Practical Theory

... because it's 1:20 in the morning, and I just got off the phone with one of my teachers, because we were hashing out some of the issues for September. The faculty of SLA are as committed a group of teachers as I have ever seen (and, trust me, that's high praise), and I don't think they are going to let anything stand in the way of providing a truly innovating and inspiring educational model for our kids.

And since I'm blogging for the first time in days, I'll continue. Here's the problem. It shouldn't be this hard to get a great school off the ground. Yes, of course, anything worth doing is going to be difficult, and yes, starting up is hard, and yes, innovation is damned hard. But that's not what I'm talking about.

There has been a real excitement and outpouring of good will here in the School District of Philadelphia about SLA. People from every conceivable office have worked with us to try to get us what we need -- I really have been blown away by the commitment of the city. And even with that, dealing with the constraints that are placed on urban school districts, both financially and politically, has meant getting to September 7th has taken a Herculean effort on the part of the teachers and the committed central office folks. (And yes, me too.) The behind-the-scenes folks at SDP who have been working all year to get the four new high schools open are exhausted, and I understand why.

If we are really to reform education in our cities, we need more money spent on our cities. We need to reform NCLB so that real reform can happen. We need to make it easier to get our best and brightest into our urban classrooms. And then we need to create structures that allow them to really teach and plan.

Until then, 1:20 am phone and email conversations are the only way we're going to get it done. I'm lucky, I have a group of teachers who are on board for that. It's my job to make sure that they don't have to do it very often.

Back from the beach... wishing that I had two weeks there, not one.

I didn't do as much reading as I'd hoped, but I read Blink and The Cluetrain Manifesto -- Cluetrain was a "re-read / finish," but I was glad I did.

Both texts have something interesting to teach us about education. And I think that's interesting for me right now... looking at texts / ideas that are not specifically education-related and finding out what wisdom they have for those of us in schools. I promise to do some writing about each of the texts, but that'll wait until after coffee.

Until then... what non-education texts have you read that had powerful ramifications on the way you looked at schools / the classroom / education and how did they change the way you thought?

At the beach with very sporatic internet service. Expect light posting this week. Have a great week, everyone.

One of the SLA teachers joins the conversation with her own blog. She's got her own reflections on the past week and a half. Go take a look and welcome her to the blogosphere.

Will blogged about his visit to the SLA planning session, and in it, he asked me a question:

Chris said something to the effect that his process had been informed by people all over the world, and that by being transparent about it on his blog, it had been a richer, more effective experience. (Chris, if you read this, maybe you could embellish that thought with a comment…but not from the beach!)

So I'll answer as a break from packing...

For me, the edu-blogsphere has been my "critical friends" group. When I've had questions, when I wanted feedback, I wrote (or podcasted, when writer's block hit), and I got amazing feedback from people all over the country. The fun thing is that I actually can't imagine trying to do with without blogging about it. It just seems so much harder to think about it that way.

I'm a collaborator by nature, and working as the sole "employee" of SLA for the first six or seven months of the project was not a natural state of being for me. There were a lot of folks here in Philly, from SDP folks to TFI folks, who could and did help. You met one of those folks yesterday in Wayne Ransom. But even with that, the idea that I could use my blog, write about ideas, questions, plans and get feedback from all of the world, really did inform my practice. When we had our curriculum summits, questions and ideas that folks posed on the blog made their way into the planning docs. When we created our interview questions, several of the questions folks came up with on the blog made it into the final draft. And when I needed help getting my head around 1:1 computing, folks like Wes Fryer and Miguel Guhlin were incredibly helpful.

And then, of course, folks like you and David Warlick and Christian Long and Arvind Grover took the time to take it off-line and come and spend time at summits and planning workshops and phone calls. The friendships and collaborations that moved off-line but started on the blogosphere have been some of the most valuable pieces of the puzzle as well.

When SLA opens in 53 days (eeeek!), it really will be a better, more democratic, richer school because so many really intelligent, passionate folks have had a hand in the planning of it.

Again, the crazy thought for me isn't that I did it this way... it's -- why would anyone try to start a school without doing it this way? It was a whole lot easier -- and better -- to plan a school by culling the best ideas from anyone who takes the time to express them than trying to come up with every ideas myself. And I think -- I hope -- that by opening up the process of planning to the web, by inviting so many folks in and allowing their thoughts to change mine, it made me more willing to give up my own ideaas and be a more democratic, consensus-driven principal when the faculty came on board.

One of the amazing things about being a edu-blogger is, of course, getting to know the other folks out there who are thinking about and writing about and doing this stuff. Having Will close our planning session with a presentation that was both practical and inspirational was the perfect way to end a really amazing, exhausting and transformative two weeks. I think we all ended up with a sense of how much work we have in front of us, how much work we've already done, and how much we could achieve if we don't allow ourselves to be limited by anything other than our (students, teachers, parents, even principal) own passion, energy, intelligence, creativity and curiousity. In the words of Tom Sobol, "When you have the chance to change the world, don't screw up." No pressure.

So back to today... we closed our session with Will with the chance to really reflect on our own ideas for technology / new literacy infusion in the classroom.

Here were our prompts for the reflective journal (filled out on Moodle, of course...)

• I want my kids to use computers...
  
• I need to learn more about .... to facilitate ....
  
• I worry most about...
  
• I am most excited about...
  
• I will want more training on...
  

What the faculty wrote was amazing, and I may ask some of them for permission to post their entries on here, but for now, here's my journal entry.

I want my kids to use computers... as a tool for information creation, retrevial and critique. I want them to understand what a communication tools is... how it changes and evolves and how we are in an age of faster change than ever before in human history. I want our kids to understand that they don't have to be passive receptors of information, but active participants in the information age. I want my kids to read, write, produce, direct, podcast, v-cast, blog... I want them to do all those things critically -- understanding that the choices they make when they craft a sentence or put together a series of cuts in a movie affect the way their message is understood. I want kids to have a message, and I want them to use these tools to better craft and publish those messages. I want our students to be able to see themselves as 21st century citizens with the right and responsibility to join in the global conversation in an informed and impassioned way.

I need to learn more about what 1:1 really can mean to facilitate our faculty's ability to maximize the use of these tools. I need to more about how other schools and teachers are using the tools to keep demonstrating models of what is possible. I need to learn more about the dark side of 1:1 so that we can plan for it, expect it and mitigate it.

I worry most about sustainability. I worry about how much it costs to keep getting these laptops -- and I hope that, should the money for the $1500 laptop run dry, we'll be ready to use the $100 laptop.

I am most excited about watching the amazing and thoughtful group of teachers that comprise the SLA faculty use these tools in powerful and new ways. I am most excited about seeing them share their ideas with students... and seeing students share their ideas with us. I am most excited about seeing all of us blog about what we learn and, with luck, become a model that other schools can follow.

I will want more training on... new ways to continue to look at these tools to make our school more efficient... more democratic... more transparent... I will want to keep finding new ways to quickly and easily get information into the hands of the stakeholders (parents, students, teachers, administrators) who need it the most. I will want to keep working to make our school a 24/7/365 school where we all understand that the walls of the school are merely the physical representation of the collective mindscape that is SLA.

(Thanks, Will.)

We're at the last day of our SLA workshop, and we're lucky enough to have Will Richardson with us today, and we're just talking about this stuff.

I'm going to live blog a bunch of ideas and sites that he's mentioning... it'll be a mess, and I'll try to contextualize a lot of it later.

-- Everyone is an expert on something, our job as teachers is now to find what they are / want to be experts and helping them to become better experts.

-- We are changing from "just in case learning" to "just in time learning"

-- What happens when we change our language from "hand it in" to "publish it."

-- If kids / we don't know how judge the information we find online and become good editors both of what we publish and what we know, we are essentially illiterate.

-- We need to be deconstructing MySpace. Can you imagine what would happen if we said to the kids, "Today we're going to learn about MySpace."

Sites Will mentioned:

• MIT Open Courseware
  
• Met Academy / Big Picture
  
• George Siemes / Connectivism
  
• WikiBooks
  
• WikiBooks -- South African Curriculum
  
• Cluetrain Manifesto
  
• Will's site and Will's wiki
  
• Barbara Ganley
  
• Del.icio.us
  
• Furl
  

Context later...

Michael Winerip's published published his last education column for the New York Times today. He's been one of the most powerful advocates for teachers in mainstream media, and I'm sorry to see him go. Be sure to read the whole column, as it is both a lovely reflection on his last four years as an edu-columnist and a final attempt to inject some sanity into the NCLB debate.

Here's a sample:

As readers know, I’m not a fan of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law aimed at raising education quality. Instead of helping teachers, for me it’s a law created by politicians who distrust teachers. Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress.

The question is: How successful can an education law be that makes teachers the enemy?

Great question. Great column. His voice in the debate will be missed.

Thanks to Arvind Grover and Alex Ragone of 21st Century Learning for doing their podcast last Friday with the SLA faculty. A special thanks to Arvind who gave of his summer time and came down to Philly to help us learn moodle. He was a gracious and talented faciltator and trainer, and we got a ton out of the session. And then, after the session, he and Alex fired up the podcast and we had a blast talking with Alex and Arvind about SLA and 21st Century Learning.

So go give a listen to the podcast. I hope it is just the next in a series that we are able to do with Alex and Arvind about the progress at SLA. And I can't wait until our faculty aren't guests on someone else's podcast, but rather our teachers and students are creating their own shows!

[Another entry that stemmed from a writing prompt from our workshops with the Philadelphia Writing Project. Today's writing prompt was: "Deborah Meier has discovered and lives by the credo: 'Teaching is mostly listening, learning is mostly telling." Write about a time in your teaching and learning experience when this resonates to you."]

For me, I think this becomes about coaching. The players “tell” you what they’ve learned with every game. Did Gaby understand the concept of protecting the middle when the center fronts the post in the 21 Slide Zone D? Does Jessie understand the concept of faking left before going to her right in her drop step? If they did, they’ll tell you when they execute it in a game. I learned after a year or so of coaching that trying to plan out several weeks of the skills I wanted to teach my players was not a particularly helpful exercise, because if I didn’t listen to what the kids were telling me, I would push forward on the skills before they had learned what I need them to learn to be a good team. One of the real breakthroughs for me was when I started breaking down game film and watching it with them. We’d talk about what we had worked on in the practices leading up to a game, what our game plan was, and then we’d watch the film to see where we did or didn’t achieve it. The funny thing is that sometimes we won without every really doing what we meant to do and sometimes we lost even though it was clear from the tape that kids had learned what we wanted them to do. (And sometimes that meant that I had a lousy game plan… which forced me to learn more too.)

And it was interesting, because once I viewed my coaching a team sport as another example of true performance-based assessment – and one where the kids’ success on the court had a powerful and obvious relation to whether or not I had listened to what they had and hadn’t learned about what I was trying to teach them, that meant that I had to look at my own classroom to find where those lessons applied. Once I did that, student assessment told me so much about where I had not succeeded in the classroom with students, which made assessment a reflective process for me as well.