Thinking about math. . .

Hey, I'm supposed to be writing about literacy, yes?  I'm taking a wee detour into math literacy on this post.  I've been a fan of Dan Meyer and his blog for a while, since before this TED Talk was recorded. (Best line: I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it, but is forced by law to buy it.)

We're at a time when we (the collective, education community "we") need to make some decisions about where math education is going. There are so many fascinating conversations going on around math right now:

Online and/or electronic math resources are finally beginning to appear in real numbers.  The National Virtual Manipulative Lab has  individual activities and entire eModules mapped to standards.   Kinetic has several more traditional ebook offerings.

Teachers in Finland and Utah, frustrated with what's available are writing their own math text books collaboratively, with their standards and students in mind.  Don't want to start from scratch?  Check out CK12--and customize it!

Henri Picciotto and a crew of like minded math teachers share ideas about how to Escape the Textbook.

There's a lot going on in math! Almost makes me want to go back to school (again!).

Enough with the "tool" already!

In the early years of the educational technology explosion the mantra was “it’s only a tool.” I must admit that I myself have used that expression, usually to reassure hesitant teachers that their jobs were not in jeopardy. However, to classify the myriad devices available today as mere “tools” is as absurd as calling the printing press as a mere machine. Sometimes a tool begets a transformation. Recently, I sat with the teachers in a world languages department who were beginning their text selection process. We’d learned of schools that leveraged digital tools to offer students a choice of over 23 languages to study in a semi-independent environment. The department chair looked at me and said “It’s becoming clear that we learn to work with blending this, or we lose our jobs.”

Yup.

It's not like the printing press is the most recent example either.  Did calligraphy survive?  Sure, as a specialty art form.  Here's a more recent example:

Dan Savage at NAIS Annual Conference

New Live Blog added to my NAIS Annual Conference schedule.  Dan Savage

I'm really excited about this one! 1:30 Friday (pacific time) Dan Savage is now a household name thanks to his It Gets Better video project on YouTube. The September 2010 project won instant acclaim asking people to upload short, positive videos about their experience with the LGBT community. Millions have viewed the popular videos, including President Barack Obama and entertainer Janet Jackson. Advertising Age called It Gets Better one of the top social media campaigns of 2010. Savage’s book, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying and Creating a Life Worth Living, released in March 2011.

Independent Matters at NAIS 2012

Backup post for Independent Matters

Equipoise in Education?

Recently, @mrmcgrann tweeted out that he had a question for Bill Gates. You can read his whole post here (and you should, I'll be here). Here's his question: To fuel innovation, we often need to take risks. Risks come with many rewards, but they also come with failure. How do you balance teacher accountability while supporting and promoting innovative teaching? This is an excellent question. Because if we take risks, we have to accept failure--it's an integral part of the process of growing to better practice. The only thing is---those are real kids and it is their learning with which we will be a risk. In Auburn Maine, some educators took an expensive and visible risk and did a randomized study with Kindergarteners and iPads. They found that using the devices with specific apps had a small but significant positive impact on literacy in just a few months.

The improvement they found leads to the question--when a benefit is observed, do those involved have an obligation to end the trial to give the benefit to all the children involved? In medical trials, the principle of equipoise means that the premise of a trial is that the researchers do not know whether a treatment or medication bestows a benefit. When the initial results of a trial are significantly positive, it means that the researchers are ethically required to stop the trial to treat all the participants. One example is early trials of AZT with AIDS patients. Does this mean that the district is now obligated to immediately provide iPads to all the kindergarteners? It's probably not that easy. So what about the opposite? What happens when a risk leads to a "nope, this isn't helping" result? When kids in the study group learn less than those with the traditional treatment? Maybe when corporate profits dip for a year, it's not a tragedy. But when a group of kindergarteners learns less about letters and sounds for a year, well, it just might be. So the stakes are high. And its not the teachers who really pay the price of failure, it's the kids. And maybe that's why it's so hard to figure out how to support truly innovative teaching.

Innovation, Live-blogs, and a Tweet or Two. . .

I'm so excited to have the opportunity to attend the NAIS Annual conference in Seattle this year. I'll be serving as a conference blogger for the first time, with a focus on live blogging the general conference sessions. I began live-blogging the conference in 2009, but this is the first time it'll be "official!"

From the conference website:

Join more than 3,500 independent school leaders and colleagues at the 2012 NAIS Annual Conference in Seattle. Together we'll tap into the innovative spirit of the Pacific Northwest to dream up bold new ideas to lead our school communities into the future. Long a hotbed of creativity, Seattle will inspire you to invent new programs and ideas and revitalize current ones to bring back to your schools. Together we'll imagine new ways to cultivate leadership within our schools -- for administrators, faculty, and our students, who are the global leaders of tomorrow. Bill Gates, our opening general session speaker and independent school alum, will inspire and challenge you as he models for us how cutting-edge innovation and philanthropy go hand in hand.

I'll be reporting live from the conference as each of the general conference speakers inspires the audience. I'll take notes on the speeches, include my own thoughts, observations of the audience and provide a curated Twitter feed as well. Clearly, I'll be drinking lots of Seattle coffee to keep me alert and multi-tasking!

The speakers I'll be live-blogging are listed below in the order in which they will speak. Click on the speakers name to go to the specific post for the live blog for that speaker. I have information about the speakers available now, along with the chance to have yourself emailed a reminder closer to the blog time.

Bill Gates

Independent Matters with a trio of guests speakers who will expound on the conference theme: Stephen Carter, Cheryl Crazy Bull, and Sarah Kay

John Hunter

Amy Chua

JUST ADDED Dan Savage

Innovation--who is doing it? What if?

This Thursday's #isedchat Everyone's talking innovation. Who's doing it? and @dwillard's Schools don't innovate? Do they?comment got me thinking.

In the "no duh" category, I had a thought this morning doing what I call jogging while listening to 21st Century Learning podcasts. Derek Willard and Josie Holford (Schools are conservative entities) are right--schools don't innovate. However, people do, both individually and collaboratively. While it's tempting to point out the wildly disruptive innovations such as, well, iAnything, most innovations/inventions aren't in that category.

Instead, some schools are intentionally creating environments that foster teachers and students who innovate. They are places where questions beginning with "what if" are met with "tell me more" or "try it" instead of "no" And that, I think, makes all the difference.

Today I listened to two leaders (Brad Rathgeber, Director of the Online School for Girls and Michael Nachbar, Director of the Global Online Academy) in the world of independent online education share the stories of their schools. How did I listen? Via downloaded podcasts while doing the aforementioned "jog." Innovative? Well, the voice interview has been around for quite a while now. The medium that allowed me to listen, not quite as long.

In a similar vein, what I learned was that not everything about these schools was wildly innovative. But something about them was--in this case it was the delivery again. Do schools need to be completely redone? Nope. Is the saying "there's nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9) still true? Yep. Do these two statements mean that there's no such thing as innovation? No. It's just that it's hard to define. Innovation isn't a set thing--a new idea, uncharted territory. Instead, it is an esprit of "let's try" that can exist in even the most tradition-bound environments. If we let it.

Nonplussed--doesn't happen to me often (but it probably should)

Last week, I returned from the Lausanne Laptop Institute in Memphis. This is always one of my favorite conferences when I go--it's well organized, the sessions are long enough not to feel rushed, and the presenters are always prepared and are masters in their areas. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

While at the institute, I live-blogged many of the presentations I attended. One of my blogs caught the attention of the keynote, Jeff Utecht. This is a conference with a pretty lively back channel and I ran into some trouble with monitoring the twitter feed and keeping up with my liveblog. Thank goodness for Bill Campbell @billcamp who stepped in to manage the twitter feed.

I'm working on a post about the value of the backchannel (not yet finished) when I realized that I had more readers of my live blogs (either live or later) of the sessions I attended, including the keynote, than I did attendees at my presentations. I'm a bit nonplussed about this fact. Could it be that I have more to contribute as a reporter than as a presenter?

Jeff Utecht The Changing Nature of Communication

Session Summary: Being a leader in the 21st Century means going beyond e-mail and newsletters into the new digital world of communicating with parents and students. Understanding that society today wants information in short and more frequent bursts is the first step in utilizing tools that allow you to communicate using the new web. This presentation demonstrates and discusses the different ways schools and school leaders can harness the power of the Internet to communicate with their school communities

Elizabeth Hellfant at Laptop Institute

Elizabeth Helfant TPACK and SAMR as Evaluative, Unifying, and Goal-Setting Framework.

There's an App for That

Julene Reed, Dir. of Academic Tech., St. George's Indep. School was so good this morning, I thought I'd come back for more!

QR Codes, connecting the physical and digital worlds with Jeff Utecht

I decided this one was too good an opportunity to pass up.

E-Books

Session on EBooks

Laptop Institute 2011

I'm back at the Laptop Institute at Lausanne this year. I missed the conference last year and it feels great to be back!

Jeff Utecht (@jutecht) is giving the keynote and I'll be liveblogging. . .surprise.



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Women who lead

On Tuesday, June 21, 2011, I'll have the chance to discuss a fascinating question with a small group of women from other NC independent schools. Why aren’t more women moving up the ranks of leadership in independent school communities to become school heads?

The question was posed in the opening of an article in the Fall 2010 edition of Independent School Leadership by Susan Feibelman and Martha Haakmat titled: A Gendered Experience.

When I read the article, I discussed it with a number of other women working in independent schools. I can only imagine that many others did the same. Shortly afterwards, in December, a TED talk (embedded at the end of this post) by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg titled Why we have too few women leaders went viral, at least among the same group. Sandberg looks at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions -- and offers 3 powerful pieces of advice to women.

Sandberg alludes to some cultural factors that Feibelman and Haakmat describe in their article:

The low number of women leaders, it turns out, is directly connected to cultural attitudes toward women as leaders.

Two women with successful school headships in their careers will keynote this gathering of women interested in learning more about leadership in independent schools. They are:

Sandra Adams, Former Head of Summit School

Doreen Kelly, Head of Ravenscroft School

As is my wont, I'll be liveblogging the keynote addresses and possibly some of the later sessions as well, right here, starting at 9:15.

Ode to Pink

Both of my daughters love the color pink. We recently moved, and they had a hand in helping to decorate their new room. It came as no surprise to me that their room is now pinkified--pink curtains, drapes, throw pillows, wall art. . . you name it, it's pink.

I'm (professionally) infatuated with another shade of pink these days. Dan Pink's Drive. When I read A Whole New Mind, the first of Pink's books to come to my attention, I will admit to being a little underwhelmed. Why it was pleasantly put together, I didn't feel that I learned anything new from AWNM. I had a completely different experience while reading Drive. Yes, Drive referenced and distilled the work of others I'd already read, most notably Carol Dweck's thought-provoking work published in Mindset. However, in Drive, Pink put his thoughts about what motivates us (people, humanity, etc)together in a way that gets the people in my school talking on a high level about topics such as motivation, assessment, student autonomy. . . conversations well worth having.

One nice thing about Drive is that Pink and others have done some of the work to help get conversations going with a group. His Two Questions video is perfect for opening a discussion.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

At my school, we felt like the second question was not one we wanted to encourage. I'll talk more about that more in another post in the future.

Once the group has discussed the first video, it is worth seeing this collection of responses made by people from around the world to the prompt "what's your sentence."


Who knows--as a group, you may be inspired to make your own video of sentences. We've started our own--there's much more to come.



Finally, if anyone read the book a while back and needs a brief refresher/overview, I highly recommend these two videos:

NAIS Annual Conference

I'm so excited to be attending the NAIS Annual Conference again this year. Thanks to Jason Ramsden of Ravenscroft School, I'm able to live blog the sessions I attend. Those are hosted on another blog, and I'd welcome visitors, comments, observations, etc.

So far, the conference has been exciting and invigorating. I've already had one big take-away. Peter Gow showed Beaver Country Day School's new teacher wiki. I don't have the link yet, but I think everyone in the room is planning to go home and set one up at their school. The site includes short video welcomes from key people at the school, links to information about books that have been all faculty reads recently, and a host of other information that takes a while to learn when one is new, such as a BCDS lexicon.

This post will definitely be edited later today to include links!

What if we taught spelling with adaptive expertise in mind?

What if we taught spelling with adaptive expertise in mind?

Such an approach would incorporate Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development along with the best practices of differentiation and would include the habits of mind associated with adaptive expertise.

We would begin with the end in mind. Students would learn common orthological spelling patterns in sequential order; learning to apply the patterns they know when they encounter words in their writing that they want to include, but are uncertain how to spell.

According to Invernizzi, Johnston, Bear et. al, each student should be working to master a spelling pattern s/he is “using but confusing.” Such a spelling program will be differentiated and developmentally appropriate for each learner in the classroom.

What would this look like in practice?

Step One: Each class would take a developmental spelling inventory to determine groupings for spelling instruction.

Step Two: Word study units for each group of students based on their developmental stage of spelling. Typically, there are 4 or 5 groups in a classroom of 20 students. Word study includes reading and writing activities such as word sorts, games, and writing activities. The words included follow the spelling patterns being studied. At this point in the fully differentiated classroom, each student would move at his/her own pace. In a partially differentiated classroom, groups would progress together, but students would move between groups depending on ongoing formative assessment.

Step Three: A summative assessment of each student’s ability to use the pattern s/he studied. This assessment should include words that students have and have not seen before but that follow the same patterns as those studied. This will allow students to demonstrate mastery and adaptive expertise. For example, if the student was learning to spell words with r controlled vowels, word study might include words such as fir and fur. During the assessment, the word furry would appear. A sentence might be “my pet cat is very furry.” Students who have mastered fir and fur should be able to generalize that the new word is spelled with the letter u.

In sum, students demonstrate mastery of a pattern before moving on to study a new pattern. There is no abandonment of skills not mastered. No student spends time studying patterns s/he has already mastered.

Sounds simple. Why is it so hard?

Preparing for NAIS

Wow--in just two days I am heading up I85 to the NAIS annual conference. I've set up liveblogs at http://cannonpep.blogspot.com/, which is the blog that the teachers at my school are familiar with. However, it is certainly not an exclusive group--anyone is welcome!

I've spent this weekend getting ready for the sessions I'm leading or, in the case of the panel I'm moderating, sessions where I just need to stay out of the way and feed the panel questions. This is going to be a great conference!

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. . .