Practical Theory

So we're getting ready to start doing some real heavy lifting on EduCon 2.1. The dates are announced -- January 23 - 25 at SLA again. We're going to be opening up reservations in the next month, and we will be capping the conference at 500, so that we can keep it small and keep it (primarily) at SLA, although we may be looking for a local place to do the big morning sessions. Also, given the funding cuts at the School District of Philadelphia, we are going to be charging $150 for the conference and using the overage to support SLA's program. One thing that was true last year and will be true this year -- no conference people made any money from EduCon. All of us volunteer the time to make the conference happen. If we're going to ask people to pay more, I want to make sure that's really understood... any leftover money would support SLA, not pay conference planners.

So here are some open ended thoughts and questions for everyone... if you attended or if you watched virtually, or if you just read about it...

1. What worked? What did you like about the conference?
   
2. What didn't work about EduCon last year? Or what could have been better, even if it did work?
   
3. Could we / should we structured the Friday "Open School" day better or is it better to leave it as an open day?

Here are some things we're thinking about doing for this year:

1. Work with the local museums and such to try to get discounts for EduCon attendees on Friday, so that people can come, see SLA, but then also have stuff to do in the afternoon.
2. And this I'm really excited about... try to get five or six speakers from outside the education world to speak on a Friday night TEDucation Talk -- 15 minutes each on their ideas on the future of education with a reception to follow. I think that'd be really fun.
3. Get more of a push for K-8 sessions as well as 9-12 sessions, so that the K-8 folks who come have more to do. (We'll need more presenters in general... *AHEM*)
4. Use the SLA Cafe as a Poster Session for teachers and students to present work.
   

And here's the really big question that I don't know the right answer to:

Do we turn SLA's Drama Studio into an exhibit hall? We've been approached by one or two companies who have asked to be involved. Here's the issue -- SLA is no longer getting laptop funding from the School District, which means we're on our own to raise money for 145 laptops every year. Grants and foundations are one avenue, but it's not inconceivable that EduCon could help us get a lot of the way there every year while providing what will hopefully be a really good service to the education reform / edu-tech community every year. I liked being vendor neutral, but I also can't ignore the financial realities that SLA faces. Having an exhibit hall could mean that we raise the money for the 2009-10 laptops through EduCon.

I feel very comfortable saying that the conference sessions will be vendor neutral. The sessions are about ideas and theory and practical application. If someone wants to run a podcasting session, it better be about more than how to use a product. We can set up a demo station room for people to learn how-tos, but the heart of the conference last year, in my opinion, were the incredible sessions, that's not going to change.

I really do want feedback on this issue... I don't know what the right answer there is. I know that I am as vocal a person as there is about being wary of the "Education-Industrial Complex," but I also know that there are a lot of good organizations out there who want to speak to the people who come to EduCon. And I also know that the educational technology reform movement is inextricably tied to companies that sell stuff. By letting companies see EduCon, by letting them talk to the folks who I believe are at the forefront of this movement, do we affect their practice as well? If we are transparent about the process, if we are careful in letting people know who is coming from where, etc... is that a good thing to bring to EduCon?

Tags: educon21, educon

My latest post over at The Faculty Room is up. It's in response to Scott McLeod's Leadership Day 2008 call, and it's entitled A Whole New School:

What is Good Technology Education Leadership?

(Use back of page if necessary.)

I’ve been grappling with this question because the question itself is so vast that to answer it in a blog post seems somehow impossible.

The simple answer is that good technology educational leadership is no different than good educational leadership; that the choices we make with technology education should be deliberate, thoughtful and in line with the overall educational goals of our organization.

Read the rest over there.

... And the limits of "Here Comes Everybody" for schools.

(I've been thinking about NECC / EduBloggerCon / EduCon and Will's post: NECC '08 / NECC '09, and I just finished reading Here Comes Everybody, the edublog book of the Summer of 2008. That's what's was ruminating around in my head as I wrote this.)

There's a lot of frustration about NECC, the EduBloggerCon and where this community of edubloggers is going right now. Will is "thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems," and I'm sure some of the frustration about change is when you compare it to the blinding speed of change in so many other facets of our society right now.

So there are a couple of questions that we can examine through Shirkey's lens, then... first, why is it that schools are so hard to transform using these tools when commerce (for instance) has been so easy to change? And second, what has to happen within the community of folks -- loose as it may be -- who care about the notion of 21st Century schools.

So why is it that the changes that are taking root in so many other aspects are not changing education as quickly as we'd like? One of the things that Shirkey writes about is how the new social tools and the powerline graph of user use / success / downloads / etc... has meant that there is no longer a high cost of failure. He uses SourceForge and MeetUp as two examples where if a software project or a meeting fails, there's no real loss, because there is no institutional infrastructure that is lost along with it. On an institutional level, schools have an incredible infrastructure that makes them hard to change, but that's really not the big problem when we question the change through this lens.

The big problem is that we never, ever have a low cost of failure. When schools fail, kids lose. Shirky writes in Chapter 10 about how in a traditional business infrastructure, there is a natural disincentive to innovate because "more people will remember you saying yes to a failure than no to a radical but promising idea." (p. 246) I'd argue this is more true in education than in traditional businesses, again because the stakes are so high. So the educational establishment sticks to safe ideas and traditional schooling because we know that while the outcomes may not be amazing, they are predictably mediocre at worst.

(By the way, and this is an aside, what is going to happen as charter schools fail? So many of these have five year charters, and a certain percentage of them are not going to get renewed. It's already happening in Philly. What is the educational / emotional costs for the kids who go to schools that get closed down after five years? Is anyone other than Mike Klonsky writing about issues like this?)

This is a real issue, and it's not one we can wish away. We have to understand, in ways that Shirky describes, why low-risk mediocrity is almost predictably a better outcome than high-risk success. Until we find ways to bring down the risk of school change / school reform, either by being able to point to enough successful examples of 21st century schools that there is sensible road map to follow or by changing the way schools are assessed to make what we're talking about more a part of that equation. (And for the record, I'm REALLY uneasy about what I just wrote.)

Which is a great reason to transition to the second part of this question -- why can't the edubloggersphere -- why can't all the educators who want to see change happen leverage all these tools to do something positive?

And that gets to the other great lens in Shirky's book -- the way to look at the how groups form and what they can do easily and well, and what is much harder. Shirky spends much of the beginning of the text talking about how the new collaborative tools make sharing easy -- sites like flickr and LiveJournal do sharing well. Collective production -- what it took to make Wikipedia is an example -- where lots of people can come together around some kind of large common goal and all play a role to produce something is harder, but still doable given the flexibility and power of the tool. Collective action, where everyone pulls in the same direction to achieve a common goal, that's harder and harder to do without a lot of the traditional organizational structures.

And our community doesn't have those yet. We've done a great job of sharing a lot over the past few years... and that's valuable and worthwhile and it's changed the way many of us -- if not all of us -- go about our professional and personal lives. Let's not sell that short. Because it's important to remember, even as we question and push about why we haven't done more, that we have done a lot already. We've even done a lot of community production... the EduCon wiki was probably a great example of a group of folks coming together and building something together. Certainly all the collaborative projects we've seen between schools are examples of that.

The next step -- the idea of collaborative action -- is where it gets really hard. If Will is serious about trying to use these tools to affect change -- and certainly, it's not a bad idea -- we need to start to think about organizational structure, philosophy, shared decision-making, goals, action plans, etc... it's the more mundane kind of organization building that gets hard and tiring and frustrating and often fails.

So what could we do? What might it look like? Here's a thought: We could use the tools we have to start a call for change. We could look to set up a core set of principles for school reform that harnesses the best pedagogies and the new tools. We could look to build a coalition of administrators, teachers, parents and students to take action in the upcoming campaign. What might it look like? Shirky points out that for collective action to work, the action must require enough effort on the part of those taking action that decision-makers take notice. We could all go to used bookstores and look for old, beat-up textbooks and send them to our Congressmen with a flyer saying, "Is this how students should learn in 2008?" and a list of our core principles and goals. We could coordinate it all with Web 2.0 tools. We could follow up with an online petition to the McCain and Obama campaigns asking for a presidental debate on educational issues.

Then, we could set up workshops and conferences around our core principles, encouraging like-minded schools to come. If we wanted to go the route of the Coalition for Essential Schools, there could be fees for schools who are member schools who abide by the philosophy of the group. We could combine the on-line and off-line tools to set up an organization that was both an advocacy / policy group and a clearinghouse / resource center to help teachers, students, parents and administrators create the change we want to see.

I'm not saying this is what we should do. Lord knows, there's a lot of work contained in those last two paragraphs, but that is what collective action toward positive change could look like for us. And Shirky is 100% right -- that would be easier to do today than it was ten years ago. Without question. Everything I wrote up there could be done quickly and in such a way as to have an effect -- because of the new tools. But Shirky is also right when he writes about how the big things are still hard. A group of hard-core folks would have to work their tails off and be very saavy about the setting up the structures (both human and technological) to pull it off.

The point of all this is just this: The hardest challenge facing our community is that we've done a very good job at going after the low-hanging fruit. We've done what was easiest to do... and most of us would agree that it hasn't been easy so far. To take things to the next level is going to be hard. Not impossible... and a lot easier because of the tools we have at our disposal today, but hard none-the-less. 

But "hard" shouldn't be the reason we don't do it.

Tags: schoolreform, clay shirky

I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the passing of Andrea Collins-Smith. Andrea's son Jesse is one of my advisees at SLA, and he's an amazing, kind, wonderful kid who I look forward to seeing every day. All year long, he's dealt with the illness of his mother, and for the past several months, we had a sense it probably wasn't going to end well. Through it all, Jesse handled it with a grace that few adults would have. There were tough times for him throughout this year, as we all would expect, and there were times when I had to remind him just how well he was holding up, given all that his family was going through. As the father of two boys, I can say that I'd be thrilled if Jakob and Theo ended up as good and kind-hearted and thoughtful as Jesse is. His mom always took a justifiable pride about the amazing spirit and sense that her son has.

Andrea defied stereotypes, and she enjoyed doing that, I think. She was, as her blog is titled, a punk rock mommy. The first time I met her, she and her husband were sitting in the second row in Meredith Elementary School as I presented to the 8th grade class about this school we were starting. They were the only parents in an auditorium full of 12 year olds, and they were the toughest audience I think I had on the recruitment trail that planning year. Afterward, Andrea came up and introduced herself to me and had some of the toughest and on-point questions about SLA that I remember getting from anyone anywhere that year. She wanted a school for her son that would not try to put him into a box, but rather would allow him to be himself. I think there was a moment in that conversation where we both realized we were talking about education the same way, and Jesse, of course, did come to SLA. And, of course, Jesse ended up in my advisory.

The biggest mistake that you could make was to underestimate her... to assume that "punk" and "pierced" meant... well... anything negative you might think it meant. She was a smart, dedicated woman who was beloved by her friends and her family. She took so much joy from being a mom, and -- as she was dying -- she made sure that her oldest son was set up to go to Rochester in the fall, her two twin boys going into high school got full scholarships to St. Joe's Prep, and her daughter got a full scholarship to Penn Charter. We at SLA get to keep Jesse, and we're a better community for his presence. (Clay is still too young for Andrea to have set up his education, but he's got a whole lot of folks looking out for him.)

Over the past two years, Andrea and I had countless phone conversations, a bunch of emails, four "official" parent-advisor-student conferences, and a bunch of unofficial conferences since then, and part of this blog entry is to say that I'll miss those conferences. Andrea was a presence, and she was a fierce advocate for her child, and no matter if Jess was having a good quarter or perhaps a less-than-good quarter, I always looked forward to the conversations. I'm going to miss her for the two years we've got left with Jesse.

And Jesse is going to be o.k. He is his mother's son, and the best thing throughout this entire process is that he could let his mother go with no regrets about his relationship with her. They were so very close, and he has known every moment of his life that he was fiercely loved. And he knows that she passed knowing how much she meant to him, and they really did -- even before she fell ill -- tell each other that every day.

And in addition to the family and friends she leaves behind, let that be Andrea Collins-Smith's legacy. The people she loved always knew. Because of the way she lived her life, there is more love and care in the world. So today, be sure to tell the people in your life you love that you love them. Tell them that a punk-rock mommy who can't do that anymore reminded you to.

I got home from NECC to find that my latest purchases from Amazon had arrived! (I have to say that the amazon.com credit card is a really, really wonderful thing. Buy everything on that, pay it off every month. Get free books. Yay!)

So, taking my cue from Will, I thought I'd publish my summer reading list. Some of these are books that have been in the queue for a while, some of them I've just gotten:

The Must Reads

• Schoolteacher by Dan C. Lortie
• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Courageous Conversations about Race by Glenn Singleton and Curtis Linton
• brain rules by John Medina
• The Power to Transform by Stephanie Pace Marshall
• Fifty Major Thinkers on Education - From Confucius to Dewey edited by Joy Palmer
• Philosophy of Education by Nel Noddings
• Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
  

The Must Finish

• Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative by Ken Robinson
• The Public School and the Private Vision by Maxine Green

The Rereads

• Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe (I re-skim this every summer to see what it holds for SLA as we get more advanced with using it.)
• Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner(been about ten years. It's time)
  

The Hope-To Get-To

• Being with Children by Phillip Lopate
• The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
• (Not) Keeping up With Our Parents - The Decline of the Professional Middle Class by Nan Mooney
• The Twentieth Century: A People's History by Howard Zinn
• After Dark by Hakuri Murakami
• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
  

I'm going to go ahead and try to make this a meme, because I'm always looking for more books to add to my list... what are you reading:

• Zac Chase
• Hannah Feldman
• Bud Hunt
• Christian Long
• Dan Meyer
• Tim Lauer
• Dave Sherman
• Sylvia Martinez

By all means, don't consider this meme list a closed list. If you've got a summer list, please share! I'm always looking for great books to share!

Mmmmmm... books.

Tags: books, summerreading, meme

Tuesday was my session at NECC: Progressive Pedagogy and the 21st Century. This was a way to teach folks about Understanding by Design and how we use it to create the curriculum at SLA. A lot of the keynotes and workshops and sessions I've been doing lately have been sort of a "birds-eye" view of school... I've been talking a lot about school reform, and the big ideas that I think we need to consider when we think about schools, but even back in October, I was feeling that we also would need to talk about how those big ideas turned into concrete practice.

But I was also really struggling with how to do it. I wasn't sure how to structure the balance of talking about tools and talking about structure... I wasn't sure how to set up the "why" of the session with the "what" of the session. I wasn't sure how to strike the balance between making this about large pedagogical ideas and making this about Understanding by Design. And I had no idea what the room was going to look like, and whether or not I could do anything but talk at people.

Moreover, perhaps because we don't see many sessions with a specific pedagogical focus, I really felt that this was high stakes for me. I wanted this to be something that gave people something concrete but also thoughtful that they could take away and use. Practical theory, if you will.

So this was one of those presentations where I had gone through ten different slide decks and thought about fifteen different ways to present it before realizing that I had to decide on one concept because, well, the presentation was in a few hours. Fortunately, it was also one of those times that once I finally came to a structure in my head, I was able to really put it together in a way that I liked. (It always helps to have Bud The Teacher sitting next to you to bounce ideas off of too.)

In the end, I was really pleased with the way the session went. The folks in the session did an amazing job of creating a first pass at a very rich unit plan on Natural Disasters on the fly. And I felt good that I had framed both how this can lead to better schools and how it can be used to make technology infusion and integrate rich and deep and meaningful. This is the kind of stuff that really is the meat of what makes us at SLA able to talk about curriculum, and I think I honored the work that the SLA teachers do every day.

Wes Fryer was kind enough to uStream the whole session and some reactions after the session and blog about it too. So here's everything from the session:

UbD21C -- the wiki

The uStream of the Session:


The uStream with reactions:


The backchannel

And the slidedeck:

Tags: sla, necc, necc08, understandingbydesign

[Sort of a stream of consciousness... hopefully, more than notes, but definitely not all that coherent.]

Wes Fryer, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Darren Kuropatwa and others...

Talking about blended professional development. How do we learn differently today?

Bud Hunt talking about how to harness the content -- putting together a Moodle Course / Face to Face meeting -- professional development credit for people who would use the content of K12Online to spark a conversation about our own classes. K12Online is a "learning object repository." This is a great way to create meaningful content.

What's the benefit of getting outside the local issues and engaging in a world-wide professional development. Keeps us from continuing to perpetuate that which we know. Allows us to see that others across the country, across the world struggle with and solve the same problems that we struggle with in our own districts.

April Chamberlin -- Trussville, AL -- bringing people (teachers, admins) together in an auditorium to watch the keynotes together. Our experts are worldwide and we can interface with them whereever they are.

Jeff Utecht -- Talking about the Shanghai LAN Party and how it affected learning. Four Saturday mornings at Jeff's house, potluck breakfasts, and people watched the keynote together, then watched different sessions, and then everyone did a podcast at the end. The idea that people watching the online conference were then creating more content. Over four weeks, the energy grew and grew. Jeff also worked with Plymouth State to get his teachers professional development credit. The teachers must watch sixteen hours of the conference and write reflections either on a Moodle course, comments on K12 site or on their own blogs.

Wes -- this is not "bell bounded" learning. It is learning unbounded. (me) What I like, however, is listening to how people took all this content and structured meaningful community learning experiences around it. I think I've got a lot to do.

The Live Events -- Sheryl -- "The Fireside Chat" / "When Night Falls"

Wes asks / talks about... how do we sustain conversations over time? Great question... and a great way to think about all this. These conversations are extended... and I've felt that powerfully this year, that so many of the conversations I've had with people are extensions of blog posts, other conference conversations, Skype calls. There is a real sense of a learning community to me, in that I have a sense that this conversation is getting richer, building off of so many other conversations.

Darren talks about how people have an innate urge to connect, and K12Online, especially the live events, allow for that connection, and I think that's true. There's something special about that sense of connection, where you can learn with and from others.

Dean is also talking about how many speakers took their presentations out into the world... and there's a really important idea to tease out here. We can take our classrooms outside of the walls. I think that structure is just a great model to remind us of how we can change our classrooms too.

This really is a for-us-by-us conference. With all the work that the conveners do, there's no one making any money off of K12Online. I feel the same way about K12Online as I do about EduCon -- there's something different about going to a conference / taking part in a conference that you know is not getting anyone paid. There's nothing wrong with someone throwing a conference as a living, that's fine. But there's still something special about people doing things as a full-on labor of love.

Some things I want to do -- can we get a team of schools together to watch K12Online and talk about how it can change our schools, but also, there are a lot of these which can serve to enhance teacher craft at SLA. There are so many really amazing workshops, that this can serve to help teachers when Marcie's just-in-time learning. I think it's just a question of teaching teachers to use the tags of K12Online sessions to find the information they need.

Tags: necc08 k12online08 a href="http://technorati.com/tag/k12online" rel="tag">k12online

There is, not surprisingly, a lot of conversation about EduBloggerCon, NECC and such. Will and Ewan have weighed in with their thoughts about unconferencing and whether or not EBC was a success, how to handle NECC, etc...  and you can also read what Bud and David were thinking during the conference. And then you can read a really strong piece about what Jeff needs from EBC and the Blogger Cafe, and what's best about that piece is that it's a really personal reflection about his needs from an event like this.

There's a lot for us to think about in terms of learning theory in all the commenting about EBC and NECC that's going on. Most folks can and do learn in different modalities, and many folks have ways they most prefer learning. The debate around lecture v. conversation v. hallways v. classrooms is, in many respects, not that dissimilar to the debate around traditional learning and progressive learning and all the other debates.

Schools -- progressive or traditional -- are generally considered formal learning environments. Now, all along the continuum of pedagogical beliefs, schools make that formal learning look incredibly different. But 99% of schools have something called "class" that meets at a formal time. That's o.k. -- there are ways to do that really, really well. Most of us have had classes we loved and classes we hate.

There are other spaces -- museums are a great example -- that are official "informal" learning spaces. Many of us like learning in those environment as well. That's cool. Most of us can think of a bricks and morter places where we were supposed to learn on our own, and we either did or didn't.

And then there's the whole online thang... and there's a lot of time and energy being spent right now trying to figure out how best to formalize the informal learning that can happen on line. And again, there's some good ways to do it, and some less than good ways to do it.

But -- and here's the thing -- there's not a right or wrong answer to whether or not you want to learn formally or informally. And most folks probably want some hybrid of the two. The answer is to reflect on what you want, how you want it to look, and -- and here's the next thing that I think is really important -- what's the pedagogy that allows you to learn best in either or both sessions. And yes, formal learning sessions lend themselves to certain pedagogies and informal learning sessions lend themselves to certain pedagogies, but I've seen the Blogger Cafe turn into a lecture, and I've seen really interactive sessions.

I keep, like Jeff, have spent at least part of my time this week thinking about NECC through the lens of EduCon, the much smaller conference we at SLA put on. With that, we were able to define a broad pedagogy for the conference, and we could provide protocols so that the structure of the sessions were pedagogically aligned with what we hoped the content of the sessions. And we set up spaces and times where people could talk and think and breathe a lot. Our goal was that when there were sessions going on, people were in them, but that people had the time and space to reflect and think and breathe in between them. (Interestingly, the one time we saw a lot of folks vote with their feet was when we tried to do a structured reflection session.) But again, that's a whole lot easier to do with a few hundred people than with 12,000. (Hm. I like small schools, I like smaller conferences. Is there something to be said for internal consistency?)

So what's the answer? I don't know. I admit, I think I like my conferences smaller. I was rushing from a meeting to Will's session yesterday, and I didn't know what building it was in, let alone what room it was in. But I also love that there are so many great people who come together here, and that only ever seems to happen at NECC.

I think that what made EduBloggerCon really special last year was a) the sense of newness both of the idea and of the relationships of the people in the room. There were so many people who met for the first time last year. That's hard to recapture, but b) it felt like EduBloggerCon offered something very different than the rest of NECC, and perhaps in our excitement about EBC, we basically created a structure that was much like the structure of NECC, which makes it harder to differentiate. c) I think it is important to remember that a lot of people did get a lot of EBC, which means that some of what we have to remember is that, especially without a defining pedagogy, the experience that people take away from a conference will be wildly divergent.

Perhaps the solution to all of this is doing more reflection before we attend conferences so that we have a sense of what we want out of them. I did a paradigm shift on Sunday night where I realized that I needed NECC to be something different than the path I was heading down, and I made a conscious effort to change my experience. I wish I had done that before I came down, because there are a few things I really would have chosen to do differently. There are a lot of different kinds of experiences you can have here, between poster sessions, birds of a feather meetings, keynotes, the exhibit floor, etc... it is a massive conference with stakeholders of every level, and therefore the experiences that people have are completely different. The trick may be to be reflective ahead of time about what you want -- and what kind of learning environments and social environments (given Dean's very smart post) you want from the conference and then actively seeking out the experiences that could fulfill you.

Tags: neccnecc08

I was watching a fun twitter conversation going on the other night between Gary Stager, Bud Hunt, Scott Floyd and others about reading lists. One could make a critique that the educational technology conversation focuses too much on new authors and, too often, is a bit ahistorical. It's one of the reasons that Gary is such an interesting person -- he often serves as a grounding voice, reminding us of the history of both educational computing and progressive education.

I think that's really important. I've got Ken Robinson in my bag next to Maxine Greene for the trip down to NECC. And I think those two authors can and should dually inform the way I think about education.

I come back to this idea over and over again. Education is often ahistorical, and for whatever reason, too many teachers and educational leaders don't view themselves as scholars of the history of education. That has been a costly error in many respects. In terms of educational technology, there is a lot to learn from the successes and failures of the first twenty-five years of computers in classrooms, (Gary would probably want me to go further back than twenty-five years) and from an overarching standpoint, we can look deeply at the last hundred years of education reform to frame what we're doing now.

All this is to say that I talk to a lot of people who are hoping for, waiting for, revolutionary change in our schools. Maybe that will happen. Maybe there is an education revolution waiting to happen. But revolutions are often very messy, and in the case, the body count may just be a metaphor for the kids who suffer through it.

I think we have to understand that what we need is evolutionary change. But that's not as sexy, it's hard to get as impassioned about it, and the evolutionary change is, I believe, harder. It's a quieter reform. It's a more measured, scholarly approach that requires careful, thoughtful movement. It requires us to honor and learn from those who came before us. But it also allows us to innovate and change without quite as much upheaval and pain for those who are undergoing the change.

And I've long, long said that we can never, ever be revolutionaries at the expense of our kids.

Tags: change, schoolreform

I've been sitting on this news for a while, but Wes just posted the news:

I've been asked to be one of the keynote speakers for the 2008 K12Online Conference!

I'm really, really excited and more than a bit freaked out by this. I'm excited because the K12Online Conference committee is made up of people I respect, admire and learn from. And to be asked to do this is just a total honor.

Thanks to the committee for even considering me, and now I just have to figure out what to do with this opportunity.

And don't forget -- Proposals are due on July 11th!

Tags: k12Online

This is how easy it is to create a blog entry. The technology isn't the hard part. The hard part is having something worthwhile to say.

Today is the "Staff Only" day for the end of our second year at SLA. There's a few dozen reflective posts for me to write about this year, but to start, I wanted to share my answers to the questions we all answered.

• What are three things I'm proud of in my own teaching?

1. I was pleased that I was able to map out a PD / Workshop plan for several month stretches. I feel like when I was able to get a sense of the whole of what we wanted to do with our workshops, there was a much more powerful sense of purpose to the meetings.
   
2. I'm pleased with the way I managed the changes above us. This could have been a more difficult year, given the changes at SDP and TFI, and I think I did a pretty good job of keeping the craziness around us away from the school.
3. I think I did a pretty good job of knowing when to step back and let folks go and when to step in and shift course. That's the hardest one to know what that looks like from where I sit, but I think I gave folks chances to really run things or really take things in directions I didn't see. I liked how many times this year I had to tell kids, "Go see [teacher] about that, because I don't know.

• What are three goals for my teaching next year?
1. As we grow, I want to keep working to see every kid and every teacher every day. I think that next year, I'm going to have to block out two periods a day where my "schedule" is to be walking around the building, seeing what is going on. I see that as something that keeps me very connected in the building, and I don't want to lose that. I already felt this year that there were days I didn't get into classrooms, and already, without planning when those times happened, it seemed there were people I saw teach more than others.
   
2. I think I need to have more times where we have a sense of where our PD is going. The more I can plan, the more I can give away big pieces of the planning to others, bring in outside folks (for example, we never did schedule David Jakes to do his digital storytelling workshop -- that's a loss.), and the more other people can own pieces of the puzzle. That requires me to be more organized and more forward thinking. That's a struggle.
3. A goal for me next year is to find the time to do a more formal style of observations / feedback. I do like the pre-meeting, meeting, post-meeting forward, but one of my private goals for this year was to be able to give every teacher a letter this week that was about what I saw from them / in them this year as an educator, and I just didn't get to that.
   
• What are three school-wide pride moments?
1. We doubled this year and kept -- and grew -- our culture. Year Two is one of the hardest years in new school development because it's the only year you double in size. I think we should be really proud of how we brought in a whole new group of kids and got them on-board with what it means to be at SLA. That's not easy.
2. I'm, honestly, in awe of the sheer amount and high quality of the work of everyone involved in SLA. The kids did a TON of really good work, and that only happened because of the care and dedication of the adults. A related pride moment is that we had, literally, hundreds, if not over a thousand, visitors this year, and we remained a transparent school. People could walk into any classroom on any day and see active, engaged learning. The feedback we got from all our visitors is important for us, because it reminds us of the bar we set for ourselves.
3. I'm really proud of the fact that two years in, we are becoming a true R&D facility, not just for the district, but for a much larger community. Whether it was EduCon, School of the Future, FLC, Lead in Philly, Penn PhD folks, etc.... we had so many people who come here to learn from and with us. We forget -- we're two years into this experiment. We should be really proud that people think we are worthy of study.
• Three school-wide goals:
1. Integrating nine (eep!) new teachers into our culture next year -- and I think one of those challenges is going to be to start to figure out how to "differentiate (BINGO!) instruction" in our own workshops. How do we teach teachers who have never used UbD to use it while allowing those who have been doing it for one or two years to continue to get better? (for example.)
2. Anticipating senior year. I think we have to really look forward this coming year so that we don't run into the "Oh, God, we've got seniors!" moment. (I've seen that in other places.) This means being able to give kids a roadmap for Capstone, this means ramping up college now.
   
3. Setting up more time and structure for stream teachers to find ways to make more deliberate interdisciplinary connections. This is something that, if we want it to happen, we have to find a way to make time for it in PD workshops. As our schedule gets more complex, that will get harder and harder, but it's still really important.
   
4. Keeping a sense of humility before the enormity of the task in front of us.

Reflecting on the reflection -- so we all answered these questions in a Moodle journal and then spent the next hour reading each other's work and then talking about the work. I'm not going to post other people's private writing here, but I will say that it's amazing to read the work of a group of dedicated educators all pulling in the same direction who have walked a walk together to build a school.

Tags: SLA, reflection, school_reform

If you like graphic representations of information, and you are a Del.icio.us fan, you need to check out Wordle.

Here's my tag cloud... this shouldn't surprise anyone.



(Perhaps that 'education' tag isn't helping me organize much. Hm.)

Tags: delicious, tools

Watching this speech, I was reminded again and again why I love the ideals of this country. I was reminded of why my lefty, hippie parents taught me to sing patriotic songs. It was a speech that I will tell my children about when I explain what why I love my country and why I spend so much time working in the most grass-roots way I know to make this country a better place.

And I don't think we can under-estimate this -- I had iChat on during the speech, and I had a number of African-American students who were just over-the-moon with excitement... watching the speech with families... viewing a moment they never believed possible.

This is going to be an incredible next few months. On a fun SLA note, next year is the first time we teach American History. Think Diana will have fun with all this?

Tags: Obama, politics

My first reaction to the Cheektogawa student discipline policy is now up at The Faculty Room. Here's the opening snippet:

Maybe it works. Maybe if we create a detailed enough system of extrinsic motivators and punishments, we can drag kids kicking and screaming to a scholasticism that is missing in many schools. Maybe we have tipped the scales so far toward overindulging the whims and desires of youth culture, that a little law and order — or a lot of it in the case of Cheektowaga Central Middle School – is what’s in order.

Maybe.

But I kept going back to one thought:

I wouldn’t want my child to go there….