Pondering the PD Flip

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by SFU’s Centre for the Study of Educational Leadership and Policy (CSELP).  The topic:  Targeting technology for maximum student benefit.  Three educational leaders – Chris Kennedy, Brian Kuhn and Kris Magnusson - shared their ideas about how “learning empowered by technology” (a key driver of the BC Education Plan) can best be achieved.  What technology should be given priority?  How should limited funding be used?

They agreed that they wouldn’t even talk about what was obvious:  the essential infrastructure of a robust network (so we can access the technology), technical support (so the technology works) and professional learning (so we know how to use the technology).

Many districts (certainly my own) are struggling to get this “obvious” piece in place.  Part of the problem is related to what Kris Magnusson noted:  “Our most pressing need is not a technology shift, but a culture shift.”  We can’t see outside of how things have always been done.  Consider this conference.  We all sat crammed into a room craning our necks to see to the front of the room where the three speakers delivered their message and we diligently wrote notes – or felt very “21st century-ish” and tweeted our thoughts for all the world rather than just whispering them to our neighbours.  (You can peruse these 140 character ruminations – all 850 of them. As a teacher, you would wonder, of course, were the students paying attention as they tweeted so prolifically?)

During the final panel discussion at the end of a long day of sitting and listening, we sat and listened to the three speakers have a conversation with each other, sparked by questions from moderator Bruce Beairsto.  Chris Kennedy dropped a hard question into the discussion – how could we have done this day differently?  Would it have been better if we had “flipped” the conference so that the presentations were pre-recorded and attendees could view them prior to attending, so we could use the face-to-face time to build on the ideas?

There was a pause in the panel discussion and a small buzz of conversation from the rather languid audience who had begun to catch up on emails.  No, said, Kris Magnusson.  People would have been too busy, too interrupted, if left on their own, to focus on the presentations.  (Of course, this is a doubly important reason why flipped classrooms won’t work, but we continue to tout them as revolutionary.  Read Ira Socol’s argument for rejecting the flip.)  What’s more, someone said, perhaps Brian, the conversations wouldn’t work without some relationship and a context for working together.  And then the panel changed directions.

I wish they’d continued on this point.  The point, I think, is this:  unless we can figure out how to learn differently, how can we frame different learning in classrooms?  How can we use technology to transform education, if, as educational leaders, we can only imagine using it to do what we’ve always done? Part of our reluctance to reimagine professional development might be related to another point that Chris Kennedy made:  many teachers become teachers (and professors become professors and especially speakers become speakers) because they like to be “on the stage,” and in control of the message. He suggested that if people knew ahead of time that they would merely be a “guide on the side,” they might not have become teachers at all.   Here, of course, is the culture shift.  What I learned from making this shift in my own teaching practice is that being a guide is often a little, well, boring.   I became a fetcher, a finder, a sometimes facilitator, an observer, a noticer, a connector.  My role became increasingly passive as the student’s role became increasingly active. As a professional development leader, I’m learning the same lesson – and it’s just as hard.
(And I’m just as slow at learning it.)

And so I thought further about how we could have done the day better.  Consider this:  we don’t travel at great expense (including the time expense) to meet in one place.  Instead the event could be a live webcast.  The twitter backchannel would allow us to have input and connect with other districts and, better, we could set up a moderated twitter chat at the end of each speech - a question generated from the talk could be posed for everyone to collect, gather and tweet our thoughts and add further questions.  Then at our separate venues we could engage in meaningful focused contextualized conversations about what we heard to consider how we might use the information to grow our own plans.  As it was, although we had a team of people attending, it was almost impossible to hear each other in the din of conversations between speakers, and our table included people from other districts and from SFU, so the conversation was necessarily general.  It isn’t that it’s a bad thing to have this general discourse; it’s that we have to learn so much so quickly that the thrust of the day needed to be how we can use these ideas for our own forward movement. We needed, in a word, to personalize the experience.  We have the technology to find creative ways to make this possible.  All we have to do now is to understand that it is the right next step for learning together.

But that next step is only possible if we consider the other barrier to flipped PD mentioned by the panel:  relationships are necessary for meaningful conversations.  This is not just a barrier in multi-district events, but in our own district and even our schools. As Roland Barth says, “although conversations have the capacity to promote reflection, to create and exchange craft knowledge, and to help improve the organization, schools deal more in meetings - in talking at and being talked at.”  This method is, of course, very efficient and sensible if you already have the solution, If you are just delivering information, if there is no ambiguity or questions or broader possibilities, if you are not seeking something new, but just want to roll out the old way of doing things.  Conversations demand a culture shift and are intregral to that shift.  To reimagine education, to use technology to do what we’ve never done before, we need to figure out how to have messy, uncomfortable conversations that acknowledge that no one of us has the answer, that value our diversity, and honour each contribution to build new understandings, rather than simply vying for our favourite “right way” that everyone has to “buy into.”  And another hard part (I’m learning a lot about this) is learning how to self-organize, to design our own learning, to create experiences that matter to us and support our next learning steps.  When you try to set up classrooms for students to be active participants, they’ll often say – can’t you just tell us what to do and give us a worksheet?  As adults, we, too, wish to wait for someone to organize the learning, give us the handouts and binders – although we’ll complain later, of course, that it didn’t meet our needs.  

We live in exciting times.  But if we are going to target technology for maximum student benefit, our first job will be to learn how to learn together in new ways.  After a day listening to educational leaders (and I’m not complaining about the day, only pondering; it was thought-provoking and invited hard questions and open discussions rather than “the way” to “do” technology in schools), one thing, though, is crystal clear:  there is a lot to learn.

Chris Kennedy’s slides and notes
Brian Kuhn’s slides


image from Marc Wathieu’s photostream

Research on Gamification from Katie Salen, Charles Leadbeater and Grade 3 students.

Gamification is one of the new buzz words and very “hot” in marketing – from points, to badges, to levels, to leaderboards to challenges, games engage the new players in today’s markets.  Games are increasingly being used to solve societal problems from health care issues to traffic safety.  In Sweden, after implementing a game where cameras captured and rewarded drivers who were keeping to the speed limit, there was a 22% reduction in driver speed after the first week of implementation.  At the Institute of Play, researchers are partnering with schools to redesign education through game play.  Games, Director Katie Salen says, "are designed as a place to be successful.  Students don’t necessarily think that school is meant to do this."

Imagine a place designed for success.  And designed for the most vulnerable students to find success.  Charles Leadbeater looked at schools in the most impoverished locations of Brazil, Africa and India to discover how educators in these places designed schools for success.  His discovery:  they look nothing like school as we know it.  Imagine, he says, “an education system that started from questions, not from knowledge to be imparted, or started from a game, not from a lesson, or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them.”

Recently I met with our own local researchers – grade 3 students who were using iPads in their classroom for six weeks.  Their findings?  Games help you learn.  Let’s do more of it!

Blinded and befuddled by technology?

Should we have more technology in schools?  Ask the grade 3 students I interviewed recently and they would unreservedly agree.  They’ve had iPads in their school for the last six weeks and tell me that math, for example, is much better with the iPads than “normal” math.  What’s normal? I asked.  They stared at me for a moment, stumped.  Boring, one girl said.  It’s just paper and pencils. There’s no colour, another girl stated emphatically.

Grade 3 students watch their interview.

I was reminded of a story a colleague told me.  Her grandson was visiting and they were watching TV together – it was an old black and white TV, but their family didn’t watch often and it served their purposes.  The little boy, after learning that the TV wasn’t broken, that is was just different, settled in to try to watch.  Finally he burst out, but I can’t see the TV.

I wonder if our children, raised in constant colour, motion, and sound are increasingly blind in still, black and white, monologue-driven spaces.  Or passive places.  The grade 7s I spoke to today told me - Having technology in the classroom is better because we don’t have to listen to one person.  We really don’t listen anyway.  With the iPads, there is the whole world to teach us and we get to work and learn together in small groups so we learn even more.

Should we be worried about this new blindness?  Riley, a grade 12 blogger, is.  She fears that we are forgetting how to communicate.  She writes, “instead of using the skill to communicate face-to-face, technology has developed countless methods such as text messaging, email, and social networking to avoid vulnerability or confrontation.”  Her classmate Deanna is worried, too:

Even now, as I try to express my ideas into this internet realm, I’ve browsed Facebook, Tumblr, and taken lengthy texting breaks before even completing my first paragraph. It seems as though our lack of attention is taking a toll on many things…. How are we meant to have an insightful and inspiring conversation with a friend over tea while someone else could be on Facebook at that exact moment changing their relationship status to “Single”? It’s impossible, it just cannot be done.

Should we be worried?  I'm more inclined to see another bright spot.  Listening to children, I’m less worried today than yesterday.  We need to rethink education but that’s not new.  The one size we’re used to has never fit all and those it doesn’t fit are objecting now.  But if we pay attention to students (and ask them to read complex literature and thought-provoking articles and ponder these big ideas in public), they’ll keep reminding us of what’s important.

Bright Spot: 100% Participation at 0 Cost.

'There's no use trying,' said Alice; 'one can't believe impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen.
'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

                                                                                                     Lewis Carroll

I have been arguing for some time, that unless we relentlessly think together in our schools, sharing ideas, collaborating, improvising, opening our classrooms, asking the same questions, working on cross-fertilization across the schools and up and down the system, the best we can do is have pockets of unsustainable excellence. And no matter how good we are in pockets, the child will not be served.  Because none of us has all the answers.  No matter how brilliant we are.  The diversity we serve demands diverse answers.  The only chance is for us to work together system-wide - not doing the same thing, but asking the same questions. 100% of the people on eacb staff. 100% of the people at the district level. 100% of the teachers. 100% of the principals.100% of the support staff.

And we have to do it at 0 cost.  There is no money.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  As George Washington said, “We are out of money.  Now it is time to think.”

Last year I posed this question to our Project Success teams (each of them receives a small grant to work collaboratively on an inquiry):  How can we use the time we have this year to grow time for 100% participation in teaching and learning together at 0 cost? After the meeting, one of the attendees chastised me.  There is no such thing as 100% participation, he said.  It’s discouraging to speak in those terms.

He might be right.  I have lately tried to focus more on reminding people of the small steps that we can take in the direction of our big ideas.  But Kathleen left that meeting a year ago and set to work to set up a professional learning community in her school.  This week she set me this note:  “Our PLC is running smoothly now!! We have divided the teaching staff into 3 teams. Each week, one team of 5 to 6 people is responsible for supervising the students as they read with older student buddies and reading tutors in their classrooms. The other two teams are free to meet as a large group, or as small collaborative teams (as they feel the need) for a period of 30 minutes during the school day. We alternate PLC meeting days to accommodate all of the part time teachers, and in this way, we have 100% participation in our PLC activities at zero cost!”

Perhaps we just need more practice believing impossible things!  After all impossible things happen every day.


via @tkonynenbelt

Bright Spots: Snow Day Meeting Goes Digital

In 2005 (2005!) Marc Prensky wrote about the process of technology adoption as typically a four-step process:
Dabbling
Doing old things in old ways
Doing old things in new ways
Doing new things in new ways.

When a new technology appears, Prensky noted seven years ago, “our first instinct is always to continue doing things within the technology the way we've always done it.”  Seven years later, we are still struggling to get past dabbling or doing old things in old ways.  Witness our extolling the virtues of the “flipped classroom,” which merely flips two old things done in old ways – lectures become homework. As Ira Socal argues, it’s “the same classroom, just re-arranged”.

But it’s hard to figure out how to do new things with these new tools when we are still comfortable with our old ways.  Jared Cohen is a Google Ideas director thinking about how we can harness what he calls “connection technologies” (the term social media, he argues, is too limiting) to address global challenges.  He argues that new things happen in places where necessity inspires innovation. Witness, he says, the Arab Spring.

The hardest part of doing new things is that you cannot imagine them.  Today, a bright spot for me was doing an old thing – a meeting - on Google+.  It was necessitated by snow – it seemed dangerously ridiculous to drive when we could meet online.  What was marvelous, as we navigated the new space, figuring out the glitches, finding the features – is beginning, at the edge of our imaginations, to consider the ways we could use this tool that we were using in an old way. But using it was a start. Using it with imaginative, passionate, thoughtful colleagues was even better.  I’m betting that right now they are already thinking about how we can have book clubs with students across the district or peer edit sessions between schools or connect students meaningfully with community mentors or…..

Bright Spot: Blogging Educators

A moment ago, an email arrived to approve a post for a collaborative blog we’ve set up for a technology project we have under way.  The post took my breath away – just the honesty of it, the thoughtfulness, the hard work of it – to reflect after a long day, to learn in front of the world (or at least a few colleagues) – so that together we can all learn from and build upon those experiences.

Chris Kennedy argues that BC is leading Canada (and perhaps the world) in the professional use of social media in K-12 education. He gives a list of seven reasons to explain it.  I’m not sure about the first six (although they make sound sense), but I’m absolutely certain of the last:  “We have an amazingly dedicated profession:  Even in challenge times, it is stunning to see the number of teachers, school administrators and other educators spending time in their evenings and weekends to reflect and share through their blogs, Twitter and other venues.”

Blue Monday Bright Spot

We all tend to focus on problems rather than strengths.  Very few of us spend time analyzing what we are doing well, so we can do more of it.  Instead we stare at our faults, our warts, our bad habits and weaknesses and try to fix them.  But Chip and Dan Heath in their book, Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard, note that especially in times of change (and surely there is no dispute that we are in the midst of profound change) there are problems everywhere, so focusing on them becomes a recipe for inaction.  Instead, we need to use our power of analysis to figure out what’s going well with an eye to doing more of it in the future.

We have a lot of Bright Spots in our schools, even on the most depressing day of the year, even when our plans come apart (for a million reasons) and our failures and disappointments loom large in our eyes.  As Senior Alternative teacher Ray Andrews said, the question about what’s going well was “a reminder that there have indeed been bright spots. For example, I have two students who are likely to achieve early graduation (Dogwoods, of course).”  According to extensive research, “An individual’s educational attainment is one of the most important determinants of their life chances in terms of employment, income, health status, housing and many other amenities,” so the opportunities opened to two students whose risks for dropping out were very high is a sun-glasses-on-it’s-so-bright  spot.  (See Cost of Dropping Out.)  Next: let’s ask the
students what worked and why they beat the odds.  And then – let’s do more of it!

Watch Dan Heath share how to find a bright spot.