Dangerously Irrelevant

Announcing the CASTLE Advisory Board

Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in serving on the CASTLE Advisory Board. We had many, many more applicants than we possibly could take. Although having too many people who are willing to serve is a wonderful problem to have as an organization, it also meant that we had to make some extremely difficult decisions. We will do our best to try and tap into everyone’s expertise in other ways…

Below is our new advisory board. As you can see, we strove for diversity of thought, professional role, and geography. Many of the individuals below also are bloggers (which probably isn’t too surprising).

Principals

• Dave Dimmett (Indiana). Assistant Principal, Harrison High School, Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation.
• Scott Elias (Colorado). Assistant Principal, Loveland High School, Thompson School District.
• Greg Farr (Texas). Principal, Shannon Education Center, Birdville Independent School District. Alternative School Administrator of the Year, Texas Association of Alternative Education.
• Dave Keane (Iowa). Principal, Keokuk High School, Keokuk Community School District.

Central office administrators

• Barry Bachenheimer (New Jersey). Director of Instructional Services, Caldwell-West Caldwell Public Schools. Google Certified Teacher. Montclair State University Educator of the Year.
• Kurt Bernardo (Ohio). Technology coordinator, Orange City Schools. Ohio Technology Coordinator of the Year.
• Dr. Greg Davis (Iowa). Executive Director, Management Support Services, Des Moines Public Schools. Co-chair, Consortium for School Networking CTO Council.
• Dr. Shabbi Luthra (India). Director of Technology, American School of Bombay.
• Andy Torris (China). Deputy Superintendent, Shanghai American School.
• James Yap (New York). Director of Instructional Technology and Data Management, Ramapo Central School District.

Teachers

• Clay Burell (South Korea). English / Social Studies teacher and technology coordinator, Korea International School. Apple Distinguished Educator.
• Dan Meyer (California). Math teacher, San Lorenzo Valley High School, San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District. Cable industry Leader in Learning.
• Ben Wilkoff (Colorado). Virtual resource teacher, eDCSD, Douglas County School District. Edutopia / Yahoo! National Totally Wired Teacher Award.

Media specialists / technology integrationists

• Carolyn Foote (Texas). Librarian, Westlake High School, Eanes Independent School District.
• Tim Stahmer (Virginia). Instructional technology specialist, Fairfax County Public Schools.

Higher education

• Dr. Jon Becker (Virginia). Assistant Professor, Educational Leadership, Virginia Commonwealth University.
• Dr. Michael McVey (Michigan), Assistant Professor, Educational Media and Technology, Eastern Michigan University.
• Dr. David Quinn (Florida). Assistant Professor, Educational Administration and Policy, University of Florida.

National, international, and other organizations

• Rowland Baker (California). Assistant Superintendent, Santa Cruz County Office of Education. Co-director, Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership.
• Dr. Stuart Ciske (Wisconsin). Educational consultant, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
• Dr. Ann Flynn (District of Columbia). Director, Education Technology, National School Boards Association.
• Wes Fryer (Oklahoma). Director of Education Advocacy (PK-20), AT&T. Apple Distinguished Educator.
• Doug Levin (District of Columbia). Senior Director, Education Policy, Cable in the Classroom. Treasurer, Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
• Sylvia Martinez (California). President, Generation YES.
• Ewan McIntosh (Scotland). National Adviser: Learning and Technology Futures, Learning and Teaching Scotland.
• Erin Reilly (Massachusetts). Research Director, Project New Media Literacies, MIT Comparative Media Studies. National School Boards Association 20 to Watch. Cable industry Leader in Learning.

Video - Learning to change

I think I may have just found the opening video for my Monday presentation to the Ames Noon Rotary.

Kudos to the Pearson Foundation Digital Arts Alliance and the Consortium for School Networking (and a hat tip to David Warlick) for a great resource!

Interview: Mike Vitelli, The Gaming Krib

As promised, here is my interview of Mike Vitelli, CEO of The Gaming Krib:

• Conversation 29: Interview with Mike Vitelli

Happy listening!

Dan Meyer is a Leader in Learning

Kudos to Dan Meyer for being named as a 2008 Leader in Learning by the cable industry! A complete list of the winners is at the Leaders in Learning web site.

My not-so-friendly library, boring teachers, and other marketing interactions

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

My city’s public library is a wonderful place. It hosts a variety of well-attended events, has a phenomenal children’s section, and serves as a real hub for the community. But its formal communications stink.

The very first time that you have an overdue book, the initial notice that you receive says that failure to pay your fines may result in being turned over to a collection agency. Ouch. When you request a book, the notification that the book is in says that failure to pick up the book promptly will result in a $0.50 fine. Huh? If you write a letter to the public library’s director highlighting the somewhat draconian tone of its communications, you receive a letter justifying the library’s terseness (trust me on this one). So despite all of the great things that the public library does, you’re still left with a bitter taste in your mouth.

Seth Godin reminds us that every interaction with a customer / client / patron / stakeholder / visitor is a marketing interaction. It’s an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.

What’s this mean for schools? Well, it means that every time a parent walks away unhappy from an encounter at school, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a teacher has yet another boring lesson, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a school board member puts her personal agenda ahead of what’s best for students, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a member of the community walks through an uninviting building, that’s a marketing interaction. And every time an administrator squanders an opportunity to be a leader rather than a manager, that’s a marketing interaction.

Schools do a host of wonderful things. But they also engage in a number of individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill of their internal and external communities. We can bemoan the lack of student engagement / parent support / community involvement / referendum votes all we want, but our actions probably led to the problem(s) in the first place. Putting forth a glossy spin on the surface (We’re the best! Support us!) does no good if we’re not willing to look at our underlying practices as the marketing interactions that they are.

Moving Forward - Blogs for special education teachers

Many of you know that I'm asking the edublogosphere to gradually help me flesh out the Moving Forward wiki so that it can be a valuable resource to presenters and others who are trying to facilitate change in schools. For example, in April we identified a number of high-quality elementary classroom blogs.

This week I'm asking for great blogs that are of interest to special education teachers (particularly special education teachers who are blogging themselves). By great blogs, I mean the kind that you might show in a presentation to persuade others of the power and potential of blogging for teachers of students with special needs. If you know of any such blogs, please add them to the wiki!

Painters ... pipefitters ... principals?

Why does it bother me so much to see principals on this list?

• St. Paul (MN) Public Schools Labor Agreements

Help out a superintendent. Deadline: noon today (Eastern)

Dennis Richards, a superintendent in Falmouth, Massachusetts, is trying to get the annual ASCD conference to recognize the power and the potential of the Social Web. Help him out by adding your name to the collaborators section of his proposal wiki (hint: don't pick the first blank row, choose one further down) and then passing this along. He's going to make his goal of 50; let's see if we can get the total over 100.

It'll only take you a couple of minutes. How often do you get a chance to help out a superintendent? Deadline: noon today (Eastern). Thanks!

Don't read this article

I really wanted to like the Creating Valuable Class Web Sites article in the May 2008 issue of Learning and Leading With Technology. I really did. I believe strongly that teachers should be incorporating digital technologies into their instruction and communication with students and parents, and I know that teachers can use all of the good ideas, best practices, and resources that we can provide. But then I read the article (hat tip to Sylvia Martinez and Bud Hunt) and I was completely dismayed…

As Sylvia and Bud noted on Twitter, many of the web sites presented by the author are quite dated. Geocities and Tripod: weren’t those big in the 1990s? Netscape Composer: Seriously? FrontPage: didn’t Microsoft quit selling that a while ago? The inclusion of such tools calls into serious question the currency, and thus credibility, of the author’s expertise.

The Resources section at the end was similarly lacking. Take a look at Blog Connection. It was one of the two best blogging sites the author could recommend for K-12 educators? And EdBlogger Praxis? The site that hasn’t been updated since February 2007? At least the author linked to eMINTS when it came to wikis…

Instead of tables of outdated web resources and an irrelevant resources section, the author should have included current tools rather than those from 5–10 years ago. Some discussion of the desirability of using outside, non-district-sponsored tools also would have been nice. Instead, the article reads like it was cobbled together by someone who’s rooted in the technology of yesteryear rather than today. This was an opportunity squandered. Is this stuff what the author teaches her students? Doesn’t ISTE have a responsibility to do some checking of article content?

Learning and Leading With Technology is supposed to be helpful to educators in 2008, not 1998. And usually it fulfills that function extremely well. I hate to say this - because I’m rarely critical in public of others (unless they’re clueless leaders who should know better) – but the author and the ISTE editors didn’t do their job with this one.

MIT New Media Literacies project needs some New England high schools

Erin Reilly, Research Director for the New Media Literacies project at MIT, is looking for some New England high schools to pilot test its new Teachers’ Strategy Guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture. Read over the description of the project, check out the web site, and then contact Erin if your school is interested in participating.

FYI, Erin rocks. I met her at the 2007 Leaders in Learning Awards in Washington, DC when she still was running Zoey’s Room. Now she gets to work with Henry Jenkins! Hope some of you can help her out…

Blocking the future

My latest article for the American Association of School Administrators is now online. Titled Blocking the Future, it’s only a page long but I’m really excited about it. Here’s an excerpt:

[S]chool district leaders have a critical choice to make: Will their schools pro-actively model and teach the safe and appropriate use of these digital tools or will they reactively block them out and leave students and families to fend for themselves? Unfortunately, many schools are choosing to do the latter. . . . I can think of no better way to highlight organizational unimportance than to block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society. Schools whose default stance is to prohibit rather than enable might as well plant a sign in front of their buildings that says, “Irrelevant to children’s futures.”

I’ve also made a handy SnipURL:

• http://snipurl.com/blockingthefuture

Hopefully this will be a useful reading for your administrators and teachers. Feel free to distribute liberally!

Low ability teachers, low ability students?

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

Here are some research findings for you…

Smart people leave teaching?

Of the teachers who had high college entrance exam scores, almost a fourth of them leave the profession within a decade. In contrast, only about 11% of the individuals with low scores leave the teaching profession within 10 years. Similarly, more than a third of the teachers with low college entrance exam scores are still teaching a decade after they started, while only 15% of the teachers with high scores are still teaching ten years after they began (Anderson & Carroll, 2008; see also Guarino, Santibanez, & Daley (2006), who note similar results for university selectiveness and certification exam scores). In other words, the percentage of teachers with lower academic ability increases in schools over time. The brightest go elsewhere.

Teacher smarts matter?

• Higher teacher ACT scores positively influences student reading scores (Ferguson & Ladd, 1996)
• Teachers’ verbal ability influences student performance (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996)
• [S]tudents learn more from teachers with higher test scores. Test scores matter…” (Wayne & Youngs, 2003)
  

Discuss among yourselves

Let’s assume that, generally speaking, these studies are correct: 1) smart people are less likely to stay in teaching (thus resulting in a concentration of teachers with lower academic ability), and 2) the academic ability of teachers impacts student learning outcomes. Now what?

References

• Anderson, S. E., & Carroll, C. D. (2008). Teacher career choices: Timing of teacher careers among 1992-1993 Bachelor’s degree recipients (NCES 2008-153). Washington, DC: United States Department of Education.
• Ferguson, R.F., & Ladd, H.F. (1996). How and why money matters: An analysis of Alabama schools. In H.F. Ladd (Ed.), Holding schools accountable. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 265-298.
  
• Greenwald, R., Hedges, L.V., & Laine, R.D. (1996, Autumn). The effect of school resources on student achievement. Review of Educational Research, 66(3), 361-396.
  
• Guarino, C. M., Santibanez, L., & Daley, G. A. (2006). Teacher recruitment and retention: A review of the recent empirical literature. Review of Educational Research, 76(2), 173-208.
  
• Wayne, A. J., & Youngs, P. (2003). Teacher characteristics and student achievement gains: A review. Review of Educational Research, 73(1), 89-122.

For me, the medium matters

[Since CoComment won’t play nice, here’s my response to Clay Burell’s post]

When I started blogging in August 2006, I was feeling very down about the idea of writing. The range of acceptability of style and form in academic writing is pretty narrow. The belief of my peers that publication in peer-reviewed journals was the only writing that was worthwhile also was very constraining, particularly since the educators that I'm trying to reach don't read those publications. I was struggling to find meaning and value in what I was supposed to be writing.

Blogging cured me of my writing blahs. It provided me with an outlet that fits me like a glove, helped me discover my writing voice, and made me realize that I LOVE to write - indeed, maybe LIVE to write - if given the proper medium. A few months of blogging also gave me the courage to say:

This is who I am. This is what I'm all about. I'm a practitioner-oriented professor trying to facilitate change in schools. I'm a professor who thinks that there is unbelievable power in the ‘Social Web’ and I am going to try to figure it out, regardless of what others think. If U. Minnesota won't reward that, it's time to find a place that will. And the hell with those who think I'm moving down the institutional pecking order. What matters is job/life satisfaction and I'm going to find it.

So it turns out that I am a writer after all. I just didn't know it because I had been trying to follow someone else's writing paradigm, one that didn't fit me very well. I'm lucky that my new university, Iowa State, finds value in what I do. And I'm lucky to live in a time when these self-publication tools are so readily available. 'Cause I'm going to milk them for all they're worth.

Not so irrelevant 008

My latest roundup of links and tools…

I read blocked blogs

• I’m gettin’ me some of these super-cool buttons (made by Stephanie Sandifer; inspired by Bud Hunt). What a great thing to hand out to administrators!

Are you up to the challenge?

• The 2008 Comment Challenge is now on (and, hey, recognize a fantastic commenter!)

Why K-12 educators shake their heads at academia

• Rick Hess perfectly captures one of my primary complaints about academia, which is that much of what we do is completely inaccessible (and/or meaningless) to K-12 educators

No hand-held electronics in front of the kids!

I was incredulous to read ... the decision by the London Catholic School Board in Ontario banning hand held electronic devices in schools. . . . Even more bizarrely ... school board employees are only allowed to use these devices "in areas from which students are excluded." Taken to its logical extent then this includes staff also being unable to use digital cameras to record student work or projects, create and listen to podcasts and so on.
– Gareth Long

Like Alfie Kohn, Dan Meyer forces us to rethink / justify

• Who do we think we are?
• The difference between us and them
• Sobriety

New tools I’m finding quite useful

• Taboo Firefox extension
• FeedDemon RSS reader

The impetus is on us, not them

Help a teacher develop an integrated lesson [that] ... focuses on a local issue of real importance, in which they, their families, and/or others in their community have a genuine stake and interest. If their learning is situated in that type of context, I think you’ll find the impact of their learning experiences will be far greater, and many more of them will learn digital literacy skills alongside traditional literacy skills. Teaching in a problem-based learning environment is a lot more work than simply lecturing and delivering content to students, but it is the type of learning environment our students need to remain engaged in school work. Too many kids today are BORED by school. As the adults running our schools, it is our responsibility to remedy this situation.
– Wesley Fryer

A couple of gems from Clay Burell…

• Muhammad Ali: A D- student or an F- school?
• Education as pretense: Schooly “speeches” versus real “talks”

And a couple more from Gerald Bracey

• Proficient readers: Dear Strong American Schools (be wary of those NAEP proficiency levels!)
• A test everyone will fail

We are a little egocentric, aren’t we?

• Fujitsu’s world map (thanks, Brett!)

And, finally, a reminder from John Pederson

• Don’t count your Twitter followers

One year ago: Well, what's your answer? and Principal blogging not allowed