Working Together 68

Connect to Learn: It’s More than One Day

2012-02-22T12:31:00.003-08:00

On Monday, 800 or so educators got together to learn. We started the day with five extraordinary BC educational leaders who shared their insights for 20 minutes each (“ed talks”). Kieran Egan, SFU professor and author began at the beginning – quite literally – with early man and our toolkits for making sense of the world. Chris Kennedy, SD45 superintendent, shared his thinking about our latest tools from the digital world. Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser, faculty members at VIU and co-leaders of the Network of Inquiry and Innovation asked us key questions for engagement and made us promise to ask them (my favourite: ask your students if they can name two adults in your school who believe they will be a success in life – if they can’t, you have a simple strategy to quickly and effectively improve their learning). Nanaimo’s own Gary Anaka, shared some key strategies for using the learner’s best tool: the brain. Participants then chose one of the four keynotes for an in-depth presentation on the topic. After lunch, there was a selection of extraordinary sessions, most developed by our own teachers to share their passionate inquiry and thinking on teaching and learning on our focus themes (co-created at our Imagine day as ideas that matter to us) of technology, building community, teaching to diversity, strategies that work, inquiry, engagement and assessment for learning. (See our Twitter archive of the conference.)

Notes on the morning keynotes by @drea_laj

The day went off without a hitch (well, no big hitches at any rate), because of the amazing, mostly invisible, behind-the-scenes efforts of the PD team. Jan Thorsen, the PD committee and the NDTA office staff worked many long hours planning, organizing, setting up and trying to ensure that members’ needs for engaging and meaningful professional development were met. At the venue, Ted, Joel, Linda and a team of student helpers worked tirelessly to ensure that the day went smoothly. And it did!

And while I loved every minute of the presentations I attended (I wished I could have attended all of them!) and was very appreciative of the effective organization, the best part was simply seeing the space filled with passionate, curious, thoughtful, learningful colleagues and all the conversations I had between things. Lately I’ve been thinking that the content of our PD is less important than the process. These events rarely tell us something new. The best events, surely, connect with, challenge, deepen, extend, add to the work we are already doing. What’s best about them isn’t what we learn while we’re there, but the conversations sparked that continue after the conference and the connections inspired that stick to create new learning partnership. After all, the learning that matters most happens when we dig in to apply the ideas, even when we’re busy, and try to add, refine, adjust, expand, extend our practice to serve our students. That’s when the continuing conversations grounded in our common experience and the partnerships forged matter most – so we can keep at the hard work of deep learning long after our day together.

I am so grateful to the presenters who inspired our further learning, to the organizers who made the day happen and to the educators who continue to act daily to make a difference for our children.

Pondering the PD Flip

2012-02-11T17:27:00.001-08:00

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.

2012-02-04T09:31:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-23T20:29:00.000-08:00

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.

2012-01-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

'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

2012-01-18T20:22:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-17T18:58:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-16T19:16:00.000-08:00

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.

7 Ways to Learn and Use Technology Even When You Have Very Little Technology or Technology Knowledge

2012-01-14T10:18:00.000-08:00

A collaboratively created list.

Project Success Gathering

1. Curate the Web
Organize your links for students using some of the online tools that make it easy for you and easy for kids.
Jog the Web
Live Binders (Steve Anderson’s binders are a great resources for educators wanted to use technology)
Symbaloo
Delicious
Diigo
Sqworl
The best thing about these tools is that our links, bundles, “jogs,” and binders can be shared. Working alone, curating the web is overwhelming – working together, we can each do less better!

2. Create a Container
Where will you put your collections so they are easy to access? Wikis are a very easy to create, easy to use, and easy to maintain space – and the best part – designed for collaboration. Try either pbworks or wikispaces. What makes Wikipedia viable is that it is built and maintained by hundreds of thousands of people. On our own, a wiki just adds one more thing; when we work together with our colleagues, we can each contribute our strengths and get help where - and when - we need it most.

3. Keep Deep and Meaningful Learning in Mind
Technology only amplifies the work we do. Just as we wouldn't tell students to “write a story” and expect quality results, we can’t tell students to “create a PowerPoint” without explicit instructions. It isn’t enough to show students merely how to add and delete images, for example; more important, they need instruction, for a start, on what makes a good image and how we credit images. (And let’s put our lessons and the resources for them on a wiki to share, so each of us doesn’t have to reinvent!)

4. “I Can” Attitude
So often we begin with “I can’t.” There is a lot we CAN do. And one of the hardest things to know that we can do: we can make mistakes, flounder, look like a novice (because we are) and learn out loud with our students.

5. Support Each Other
We really, really need to find ways to work together, to team teach, to touch bases regularly, to remind each other to take baby steps (and cheer each one!), and to accept - embrace - that learning will be mucky and slow.

6. Get Students to Teach
Teaching is still the best way to learn deeply. Students are both familiar with technology and comfortable in that environment: let them teach each other (peer teaching, buddy teaching, partner learning) – and best of all, let them teach us.

7. Waste Time!
Leave time for “timewasting.” Explore. Play. Discover. Tinker. Laugh. And best of all, waste time together.

Saying Yes and No to Technology

2011-12-31T08:51:00.000-08:00

For me the question – should we have technology in schools? – is an unconditional yes. We have, at our fingertips, the capacity to personalize, differentiate, support in “just-in-time” ways; to collect, organize and share the information we need exactly when we need it; to spark and sustain curiosity by bringing into the classroom the capacity to follow any question to the greatest depths known to man.

People ask continually – But what about slow, deep, contemplative thought? What about exercise and just “going outside” to play? What about community and teamwork?

First, I can think of at least ten ways I could use technology in service of all those goals in a classroom, even the “going outside” part. Here’s one: research the effect of nature on the brain – we all need to know why we should do what someone else tells us is “good for us” – and then use a tracking program like metracker.com to do an experiment to see if the classroom community experiences a difference in learning by spending more time outside.

But more important, we can say no. Right now we’ll use a pen, a book, our physical senses, conversation only, a silent space. Just because we have technology doesn’t mean that it must be constantly on or used endlessly.

It is similar, I think, to the grave fears over the last decades about television. Is TV good or bad? Does TV harm us? TV is a mode of entertainment. The only thing new is that it is instant and in our homes. Parents can limit TV for children; we can limit it for ourselves. And we ought to. The overuse of media by children is the decision of adults who struggle to say no to their own desire for peace, quiet, ease (or, because we do not yet have effective, affordable child care, they cannot supervise their children. As a society, we have decided that other things are more important.)

If only it weren’t so hard! Previously, we did not have to set internal limits to our entertainment. They were limited by access – the carnival passing through the village, for example. Now, entertainment is in our pocket. We have to learn how to say no. And this “no” extends, among other newly abundant and easy things: buying what we can’t afford in a credit-easy world, abusing our bodies through excess food and sloth in a world of fast food and remote controls, and destroying our planet when pre-packaged and throw away are everywhere, instant, and so very very easy.

Our children will live in - have always lived in - an instant world – one where they can make a decision to publically shame and humiliate someone they don’t understand; where they can access pornography and violence with a click; where they are continually inundated with requests to purchase the next best thing. It is also a world where they can instantly connect with the knowledge of the world and our global neighbours, where they can have a say on important issues and become active citizens.

We do not serve them by putting them in technology-free schools. We serve them by teaching them (I’m not really sure how, but probably through modelling, through strategies, through positive experiences, through actively engaging them in conversations about decision-making and providing a framework of values against which to make those decisions) to find ways to say NO to excesses that harm us and hurt our neighbours and to say YES to the power, at their fingertips, to do good.

I hope they are better at it than we are. Our future depends upon it.

Yes - From erix!'s photostream
No - From Mr Jaded's photostream

Living Slow

2011-12-27T08:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve been living Slow for a few days: slow cooking – cookies, pastries, all the trimmings for Christmas dinner – polishing, cleaning, wrapping presents, festive decorating – and then two perfect days of food and conversation, board games and laughter.

On Christmas Eve, after the dishes were done and the extra guests had left, my daughter and her husband sat with me for a bedtime recap of the day. I don’t know, Katie said, if I can continue this tradition. It is all so…much! Katie is a doctor, her husband the CEO of a social media company; their lives are intense, fast-paced. Katie is on call for the rest of the holidays; Ben has various meetings scheduled, emerging issues, new challenges. They live in a beautiful condo downtown Vancouver, but all of us smile at the image of our Christmas clan – and trimmings – shoehorned into the space.

At first I thought, perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps these traditions are simply the continuation of “women’s work,” a kind of subjugation to kitchen that is no longer appropriate in this new world. But by morning I had rethought. Although it no doubt will have to continue differently – and it has to become the work of everyone – I’m pretty sure that this “women’s work” – slow, loving, knitting together of family and friends – is essential to continue. I say work, because I’m pretty sure that what’s important is that it can’t be instant – a phone call to a caterer, let’s say. I think what matters – and it matters now more than ever as the pace of living increases – is that it is Slow.

Things I did this week that I didn’t even know about five years ago

2011-12-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

Put together a Christmas Connections Listserv “cool links” email by adding content saved to my Delicious social bookmarking site .
Posted information about a new book in our DRC collection on our Facebook page.
Developed a Twitter workshop, including an online poll for choosing our discussion question.
Helped a school team set up iPads.
Helped a teacher set up a web camera to use as a document camera in her classroom.
Approved a post to a collaborative Posterous blog that I administer.
Posted a picture of a classroom strategy on a Pinterest bulletin board.
Added an information flyer to our wiki.
Uploaded a video to youtube and then shared how to embed it on a classroom wiki.
Took videos of a student showcase of learning that I will edit (soon).

And then wrote about it here.

The question is - is it helpful for kids and teachers? Or am I just creating more binders to gather digital dust and files that disappear into digital cabinets and “toys” that distract us for a while and then are shelved, too, never to be seen again?

More Gorgeousness

2011-11-12T07:40:00.000-08:00

When you walk into Leslie’s classroom, you know that the classroom is set up for gorgeous learning! She shared some of the small things that make a big difference, that allow the teacher to focus on the children because everything is organized, and enable the children to be independent in a caring space alive with learning sparks.

In grade one, of course, lots and lots of reading is paramount. Leslie’s home reading program has children able to quickly and independently choose “just right books” and take them home in their book bag each week.

They can also take home a “theme bag” of books every two weeks on topics that excite them.

And they also have their reading workshop books (the groups and bins organized and ready for the parent volunteers).

The bell rang before I’d even finished dashing around the classroom trying to soak up everything! The students clearly knew the routine, taking off boots and coats, putting books in place, checking the agenda (I love the visual dayplan!) and sitting at their desks with their Bee Books open.

In a room full of favourite things, the BEE book, I think, is my favourite: Bring Everything Everyday. Students take the BEE book home nightly and return it each morning. In it is their sharing book, a zippered bag for forms and money, planner sheets, newsletters and a word work pouch. While the students listened to the announcements, Leslie checked their planners and then, announcements done, students put the BEE books in a bin and sat at the carpet. Another favourite thing: using male Velcro, she wrote each child’s name so they know where they should sit at the carpet.

After a few minutes of welcome and questions with thumbs up/thumbs down answering about their Halloween evening (they were amazingly quiet and respectful despite a no doubt sugary and late evening), they organized into reading groups. One of the groups was an independent group and they quickly (and very happily) recited all the things they could do for their workshop – reading on their own, reading together - what they could read (so many options!) - where they could read – at the carpet and on the soft couch! Two girls immediately began reading a classroom poem from a chart stand – complete with actions.

Another meeting to attend and a reluctant goodbye. Of course, no one noticed me leave. Everyone was so thoroughly engaged and the quiet hum of reading and thinking and learning played back to me like music all day. Another gorgeous teaching and learning environment in our neighbourhood.

Gorgeous Teaching in our Neighbourhood

2011-11-07T06:40:00.000-08:00

I slipped into the classroom uninvited, a little uncertain that it was all right. Tricia paused in the mid-lesson to welcome me generously, wholeheartedly, and to introduce me to her students and then continued, completely and deeply attentive once again to the small children clustered around her on the carpet. They, too, forgot about me as soon as her soft voice began to tell them about the exciting work they were about to begin. The instructions (so clear, so inviting, so interactive) for creating a picture of themselves buried in leaves like the book they’d just read were followed by students moving (in an orderly fashion – they knew the routine) to the demonstration table to watch the painting. Once again the instructions were clear and modeled step by step. My favourite part was when she made a mistake, covering one of her sentence strips with paint. “Don’t worry,” one the children said, “everyone makes mistakes.” The small heads nodded heartily, encouragingly. It was so obvious that the classroom lived this message.

When she finished the demonstration, she said, “I know I don’t have to tell you about gorgeous printing.” Heads shook vigorously in unison, their bodies starting to vibrate with excitement to get started on their own. “And I don’t have to tell you about gorgeous cutting.” More vigorous head-shaking.
She released them then to go do their own no doubt gorgeous work. I left reluctantly to attend a meeting, but all I could think was how very very mad it is to go anywhere or read anything about teacher and learning when we have, right in our own neighbourhood, so many gorgeous examples at our fingertips!

Un-discouraged again – Thanks @Joe_Bower and many others!

2011-10-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

It is sometimes difficult not to feel discouraged. The world is changing so quickly, the bureaucracy moves so slowly, the gaps between what we need and what we have is growing, the time to learn what we need to know and to make sure we know what we need is shrinking, and even though I’m game to be a pioneer, there are days when trying to implement and initiate technological reform without adequate infrastructure or systems support can be wearisome.

Luckily I work with the best colleagues in the world. It’s hard not to be buoyed up by the educators who are keen to learn, to think together, to share, to take risks, to generously and whole-heartedly give their time, their energy and their commitment to learning and learners. Every day I meet with teachers who make my heart sing. Of course, many of them don’t even know my name. This morning, I followed a tweet from @Kyttie (a new BC teacher) who tweeted a link to an old blog post by @Joe_Bower (Alberta educator) where he had shared a video – the Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun. I realized that my discouragement this week was because I’d forgotten the fifth principle: Stop taking it all so damn seriously. Instead, I need to continue to do what I believe matters, to scare myself every day, and to just start something – instead of worrying that nothing is getting started.

Learning is a "we" business.

2011-10-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

On our Provincial Specialists Day, we usually host a small local event for teachers who can’t get away to the big provincial conferences. This year, we had a great idea! With help from our CUEBC colleagues (thanks @msilverton!), we live-streamed their keynote presentation from David Warlick on embracing emerging technologies.

Everything was set up, people had settled into the gym, the video was live with a notice that the start time was delayed, so we had just enough time to acknowledge organizers and introduce the keynote from our end. The timing was perfect. As soon as David Warlick stepped onto the stage, we turned up the volume and – horrors – the sound was a garbled mess! Happily, Bill Boyd (a truly 21st century teacher-librarian) was there and disappeared into the sound room. Minutes later, all was well again.

At the end of the day, as we gathered up bits and pieces of conference paraphernalia (chart paper, scissors, tape, coffee urns), stacked chairs and turned out lights, Bill joined us to see if we needed a hand. Bill, I said, it’s so lucky we were able to fix the sound this morning! And by we, I corrected myself, I mean you. No, it is we, he replied. We cannot put on events like this unless it is we. This is a “we business.” We have to each contribute what we can. (This was generous, of course, since all I contributed to the morning’s near disaster was hand-wringing.)

But I’ve been thinking about “we” a lot. It isn’t just for events, but for the daily business of classrooms that “we” is necessary. The abundance of information, the diversity of learners, the changed goals of education (from sorting to inclusion) has made the stand-and-deliver “I”model obsolete. But it’s hard to shift. In classrooms, we are trying by including students (peer learning) and experimenting in co-teaching models. In professional development, we are trying to move away from our traditional workshops (the expert at the front who tells us how to do stuff) toward collaborative conversations and “do-shops”.

It’s easier said than done. I organized two sessions for PSA day. I opened up a computer lab and I also put out iPads and iPods in another room. My plan was to set up some resource pages on the Working Together wiki and then float between the rooms to support, problem-solve, answer questions, connect people to resources. But the night before I had a nightmare: I left the computer lab to check on the Apple room and everyone there was staring blanking at the iPads and then accusingly at me, saying – what do we do? We don’t know what to do. After getting them started, I scurried back to the computer lab to find everyone was watching movies. You weren’t here, they said. We didn’t know what to do.

Of course this is always what teachers fear. If I am not in front, in control, going through the steps, organizing and orchestrating the learning, nothing will happen. But when we let go, we discover that the opposite is true. When I get out of the way, allow people to pursue what’s important to them, provide time and resources – learning happens in a way that has NEVER occurred when I walk people through the steps. I cannot count how many workshops I have put on about blogs and wikis: reviewing steps, providing handouts, working VERY hard. And almost no one actually set up a blog or a wiki.

Here’s what really happened on PSA day when I got out of the way. The Apple room was stuffed with people just playing and talking and thinking about possibilities for education. When I came in a few people looked up – there were one or two questions and they ignored me. They were too busy learning.

Meanwhile, back in the computer lab (down a long hallway and up two flights of stairs), people learned massively – without me. Here is a short list of what some of the participants did: Heather set up a wiki with the help of Sue and then Heather shared great links with Sue who added them to her wiki and together they learned about some new features. Glen and Peter set up their own blog with the help of Maryah who updated her wiki, set up a delicious account and began collecting digital story telling links. Rebecca, too, set up a delicious account, scrolled through mine, found a great link to a site that she is going to use in her class and shared ideas with Loa who focussed on storytelling ideas, set up delicious and “got a baby step” into blogging. Meanwhile, at the back of the room, the English department at Barsby created a school-wide blog for independent reading.

And me: I answered a few questions, solved a couple of problems, engaged in some exciting conversations about technology in education - and got a lot of exercise! But finally (!), after years of facilitating unsatisfactory technology workshops, I had a successful day – by not teaching. Which, I guess, makes sense: learning is a “we” business. It goes better when “I” gets out of the way.

Less Work??

2011-10-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

I was shocked to read that BC Public School Employers’ Association are meeting this morning to consider reducing teachers' pay since under job action they are doing less work. Less work? The teachers I meet daily are doing MORE work to ensure that the most important things – the things that make the most difference for kids – are getting done. Here is a short list.

On Monday, I co-led a meeting of the professional development representatives from each school. It was during the school day – funded by the BCTF in a twice yearly training session. This is a group of teachers who volunteer to organize the three school-based days – polling staffs to see what they most need to learn to serve this year’s students, getting speakers to match the needs, setting up workshops and organizing resources. Monday’s meeting was a chance to mentor new reps, to gather ideas from each other and to figure out ways to collaborate to share costs to maximize each opportunity. Then they were off to organize the first PD day on October 11th. When? After school, on weekends, during lunch, before the bell rings in the morning.

Teacher-Librarians at 5:00 on a Thursday afternoon

On Tuesday, I met with a group of Teacher-Librarians who had signed on to reflect on the role of libraries in a digital world. We learned about twitter, blogs and social bookmarking and they left with a long list of homework to complete over the next month to practice learning these new tools so we can begin to use them effectively to gather and share resources for teachers to more effectively meet the needs of students.

On Wednesday, we had an Open House at the DRC to showcase the resources available to teachers, followed by a workshop from 4:00 to 6:00 to show our latest acquisition: iPods and iPads. We shared how these tools could be used to engage all learners and powerfully support our struggling readers and writers. After the workshop (full!), they filtered out slowly (I pushed out the last one just before 7:00) filled with ideas and plans and organizing how they could continue to learn together.

On Thursday, I had a dilemma. I could meet with Teacher-Librarians again – they hold five after school meetings to share resources, ideas, plans – or the Kindergarten teachers (monthly meetings and a large learning group that meets in-between) – or the Math teachers (monthly meetings). In the end, I went to meet with the teacher-librarians since they had some specific questions they wanted me to address related to our digital libraries initiative. One item on the agenda was starting an additional learning group: a dozen people signed up immediately.

And this weekend? I’ve answered dozens of emails from teachers who have been working on an application for Project Success – our year-long inquiry into how we can improve learning for vulnerable learners. In fact, I’d better get back to the real work of the day. I have a half-dozen emails to answer about the project (the application is due today) sent to me after 7:00 on a Sunday evening. Oh, I see there is also a twitter follow from one of the teacher-librarians who did her homework this weekend. Ah, another from a PD rep looking for a word sort of assessment-for-learning words to use on PD day - planning on the weekend, of course.

This is a tiny sliver of the kind of work that continues from my small circle - never mind the coaching and clubs and just daily beautiful hard hard work to ensure that each child learns. If teachers are doing less work, my mind boggles: how were they doing more?

What I learned in 35 minutes at Pleasant Valley School

2011-09-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

After reading an Edutopia article about How Classroom Environments Can Ignite Learning and Cultivate Caring, I thought about the many teachers who are doing a fabulous job of this here in our own backyard. The best thing is that we don’t have to travel across the country or bring in experts at great expense! So I dropped in at one of our local elementary schools on my way to work.

In 35 minutes at Pleasant Valley School I learned:

Teachers are passionate and committed to their students. I knew this already, of course, but when you are out of the classroom, you tend to forget as you are awash in “how to fix the education system” conversations. Of course, in the meantime, extraordinary teachers are just getting on with the deep work of ensuring that each child is learning.

Even kindergarten students can organize their learning. In Teri’s kindergarten class students sign in (if they can’t yet write their names, they trace it). They already know what to do next, going to the centres board and putting a clothespin next to the centre they want to play in. And they already know about the “four no more” rule and choose a different centre if it’s full. This year Teri added a new feature to her classroom – curtains to hide the bins of toys and books. They are less distracted, she says. What an easy solution for creating a calm “ready to learn” environment.

Across the hall in the other kindergarten room, Wendy shows off the carpet - it is multicoloured circles. When students come in, they settle themselves on the circle with their name card. When I came in, Wendy and her EA were looking at the name tags and discussing where each child would sit for this morning's lesson. In a few simple routines on the carpet, student learn number, shape, letters, how to notice what’s happening and how to get along with whoever is sitting beside them. What’s more, students who have difficulty participating in groups feel safe and able to join in when the space boundaries are clear.

Collaboration happens in a many ways. We read about PLCs and argue about how best to implement them system-wide. In the meantime, teachers just work together. Wendy and Teri co-teach yoga and on “Fabulous Friday” half of each class swaps to begin to get to know more of the children who will be part of their learning community for years to come. What a simple idea to ensure that students feel safe, connected and part of the broader school community.

Students can organize the classroom routines. Upstairs in Jan’s grade 7 classroom, students were getting their homework done before class started. There is no guess work about homework; students can see what’s expected in a glance and help each other. Tell her, one of the students piped up, about the "while you were away" folder. If we are absent, she told me, we know just where to look for what we missed. On another wall, the job board lets everyone know who’s in charge of what and students set up for gym, fine arts, recycling and other jobs that make the class run smoothly so deep learning is the focus.

Student caring and courtesy is alive and well. If you read the news too often or attend too many meetings, you’ll often hear that “kids nowadays” are rude and self-centred. Jan was telling me about the food drives, buddy work and other acts of generosity the grade 7s are committed to and organize on their own with only a little coaching. As she talked, with her “teacher eye” (teachers always scan), she noted a boy gently rocking and standing at a short, but respectful distance from us. You look like you have a question, she said. Thank you for your patience and polite signalling. Relieved to have her attention before the bell, he launched into a very-important-to-him series of questions. I left them to slip across the hall to see Lesley.

Self-regulated Learning is happening. Our new superintendent wrote in his latest blog post about “Self Regulated Learning & the New Human Development Theory.” There are always, of course, new theories and new initiatives and new programs. And, of course, there are people (like me) who run workshops and share resources and send out articles. Meanwhile, in classrooms, teachers get on with the work and find ways to ensure that the children in their care are learning. I got to Lesley’s grade one room just in time to watch the children filter in. It was only the third week of school and they clearly knew exactly what to do. They quickly organized their coats and supplies and settled into their seats. One boy got up quietly and went to the back of the room and returned with a little container of play dough and began to shape it. Several other children, I noticed, also got out the play dough. They talked quietly while their teacher greeted and had soft conversations with the arriving students. All conversations stopped as the announcements came on. A fire drill was announced and after the announcements, Lesley asked them questions about what they remembered and did a quick role play (students enthusiastically called out the things the teachers and students would have to say and do) to help them review the process. The whole time her voice was soft and calm and instructions were clear and gentle. How long do we have left? a boy asked. Lesley gestured to what she called her new favourite tool – the timer at the front. He nodded, satisfied, and bent to his play dough again. These timers (like the play dough) are often used to support students with behaviour difficulties, but of course, are effective for everyone, giving all students a clear sense of “how long” or “how short”. I reluctantly left the classroom to attend a meeting, but really, I felt calm, alert and ready to learn! And I’m sure the grade ones were, too.

It’s amazing how much you can learn by just spending 35 minutes in a school. What struck me most was that in each case, when asked about their “best thing” for starting the year, what the teachers shared with me were the simple routines and tools that set up each student to be ready to learn (removing distractions, clear routines and organized space, strategies to help them be calm, alert and to feel safe) and best of all - to be in charge of that learning themselves. Lucky students.

Unplugging to Plug in Powerfully

2011-09-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve been waking up too early: my “back at school again” lists of things to do keep playing in my head. Usually I succumb and get up to start on my list, beginning by answering emails (sent to me by teachers very late at night, no doubt after they've done their marking and lesson planning for the day – why do I keep hearing that teachers only work from 8:30 to 3:00?). On this particular morning as I answered emails, I kept my twitter feed open and followed a couple of good links, read several articles, tweeted two, revised my to-do list for the day (adding the items that woke me too early), noted two birthdays from my Facebook “friends” and sent messages, and researched which screencasting tool would work best in an elementary classroom before I was distracted by the sunrise sky filling my window.

I had been reading lately about the positive effects of getting “off the grid,” that reflective downtime is necessary to learn, remember and come up with good ideas, that moral and emotional reasoning, in particular, demand adequate time and reflection, that we are “hooked on busyness” (and my morning routine and sleepless nights suggests I am), that our obsessive clicking, the endless stream of information, the constant connection with anyone and everything, our relentless pursuit of “friends” and “followers” is reducing our capacity to think deeply, relate meaningfully, or to know ourselves. Indeed, as one researcher contends (in an article that tries to find the benefits of our attention deficits), our digital distractions are “a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought.”   The final argument that made me back away from my screen (in an article that is part of the firehose of information that streams across my desktop daily): people learned significantly better after a walk in nature. (An interesting recent study showed that students with ADHD have less severe symptoms if they have regular access to open green space.) So despite my list, I resolved to walk my way into deep thought and good ideas with the sunrise. (Did you follow the links? There are hours of distractions embedded into this short post!)

As I walked (the morning air was soft, warm), my mind began to flip through its own archive of clicks: I remembered the Slate writer who set up fake birthdays, three in a row, to show the shallowness of Facebook birthday greetings. He says we are using social media, first as a self-promotion (look how many friends I have and how many of them wished me a happy birthday – or how many articles I’ve read and created as links in my blog or tweeted for my “followers”), but also to fool ourselves that we’ve made connections. Real connection, he argues, takes more effort than a 30 second post. It’s more, even, than a retweet or “twitter love” or a comment on a blog post (although it is nice to have comments on my blog posts). Breathing in the fresh sea-scented air, I began to regret my cheery FB wishes earlier (and my childish glee in comments and “followers”).

Of course we get caught up. When there are more than 750 million active users on Facebook spending cumulatively over 700 billion minutes per month at the site), when millions of twitter users send 1 billion tweets per week, when there have been 500 new blog posts since you started reading this one - we begin to accept the norms these new media create.   Now our grandmothers, banks, department stores, NGOs, writers, reporters and schools all blog, tweet, and post to Facebook. It must all be good, right?

And therefore, it goes without saying that the tools to access these social media so you can access your friends any time of day, check your RSS feeds, “like” pictures on Facebook, and post interesting tidbits to Twitter are essential. And, of course, if they are essential, and their uses are good, we need them in schools; children, too, should use Facebook, twitter, blogs, instant messaging, polling, video and more to connect to information instantly, to find what they need immediately, to follow their passions, to personalize their quests.

At the top of the hill behind my home overlooking the glittering ocean and the red sky, I began to question my morning routine, the screen-facing hours, to wonder if technology matters more to education than quiet moments and fresh air. My mind clicked to the recent NYT article that revealed years of technology implementation has not improved test scores forces us to at least ask questions. The first question, I hope, is – what are these tests testing and is it relevant? But it isn’t enough to simply dismiss the findings as another black eye on testing. We can’t keep saying that because Facebook is used by millions, it is good; because technology is pervasive, we must therefore buy technology for schools. Industrialization must have taught us a lesson or two.

We want to be sure to ask – what do we, as educators, want to do with technology.   Right now our conversations seemed to be mired in more and better. More computers. Bigger computers. Smaller computers. More friends. More followers. More programs. New programs. Apps, apps, apps. More links. More sites. But just as more money doesn’t bring more happiness, more technology won’t bring better education. Quoted in the NYT article, education researcher Brian Goodwin says of the pinnacle of “more” – a device in every students hands: “Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse.” If technology isn’t amplifying students’ ability to do the things we traditionally test for (reading, writing, math, general knowledge), what is it amplifying? And is it good?

I love technology. I love the possibility, the creativity, the choice, the now-ness. I love being able to read or learn whatever I want whenever I want; I love being connected, that I can see my family, my friends, colleagues when they are far away, that I can participate in a conference as I did recently – live! – half-way across the world in London. The possibilities for education are dizzying. And yet, you can have an extraordinary education without technology and a shallow one with it. While it is no doubt true that technology can only amplify what already exists, the amplifying power of our current technologies is so vast, its reach so pervasive, the change it brings, as Neil Postman warned, not just additive, but ecological, that we must be much much clearer about what is important in education. The danger of amplifying indifference, ignorance, banality, shallowness, inequities, injustice is greater now than ever before.

Technology is a given. What is still up for grabs is how we’ll use it. I think it will take a lot unplugged thinking so we can plug in for powerful learning.

Seven Years is a Long Short Time

2011-08-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Seven years. Time, as Einstein explains, is relative: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute -- then it's longer than any hour. That's relativity!" There are days when the seven years since my brother died seems thick with time, forever ago. On other days, like Wordsworth, when I'm "surprised by joy," the time is lost and I will think - I can't wait to tell Marc. Feeling the weight of the years again is the hard part.

Seven years. It's surprising to think of all the things he'd never heard of that are an everyday part of my life now: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, iPhone. Befunky.com. And that's the short list. And the events he missed. A (very) short list: Hurricane Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, the election of President Obama, the Global recession, the earthquakes in China and Japan, the fall of Tiger Woods, the Vancouver Olympics, the Canucks big run (and the subsequent riots), his youngest son's graduation from high school, his oldest son's graduation from university, my daughter's wedding.

What's important quickly reveals itself against our greatest losses. I've been thinking about what's important to teach in school again. I feel inarticulate always. I keep wanting to say, let's teach each child as though he is the one who will save the world. Because he will. She will. Who else is there? Let's teach each child as if he were the brother we lost, the daughter we yearn for, the children we hold in our arms. Doesn't it seem that what's important is easier to see? But still, it's so very hard to move from an idea to action in schools.

Marc often sent me quotes. Just before he died he sent this one: The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. (Thomas Paine)

When I think about how much the world has changed in seven years, I begin to feel braver: surely we can change schools enough for Zachary - and for the extraordinary children like my brother was, like so many of our brothers are, who are lost in schools today.

What do students really need to learn?

2011-08-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

Michael Wesch asks a question I, too, am always pondering: What do students really need to learn? He says he's not interested in figuring out what information or skill sets are needed; "skills and information alone do not help us lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical and more meaningful lives." He thinks we need "a vision for who we are and our students need to be - not just what we should know." In other words, he's seeking a metaphysical answer. TS Eliot, writing in 1932, would say he's on the right track: "Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction."

So who are we and what do our students need be? Wesch looks back to 1991, before the Internet, to figure out, he says, who we were. His references to Charles Taylor sent me to reread Malaise of Modernity. (I had to move away from my computer, shut down my twitter stream, RSS feed, email and text notifications. Reading philosophy is a little like deciding to cook a meal from scratch - fast food and packaged shortcuts are just so easy and still fill you up. But what a different "filling up" it is!) Taylor reminds us, as Wesch says, that what we consider the "effects of the web" are not new at all, and in fact are, as Taylor says, the effects, rather, of modernity. (TS Eliot, too, was concerned about the effects of modern life.) Taylor identifies three "malaises": the first, loss of meaning. The individualism that defines modern life is a result of the dismantling of the old orders, which, while restricting freedom, nonetheless gave meaning to life. (In education, our continued desire to "personalize" learning is driven by this value.) The second malaise, the eclipse of ends, occurred as a result of the vacuum left behind after the old orders were swept away. Instrumental reason became the yardstick to measure happiness: everything is calculated in terms of maximum efficiency and profit. (We feel this deeply in education; we determine our success on graphs and data points. We decide what we teach by economic measure - how important those skills and that information are in the job market.) Finally, a consequence of individualism and instrumental reason is the third malaise: loss of freedom. Political liberty is at risk, for the “institutions and structures of industrial-technological society severely restrict our choices”. In a society in which people prefer to stay home and be private, “few will want to participate actively in self-government." This “atomism of the self-absorbed individual” creates a sort of “soft” despotism: government runs things in a paternalistic way, which, without vigorous political culture, leaves people with little control. The result is a kind of powerlessness of the citizen against the vast bureaucracy of state. (In education, we feel this as well: we shrug our shoulders and "do our own thing" in classrooms, rather than "participate" in bureaucratic hoop-jumping.)

Where to from here? The Internet has provided a vehicle for changing the last - the loss of freedom. We now have the capacity to participate in ways we never had before. We can connect with our community - become writers, newsmakers, change agents. As Clay Shirky writes, in Cognitive Surplus, even 14 year old girls in Korea can change government policy (their protests led to a ban on imports of American beef).

But just participating, surely isn't enough. Just being passionate about something isn't sufficient. The young men in Vancouver and in London are passionate, too, and participated in droves to loot and riot in the streets. And it isn't enough to dismiss the rioters as mere thugs. It isn't enough to argue that an economic fix (jobs) would solve the violence. Or better parenting. Or less TV, Internet, pornography, video-games - name your poison. I'm afraid is connected to who we are. I'm wondering if it is the effect of the first two "malaises": a lack of meaning in their lives, something to live for and love beyond their own self and a lack of a way to measure their worth and actions beyond a pay cheque. Because then, of course, one is nothing without a job.

So what do students need to be to participate meaningfully in their community to enrich their own lives and that of others?

How We Think Depends on What We Think With

2011-08-05T05:56:00.000-07:00

What does it matter what you teach, said one superintendent to me recently, as long as you teach how to think? The danger, I would have argued if I hadn't been dumbstruck, is that it leaves students without ideas to think with. Or rather, it leaves them with those ideas they are awash in every day. For all children, that is a barrage of images from media that sell a message that cannot be thought to build a conceptual framework for a life; for those children who need education most, there is often, in addition, a daily onslaught of destructive ideas that negate self-worth, persistence, effort and resilience. As E.F. Schumacher says, "The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic." What education ought to do, he says, is provide the mind with a toolbox of powerful ideas.

We continually ponder how to best teach the best process tools - creativity, critical thinking, inference, synthesis - but when we leave the "what" up to children to choose what's "relevant" to them as they "follow their passion" (I argue students should not follow their passion), we deprive them of vital ideas with which to make sense. After all, we cannot think critically without a set of coherent ideas against which to make judgements. We can't make inferences without a broad and rich array of ideas out of which to reason and draw conclusions. We can't innovate and create either. As Steven Johnson says, in his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, "Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are build out of a collection of existing parts." Good "parts," surely, like fine ingredients in a meal, make better good ideas.

The superintendent went on to say that facts and ideas, the "what" of learning, belong to the old world. What do they matter, he said, to the future? Had I not simply sputtered incoherently, I would have said that a profoundly changing world does not necessarily mean that everything old will become obsolete; it does demands that we clarify what's most important, what good ideas we want our children to take into the future. After all, while facts and fads change, there are deep human ideas (truths I want to say) that are worth knowing, and new things are only learned upon a foundation of what we already know. Children who come to school with a vast stock of ideas from rich experiences at home will flourish in an environment that focuses on helping them use those ideas creatively, critically, comprehensively. For children who come to school for an education, to gather up the ideas that will allow them to make a life, what will they come away with?

Why Students Should Not Follow Their Passion

2011-07-15T05:51:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk, lately, about allowing students to "follow their passion" and "personalizing" learning for them. Students are disengaged, it's said, because they aren't allowed to pursue what matters to them, to follow a dream, to learn what's "relevant" to them and their future. Why should students read Shakespeare, they ask. It's boring, "old school," irrelevant. What if, instead, as BC Superintendent of Achievement Rod Allen argues, "things started getting packaged in terms of kids’ needs, passions?” What if instead of "traditional learning" which involves "the ability to accept facts as provided, to learn how to compute without always understanding the subject matter or its applicability – taking notes quickly and accurately; retrieving/transcribing information previously acquired," where "mental and emotional concerns are parked for large periods of the day; students sit still for much of their time in school," we moved to schools that enable "student-initiated, self-directed, interdisciplinary learning with the teacher as facilitator."

Let's set aside an argument for why Shakespeare (and other traditional content) might be important for all children. Let's set aside another argument against linking traditional content to "traditional learning." (But briefly, Shakespeare does not need to be taught through a series of lectures and "Round Robin" reading.) Instead, let's just consider whether this idea of "personalized learning" would engage students. I asked several groups of tenth graders. I explained that the plan is to have more choice, to design their own personalized path in high school, to work with mentors, to self-select seminars.

Are they on crack, they asked. I admit that I was a little taken aback by their incredulity. They explained: we wouldn't do anything. We'd just goof off.

They have a point. And it isn't merely because they've been spoon-fed information throughout school, that they haven't been taught the skills of self-awareness or self-directed learning. It's that they haven't had enough life experience to even know what their passions are. It might be skateboarding or "going to the mall and hanging out with friends" now (two answers I commonly get from teens when I ask what really matters to them), but they haven't yet read widely, travelled broadly, or had a range of experiences. This is most true for the students who need a sound education system most: the one's whose life experiences to date show them a circumscribed world and limited options.

Trust me. I know. I was in a high school led by a principal who wanted to revolutionize school. I could do what I wanted. I could attend classes or not. I could hand in work or not. I spent five years hanging out with friends downtown. I had no goal to go to university. Of course, I sometimes imagined in a childish way - like becoming a fireman or playing in the NHL - that I'd become a lawyer, a writer, a traveller. But I had no idea what was necessary. If I thought about my future at all, I thought I'd get married and have children. In the remote logging community I grew up in, I didn't know anyone who'd done anything else.

But even setting aside my deep concern that "personalized, passion-based" education would become a tool to further limit the options of those whose options are most limited - it's possible that with forethought and a deep network of mentorship, this will not be the case - a grave danger still remains. The message of personalization and passion is that the purpose of an education is to please oneself (or to be pleased). In his address to Harvard graduates, Chris Anderson has different advice:

Don't pursue your passion directly. At least not yet. Instead... pursue the things that will empower you. Pursue knowledge. Be relentlessly curious. Listen, learn....Pursue discipline. It's an old-fashioned word, but it's never been more important. Today's world is full of an impossible number of distractions. The world-changers are those who find a way of ignoring most of them....And above all: Pursue generosity. Not just because it will add meaning to your life -- though it will do that -- but because your future is going to be built on great ideas and in the future you are entering, great ideas HAVE to be given away. They do. The world is more interconnected than ever....Knowledge, discipline, generosity. If you pursue those with all the determination you possess, one day before too long, without your even knowing it, the chance to realize your most spectacular dreams will come gently tap you on the shoulder and whisper... "Let's go!". And you'll be ready. And that is how you're going to help shape a better future for all of us.

An education is what will allow our children to pursue the passion that will make a difference. We need to think deeply about ensuring we put in their way the things that will empower them to pursue it.

In our rush...

2011-06-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

"In our rush to reform education, we have forgotten this simple truth: reform will never be achieved by renewing appropriations, restructuring schools, rewriting curriculum, and revising texts if we continue to demean and dishearten the human resource called the teach on whom so much depends...if we fail to cherish - and challenge - the human heart that is the source of good teaching." Parker Palmer, Courage to Teach

A Birthday Wish

2011-05-31T21:44:00.000-07:00

On my birthday, I had the perfect end to the work day - I attended the final celebration of a group of teachers who had been inquiring together all year into the inclusion of all learners at secondary. There is nothing better to lift your spirits and remind you of possibility than listening to teachers share their research and reflect on how to improve their practice. The presentations began with an inquiry into the transition process for autistic children from elementary into high school. The teacher revealed her motivation - her son Zachary is autistic. Her inquiry revealed that many teachers at her high school (good, caring, thoughtful, experienced educators) didn't feel they knew enough about autism to teach an autistic child effectively and didn't have a clear idea about where to find out more or how to be involved in powerful planning for the student. She asked this question of us: What if we were able to tell each autistic child, "Come to our school. We know our stuff and we will make you feel welcome here."

It strikes me that if we could make this true for autistic children, if they were truly welcome and deeply understood, we would be a long ways toward making it true for all kids. What's important for autistic children - that we value their strengths, that we understand their unique challenges, that we seek diverse ways to meet needs and leverage strengths, that we have a plan to provide the ongoing support they require throughout their school years to thrive - is important for all children. All we have to do now is to open our minds and hearts wide enough to find ways to include the most diverse of our diverse learners. But it won't be by doing more of what we've always done. It won't even be by doing some things better. If we are going to include all learners in a rich meaningful education that allows them, to use Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser's phrase, to cross the stage with purpose, dignity and options, we'll need a revolution.

Zachary goes to high school in seven years. When I spoke to his mom later, she said she wasn't optimistic. She holds out little hope that schools can change enough. I, however, had just listened to a half-dozen passionate, committed and generous educators and still felt the glow of possibility.

And so when I blew out my candles, this was my birthday wish - let's make school ready for Zachary. We've got seven years. Can anything else be more important?

The Holy Grail is Us

2011-05-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

We keep looking for the Holy Grail "out there," but we have everything we need for the profession in the profession. As Alma Harris iterated at the recent NPBS Seminar, "There is nothing more powerful than teachers working together on what matters." The question becomes, if we know this (and surely we do), what's stopping us? Three things spring to mind.

We get distracted.
To learn together demands that each of us steps out of our circle of confidence into a place of dissonance and uncertainty (Lorna Williams gives us a beautiful word for this concept: cwelelep).
We yearn for quick fixes.

As the distractions increase and the snake oil salesmen with the Holy Grail neatly packaged proliferate, it is more important than ever that we slow down to take time to talk together, to think hard together, to prod and support each other as we step into learning (push, but not be pushy as Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser say), and to have faith in each other to do what's most important for our children. No one of us has the answer, because the answer is our working and learning together. It's slow work, but as GK Chesterton said, "One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time." We'll get there faster slower.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Sharing Anchors Community

2011-02-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

It takes a village to raise a child, certainly, and to educate one. No one teacher, not even one school, and lately, I've been thinking, not even one village or one country can educate a child. At least, not as well as all of us. Together, we have beautiful lessons, excellent resources, a vast toolbox of strategies, and the broad range of skills and strengths necessary to customize an extraordinary learning experience for each child. We just have to share. And sharing, Clay Shirky writes, anchors community, the community we need to support each child. Dean Shareski, in the freely shared keynote address below, argues that sharing is a teacher's job. He asks, why hoard good teaching and learning? In fact, he says, given the online platforms now available, sharing is no longer an option: it's a moral imperative, an ethical responsibility.

I am grateful to be surrounded by ethical educators. Donna Anderson is one such. In this last year of her teaching career, she has learned about how to use online sharing tools and her first thought is to share some of the resources she has created with us. Go to her grade 2 wiki. Enjoy.

What a Way to End the Day

2011-01-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

Steven Johnson, in the Ted Talk below, explores where good ideas come from. What, he asks, is the space of creativity? He shares one study where a researcher filmed the work of scientists in labs to see when the "lightbulb" moment came. And it didn't come when a scientist, working alone staring silently into a Petri dish, suddenly yelled, "Eureka." Instead, good ideas grew out of the weekly lab meetings, where scientists shared what they were working on, what didn't work and some of their hunches. Good ideas came from connecting their thinking.

I was lucky to be in the midst of such a space of creativity at a recent visit to Ecole Davis Road Elementary for their bi-monthly Professional Learning Community meeting. One meeting is held during the day while the principal takes the students in a school-wide activity (later this week, he'll supervise a 'read-in' in the gym) and one meeting is after school during their staff meeting. The business is 15 minutes and the rest of the meeting is devoted to PLC time.

Each meeting has a rotating chair and recorder. When I visited, it was Sean's turn to chair and he began the conversation by suggesting the focus: to reflect on their Family Math Night (planned during previous PLC meetings). We've had lots of positive feedback, he said, but let's think, too, about what didn't go as well as we'd hoped so we can improve next time. They quickly went around the table, noting what didn't work and simultaneously thinking of ways to improve, building on each other's ideas. After each person had their say, they had a plan for fewer stations in each room, a method to try out the games with buddy classes prior to the evening, an idea for engaging parents in participation and a right-now solution for allowing the kids who didn't attend the evening a chance to engage in the games - they would have a cross-grade activity next month with the games that worked best. This led to an idea to use the math games as a culminating activity for the upcoming math sequence (a generous gift from another school - June Bouchard and Ann Grant at Quarterway) and the decision to use the next PLC meeting for planning.

Glancing at the clock to signal the wrap up, Sean said aloud what I'd been thinking, "At our Family Math Night next year, our awesomeness will be even awesomer." The meeting finished with a reflection, as Sean put it, on "the purpose of a true PLC, student achievement." How can we connect our Math Night with achievement, he asked. Hands shot up. What's fun is worth taking time for; it's a good reminder not to get caught up in the text book. I keep asking myself, are my weekly math games making a difference, are they getting it? And I know the answer is yes. And what's important, they still think it's fun. They think math is fun.

And then came one of my favourite parts - another creative idea at two minutes before the end of the session - let's build a games toolkit matched to the IRP strands. A flurry of decisions about time, dates, funding, where to store the games - and at 4:00, they rose.

Can you imagine ending your day so joyfully?

For more on our PLC series
If it's important
Seaview Elementary
Bayview Elementary
What do we value?
McGirr Elementary
North Oyster Elementary

What a way to start the day!

2011-01-11T05:42:00.000-08:00

At North Cedar Intermediate, teachers start each day with thirty minutes to think, plan and learn together while student-leaders, EAs and principal or teacher lead all students in fitness. Listening to the teachers talk together, I was reminded of the power of "off-topic" conversations. The group, clearly comfortable with each other and the process, began with their purpose in mind: reviewing the learning outcomes and considering how what they are doing meets them. They reviewed a potential project with Hul'qumi'num teacher Jerry Brown to translate a text of Aboriginal stories and to work with him to develop text-to-text connections, visualization strategies, and assessment into a learning sequence to use with the stories. They quickly agreed on shared tasks, and organized times.

They then pulled out the learning outcomes and began to think further about their programs. Somehow, the conversation turned to the Pigeon stories (if you haven't read them, do so now!) and someone connected them with drama and the group bounced around the idea of having students create their own dramatized Pigeon stories for Literacy week, which somehow led to a sharing of excellent read-alouds that support practice of visualizing strategies (and had us all scrambling for our pens to write down titles), which led to pondering together why some students are inattentive, which led to thoughts about increasing participation and attachment theory.

What a way to start the day! Children come to class ready to learn after 30 minutes of vigorous exercise (the research is extensive to show that learning increases and negative behaviour decreases with daily exercise) and teachers come to class ready to teach - their minds open to thinking about participation, belonging, strategies, ready to reflect on their practice as the day unfolds and knowing that tomorrow they have a supportive team to share questions, concerns, new ideas and triumphs.

You might be wondering how your school could re-organize to make this happen - and you might also be wondering (especially if you are a teacher) - where can I get a copy of the Hulquminim lesson sequence when it's completed or the Pigeon drama lessons? Where can I get the list of great read-alouds? Once you begin working together, surely the next step is more working together. What if we had better communication and sharing channels so that we can build on our work instead of continually beginning from scratch at each site - or worse, in each classroom? We keeping working so hard, but we can't seem to keep ahead of changing students with changing needs in a changing world. But if we worked together, if we found ways - through professional learning communities in schools, across the district, and, indeed, connecting globally - surely our combined strength could ensure that each child was beautifully educated.

For more on our PLC series
If it's important
Seaview Elementary
Bayview Elementary
What do we value?
McGirr Elementary

Teacher Gold

2010-12-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

Collaboration: working together in a supportive and mutually beneficial relationship. Friend and Cook

At McGirr Elementary, intermediate and primary teams meet twice a week: once while the principal has an assembly with students, once while students eat their lunch supervised by EAs. The day I went to visit, I got lost in the halls on my way to the meeting, admiring bulletin boards of student work and the Christmas door decorations. When I arrived at the right room, the primary teachers were already gathered with their principal (Jill attends as many of the PLC meetings as she can) and the Assistant Superintendent who had been invited to listen to their reflections on the recent report card implementation. They were well-prepared. They began with what they appreciated about the new report card, followed with what didn't work and why, and concluded with recommendations. Many of their recommendations demanded deeper collaboration across the district, so that we can support each other quickly and share resources (exemplars, comment banks, a quick guide for using the technology), rather than add to our workload by inventing everything in isolation. It struck me that we continually seek answers to our difficult situations "out there," when everything we need is here. We just have to find a way to mine the gold.

And what a gold mine can be found at McGirr! After the team shared their recommendations, we had just enough time to get a run-down on their work. Their team was focussed on increasing student ownership. They talked of the reflection journals they had developed (for thinking about thinking) and the kid-friendly rubrics they designed to allow students to assess their own learning. Their next project is to develop a "writing clothesline," an idea they'd learned about from an Assessment Webcast and had been implemented by colleagues in another school (see the Resource PowerPoint developed by Donna and Tammy). They planned to use the writing tasks from the BC Performance Standards, mark together, choose samples and create a K-3 "clothesline" of samples so that students can self-assess effectively and choose goals based on concrete evidence of "what's next."

It's hard not to simple stare in awe at these women, at their energy and their commitment to work together, to reflect on their practice, to give voice to what matters for teachers and learners, and to learn deeply to improve student learning. As Robin said, "At the end of our PLC meetings, I walk away and say, wow, we're doing good work." Who can ask for anything more?

For more on our PLC series
If it's important
Seaview
Bayview
What do we value?

A Recipe for Miracles

2010-12-07T10:10:00.001-08:00

We are constantly asking - how can we create success for each child? And we continually hit the wall of poverty or learning differences or isolation or fragmentation. We shrug our shoulders and say - what can we do with these children or those teachers? How can we succeed while inequities exist? Ask Coach Stevenson. He's found the answer.

John Barsby is one of the smallest public schools playing football in BC and is an "inner city" high school. On paper, it doesn't have a hope of sustaining a football program, never mind winning championships. At Barsby, it's hard to get kids to attend school each morning; it's hard to get kids to finish school with their Dogwood diploma. But they get up early and stay late to play football. And they work hard! Very, very hard, both at football - and if they want to continue to play football - at school. Coach Stevenson's recipe: relentless support, focused teaching, consistency, powerful goals, positive attitude, a focus on effort - try your hardest! get better each day! - a commitment to "doing the right thing," celebration of success, and, above all, team effort. After their miraculous double-A BC high school championship win on Saturday, quarterback Patrick Doyle said, "This is a team with no ego. We stick together. We play for each other. We play as one."

Imagine if we played as one in our schools. We'd be as unstoppable as the Barsby Bulldogs.

Photo: by Craig Letourneau

What do we value?

2010-12-06T05:47:00.000-08:00

Last week we gathered a number of people together to discuss how they built a learning community in their school. As I sifted through my notes and video from the discussion (more on that soon), I tried to put my finger on what I was missing, what the leaders were trying to get across as they tried to answer my clumsy questions. It was only when reading Sustainable Improvement by Coral Mitchell and Larry Sackney (thanks for the loan, Twila), that I realized that I had asked the wrong question. Mitchell and Sackney write, "The question is not 'How will we build a learning community?' Instead it is, 'Who are the people in this community? What do we value and what is meaningful to us? What is disturbing us, and how are we making sense of the disturbances? What do we want, and where are we going?'"

Two things are meaningful to all of us. First, student achievement matters. We are all disturbed when some of our students don't thrive. Second, educators working together can have greater impact on student achievement (and greater joy in the process) than a teacher working in isolation. To work together, we need to value time to talk together. If, as Roger said at our meeting, you agree that "talking counts - us talking counts," then "you shape the environment to make it happen." How you go about it depends on your community. But you get started. Today.

For more on our PLC series
If it's important
Seaview
Bayview

Drop Everything and Work Together

2010-12-02T05:16:00.000-08:00

At Bayview Elementary, the educators have made a commitment to find time for teachers to work together. They've found the time where they already had it: all students begin their day with "DEAR" (Drop Everything and Read). During that time, teachers meet while the two student support teachers, Aboriginal teacher, principal and counsellor take over the classes, settling students in for the day, checking in with them, connecting, and giving them the time to leave behind the bustle and chaos of home to transition into their school day by quietly reading. And, of course, at the same time, they are valuing reading and allowing students to do what improves reading most - read!

On the day I visited, intermediate teachers Sooz, Phil, Courtenay and Jennifer jumped into conversation right away. They had just been writing report cards and took some time to debrief the experience (there had been a new format) and to check in about a few students. One teacher related a story of a student who had scored the winning point in volleyball at the last game. The rest of the teachers lit up with the news, for this was a girl they'd all worried about together for years. Sooz leaned over to me as the others learned the details, "We are like family here." You might think - well, what's that got to do with teaching and learning? The teachers didn't examine student work or share strategies or develop a lesson. Next time perhaps. But this time, when they leave the meeting, they'll each touch base with the girl who had a great volleyball game. And that girl will know she's cared about, that she's noticed, that what she does matters. Can you see her smile? Can you picture her doing one more problem during math? Do you hear her shush a friend when the teacher asks for silence? I'm guessing that the impact is at least as powerful as time spent learning a new strategy. Teaching and learning, surely, is built on a network of relationships. And we need to spend time together for that.

For more on our PLC series go to "If it's important" and "Seaview"

How many ways can we work together?

2010-11-24T06:33:00.000-08:00

The nice thing about the concept of professional learning communities is that you can configure them in so many ways. The key idea is that we can't learn everything on our own. We need to think hard and often with others. Last week we experimented with a late intermediate mentorship professional learning team. We sent an invitation through principals to the new-to-grade-6/7 teachers to join us to observe in Twila's classroom, debrief and then have some time for their own questions with Twila.

We arrived at 8:15 and Twila passed them a thick package of her favourite things. Eyes lit up. She spoke of things you don't hear about often enough: how to care for yourself as a teacher and how to make the extraordinarily difficult task of teaching thirty or so unique individuals in multiple courses doable. She shared what she called sustainable frameworks - everything from a hand-in zone to the overhead with tasks for transition to four-quadrant note-taking.

We then got to observe a math lesson. Students warmed up by reviewing their problem-solving strategies. My favourite: problem-solving is like rock climbing. You need to look for the footholds and climb bit by bit to the solution. Yes, chimed in another student, and if you just look at the top, it's overwhelming. Don't look up and say you can't do it. Break it down. Another student added: Do little bits so you can find the footholds. Yes, said another, if you look at a climbing wall, you can't know where you'll find your footholds. You have to start climbing. They then started their lesson as they did each day - with a problem using a four-quadrant strategy and partners, while Twila checked their homework (and checked in with each student). After ten minutes, several students shared their strategies on the overhead. They all had different approaches and the rest of the students listened intently and thought hard with them. This was followed by a math lesson introducing a new concept - using four-quadrant note-taking, of course.

Next the grade three buddies joined us for Power Paragraph writing. The room filled to overflowing with chattering children who quickly settled as their teachers began the lesson. The teams were to write a paragraph that began - We love the Christmas season for many reasons. Once again they reviewed their tools: zoom in, transitions, sentence variety, vocabulary. Debbie and Twila modelled the process, writing their own paragraph for students. And then it was the students turn - leaning in, listening, talking, writing quickly - they worked furiously. The lesson closed with three teams reading their paragraphs. Again, the students listened closely to their peers and learned with them. At the back of the room, we teachers leaned in, too, soaking up everything.

We finished with a chance to think further with Twila. My favourite Twila quote: "If something is not sustainable, you will just stop doing it. You only have a limited amount of energy."

We can't learn alone. It's not sustainable. We can't teach alone. It's not sustainable. We need to find ways to work together.

Movember Meeting at Seaview Elementary

2010-11-15T06:13:00.000-08:00

PLC Part II - For PLC Part I see If it's important.

Friday, 10:45. It's time for the bi-weekly intermediate teachers meeting. Their students troop down to the gym where the principal leads them in activities. Today it's preparation for their upcoming Christmas concert. Classroom teachers Mike, Shaun, Steve and Jeff (all sporting their Movember mustaches), Student Support teacher Kori and two student teachers meet in the library. Their focus is peer and self assessment. Shaun launches the conversation with his work using learning intentions, stop lights and student reflections. Steve adds to the conversation with samples of some of his criteria and writing checklists for self assessment. He shares one that gives student space to point out what they've concentrated on, so as a teacher, he can pay attention to what a student is focussed on improving. Mike shares some of his self evaluation sheets and how he has incorporated a work ethic four-point scale that student regularly use to self-assess. Jeff shares a reading response workbook that includes a space for parent, peer, self and/or teacher assessment. He's now going to add a column for "sibling" assessment, since a boy came to school yesterday and said his sister read and assessed his response for him.

If you are a teacher, you're thinking - where can I get copies of all these goodies (including the over 100 graphic organizers in Shaun's "toolbox")? But it's not the same. You would just file it. You know you have too many organizers already. But if you worked at Seaview and took Mike's idea and tried it and it didn't quite work, you could pop in the next day and ask a question or see samples. You could reflect on things you tried at the next intermediate meeting and figure out what worked, what didn't and what you needed for next steps. You could talk to Kori about the student with special needs and how you could adapt the assessment tool for him. You could share what you're working on with your principal, so she could incorporate the strategy within the intermediate-wide activities she develops.

We don't need more stuff, more ideas, more resources. We need time to think deeply, to reflect with colleagues, to build a repertoire of what works for the kids we have today; we need a supportive environment, to know we are not alone, to share triumphs and catastrophes, to take risks to change; we need to know that a team will help us, prompt us, join us, plan with us, analyze, figure out.

Is it easy to set up a professional learning community in your school? Not at all! But is there any other way to ensure that teachers are supported, continually learning, sharing and deepening their practice, regularly consulting each other when they have a challenge, and staying current with new research, new curriculum and new tools for learning? I haven't thought of one yet. And until every teacher is supported, I don't know how we can ensure that each child is successful.

If it's important

2010-11-14T14:53:00.000-08:00

Suppose you believe the research that the most significant influence on student learning is the teacher? How do you ensure that teachers are supported, continually learning, sharing and deepening their practice, regularly consulting each other when they have a challenge, and staying current with new research, new curriculum and new tools for learning?

If the answer is - we expect them to find their own learning network, join after school workshops or meetings, and attend relevant professional development during the five allotted days during the year - it's not enough. It's not just-in-time, it's not deeply connected to the students they have in their classroom or to the school they are working in, and it demands that the teacher, rather than focus on their students, use precious time to find people to learn with. And it doesn't take into account the life of the teacher. As a mother of five, I attended a minimum of after school meetings. Instead, I went home, picked up children, took them to after school events, listened to their stories, fed them snacks, made dinner, played games, read to them and then - after the last of them was tucked into bed or quietly engaged in an evening activity - I marked, planned, or if I had any energy left, read professional articles. I have colleagues, bless them, who are busy with other kids after school - drama, football, student council, basketball, volleyball, dance. Do we stop providing these services that connect our students to the school community, foster leadership, citizenship and a sense of belonging?

If our answer to professional learning and collaboration is to organize more after school meetings, we are providing opportunities for some teachers. We need an answer for every teacher if we want success for each child. How? Schools in SD68 are doing it! If it's important, we'll learn together to find a way.

First stop: Seaview Elementary

Embracing Change

2010-11-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

Guest Blogger: Cheryl Lloyd is a primary teacher from SD71. Meet her for five minutes and you are struck by her passion for teaching and learning. Where is she now? On Arabian Adventures. Find out about her experiences on exchange in Saudia Arabia at her blog: http://lloydsarabianadventures.blogspot.com.

Educating children is no easy task! The whirlwind of current practices changes at a rate similar to our advancing technology. Students and adults alike are on a nonstop continuum of learning and sometimes as educators, admitting our ignorance is a difficult task. Can we remember back to when we first started teaching in our classrooms? It was not only acceptable, but expected we would ask others for assistance and help as we graciously or ungraciously strung together lessons and units of study. What’s changed? Are we supposed to know everything now with all our years of experience? This is an absurd notion, especially when research continues to reveal new and exciting phenomenon about how we learn.

Presently, one ongoing question revolves around assessment. Should we, shouldn’t we, how often, what assessment tool, what’s the purpose, what do we do with the results, and, do I want to share the results to name a few. Of course we should assess children and use the data to assist and support student learning. Assessments can also be a tool to guide unit planning and even school and district goals.

Over the past four years, I have had the opportunity to once again embrace meaningful professional learning. Becoming vulnerable, asking questions, trying on little bits, teaching others, and learning from others has enhanced my capabilities and confidence. Finding a team of other educators who are expanding their knowledge has been an invaluable tool and wealth of information for me. Assessment practices have been a part of our learning and I now embrace formative assessment, peer assessment practices and summative assessment. I match various assessments for specific purposes.

I desire ongoing professional development and am forever grateful to my colleagues for stretching my thinking, encouraging me to try new practices, and believing in me. I think the process of participation verses the perfect product assists me to embrace the shifting practices in our ever-changing vocation!

I didn't expect to dance

2010-10-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

It was the beginning of my smorgasbord of professional learning day. October 22. The day teachers across the province thought and learned together. I wanted to sit in on some of the collaborative working sessions that were happening in our district. My first stop: "Primarily Primary Science Creative Activities." And we warmed up by dancing! A student teacher put us through some moves - the shirt, the bow and arrow, and my favourite - the fist pumps at the beginning of "tonight's going to be good night." The music and movement made us all smile. And I thought - lucky students who will benefit from this young woman's talent. And lucky us to learn from her.

Then we talked science. I learned how these amazing teachers used science exploration with their primary students, how they included family, how they fostered independence, how they deepened scientific understanding and shared the language of science. I looked at grade one science journals with carefully labelled drawings, even down to H20 for the water in a beaker! (I'll get to work on a science page soon to post some of these ideas on our Working Together Wiki.)

I spent much longer drinking up the knowledge and passion for teaching, for science and for learning than I had intended. I left reluctantly and only because I was keen to get to my next stop: the librarians. The conversation, wide-ranging and in high gear when I arrived, tackled 21st century libraries - kindles, multi-tasking and the brain, etiquette in a new age, streaming video, databases and the age-old question: how do we get the best resources in the hands of the most people at the right time? Immersed in conversation, time flew and when I looked up again, the day was done.

I had thought I'd get a chance to sit in with the group sharing strategies for diverse learners and drop by the SmartBoard session and maybe even sneak in to learn some ideas from the group discussing powerful tools for behaviour management and, if I was lucky, to finish the day with the group thinking about assessment in music. So many excellent choices. This district, the province, was humming with learning!

Lately, it seems, we hear so much about what teachers aren't doing right and how to "fix" them. I am simply in awe of how much, despite difficult conditions, teachers are doing so very very right!

Can we imagine not keeping score?

2010-10-14T07:35:00.000-07:00

Guest Blogger Christine VanderRee is Comox Valley's District Numeracy Lead teacher, supporting classrooms from K to 7. She has always specialized in elementary mathematics education but values her kids and colleagues from Middle School and Intermediate classrooms that she had before this position. Christine is currently working on her Masters of Educational Leadership at VIU and is delighted to be back as a formal student after such a long break from it. She values her time with her family as well as time on the water with their sailboat.

Is there any difference between a rubric with a 4 point scale and percents when looking at assessment practices? Both keep score – a rubric with a clearer picture than the percent but a score nonetheless. As teachers we are obliged to report student progress to parents so we are caught in a number trap. However, typically, especially at the intermediate and then into high school level we provide feedback to students using these same numbers.

School is a constant number game, especially in subject areas such as mathematics. A child might be told that he or she has 73% of the questions correct on a paper. I am no longer sure what this tells the student? It’s a low B. That’s clear, but what can the child really do about the 27% of the missed concepts and how could he/she identify them? Did the student know how deeply he/she understood the work before it was marked? Children, especially older ones, appear to be motivated by marks but I think that we are part of a culture that values the score as we equate that with learning. However, if my goal is to help a child become a mathematical thinker, problem solver, someone who can identify where they are stuck and identify what they need to do next, a 73% is meaningless. I believe that too many of us confuse assessment with evaluation. Assessment, not evaluation should drive our practice. How can we help students achieve an optimal learning experience? By striving as teachers to help our students achieve ‘flow’, I believe that children can get to that place of learning for the sake of learning with the experience as the end in itself. We have a significant amount of learning to do as teachers if we are to ever come close to helping all of our students achieve this. Formative assessment is the key!

Interestingly, my work with the Teacher Leadership program is my first experience with receiving descriptive feedback and not scores as a student. At first I was quite taken back that I didn’t have a number attached to each of my assignments. I have always kept score and have valued those A’s. When I examined my own learning however, I realized that I did know when I understood concepts and had presented my ideas in an appropriate way. I learned to seek clarifications when I was unsure. I began to look instead for the ‘those comments’ of my instructors. They helped me to reflect further on my learning. I studied ‘those comments’ looking for opportunities to explain, expand and clarify. The experience of my learning is what mattered, not a score. I have decades of wanting that high score with me and know that I will need to keep fighting my desire for the number and instead truly acknowledge that it is the learning that really matters and a score will not assist the learning.

The task isn’t just to get something done, it’s to create an environment in which people want to do it. Clay Shirky

We Can Only See With Our Beliefs

2010-10-04T05:47:00.000-07:00

Guest Blogger Jennifer Hedican: I live in Courtenay with husband, three kids and one puppy. I currently working as Learning Support Teacher at elementary school. I grew up in Lower Mainland, moved to the Island 23 years ago and love it here. I spent 6 years up in Port Hardy area before moving to Courtenay. I raised my children as I worked part time and as a TOC before returning fulltime about 10 years ago. (The picture is of a sunset taken this summer at Sproat Lake, where we are lucky enough to own a cabin.)

We can only see with our beliefs.
A simple yet powerful statement that directly affects my teaching capacity.

Our beliefs can either lead to a good or a bad school experience for a child, depending on what we, their teacher, believe. Taking the time to understand our beliefs, the unspoken assumptions and daily actions that determine our scholarly practice is an oft ignored practice. Who has time for this when we have 22 primary kids, up to 30 older students, all clamoring around inside our tiny teaching space? We all have subject matter to cover, assessment to complete and meetings to attend!

Yet when we slow down, breathe deeply and look at each student, we see that each one of them has something about them that we need to understand, to connect with, to help move them forward to possibilities of where they might be.

One of the most important beliefs educators must have comes from a growth mindset (Carol Dweck), one which believes in possibilities, sees potential and knows that being wrong can be a good thing. To have a growth mindset, one must lose the notion that there is only one way to learn things, that a child as we see them now will be how they will always be.

I work as a Learning Support Teacher for an elementary school with 377 students. I believe that all students can be successful, but not necessarily only in the traditional school subjects. I believe that the scientist in Grade Two who is reading, talking and drawing about black holes and nuclear matter at a level I can not even begin to comprehend (yet struggles with printing, sustaining attention and completing work) will grow up to discover new things no one ever thought possible and that I can ease his way to that level.

I believe that the child who is still not reading in Grade 2 may some day write us the most poetic novel ever, or sing songs that soothe the soul or teach adults to read.

I believe that every single child I see, every one sitting in a classroom or out in the hallway or in the office, will be able to thrive in the environment that we create for them, if we have a growth mindset.

I want to believe that I can begin slowly to change the mindsets of some of my colleagues about how to integrate and embrace different learning styles.

I want to believe that my colleagues will realize that disabilities only exist in our mind as we make them, not in reality.

I want to be able to effect the life chances of a child who learns differently from me, knowing that it is my beliefs that are more potent than any other component of my teaching.

We can only see with our beliefs and I believe in the positive life potential of every student in our school.

Walking with Wisdom

2010-10-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Guest Blogger Toresa Crawford: I taught in a number of BC and Yukon schools before moving to the Comox Valley in 2000 to set up the Nala’atsi program. My program incorporates Aboriginal cultural projects into the curriculum, providing a positive and welcoming alternative for students who have previously been unsuccessful in school. To date, over 300 grade 10-12 students have enrolled in our program which is housed in the Aboriginal Learning Centre in downtown Courtenay. In my spare time, I enjoy running, painting, cooking, reading, photography and being with my friends and family.

Nala'atsi is an alternate program for grades 10-12 Aboriginal students in the Comox Valley. For the last 11 years we have been closely affiliated with the Wachiay Friendship Centre and the Ni’nogad (Knowledgeable Ones) Elders' Group. Many of our students do not have close connections with their families and/or have lost touch with their Aboriginal culture and customs. One day during lunch, I spoke to the cultural aide about bringing some of our Aboriginal Elders in as guest speakers in our class. We decided that we would start small and chose 5 Elders to be part of the Elder of the Week group. The students took the initiative, and invited the Elders, researched the proper protocol, prepared and edited the interview, took pictures and put together the resulting displays. By the end of the first month, the project had mushroomed and we soon had 25 Elders who wanted to be part of the Elder of the Week program. Having Elders come in provided positive and cultural role models for our students and they often brought interesting artifacts with them giving the students the opportunity to see traditional clothing, hunting and cooking materials as well as a range of articles and photographs. One student got to know about her grandfather through talking with one of the Elders who had been close friends with her grandfather when they were growing up. Many happy hours were spent with this group as they shared stories with each other! Elders found that they could teach students how to weave cedar, make bannock and cook fish and a whole week was spent when the students and Elders made and decorated their own drums. The photographs showing the group singing and drumming was a powerful reminder of how much fun it can be to do activities that involve more than one generation! Over the school year, we have had over 50 Elders interact positively with students in the Nala'atsi program.

One of the Elders, who had watched a student doing a Power Point display, decided that he wanted to learn how to do his own Power Point. Before we knew it we had 14 Elders who all wanted the students to teach them how to use their photographs and make their own Power Point projects. Each Nala'atsi student sat with an Elder and before long we could see beautiful projects developing as they students and Elders worked together. Then ...the Elders discovered that there were sounds that they could add to their pictures and before long the sound of screeching cars, breaking glass, howling dogs and ringing bells could be heard throughout the building!

Another memory; one of the Elders spoke about how he had got his fishing boat got caught in the riptide and was sinking near the Campbell River rapids. As the students listened to his quiet voice, he spoke about radioing in to the Coast Guard while trying to fit a survival suit on to his 8 year old son. The students were on the edge of their seats when he suddenly paused and mentioned casually that a passing fisherman had stopped, pulled he and his son to safety on board his Seiner, and had then taken a video of the sinking boat. Our Elder was quite surprised that our students were interested in seeing the video and to his delight, it has become a favorite with the students ...they’ve enjoyed seeing a real life reality show!

Probably one of the most moving interactions between the Elders and the students happened last year when two elderly sisters came into the school dressed in their traditional clothing, selected music by the Alert Bay singers and then started to dance. As they moved around the room, their frail bodies proudly performed the intricate steps while tears streamed down their cheeks as they realized this was the first time that they had danced together since they had been sent to residential schools. Moving though that was, there wasn't a dry eye in the place as slowly one by one each of the students got up and joined them in this traditional welcome dance.

Lorna Williams in her 2010 Network of Performance Based Schools conference mentions the word Stucum Wi or Walking with Wisdom. Inviting Elderly Cultural Ambassadors who are positive role models into our classrooms will go a long way towards ensuring that we all can walk with wisdom.

Read more about Lorna Williams: Closing the Gap or the Final Nail?

Freeing the Frozen Flow: Thawing our Thinking on Assessment

2010-09-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

Mike Copes is an elementary counsellor for school district #71 in Courtenay. His circuitous path to involvement with the school system has included work in Community Corrections and in psychiatric care at Riverview Hospital as well as ten years in residential youth care at the Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre where he worked as as team leader, unit supervisor, staffing coordinator and complex supervisor. He has also worked as a Conduct Disorder Specialist and as a Therapist for Child and Youth
Mental Health. His brief flirtations with working as a election campaign manager and as a bouncer at a biker bar were outlying sortees at finding employment self-actualization and should in no way be construed as foreshadowings of his eventual enlistment in the public education system.

Drafting a brief response to the August 27-28 session on Assessment for Learning has been a very challenging exercise. The range and depth of information, research results, pinions and ideas presented and discussed gives rise to such a vast array of further thoughts, questions and connections as to render succinct summarization a dauntingly difficult task.

If there was a single overarching theme to the session it would have to be that assessment as it is commonly practiced within the current educational paradigm does not accomplish the goal of accurately depicting the learning that is taking place. Even less does it assist in directing learning toward optimal conditions in either process or outcome.

Of the range of ideas for developing a new direction in assessment which emerged, the two that stood out for me the most were the notion of continuous or instantaneous assessment and the work of Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi on "Flow".

Assessment, to properly reflect and assist in the learning process, needs to take place in a continuous fashion that is intimately integrated with the minute to minute enterprise of learning rather than in discrete, widely spaced intervals. Establishing what students already know at any given point in the learning process is not only important so as to be able to proceed from the appropriate point, it is also essential as a way of building confidence in every learner that there is a pay-off in making effort and taking risks. It is a start in the conversation with students that says to them "you can learn this and here is proof that you have already begun to do so".

One promising example of continuous assessment is described by Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi in his research on the subjective internal state he calls "Flow". Csikzentmihalyi identifies a range of mental states which relate to the affective content of the person's experience and the level or quality of engagement or focus on the activity. The emotional states he identifies are apathy, boredom, worry, anxiety, relaxation, arousal, control and "Flow". Which of these states a person engaged in an activity (ie, a learner) will experience depends upon the intersection of the level of skill being called forth and the level of challenge involved. In order to reach a state of Flow, the task must present a challenge that stretches a person to the ordinary limits of his skill level and beyond. Bringing about this mental state while engaging with curricular material in the classroom could be used as a means of creating conditions optimal for learning within a process in which a continual feedback loop - a form of self-assessment - exists for the
learner. The alignment of the idea of "Flow" with the process of assessment has provoked for me a great deal of reflection that will likely percolate through my thinking about learning for a long time to come.

As I write this, I am drawn to consider, for instance, the implications of "Flow" versus non-Flow states for the creative exercise of writing in which I am now engaged. How is it that I so often begin the process of writing so haltingly and painfully, attempting to pull forth ideas and express them intelligibly in an agonizingly slow process fraught with long periods of numb empty-mindedness, only to inexplicably reach at some point a break-through to an effortless flight of prose? Is there a way I can draw upon the much easier and more reliable attainment of Flow in the area of piano improvisation to assist in the too infrequent and hard to reach attainment of Flow in my experience of writing? What happens that occasionally puts me there as I seem to be now? How can I translate any personal insights I may arrive at on entering "Flow" to benefit the students with whom I am working? Questions such as these will need to be reflected upon for some time for answers to emerge. Will they arrive effortlessly when some piece has dropped into place during a rare interval of "Flow", or need to be wrenched forth in the grinding hours of non-Flow states which make up the majority of my waking moments? I can't predict with certainty, but if ever forced to wager on it, I think I'll go with the Flow.

Assessment: Purposes and Purposeful?

2010-09-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

Bonnie Kemble is currently teaching high school students in Qualicum Beach BC. Prior to this, she taught in middle school in a variety of student support positions. Her teaching career began in the north with adult learners preparing for entry into college, proving that variety is the spice of life!

Curious thing about assessments and the power they can have to alter life choices and courses... In education, as in life, there are bigger assessments and smaller assessments, ones that change life opportunities, and others which change the course of the day. I have come to know both as an educator in the classroom who makes daily decisions about learning opportunities, and as a specialist whose assessments may build a student's permanent learning file, which can in turn create places for students to be, on occasion, and how teachers may come to know them, for I regularly do what is referred to as Level B testing, normally a step beyond classroom assessment. I take this responsibility very seriously, for these higher stakes tests, done carefully, can take on a mystic of their own at times. "ah, this test will reveal that this student is ...(pick your pigeon hole)", yet the testing CAN be helpful even if it is at the same time, rather artificial information about a student's ability to learn. Assessments are limited in the ability to describe how a student learns, or how intelligent the student may be, by the questions that are asked, and so there are times when it is frustrating knowing that the assessment tools I am using, standardized and legitimized, show not the student who is before me, but how well the test is measuring up to a standard set by anonymous others. I participate in it because there are opportunities for supporting struggling learners who meet the criterion set, so on it goes.

Assessment for learning in the classroom seems friendlier somehow, because as an educator, you can change the flow according to what you see and hear from your students who are in the throes of learning. It is responsive, at its best, and useful. Assessment for learning is good teaching, because it relies on relationships and communication to resolve the edges of "I am learning and I am not there yet". It contributes to education as a transaction and transformation in contrast to assessment of learning, which is largely "I transfer to you and you and transfer back to me in as close to a accurate approximation to the original as possible". For me, assessment for learning is a way to figure out what we are doing in the classroom together, and how do we make it even richer? I get to guide the boat, for I am the teacher leader, but the journey is more rewarding when we are all part of the adventure. We will stop, and take photographs, and based on these snapshots, I may decide to speed up the boat, take side trips, continue on, back track, or make a speedier finish so that we can take another journey together sooner, but we will all have a part in the experience.

I was struck, this past year, by two classes in particular that I taught: one a grade 10 Social Studies classroom, the other a grade 12 Geography classroom. The grade 10 classroom, generally, was a livelier place. Students did not have a choice in their to take this course as it is a requirement for graduation, but at this age level, most were still willing to question the teacher, engage in conversation, offer differences of opinion out loud, challenge some ideas about the subject matter (and my teaching of it), and wrestle with if it had any meaning to them as people growing and developing. The life of the classroom was had assessment for learning elements, and lots of assessment of learning standardized practices too (professional development opportunities abound for me as a teacher to work with this mix more!) A departmental final and expectations for "what is usually done" and "what I was ready for" kept me in check, quite frankly. Students too were also quite surprised when practices beyond "read this section, do these questions, the unit test will be on Friday" were tried, and some were a little nervous that I was changing the rules to some degree. The grade 12 classroom was so "schooled" in older practices, it was really tough to break down barriers. "Is this going to be on the test?", "How did I do on the assignment?" were common questions. Breaking it open to ask them what they learned, what might be useful for them to know and how did our study of Geography relate to them were scary questions. I was saddened by how the students relied so much on the teacher to tell them, by way of marks, how much they had learned, and by how little they knew about their own work and how to evaluate it as having worth. I learned a great deal about the end of high school experiences by teaching this group. I can't say I felt overly optimistic about the experiences these students have had through out their formal education. We have a lot to learn as teachers about how to help students be learners: interested, curious, and eager to feed their hungry brains. For this group, they just wanted to get out of school. This was, I suspect, not the same group of youngsters who arrived at the school's doors a dozen or so years earlier. We have better work to do, more enriching work to do, than what we have, as a system, already done. September beckons...

Summertime and the livin’ is easy........

2010-09-17T05:19:00.000-07:00

Jillian Walkus is our guest blogger today. Who is she? She writes: I am doing the job I was destined to do. One of most exciting parts of the job is that lightbulb moment- we all know the one- when you see that a student "gets it." Personally, that is so rewarding and has such an addictive quality to it. I have been teaching for 15 years on the beautiful North Island. I have lived in Alert Bay, Port Alice and Port McNeill. I currently reside in Port Hardy, where the ocean is our front yard, with my husband, our two younger daughters. My adult stepchildren live in Campbell River and Courtenay where they are pursuing their work and postsecondary passions. Last summer we brought a soft-coated wheaten terrier home and I relish the daily forty minute walk on my lunch break.

Anyone feel like leaning against my photocopied hand? [See Jillian's strategy here.] I sure do! I survived the first week and if you are reading this not only did you survive, you have managed to eke out a few moments of time at the computer. Congratulations to you!

On Friday I grimaced and confessed to my colleague, "I think I bragged a little too early about how well things were going in my English/English First Peoples 10 class. My lesson today totally bombed! I was asking inquiry-type questions and nobody was answering. Maybe my questions were too hard." Karen, my colleague, smiles politely as I continue on. "I don’t know if this was too new for them. I had to give them a few (too many) prompts. I hope they are not expecting a worksheet and boring old questions! You know the kind. The worst ones--the lower than the between-the-lines kind. I can’t do that!"

[Aside #1 ] I spent good money on Jim Burke’s new book What’s the Big Idea?
[Aside #2 ] I just spent two fascinating days stretching my mind about assessment at VIU and man do I ever have some great insights and new ideas to try.

"On Wednesday and Thursday they were dialoguing, volunteering ideas, think-pair-sharing, relocating to sit with new people. I just know I jinxed it when I told you every single student stood up and read aloud on Thursday."

[Aside #3] Shelley mentioned no opting out so I created a safe lesson where students would feel comfortable to read out another student’s 4 line poem.

Karen smiled again and began to speak. I was prepared to eat crow although my appetizer had already been a steady diet of self-flagellation.

"They’re tired. Everyone is tired."
Don’t you love Karen? It was true! So simple and so true!
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It makes perfect sense to me. I am tired. My students are tired. Why wouldn’t we be tired? I think it is important for us to recognize the transition from summer to work. September has a crazy way of sneaking up and disappearing on us. If at all possible take some time to honor and acknowledge the transition. So many times we plow forward at break neck speed only to lose ourselves and our focus. It may surface as the “back to school cold” or the sore back that comes out of nowhere. We have had the luxury of sleeping in & staying up late as well as, reading, eating and drinking whatever we want. Is this why the transition is so hard?

Or is the transition hard because we hit the ground running? Maybe I hit the ground so hard I winded myself. I have decided that my personal goal for this month is to slow down and be mindful. When I am in the classroom, I will be in the classroom-- I will not worry about the next period, tonight’s dinner or who needs to be driven where after school.

There is a difference between physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion. I can sleep to combat the physical; I can be gentle with my thoughts and myself to combat the latter.

Fish are jumpin'....
Right now at the Quatse River the fish are travelling upstream. I watched this on Saturday with my family. We walked the nature trail and picked huckleberries. I enjoyed every second of it.

He who asks questions cannot avoid the answers.

2010-09-12T17:02:00.000-07:00

Guest Blogger Shannon Johnston is a teacher with 20 years experience teaching K-12 in Canada and overseas in Japan and the Philippines. She lives on Saltspring Island with her wonderful husband and three active fun kids. This year she is starting a new position in an Alternative Ed school teaching K-3. She is excited about the possibilities of connecting her own recent schooling at VIU in TLCP (Teacher Leadership Certification Program) and SETS (Special Education Diploma) to a unique classroom environment. When not in school, or hiking with her kids, she is a Pilates instructor and Group Fitness Leader as well. She loves being active and alive! She live with the philosophy of Carpe Diem ~ seize the moment! Life is a gift, treasure it!

At the end of the summer, I spent a weekend asking deep-layered ‘Assessment’ questions. I leave feeling inspired and challenged. Will my practice change? Likely- though in small do-able bite size ways. Will my thinking change? Absolutely. The lens I view Assessment with has altered. Really chewing on deep beliefs and values challenged my own biases and personal tendencies. Though some may view this as threatening I actually embrace the idea. I love thinking about my thinking…and isn’t that what we want of our learners? We want, indeed we need, critical thinkers who challenge life and challenge themselves to look at things differently. This weekend has opened that long hidden box of personal values and beliefs attached to ‘assessment’.

As a Type A ‘people pleaser’ I recognize that I give myself value by what others perceive me as…in other words, I try to perform my way through life for extrinsic rewards from others. Recognizing that now and watching my own daughter follow my footsteps in trying to please everyone all the time is evidence that this is not what I want to pass on to her… or to any of my students. What a burden to place on small shoulders. I feel convicted. I want to do life (and assessment) differently. I need to… for her sake, for others and for myself.

Being cognizant of ‘Fixed Mindsets’ as compared to ‘Growth Mindsets’ is the first step. Examining my beliefs and practices in a real way, moving from lip service to heart is gong to take time and effort. Slipping back in to old thought patterns would be easy and natural when the pressures of life and school start back up next week. My goal and hope is that to be ‘aware’ when jumping back into the ‘chaos’ is the first step… and a critical one I intend to do. In my own way this is the ‘desirable difficulty’ I set for myself ~ to continue to think about my own thinking regarding assessment and performance. Thank you for stretching my thinking… and my heart.

What’s So Special About Special Education?

2010-09-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

Guest Blogger Brian Worthen is a teacher at Qualicum Beach Middle School where he teaches all general subjects at the Grade 6 and 7 level. Previously, he has taught in Vancouver and suburban districts in SLD,remedial, accelerated as well as ESL. Graduate studies centred on barriers to experimental field studies in the subject of science education.

Students in today’s classrooms reflect what is currently happening in society. Gone are the days of shaping students to be model citizens that have been instructed to uniform beliefs, manners and information. Society of today is rapid, multifarious and dynamic. Family compositions are numerous as are the challenges and stories each child possesses. We cannot even possibly predict what the future society holds for our students in a decade.

With this in mind, it is crucial that many educators consider change. This means distancing themselves from lock and step, uniform, curriculum based lessons and paying more attention to the learning needs of the child. Students of today will need many different progressive opportunities in their avenues of learning. More importantly, they will need to be exposed to a large set of learning tools that they can utilize to confidently navigate in the world that they must contribute to. Teachers may have to consider their role less as an instructor and more as a steward in preparing the youth of today.

When one enters a special education resource room, we are frequently reminded of the manipulatives, media as well as other approaches for the concepts being taught. We ponder the flexibility of evaluation and the various approaches used in order to meet the learning outcomes for the students of these resource rooms. Yet, there are barriers in offering a “regular” classroom these types of tools – large numbers of students with increasingly challenging needs. Other obstacles include the continual assignments of programs by communities and governments that address growing social problems in the community. Then there is the fundraising and the valuable time taken in order to comply with student data requests. These impairments reduce the time that a teacher could utilize in order to concentrate more time with assessment and tools that could be employed to reach more students in the classroom. If this were made possible, perhaps we would see that “special education” is really more general than we think. Perhaps it is what we should all try to achieve?

For many, distancing oneself from a comfortable fixed mindset is not simple. The hidden curriculum that teachers must consider to embrace in their quest to reach as many learners as possible should take into account many practices and systems such as formative assessments, feedback, quick checks, and strategies that reveal to students how they each learn. One should consider replacing the pressure of curriculum amounts with the availability of some degree of choice for the spectrum of learners that sit in the class. Energy directed to stagnant data collection could take meaning with its purposeful rerouting to individual student progress indicating improvement or weaknesses. Personal interviews with portfolio work and self assessment is a continued “best next practice” that can show benefits for learning. Performance vs. Learning or the dialogues over flexibility, clear goals and the balance between opportunity and capacity must be a constant topic whether in the staffroom, parking lot or at the water fountain.

A teacher is the coach in the classroom. Performance can be prefaced by the learning of the skill set. This skill set can be taught in many ways in order to reach all the players. Then, and only then, can the classroom become a place of showing students how they can flourish in the world. The principal, who cannot possibly do school reform alone, must take on the role to advocate for conditions where teachers can be distracted less from management administrivia and interruptions which would hopefully free up time for honing practices in an environment that fosters greater individual student learning needs. However, until some fixed mindsets are weakened, educators hopefully will, in small steps, help each other with the age old adage that stays constant: teachers need to teach.

Photo from Orange42's photostream

We are blessed to teach

2010-09-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

We are blessed to teach. To stand in front of a group of people - no matter how small or tall - we need to have a clear sense of our topic. We are forced to think more deeply, ask ourselves harder questions, make our knowledge explicit enough so that our audience - no matter how young or old - can understand us.

Recently I was asked to talk about assessment with a group of teachers participating in the VIU Teacher Leadership Program. Blessings, of course, often seem like curses at first. The more I thought about assessment, the more obvious it was that I knew nothing. As Parker Palmer reminds us, it takes a lot of courage to teach. Like so many of our students we are afraid to reveal our vulnerability. Jane Tompkins writes that so often behind the "performance" of teaching lies fear: "Fear of being shown up for what you are: a fraud, stupid, ignorant, a clod, a dolt, a weakling, someone who can't cut the mustard." We are afraid that a "good teacher" is always right. But we're not.

Why do we think we need to know it all? Why do we believe that we must have the "right answer" for everything? Carol Dweck in her must-read book Mindset: the New Psychology of Success argues that there are two mindsets - the fixed mindset that sees every failure as a reflection of self (I am a failure, pitiful, useless) and the growth mindset that sees every failure as a gift, a challenge, an opportunity to learn more. It's easy to see which mindset we need to nourish in learners. Too often, however, our grading system, our focus on intelligence, our praise of talent, of product, of quickness, of easy accomplishment send the message that unless we get it right and know it all, we fail. And when we fail, we are stupid, slow or at best slothful, rather than someone who is simply still learning.

How can we refine our assessment practices to foster a growth mindset? First, I suppose, we need to begin with us. We need to know that "good teachers" know they don't know it all. We need to open our doors and our hearts to learning together because teaching is far too complex for any one of us to get "right". We are so lucky to have so many people to learn with! This month, the teacher-learners in the VIU Teacher Leadership program have promised to share what they've learned on their journey this year as guest bloggers. In listening to their stories and gathering ideas from their experiences, we can begin to shape and reshape our own learning journey. By asking each other questions, by re-examining our practices against new knowledge, new contexts, new students, by working together relentlessly, we might begin to believe that none of us can get it right or know it all. But together we have a chance. We are blessed to teach, I think, but only when we remember that teaching means we are continually learning.

To Marc

2010-08-13T06:29:00.000-07:00

I try to imagine a reader of this blog.

I can't.

Except for one person. My brother. He definitely would have read my blog. He died six years ago today. He would have commented, too, and told people - my sister has a blog - and rolled his eyes as though it were silly instead of something he was proud of. He was the only person who read my final master's paper. I don't even think the professor read it; there was a cursory "excellent work" scribbled at the bottom of the last page. My brother had sticky notes throughout and asked me a number of hard insightful questions, leaning in as I spoke about philosophy and education and psychology and the latest research in literacy.

It's ironic, of course. He wasn't "smart" in school. He got in trouble. The usual stuff. He dropped out in grade 10.

Not long after he died I ran into one of his teachers. She asked about him. He was killed, I said. Oh, my gosh, what happened, she asked, and then I could see her flinch and think - why did I ask? I could read her mind (perhaps I'm wrong): he was probably stabbed in some dark alley while doing a shady drug deal.

His helicopter crashed, I said. Her eyes grew large and she couldn't leave out the incredulity - he was a helicopter pilot! Yes, I said and left it at that. I wanted to say, when he died he was a multi-millionaire, an entrepreneur with multiple business interests who had bought a helicopter and learned how to fly it. And more important - more important to Marc: he was a loving father, a dutiful son, a loyal friend, the kind of brother everyone wishes they had.

He had taken the helicopter in to be serviced - it wasn't running to his satisfaction. On his first flight after picking it up, the engine quit. He didn't have a chance.

He didn't have a chance in school, either. Despite his intelligence, his curiosity, his joy in learning, he was shuffled into the "not yet meeting" part of every class. He didn't learn to read quickly, spelling wasn't his strong suit - but oh, if anyone had paused to know him, they would have discovered that his mind could dance like Baryshnikov. (I can hear him now. He wouldn't appreciate the metaphor. A ballet dancer? What the hell?)

His death was senseless. Someone used a 10-amp fuse instead of the required 1.5-amp fuse. And despite his enormous success during his too-short life, the loss of dignity that he suffered throughout his school years was senseless, too. I can't do anything about the helicopter. But I'd like to find a way to make sure that no one suffers needlessly in school as he did.

The Danger of PLNs: More Thoughts

2010-07-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

In a must-read article (thanks Ben), William Deriewicz addresses students at West Point on the topic of solitude and leadership. His premise is that solitude is necessary for true leadership. A true leader, he argues, is not merely someone "who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place." A true leader (and surely every teacher is a leader - a leader of children) is a thinker. She must not only follow orders but create new pathways; she must not merely do what's always been done, but have the courage and the confidence to stand up for what she believes in, even if it means standing against a traditional practice or what's "popular."

To think, Deriewicz argues further, we need solitude. We need to concentrate on something long enough to develop an idea about it, which isn't possible "in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube." Or scanning your RSS reader. What's more, he points out yet another problem with our continuous stream of information (blogs, news, even the New York Times): "When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now...you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else."

How much more dangerous, now that we can create our own personal "learning" networks and marinate ourselves in a soup of sameness. In my last post, I considered the question posed by blogger Scott McLeod: Should we require teachers to have RSS readers? I'm almost convinced we should ban them. (But not quite. I love my RSS reader.)

The Danger of PLNs (and other like-minded groups)

2010-07-23T08:41:00.000-07:00

The "next best thing" is PLNs - personal learning networks: a network of people with whom you exchange information - in the case of teachers, about professional development, lesson plans, resources, solutions, news. In the 21st century, your network can include the best minds in the world through twitter, blogs, wikis, nings, webinars and more (or at least the best minds in the world who are engaged in the online world). We are a network of learners learning together. Exciting!

And dangerous. It hit me hard when one of the educators in my network, Scott McLeod (note that in the "real" world I would never get a chance to hear the almost daily musings of this professor and guru of educational technology), posted this question on his blog: Should we require school employees to have RSS readers? An RSS reader, just in case you are one of the many people who haven't "kept up" with technology, is a tool that feeds you updates from your favourite blogs, websites, and news headlines.

It's quite possible that the question was merely meant to provoke. My immediate reaction was against the word "require." Why not require exercise? Meditation? Reading poetry? My further reaction surprised me: I realized I'm at least as concerned with the belief that daily reading of RSS feeds - this stream of information from a network we create - is necessarily a good thing.

The first problem is that we surround ourselves with people who think like we do. Scott McLeod has thousands of readers (on Twitter he has 6400 followers), but while all of them (thankfully) balked at the word "required," none of them (except me) suggested that the idea of RSS for teachers was not a good thing. Can you imagine asking such a question in a staff room? Even with a staff of five teachers?

Despite the size of our PLNs - and perhaps that is what makes them most dangerous, since their very size inflate our certainty - their lack of diversity reinforces our biases and encourages us in our ideas, however nonsensical, rather than holding them up to the light of diverse facts, ideas, and opinions. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, writing in 1859, argues vehemently that while there is no such thing as absolute certainty, the very best thing we can do, in order to act on our beliefs, is to hold them up to those who contradict and disprove them. Without the dissenters, we all lose: "If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchange error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with error."

We have swallowed the idea that the Internet has allowed us to finally "have our say," to move opinion out of the hands of the elite and into the hands of the "people." We believe that the Internet is a tool, at last, not only of democracy - but also of diversity. I'm wondering. What if someone in my PLN doesn't agree with me? I get to do something I may have secretly wished to do to the curmudgeonly naysayer on my staff - I delete them.

The Mathematization of Reading Comprehension (and Love)

2010-07-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

Online dating is touted as "the answer" to anonymous city lives: one simply punches in requisite information (height, weight, age, eye colour, religion, work, hobbies) and a one's preferences in a partner - and voila - a list of matches is found for you. In a survey of participants in the online dating world, however, Dan Ariely and his team discovered that the odds of finding the "right one" through an online service are not as good as one might expect. Why? Ariely writes, "In the same way that the chemical composition of broccoli or pecan pie is not going to help us better understand what the real thing tastes like, breaking people up into their individual attributes is not very helpful in figuring out what it might be like to spend time or live with them." (The Upside of Irrationality)

We keep trying, of course, to find formulas, to remove uncertainty, to speed up the processes of these "messy" things in our lives.

We certainly keep trying in education. We have a test of reading comprehension. Because we know that kids who can take notes to organize their thoughts, make connections, infer, determine importance, synthesize and so on can comprehend better, this test tests their tools. The reasoning: then we'll know what to teach them. If they struggle to make connections to the text we'll teach "connections." A perfect formula!

It probably increases the odds of understanding and enhancing reading comprehension as often as online dating hits the perfect match. Comprehension (like love) is complex and so much more than the sum of its parts. And it's elusively individual. Ultimately we've only learned how well they can write this particular sort of test and we get some glimpse into their reading comprehension. That's not a bad thing. It's only a problem if we put more weight on it than it deserves - if we believe our story that it's a perfect formula - if we don't have a rich array of data from many sources to make our teaching decisions in our schools, our classrooms and for individual students.

Of course, what we're looking for, rather than this messy muchness, is some perfect diagnosis - a CT scan for learning that reveals the map of a student's weaknesses so we can "fix" them with a series of well-crafted lessons determined by a rigorous and precise formula. But, alas, learning doesn't work that way. Reading comprehension is no more matter of the right tools than love is a function of eye colour preference and similar hobbies. We need, at the very least, in the first place to engage with the text. Or we need, instead, deep purpose. And we need to be able to bring our attention to bear on the text (even if we're tired, bored, angry, confused). And we need the flexibility to read differently with different texts. And so on. Our inability to comprehend (or show our comprehension) of any one text on a particular day could be caused by any of these factors (and others) or a complex combination of them.

I've been thinking lately, that if we spent less time seeking the formula for reading comprehension and more time providing a sea of opportunities, rich experiences, flexible tools, sharing what works not telling what's right, then we might have a better chance of providing each child with what seems in the 21st century, a basic right - the ability to read well.

Shredding Motivation

2010-07-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

Here's the experiment: each participant receives a sheet of paper with a random sequence of letters and is asked to find instances where the letter S is followed by another letter S. Each sheet contained ten instances of consecutive Ss and they have to find all ten instances. They get paid $0.55 for the first completed page, $0.50 for the second and so on - thus for the twelfth page on they would get nothing.

The experimenters, Dan Ariely and his team (read more about this in his book The Upside of Irrationality) set the following conditions. In the first, participants write their name at the top of each sheet. Once finished, they handed it to the experimenter who looks it over from top to bottom, nods in a positive way, and places it upside down on a pile. In the second condition, participants are not asked to write their names at the top of the sheet and when they hand it in, the experimenter just places it on the top of the pile without reviewing it or acknowledging the participant. In the third condition, when the participants hand in their sheets, the experimenter simply shreds it. In other words, the difference in this rather meaningless task is that in the first condition, the participant is acknowledged and her work is not anonymous or obviously meaningless (shredded).

Guess which group completed more sheets?

The participants in the acknowledged condition completed an average of 9.03 sheets, those in the shredded condition 6.34 and those in the ignored condition 6.77. The perhaps not so surprising surprise is that simply ignoring the participants' work had almost as much effect as the more dramatic shredding.

Consider the classroom. Consider how many assignments children do. Some children are continuously acknowledged: their work is read aloud, the teacher says kind things. Some children are rather regularly ignored: their work is mediocre at best and beyond "correcting" them (surely a form of "shredding"), there is little to celebrate. And some children have their work routinely "shredded." Perhaps it's not surprising that over time the motivation of a number of children (in our district 30%) steadily decreases, so that by grade 8 they are lounging in the back row, disengaged, scribbling out the minimum and on the road to dropping out.

What could we do differently so that each child - and the work they do - is acknowledged in a meaningful way?

Closing the Gap or the Final Nail?

2010-06-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

Recently I was lucky to listen to Lorna Williams. You can, too, at the Network of Performance-Based Schools website. Her message is critically important as we dash forward, our intentions good, our ideals clear. She says we must be humble, knowing that alone we cannot always see the path; when we walk together, she says, we can help each other see the way. Too often, we are so certain that we see the way, that we can "fix" the world, that we have "the answer." However, if we dare to ask others, especially those we are so keen to "support," if we ask humbly, if we have the courage to listen to the answer, if we are willing to be helped, we might find that all our carefully laid plans and all our excellent ideas that we believed were blazing a trail are taking us down the same old road to the same old place.

Our mantra lately is "success" for each child. We look at our dismal graduation rates for Aboriginal students and with good intention decide that we will "close the gap." Who can argue? Lorna Williams. She asks, what does closing the gap mean? Is it the final nail on our assimilation? Unless, she says, schools are reflective of the knowledge systems of the people who attend, that is what it means. The way that we assess, count success, means I have to be a learner of a very specific kind. Unless school can be places where children can value their own identity, where they can walk in schools and in classrooms and feel they don't need to not hide who they are, we are in the work of continuing to assimilate. Her question to us is: how do we become a bridge that reconciles values that clash? Recently our good intentions have led us to focus on the success of the child. Lorna Williams asks us to reconsider - if the only improvement rests on shoulders of students, not on quality of the experience of what we're constructing in relationships in our rooms of learning.

Her words remind me that we must be relentlessly cautious as we define "success," and "closing the gap," that we are not simply couching old intentions in new language. Let us always remember - and help each other to make sure we never never follow the same path - the mandate of Residential schools: “Their education must consist not merely of the training of the mind, but of a weaning from the habits and feelings of their ancestors, and the acquirements of the language, arts and customs of civilized life” (Government of Canada report, 1847).

Image from Daniel Y. Go's photostream

The answer to success for each child

2010-05-03T05:21:00.001-07:00

I tell my students, Janet said, that when I first look at a math problem, I don't know the answer. They are always astonished. I let them know that the only difference between us is that I've solved enough math problems that I know I'll be able to solve this one, too, if I stick with it.

And it struck me - that's it! As educators we're always looking for someone with the answer to success for each child. But the answer is that we need to be confident that we can solve any learning "problem". Although, learning is different for each child, in each school, even each day, if we just stick with it, creatively, persistently, using different tools, asking questions, visualizing, building from what we already know, and relentlessly working together - we'll find a way to educate each child beautifully. We already know how. We've done it before. Often.

So the answer is - we don't know the answer, but it doesn't matter. The answer always changes anyway. What's important: we know how to find the answer.

If we really wanted change, we'd stand at the door with a pill

2010-04-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

Recently I attended a day-long symposium, Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap, with Dennis Sparks and Bruce Beairsto. We had conversations about an idea Sparks writes about, "Individuals and organizations have an amazing capacity to maintain their current beliefs, ideas, and practices in the face of massive, well-intentioned efforts to change them." Why? At the session he referred to the book Change or Die. If a person has a heart attack, the doctor gives a prescription: to continue to live, take this medication, change what you eat, add exercise, de-stress and foster your relationships. What percentage of people, given the option of changing or dying, will change? A meagre 10%. Suppose you make it easy? Just take the pill. What percentage, given this very easy prescription to change rather than die, will opt for change? 20%.

But I've been thinking - it isn't simply that people don't want to change. It isn't even that we need to change how we give prescriptions, or who gives the prescriptions, or when we give the prescriptions. The problem isn't the prescription. The problem is that we give prescriptions and send people back to live in the world that's killing them - a world of friends who gather to drink beer and eat pizza every Thursday night, a fridge full of pre-packaged food, a job with deadlines that don't go away, a relationship that can't be mended by wishing it was so. We might argue that even if we make change so easy that we give a pill for the solution, most still don't change. But what if someone stood at the door and gave them a pill each day? I'm convinced you'd have 100% change.

In schools we continually prescribe change and then send educators back to schools that make it easier to continue unhealthy, even harmful, practices. We have buildings, schedules, reporting procedures, and expectations that are the beer and pizza of the heart patient. We make it so hard to make even simple changes to our practice that it's hard not to suspect that - really - no one wants education to change. We just want to blame others for not changing.

Photo: callme_crochet's photostream

Own the Podium?

2010-03-01T06:17:00.000-08:00

I watched the Olympics as often as I could, held my breath for each Canadian athlete, cheered madly for their victories, teared up when our anthem was sung - all fourteen times - and for the endless replays. Yet at the same time, like so many Canadians, I ask if it's worth it. It's a hard question to ask in the midst of our collective euphoria. I don't just mean the money. What I've been thinking about is the message of "Own the Podium." It seems to me that we don't fund athletics so Canada can rack up medals; we fund athletics because it promotes a healthy lifestyle, joy in effort, and the pursuit of excellence, a mindset that transfers - get good at something and you can get good at anything. For those of us watching, the stories of effort, excellence, passion and commitment can inspire us to find our own dream. Yet when people ask, "Has the program been a failure?" I would emphatically argue yes! It isn't a failure because we don't have the most medals. I thought it was a failure when I heard speed skater Denny Morrison, expected to "own the podium," say, after a ninth place finish, I let my team down, my country down. How could he let anyone down when he pursued excellence through rigorous training, giving up much, giving his all? How can less than a second on a given day make him a failure? What is the message to the hundreds of extraordinary athletes who continue to pursue their passion without hope of winning medals? How can "Own the Podium" be a success if we see an athlete as a "failure" who doesn't step onto the podium? Of course, now we are lauding the program as a "success" because, despite the lower-than-expected medal haul, we won the most gold. But I'd argue the success comes from providing much-needed funding. If we believe in continuing to fund elite athletes, then call the program "Own the Dream." Gold medals will follow, but in the second place, only because it's the inevitable result of funding passionate committed individuals.

It might seem like a hair-splitting argument, but here's what I'm what I'm worried about. First, this program is testament to our continued belief, despite overwhelming research against it, that the way to encourage excellence is to reward it. (Did you know that each gold medalist gets $20,000 cash payment, a silver $15,000 and a bronze $10,000?) But, ironically, the opposite happens. You take the joy and passion out of the performance and it becomes work. Worse, I think, collectively we tend to confuse the prize with the goal. It's everywhere. In education, our focus on improving student achievement is the "own the podium" of education: our "gold medal" is improved marks and graduation rates. We acclaim schools that have met "improvement targets." It strikes me that perhaps we should focus on learning, not improvement, not achievement. If we focus on (and fund) what we educate children for - to foster confident, creative, empathetic, joyous learners who contribute positively to our society - then the extraordinary, passionate, exciting, learning that takes place every day in our schools led by educators who give it all they've got - will inevitably lead to improvement.

Photo: Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images

A Standing Ovation for Teachers

2010-02-10T06:10:00.000-08:00

The math curriculum has changed completely. New text books are required. A new pedogogy is demanded. And secondary teachers have to rebuild their courses from scratch. There is no funding, however, for release time for teachers to work together, to review the new curriculum, to learn the new teaching methods.

So what do our math teachers do? You might imagine that they would close their doors, continue to teach the old curriculum, and wait for a change in government. But they don't. They find funding through the local and provincial teachers union, organize as a local specialist group, and begin to hold monthly meetings after school. (Thanks for doing the legwork, Denise.) I attended the last meeting: they were immersed in reviewing the new provincial exam that they would need to prepare students for, discussing upcoming professional development, and developing a plan to work with their elementary colleagues on an essential learning document to aid transition.

Their commitment against odds doesn't surprise me. Everywhere I go I see educators meeting after school, on weekends, during breaks, and online to think about teaching and learning. What's surprising is that you rarely hear about the daily dedication and passion of teachers. Our eyes tear up to hear the stories of Olympic athletes and their Herculean effort to "own the podium." Daily newscasts extol their virtues. Let's spare a few minutes to think of the heroes in education, their long hours, their commitment to excellence, their dedication to their craft, and their passionate pursuit of improved life-chances for each child in their care. Let's give them a standing ovation!
Image: garryknight's photostream on Flickr

Not gold medals but glowing hearts

2010-02-07T05:58:00.000-08:00

I've spent most of my career in high schools, so I wondered how much help I could be when I was invited to supervise a station at Ladysmith Primary School for their family math afternoon. Don't worry, Anita said, we've trained the grade 2 and 3 students to “man” the stations. You really won't have to do anything.

I arrived at the "Olympic" event and got a participant card - the Olympic logo on a clip secured by a ribbon around my neck - and was steered to my station. There were a dozen or so stations around the gym with various activities suitable for primary students. Mine was a logic puzzle. My tiny student leaders quickly showed me how to help the families do the "event" at our station, how to give the participant a "medal" to add to their Olympic logo clip when they'd completed the puzzle. And they taught me how to be "gentle." Even if they don't solve it, you can give them a medal, they told me. We honour their participation. And don't forget to be encouraging, they added. But don't just give them the answer, they admonished - that takes the fun of it. Then with that sage teaching advice, they invited me to sit in a chair, because, really, I wouldn't have to do anything - they had everything under control. And they did. I got to watch.

Parents and their children poured into the gym, enthusiastically participating in the math "events" and gathering up their "medals" with glee. At our station, even the smallest child solved the puzzle with Ruby and Maddy's expert prompting and support. You could see the light shine in their eyes when their tiny fingers pointed to the solution - "It's that one!" And Maddy and Ruby's enthusiastic, "Yes! You got it!" was never less than genuine. What was best of all was watching the parents as they watched their children thinking hard in math. And another best - every person in the room could say, "Math is fun!"

The Olympic feat I'd like to point out is something else though. A quick glance around the room would tell you that hours and hours and hours of time was spent to make this magical event happen - everything from planning and designing the stations, training the student-leaders, creating the ribbons, "medals," and signs, ordering tables, setting up the gym, inviting parents. The list is long - surely Anita and her Ladysmith Primary team should stand on a podium and receive their own medal. And they are just one of the schools I happened to visit. Events like this take place in our schools constantly. They connect our parents to our community, allow children to be leaders, and provide educators an opportunity to showcase what's most important for learning. There are no ceremonies to acknowledge this important work; the reward, for those who are lucky enough to see it, is in the glowing hearts of the children and their families.

Do you believe?

2010-02-05T05:55:00.000-08:00

Ordering food is the hard part. Close to 100 people are expected, but will they really show up, tired educators at the end of a long day? How many of them will have something "come up"? By the time we started, however, we realized we'd have to have chairs brought in and I began to wish I'd decided on one more platter of cheese.

Over 100 educators arrived in the end - administrators, teachers, university instructors, student teachers - to think together as productive partners in a network of educators - the Network of Performance Based Schools. Our task? To achieve our collective "dream with a deadline": an equitable future with quality outcomes for every learner by 2020. In each network school, teacher design an inquiry question to discover ways to improve learning. In our region, we meet formally three times each year to share ideas, ask question, and learn together. You can see some of our work in progress at our Mid-Island Wiki.

Here are educators deciding that it's "too late to wait," as Peter Senge says, and are working in teams in their schools or, if in their school there is no one to work with, with educators in other schools, and if there is no one to work with in their district, with other educators in our province. They are refusing to work in isolation. They are pushing themselves to think about research-based practice, designing focused inquiry questions to examine their own teaching and learning, and implementing formative assessment daily.

Is it going smoothly? No. It's messy, hard work that forces us to think hard, work hard, redesign the way we do things in schools, test our own preconceptions - and meet together at the end of a long day. But here is gold medal work that makes you want to say, "I believe."

Blowing a horn loudly for teachers

2010-02-03T05:06:00.000-08:00

Shelley, my first practicum teacher told me, if you don't blow your own horn, someone will use it as a spittoon. For years I thought that my difficulty with self-praise was in part due to the way I was raised ("bragging" was the ultimate sin), in part because I am Canadian (we are defined by our unassuming nature) and in part because I am a woman (as Clay Shirky argues, "not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks"). However, lately I've been thinking that it is also because I am a teacher. Those of us who are drawn to teaching are more modest, less self-aggrandizing. Teachers are "behind-the-scenes" people, coaching, prompting, encouraging, pushing, carrying, cheering. The focus is not on the teacher, but on the student.

The danger, of course, is that we become the spittoon of society. Kids can't read? Blame teachers. Kids can't write? Blame teachers. Kids can't solve math problems? Blame teachers. Kids aren't motivated? Blame teachers. Kids are overweight? Blame teachers. Kids aren't responsible? Blame teachers. And because we are modest, we think, yes, we could do better. And we go back to the drawing board and add more things to our plate: literacy initiatives, numeracy initiatives, healthy schools initiatives, social responsibility initiatives and spend our professional development learning how to "engage" students.

The result? Tired teachers. Discouraged teachers. And teachers who don't feel valued. Yet the teachers I meet daily should be sung about in the streets and have their pictures hung on Olympic-sized billboards. But who will blow their horn?

I've decided to take it up - my Olympic series. Here is my first snapshot. Last week was exam week for secondary schools on a semester system. That means that teachers wrap up their semester, mark final assignments and exams, write report cards, put away the books, files, and materials of one set of courses and start to fill their rooms with a new set. It is, as you can imagine, a very busy week. And if they are teaching Socials 11 or English 10, they also have to mark the provincial exams. There is no requirement to mark them in a certain way. They could mark the papers in their classroom by themselves quickly. But teachers in our district decided to mark the exams in a district-wide process that takes a full day to complete. It begins, actually, the day before when a half dozen teachers volunteer - during this madly busy week - to create anchor papers from the stacks and stacks of written exams. The next day the whole group reads the anchor papers together and agree on how the papers should be marked and why. Then each paper is "blind marked" (neither the school nor the student is identified) and "double-marked" (two teachers agree on the mark). Throughout the day and more formally at the end of the day, teachers reflect on the student work, note areas of weakness, and consider approaches and ideas to tackle those challenges.

This heroic work done during a busy time by exhausted teachers isn't just a good day's work. It's work meant to change the future for children, to improve their life chances, to make success for each child a reality. Three cheers for our teacher heroes. I wish we had a podium and medals to hand out.

Image: Nick-K.'s photostream on Flickr

Book clubs are nice, but...

2010-01-10T12:58:00.001-08:00

Book clubs are nice - but you have to find a club, buy a book (it's not even necessarily your first pick), go to meetings (even when you are dead tired after a long day) and take your turn buying snacks.

Now imagine reading a book online (your choice and possibly free) with a group of people all passionately interested in the same topic, making margin comments and adding stickies to the same book, chatting in real time with people from your group whenever you are reading (in the middle of the night when you can't sleep but have a burning question about why the heroine opened the door). Interested? Go to the Book Glutton.

But book clubs are social, you say. It's the friendly faces, the glass of wine, the cheese tray, the laugher. Yes. And the online world is social, too. Just different - and it meets different needs. Think, for example, about the how we could use this tool in classrooms where we've made a commitment to teaching to diversity. You are setting up for Literature Circles in your grade 9 classroom and you have a gifted reader. She wants to read a classic, but there isn't anyone else to partner her with for discussions. You contact other teachers in your district or province or the world - and you find two other students with similar interests. You and their teachers give them the choices: King Lear or Tale of Two Cities or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Room with a View or Crime and Punishment (I'm just choosing off the top of my head; the classics are freely available). Your students read, mark text, ask questions, research together using Diigo and Google Docs, and co-create a presentation using Presentit. For your gifted reader, it is a rich and rewarding experience: she meets other students with similar interests and feels challenged, stimulated and excited about learning.

We have extraordinary tools for diversity at our fingertips. We just need to learn how we can use them and how we can work together to leverage their power.

Image: Prattman's photostream on Flickr

Do you know the game?

2010-01-05T06:03:00.001-08:00

We often make the analogy, when we argue for math drills, let's say, that to get good at anything, you need practice. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers gives us all kinds of examples of why extraordinary people do extraordinary things - they practice for 10,000 hours. As teachers, we argue that sports uses drills all the time. It's part of the hard work that makes us good at what we do. Therefore, drills in schools are a good thing. But where we go wrong in schools with practice is context. In volleyball, for example, we might practice setting for hours - but it's always in service of the game. The game is the thing. We practice over and over to win the game. But do kids know what the game is when they practice their times tables? The ones that do - win. How can we make sure each child knows about the game? And how can we ensure that we, as teachers, know the game? Sometimes we forget that it's not the test. It's not the assignment. It's not the project. And it's not the report card.

How are you doing?

2010-01-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking that the question - how are you doing? - is framed from one of two opposing attitudes (and the third "Joey" way which is something else entirely and not really relevant here, except that it's interesting to consider how many people think of Joey when the question is posed). The first attitude is one of curiosity and concern - What do you need? Are you comfortable? How can I help? The second attitude is one of "accountability" and accusation - Are you meeting the quota, outcomes, checklist? Are you performing adequately? Are you "improving"?

Lately we've been caught up in thinking that the "accountability" attitude is the best one for schools. But I'm not convinced. I'm pretty sure that there is nothing more important to the future than education today. And I'm pretty sure that we all have a role to play in making sure that we have the best education system possible. But I doubt that we'll get there through checklists and performance indicators. Rather than ask - how are you doing and prove it - it might be time to ask - how are you doing, so our entire community help.

Good manners make people happy

2009-11-29T07:49:00.000-08:00

Remember when children had good manners? Watch this Thanksgiving video just to jog your memory. Remember matching sweaters? Remember "happy times"? Aren't you glad you know what to do with a napkin? Holidays are fun.

And aren't you glad, now that you've watched the video, that you live in the 21st century? We still need good manners, but surely they go beyond which fork to use and how to eat food easily without noise and neatly without spots. Rather, good manners require us to understand, honour, accept and include very different protocols from different cultures. Good manners in the 21st century demand that we are deeply aware that there are some who are unhappy, not because they have poor table manners, but because they have no food on their table. Food makes people happy. And good manners in the 21st century go beyond offering thanks for our food to offering help to those who have none. Good manners are much more difficult in the 21st century. The new manners are less tidy, neat, and nice - but they are desperately needed for peace in our time and a sustainable future.

A New Operating System for Schools

2009-10-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

Daniel Pink, author of the must-read Whole New Mind, makes a riveting and compelling case for dedicating our attention to rethinking assessment. Although his examples are for business, it's no leap at all to apply his thinking to education. He shares the overwhelming research (replicated over and over) to demonstrate that when we incentivize - give bonuses, rewards, or in our case, A's, praise, and smiley faces - we do more harm than good. There is one exception: incentives work if the task we set is simple, clear, routine, with clear rules, a single solution and can be completed by rote. However, for critical, creative, problem-solving, ambiguous tasks, incentives dull thinking, block creativity, don't work and often do harm. Since there isn't much of a future for rote tasks, if we wish to prepare kids for the future, we must rethink our assessment practices (and the tasks we assign).

Pink argues that we need to stop doing more of what doesn't work. It doesn't matter, he points out, if we have a sweeter carrot or sharper stick. In fact, research shows that higher incentives lead to the lowest performance. Instead, we need to create a new operating system for business - and, I argue, for schools. This new operating system must be built on intrinsic motivation, where we do things that matter, because we like them, because they're interesting, because they're important. He argues that the new operating system must revolve around three elements.

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives,
Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters,
Purpose: yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Can you imagine?

What's Important in Determining What's Important?

2009-09-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, at a workshop with Adrienne Gear (author of Reading Power and Nonfiction Reading Power), she discussed the strategy of "determining importance." What's important, she said, is that students find what's important to them and can justify it, not that they all have the same points. The secondary teacher in me began to protest (silently). After all, in any text, there are main ideas and supporting ideas. Our job is to make sure students know the difference. Surely it doesn't make sense that we visit the same problem on non-fiction that we often have in fiction, where students think they are free to interpret the text however they wish, that there is no "right answer" and that poetry, as Stephen Zelnick observes of his college students, is merely a Rorschach pattern rather than a carefully constructed design.

But Adrienne Gear continued to show how to develop a list with students of ways to determine importance - repeated ideas, stand alone information, information that answers the who, what, where, when, why questions - so they can make choices that help them make sense of text and, most important, are able to justify those choices. Does it matter if everyone has the same point, she asked? I remembered a workshop I attended a few years ago. The presenter was sharing the Magnet Word strategy to a group of teachers (the reader chooses the word that the rest of the paragraph "sticks" to). He had the group participate by reading a very short paragraph on the French Revolution and reporting out the "magnet word." I was astounded by the variety of words chosen and the vehemence with which each teacher justified "their" word as "the" magnet word. The presenter finally gave up trying to get the group to reach consensus. After all, did it matter? And was anyone wrong? (I admit to thinking my word was the only "right" one.)

We are more used to making sure students arrive at the right important idea (and we decide what it is) than that they learn the process by which we arrive there. Students become used to this (the "good" ones, at least) and get busy trying to read the teacher's mind instead of getting curious about the text and puzzling out meaning. Perhaps the biggest problem with Zelnick's college students isn't that they didn't understand that there is a right interpretation, but they had no curiosity about the text at all.

Arriving at answers we can justify, that makes sense to us and for us is exciting and motivating in and of itself. Arriving at "right answers" by comparison is satisfying only if you have some external motivation: marks, goals that need marks, a desire to please parents or teachers. Interesting, the children who struggle most in school are rarely motivated by any of those things. Teachers throw up their hands and say "these kids" aren't motivated to succeed. But it strikes me that we are focussed on the wrong motivations. We should focus on the purpose of learning: to make sense of ourselves and our world. When learning becomes a means to an end determined by others, it's hardly surprising that those who don't define the end won't participate.

How can we work together? And on what?

2009-08-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

We can't do it alone. We know that. Consider a child entering kindergarten this year. To ensure that she is successful when she graduates in 2022, we have to work together not only in her schools (and some children can attend half dozen or more), but as a district to coordinate the resources and support she and her teachers need, and as a community (her family, daycare, recreation providers, health care workers, social services). And together, we need to continually ask - what does she need to be successful? It's a hard question to ask in a rapidly changing world.

Consider: the children who graduated from school this year (leaving us as our new kindergartner begins) started school in 1996. When they waved good-bye to parents on that first day, chances are someone took a picture that needed to be developed (digital cameras for consumers were introduced in 1990 and were still prohibitively expensive and not very good in 1996). Few would have been connected to the Internet at home (only 7% of households in Canada were connected by 1997 - not broadband, of course, but via telephone), text messaging was a new idea used by a handful of people, the patent for WIFI had just been filed, and certainly the students wouldn't have had their own cell phone yet (they cost, on average, $600, and rates were sky-high). iPods were in the future, Google was still a research project by university students, there were no blogs, no YouTube, no Facebook .

What else will become ubiquitous by 2022? How will that affect the economy, culture, individuals? What will a child entering kindergarten today need when she graduates?

We know we have to work and think hard together if we are going to educate her to gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes she needs to participate fully in our society and also to follow her heart to a fulfilling life of meaningful contribution and lifelong learning. But working together is difficult. Not only do we have an increasingly demanding job, but we live (in the rest of our lives as well) in a complex world with constant demands on our attention. Working together might enhance our work in the long term, but in the short term, it just demands more of what we have so little of: time, energy, attention. What can we do better together than on our own? How can we work together effectively (not just spinning our wheels in endless meetings)? And what will we work together on? After all, do we really know what will make the most difference in the life-chances of our kindergartner as she moves through the system toward graduation?

IMAGE: Esquire Magazine - The Object of Desire: The Cell Phone (September 1999)