described as heartening! And this happened without a course, a scholarly journal article, or a professional development session!

The American Lit students in my course and I had an interesting conversation about their thoughts as they looked at the Wordles. I'm sure that the other classes that answered the same questions did too. Is the next step connecting the students together to see what they have in common with students across the country (and maybe across the world?) That would be yet another value add.

Creating a positive herd

In Switch, Dan and Chip Heath discuss how to convince individuals and organizations to change the ways they operate when the initial inclination is to resist change at all costs.

There's a lot that is interesting in the book--I received my copy as a gift at the NAIS conference in San Francisco last year. Instead of reading it all at once, I've been reading it in quick snippets for months. I'm not totally sure how that happened, in the intervening time I've read a number of other books in the more traditional (start in the front and work your way through to the end, one book at a time) methods.

The upshot of this though, is that I reached the section on the power of the herd just as the school year was beginning at Cannon School. At the end of the first week, I said to our Dean of Students "You know, I haven't seen a single sullen face all week."

Now, I'm sure there were at least a couple of students who weren't quite ready for summer to end. However, the culture at the school is "we're happy to be here with each other." I saw smiles, heard many offers of help from/to students and adults, and witnessed more helping hands than I could count.

Not all the new students wanted to be here. Yet, when I checked in with the new students during the week, the universal observation was "I'm feeling happy to be here, everyone here is so great." It's hard to be sullen when those around you are cheerfully showing you where to put your stuff, helping you navigate the lunch line just because they can tell they haven't seen you before, and translating words to you in whispers during class (we have several international students). In other words, the herd at Cannon gives the message that here, we look out for ways to help each other. There's an ad for a financial or insurance company that implies the same thing-folks in the ad see someone help a stranger struggling with a package, then go on to restore a baby's fallen toy to the stroller, someone else sees that and so on.

I credit the two Deans of Students with creating the kind of "herd" that encourages new students to enter the community with a positive outlook. They are, without a doubt two of the most positive, yet non-Pollyanna educators I've met. They act as a team, make their contributions unselfishly, all of which makes them role models for everyone else in the community (students and faculty).

Earth shattering research? No, we all sort of knew this already, but seeing it in action is powerful. It's going

The What If Game

The what if game is totally underrated. It's so much more that a tool 5 year olds use to annoy their parents from the backseat!

Google's 20% rule is a derivative of the back seat game for grown ups--don't just wonder what if, try to bring into existence that which you imagine. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s head of product management, advised students in a blog post.
Google, he said, is looking for “non-routine problem-solving skills.” I found that on Jeff Jarvis's blog transcript of his TedXNY talk. Google engineers are encouraged to spend twenty percent of their work time on projects that interest them.

So. . . how do you play "what if?" professionally?

Why now?

This isn't usually a time of year for philosophical musing--it's practical time in education, make the schedules, get the room ready, laminate, copy. . .

This post originated from an assignment to write a sentence describing yourself based on your top 5 Strengths. We're going to have all the students start the year by thinking about what they do well and how to use their strengths to their advantage all year. I can't wait for school to start!

My sentence

Let's find out! What, why, how, and, while we're at it, what if. . .