Dangerously Irrelevant

Not so irrelevant 013

My latest roundup of links and tools…

When did the IT staff get promoted above the superintendent?

Will Richardson notes:

[A] school superintendent I spoke with … lamented the fact that his IT staff wouldn’t give him access to YouTube and even Wikipedia.

See also my older post: Principal blogging not allowed.

Math and motocross

Check out this sweet series of motocross math videos at HotChalk. The brains behind the math? Former guest blogger Jason Dyer!

“I didn’t know Sasquatch was real.”

Fun with the Pacific Tree Octopus!

Maybe we should do this for teachers and administrators too

"Seventy-one-year-old Peggy McIntyre needs to learn as much as she can about Windows before 8 a.m. Or else."

Post-Gutenberg economics

It’s now a publish-then-filter world. Clay Shirky notes that “we’re clocking a singularity a week at this point.”

We need to educate our educators

Seth Godin says:

It’s easy to be against something you’re afraid of. And it’s easy to be afraid of something that you don’t understand.

Open your brain, open your model of education

The Education Innovation blog has an interesting post on closed v. open models of education. [Note to self: this might be the world’s longest URL]

Some good thinking going on here

Thanks to Mike Sansone, I recently discovered the Union Square Ventures blog. In Power to the People, they state:

[W]e believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups.

In Why the Flow of Innovation Has Reversed, they note:

[T]he vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. . . . [O]ne reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

Students aren’t the only ones missing the big picture

The Florida Department of Education is concerned that students are missing the big picture when it comes to science. A task force stated that “teachers should provide a broader focus on scientific concepts and process in a 'big picture' sense.” Hmmm… I wonder if that means the Department is going to narrow down the list of required science standards and also pare down the size of approved textbooks. I’m guessing not. Download the full report if you dare.

Disempowered today = disempowered tomorrow

I left this comment at Jim Gates’ Tipline blog:

Students who aren't fluid technology users today will be the low-wage workers and disempowered citizens of tomorrow.

I want it right THERE

Finally, if you’re anal-retentive about your Windows taskbar like I am, check out Taskbar Shuffle.

Adventures in Online Synchronous Communication

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys] 

What is your favourite form of online synchronous communication? I am pondering this today as I write the 5th and final blog post as guest blogger on Dangerously Irrelevant. As I much as I love and become immersed in the asynchronous communication modes of being online there is nothing better than a quick fix or an interaction or meeting that is in real time. Let me share with you some methods I have used recently for real-time (synchronous) communications. For a start there is always GChat! using GMail and having access to friends and colleagues around the world via the chat facility gives me a warm glow (you too?). For example, this screen shot was taken today. The different colours represent online activity: Green (online), Red (online but busy), Orange (online but away from computer), and Grey (has been online recently but gone now). It is early Saturday morning here in Qatar as I write this so I can see that Vicki has probably gone to bed in Georgia, my friend in India has gone out shopping, Elizabeth and Dean are possibly still awake in the USA, Judy in Australia is up but busy, Saad is up and online in Dhaka, David in Singapore, and Chris in France...well it's early in the morning for him but he is often online at odd hours.  What an international group I have represented here!
Advantages of GChat: archive of chats stored in 'Chats' mailbox. Message can be sent to a person not online, they will receive it later.

Skype of course has to come next! What a wonderful tool. I use Skype in the classroom, I use Skype to communicate with family and friends around the world. Here is a link to an article I wrote for ISTE's Learning and Leading with Technology  magazine Using VoIP to Foster Connectivity and Communication. It is also reproduced here on my wiki.
Advantages of Skype: Can include video and text-chat and audio chat, can include a group of up to 9 people. A Skypecast can include a lot more! Skype calls can be recorded using applications such as PowerGramo or Pretty May.

Another tool, UStream, is being used by many educators to share, once again in real time initially, what they are presenting, thinking, or discussing. This image is from Educon 2.0 in January. George Mayo presented on global collaboration and Skyped a few of us in to his presentation, which he also had running through UStream. This shows George in conversation with Clarence Fisher. The Skype calls and conversation were seamless and George was adept at directing the live audience as well as the virtual audience along a path of exploration.

I am really loving Elluminate this year. The facility of audio, chat, whiteboard combined with being able to import PPT files and images, videos, take polls etc etc means it is a very powerful tool for synchronous work. Yes, I know it is expensive for a school, however don't forget the free V-Room that will take 3 people and is fully functional.

It is through Elluminate that we run the student summits for Flat Classroom Project. Each student and teacher in the summit prepares a JPG file and uploads it ready to talk to the images on the file that represent their work and experiences.
Advantages of Elluminate: Video of presenter possible, audio of one or more participants, back-channel chat.

Student from LACHSA presenting in Elluminate (Flat Classroom 2007)

I cannot finish this post without mentioning Twitter. Yes, I know this is strictly not synchronous however often it feels like it! For example this morning I tweeted this: To which I received these responses: and also a direct message via Twitter from @mohamed: "instant messenger because of presence and ability to have trusted connections. Now if only it was integrated with SMS"

My Twitter community is always there for me. Learn more about Twitter, find more Twitter resources. Follow me on Twitter.
Advantages of Twitter: micro-blogging with usually fast response from followers, able to share ideas without getting into a 'real conversation', archives all tweets, integrates with mobile phone technology.

Also, to share another synchronous online experience.......Not long ago I also had the opportunity to be part of a 'fishbowl' classroom project. Karl Fisch sent me an invitation to 'live blog' with students at Arapahoe High School as they discuss Dan Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. A class blog post had been set up and as we listened to the live conversation by the 'inner circle' the outer circle (educators and outer students) posted comments to this post. We used an online tool called MeBeam with success to webcam the educators and the physical classroom together.
Here is an image of participants using MeBeam with the blog comment window open as well.

Julie Lindsay, guest blogger

[A special thank you to Scott McLeod for inviting me to be guest presenter over the past week. This has been quite a challenge and I have appreciated the opportunity to put more extended blog posts together.]

Technorati Tags: twitter skype ustream elluminate google synchronous communication

My 2020 Vision for Global Collaboration

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

I have been reflecting on global collaboration and what it means for teachers, students and the wider community. I have also been reflecting on sustainability of online spaces and how much of what we are 'producing' in terms of creative output  has not been preserved over the past 15 years. Let me be more specific.

For the past 12 years I have participated in online global projects with my students. In 1996, my school in Australia, Eltham College, received an Honorable Mention in the Environmental Awareness section of  the International Cyberfair project (organised by the Global School Net). This project had an amazing affect on our school community. To be able to publish images, sounds (yes, we even got up at dawn and recorded the Australian bird song as the day begins to upload), ideas and thoughts from our part of the world and share them internationally was an amazing achievement in the early days of he Internet. In fact many of us got up at 5am (pre-dawn!) to come to school and listen to the Cyberfair awards ceremony that year (at a reasonable time in the USA of course) that included an opening address from Al Gore. Those were the days. Alas, the website for this project is gone, changes in school server and ISP hosting etc etc have deleted it long ago.

In my first 5 years as an international educator I ran Learning Circle projects with classes in Zambia and Kuwait as part of the iEARN initiative. These involved grouping 6 or so classrooms from around the world into a 'project' that was self-determined according to curriculum section. The outcome from the interaction was often a hard-copy publication or a website. I still have two of the 'books' produced during these years with students writings and ideas from the various international locations. I am excited to see that iEARN are now in Qatar and promoting collaborative projects in this region.

When I moved to Bangladesh and International School Dhaka we participated in the 2004 international School's Cyberfair and won the Platinum (first prize) in the Environmental Awareness section for Poribesh Bachan (Bangla for being aware, taking action). Once again this was a community project and we had great fun compiling images and records of the current environmental state of Dhaka and initiatives that were moving it forward at that time. Alas, this website is not available online anymore.

In the past 18 months I have been a co-founder (with Vicki Davis) of the Flat Classroom Project and Horizon Project and global collaboration as I knew it suddenly took on a whole new dimension. I have written about this new 'Global Collaboration 3.0' earlier however let me make some salient points here as to why we now have a whole new focus for online collaborative projects and what that means for education.

• Web 2.0 has changed the online world making interaction and collaboration easier. Instant publication via a wiki, social networking via a Ning (see flat classroom Ning) have brought people (teachers and students) together as they have never been before
• A 'flat classroom' is able to connect, collaborate and create products with other 'flat classrooms' anywhere in the world and as well as the already tried and true organisations such as GSN and iEARN there are also many wonderful educators out there internationally making this happen. This is not a definitive list but a starting point: Global education collaborative, Many Voices, Voices of the World, Global Collaborations, Taking IT Global (you have to check this one out!), Thousand and One Flat World Tales, Global education resources, Life 'Round Here. I also recommend you look at the work of Kim Cofino and A Step-by-step guide to global collaborations, Developing the global student.
• In global collaboration 3.0 here are high expectations for connectivity and communication with a true 'flat classroom' setup where teachers and students are on the same level and with the focus on student-centered learning

What is my 2020 Vision for global collaboration? (thanks to Karl Fisch for his inspiration and for being the Keynote speaker for Horizon Project 2006)

• Global collaborative projects need to be embedded into the curriculum. We need to be looking at how students can have experiential learning opportunities at all levels of education. As a middle and high school specialist I expect my students to have had at least one global project experience before they leave Primary school, and then to have at least one global project experience each year of middle and high school. I do not think this is unreasonable or unrealistic
• We need to continue (or start) to foster technology integration as part of what we do in schools. Gone are the days where students come to the computer lab. to do IT. Moving towards 1:1 mobile computing programs is a start, providing professional development for teachers in embedding IT into their curriculum is even more important, providing the support via integration facilitators is also essential. Facilitators must have a no-class load within a school and could be IT and/or library/media specialist or strong curriculum specialists comfortable with online tools and Web 2.0
• We need to be unblocking viable connectivity tools so that digital access and participation is available for all classrooms around the world. Can we get governments and school organizations to talk about this at the same table? Can we develop a set of essential tools that ALL schools around the world access in order to communicate?
• We need to be developing digital citizenship skills and courses within schools, starting once again at the Primary/Elementary school level. It is so important to be able to work professionally online and to understand the dynamics of online communication. This does not come easily to most beginners. Students who are perhaps used to being online via Facebook or MySpace have a perspective of how to be social but not professional online communicators. There is a difference and we need to highlight this.
• We need to be investigating sustainability of online spaces and archiving successfully projects and collaborations. Currently we use wikispaces and ning (amongst others of course)....will these still be around in 5 years time? If not, what happens to the amazing content and productivity from classrooms all around the world? Will it be lost for ever?

I have a strong belief in the power of online connectivity and global collaboration (in all of it's many forms) at the school level to make a difference to the world we live in through fostering better understanding and cultural awareness. These are not just words. I have seen this happen through the projects I have run with my own classes.

What is your 2020 vision for global collaboration? Do you have a global collaboration on your horizon?
I invite you to join our Flat Classroom Ning, Horizon Project Ning and also to have a look at our current project just starting, Horizon Project 2008, where we have 11 classrooms and over 250 students from Australia, Austria, Japan, Spain, Qatar and the USA.

Julie Lindsay, guest blogger

Technorati Tags: flatclassroom flatclassroomproject horizonproject horizonproject2008 iearn globalschoolnet cyberfair ning wikispaces kimcofino karlfisch vickidavis

My Life in Qatar: A Tall Spike in an Unflat World?

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

This is my third blog post as the guest of the week so I thought it was time I introduced myself a little more and talked about where I currently live and work. As you can tell by my accent, I am from Melbourne, Australia but have been working and traveling as an international educator for over 10 years, along with my husband (mathematics teacher) and daughter (just hit the terrible teen years!). Places I have worked are Zambia, Kuwait, Bangladesh and now Qatar. Being our first year in Qatar we are finding our new school, Qatar Academy, challenging in many ways. However I am finding my new position as Head of Information Technology and E-Learning to be a wonderfully rewarding experience with lots of amazing opportunities to contribute to the growth of the school.

I am also responding to Scott's post earlier today, The World is Spiky, where he shares some interesting insights from Richard Florida's new book Who's your city. From reading the words of Florida I think Qatar is in fact a 'tall spike' in an unflat world. Definition of this: "the tallest spikes that attract global talent, generate knowledge, and produce the lion's share of global innovation."
Qatar is an amazing place to be working right now. I found a blog post from last September after just arriving on 'Sharing an amazing vision in Qatar' in which I wrote:

Here in Qatar I work at Qatar Academy, a PreK-12 school now delivering the IBO curriculum across all levels (PYP, MYP and DP) which is located on Education City, a large campus on the outskirts of Doha. However I work for Qatar Foundation (QF) for Education, Science and Community Development. QF represents the innovation and creativity of His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar. QF is a non-profit organisation and was founded in 1995, and Education City is their flagship.

I also wrote:

The vision and commitment to excellence in education here is amazing. The money being spent and the rate of development is staggering. QF is the driving force behind the countries commitment to education and to Qatar becoming one of the most developed knowledge-based societies around the world. To do this they are partnering with international educational institutions, supporting higher research and contributing to community health and development programs. Her Highness, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned, Consort of His Highness, serves as the chairperson of QF and personally guides the organisation with passion, vision and enthusiasm.

Since September the pace of change and development has increased if anything. Education City is like a construction zone, with a new academic medical center, a new library, a new convention center, an amazing equestrian center and many other buildings going up....and fast! In a recent article in the New York Times talking about the rush of American universities to set up in global locations it stated:

And many are now considering full-fledged foreign branch campuses, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university without the expense, culture shock or post-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America.

At Education City in Doha, Qatar’s capital, they can study medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, international affairs at Georgetown, computer science and business at Carnegie Mellon, fine arts at Virginia Commonwealth, engineering at Texas A&M, and soon, journalism at Northwestern.

And yet another article from the NY Times:

Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas, has fast become the elite of Qatari education, a sort of local Ivy League. But the five American schools have started small, with only about 300 slots among them for next year’s entering classes.

Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, after a recent trip to Doha commented:

In Doha, since I was last there, a skyline that looks like a mini-Manhattan has sprouted from the desert. Whatever construction cranes are not in China must be in Doha today. This once sleepy harbor now has a profile of skyscrapers, thanks to a huge injection of oil and gas revenues.

Then there are the other Qatari government initiatives in education from ICT Qatar that include e-Education and the e-Schoolbag program amongst other programs. I visited the new boys school rolling out the e-Schoolbag Tablet PC implementation and was duly impressed. There are many international consultants and educators currently working in Qatar, advising the government and supporting the vision with extra expertise and knowledge.

Qatar is determined to be a 'knowledge society' and with that vision in mind are carefully planning their approach to education. Yes, this is the Middle East and there are certain cultural sensitivities (aren't there any where in the world?) however I am finding a certain liberal attitude and a genuine desire to move forward. At a recent parent-teacher conference (Qatar Academy has about 85% Arabic students) I was pleasantly surprised at the friendly parents who not only wanted to shake my hand (remember that it is not always acceptable for men to shake a woman's hand here) but also called me by my first name.

So what does this all mean for the rest of the world?......well I suggest you all keep a close eye on Qatar. This is not a flash in the pan, this is a carefully calculated and planned development that is already making waves and impacting around the world. We have Al Jazeera news, we have Doha Debates, we had the Asian games 2006 and we are bidding for the Olympics for 2016. We have a clean city (I have just been to Mumbai and was brought back to the reality of a large, dirty city..what does Florida call them? 'third-world megacities'), albeit a little sandy some days. Qatar really is a 'tall spike in an unflat world' and despite the environmental concerns caused by over-indulgence (thanks Tom for reminding us), it is a beehive for creativity, innovation and 21st century thinking.

In the words of Sheikha Mozah:
"Today we plant seeds, tomorrow we open frontiers, tomorrow is rooted here".

Photo of Doha city skyline, taken late 2007

Animoto of a recent 'dune bashing' trip in the desert

Julie Lindsay, guest blogger

Technorati Tags: qatar thomasfriedman richardflorida qataracademy qatarfoundation doha

What's Worth Fighting For in Your School?

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

Change is a process in a school. Change is neither good nor bad but just is. Rapid change can cause discomfort and upset. No change can also cause discomfort and upset. Any educational institution that is not going through some form of change right now is possible missing the boat, or at least missing the opportunity to create their own boat and sail on the sea of individualized, student-centered, technology embedded learning.

In the international school world change often comes in measured doses lasting for the length of a contract (2 years minimum usually). Change can be personality driven, more rapid and possibly more adhoc in this realm of education given the desire of individuals to want to make their mark and then move onto another international school and start the process again. For the vast majority of expatriate teachers the results of visionary new programs and curriculum implementations will not be fully seen by the instigators, as they will be long gone, with new teachers and administrators in place trying to move forward with an altered vision, a newly tweaked plan and new enthusiasm. This is not abnormal and yet it can be frustrating for the school as a whole as programs come and go and initiatives are sparked and then put out.

A colleague lent me a book last week called "What's worth fighting for in your school?" Published in 1996, it talks about the culture of a school and transforming schools into better places. It got me thinking about how teaching can be a lonely profession and that building the culture of collaboration is a challenge. It also got me to thinking about how now, 12 years later, what has changed are the tools that we now use to foster collaboration but not necessarily the conditions under which collaboration, risk-taking and change can successfully take place. So what are these essential conditions for success within a school that are worth fighting for in the environment of 21st century learning?

At a recent conference, the  ECIS / ISTE IT Leadership conference, in Prague other IT leaders along with ISTE leaders Don Knezek and Lynn Nolan, discussed essential conditions for successful change and how these can be extrapolated into a leadership action plan. This is my summary/interpretation and what I think is worth fighting for in my school:

• A shared vision: what has shifted in education over the past five years and how has technology advanced and supported this? Proactive leadership can bring together a school community to share a vision for transforming learning.
• Strategic planning: systemic and aligned with a shared vision for school effectiveness and student learning through the infusion of technology and digital resources
• Understanding learning and leading in a digital age: It is through better understanding of how learners have changed, how the learning environment has changed, how the curriculum has changed that we can best plan for effective reform across the school
• Professional learning communities: now this is one I am already fighting for. Encouraging conversations, supporting adoption of new techniques, encouraging sharing of ideas, resources and best-practice
• One-to-one computing: mobility and ubiquity is the only way to go but this needs to be supported through funding for devices and for professional development. Not everyone yet sees the value in having a computing tool in hand
• Online learning community: for students, for teachers, for administrators and for the wider school community. This can be fostered through supporting technologies including Web 2.0 tools. However the tool is insignificant (to an extent), it is the interaction and potential for continuous improvement and perpetual learning that is the ultimate promise here
• Team-based professional development: Social learning and community-based exploration of new ideas for learning
• Sustainability: OK, this is a big one. We need to build in sustainability so that valid programs are able to survive leadership and other changes. At the same time we need to build in flexibility so that plans can be tweaked if needed to cater for changing technologies, local emphasis etc.

I was reminded coincidently today of a video a student in my class in Bangladesh created for the Horizon Project 2007. If you overlook some poor technical quality, ESL spelling and grammar and actually absorb the message this video has a lot to say about change, where we have come from with educational technology and where we could be going. Called 'The Future is Now', it was part of the 'User created content' section of the project.

From the book again:
"What is worth fighting for is not to allow our organizations to be negative by default but to make them positive by design"

What do you think is worth fighting for in your school?

Julie Lindsay, Guest blogger

Technorati Tags: horizonproject2007 donknezek lynnnolan iste ecis

Conference 2.0: The Global Stage Awaits

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

My life as an international educator is bursting with exciting opportunities and experiences. Being a guest blogger for Dr Scott McLeod is one challenge I have been looking forward to. As a leader in educational technology I blog about my own journey in the classroom as well as interactions and collaborations with colleagues around the world and try to make sense of the changing learning landscape.

Recently I have had the opportunity to attend in person conferences in Madrid, Prague and Mumbai. I have also been able to attend virtually a number of online events/conferences, in particular EduCon 2.0, where I was Skyped in by George Mayo to discuss global collaboration and the amazing CUE 2008 this past weekend where I was Skyped in by Steve Hargadon to a session discussing Web 2.0 in Education.  I have been reflecting on what it means to be a 21st century conference attendee and presenter at, as it is being called, Conference 2.0. Gone are the days when information is only delivered via the conference presenter and only at the conference. Gone are the days where information is uni-directional and non-conversational. Gone are the days when information is delivered via hard-copy handout and boring bullet-points on a ubiquitous slideshow.

To be a leader in education today means to be a contributor, not a passive onlooker. A 'conference' opportunity is to be embraced for all of the dynamic cross-links and flowing ideas it brings. Let's use Web 2.0 tools and what ever else we can online to enhance and extend the experience and learning.

So what does a Conference 2.0 look like? On one level it has presenters who have set up learning experiences and objects ahead of time including posting resources online and organizing virtual input via Skype and chat etc. Let me tell a story here and then give credit to some great colleagues out there who are already writing about this in a more succinct way than I am.

My experience at the ASB Unplugged conference in Mumbai, India recently highlighted the need to be mobile, online and interacting at different levels. Connected to the WLAN and therefore with connectivity to the world (the only way to be at a conference!) I was able to 'moblog' to our school Ning (mobile blogging, or blogging on the run, a phrase coined by David Warlick I believe), Twitter, Google Chat and search for resource URLs as presenters mentioned them...all at the same time. In one session I remember Twittering with Kim Cofino, who was also attending a conference in Berlin, Germany, while at the same time chatting with Vicki Davis, who was also at a conference presenting on our Flat Classroom Project and more in Illinois ICE and wowing the crowd with her exemplary style and sharing her latest Zoho online material with me, while continuing to blog and interact with people back at Qatar Academy via the Ning and also with people around me re the current presentation in Mumbai.

What I really missed in Mumbai was what is called a 'backchannel' where the audience (real and virtual) can chat about the presentation. An effective way to do this is to have the backchannel (using a tool such as chatzy.com) projected onto the screen so the whole room can see what is being said (including the presenter) and react to it as needed. This method was also used by Karl Fisch, although using slightly different tools, for his fishbowl sessions with students and guests discussing Pink's 'A Whole New Mind' recently.

What I also miss at non-Conference 2.0 events is the use of RSS as the glue to bind us all together. Once again David Warlick leads the way with his hitchhikr.com conference aggregator. I need to know where I can find other blog posts, images, etc tagged for the events I am in. I need to know what the tagging standard is so I can use it. I feel this still has not caught on with educators around the world as it should have done.

I am in awe of the recent blog post by Steve Hargadon detailing his views and experiences with Conference 2.0 ideals and thoroughly  recommend his new wiki Conference 2.0 where, in typical Steve style he has provided a valuable resource and service for everyone to use when attending/presenting at a conference. Describing this wiki he states:

Web 2.0 has provided a number of opportunities for new collaborative events to take place at and around conferences. The events can enhance participants' connections, dialog, and engagement. Here are a number of these activities that can be planned specifically for educational technology.

A recent blog post "The Ultimate Conference Attendee" by Will Richardson, although a little esoteric, has similar sentiments.

So, it is true, the global stage does await every real and virtual attendee at a conference. There are opportunities to foster and continue conversations, make connections, squeeze the essence out of each session and breath life into the topic. Is this information overload? Is this too geeky for the average conference goer....well yes, maybe it is however let's lead the way, let's set the standards internationally and move beyond the static, dry, hard-copy handout, non-Internet based session that does not deserve to exist in the Conference 2.0 mode.

Julie Lindsay, Guest blogger

Technorati Tags: georgemayo stevehargadon conference20 asbunplugged davidwarlick twitter kimcofino vickidavis karlfisch willrichardson

Guest blogger - Julie Lindsay

We've had an incredible run of guest bloggers here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Many thanks to Jason Dyer, my latest guest, who sparked a lot of conversation and gave us much to think about regarding the intersections of math and technology.

My next guest is Julie Lindsay, the Head of Information Technology at Qatar Academy, who also somehow finds time to blog regularly at E-Learning Journeys. I had the pleasure of meeting (and making a podcast with) Julie at the ASB Unplugged conference in Mumbai, India. You can learn more about Julie by visiting her wiki. As you will see, she'll offer a rich international perspective to our discussions next week.

You can see the contributions of all of my guest bloggers by clicking on the Guest Bloggers category. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger yourself, let me know!

Whither Competition?

Now, this may seem like I'm contradicting the opinion of the guest blogger last week. However, I'm not referring to the endless pursuit of rankings and grades.

I'm meaning the fantastic things that can happen when competition is used as an instructional tool. I'm meaning having students race to solve puzzles, or sort number cards into Pythagorean triples. I'm meaning getting a wild energy in class, and having students speak up who never said a word before.

In most of the work on social technology I've been reading, it's paired with the word "cooperation". What happened to competition? Why is it so wrong?

This concerns me because mathematics is particularly suited to competition. Some competitions are downright legendary. Solving problems in high-level math competitions can lead to thinking that shatters the hierarchy of intelligences, creating wonderful things I still don't fully understand.

What's wrong with students competing to solve an Internet math hunt, or students challenging each to ever-harder problems?

I simply implore technology coordinators: please consider the possibilities competition can offer.

...

Goodness, it's been a week already? I feel like I've just nicked the surface of this territory. I'll try to continue with things I couldn't fit next week at my blog. I'd like to thank everyone for their comments; I learned much more than I ever suspected possible, and I'll be closely following this blog and others for new developments.

Jason Dyer, Guest Blogger

Mathematics En Masse

So far I've covered a technological and an ideological problem. This one's logistical.

Specifically, in a discipline where one question can have many answers, it's easy to set up a traditional forum discussion where every student's contribution is meaningful and a springboard for further interaction. One student's opinion does not make moot the opinion of anyone else.

With mathematics, even if the question is applied and relevant, quite often there is only one correct answer. So the traditional forum method can fail, since once one student posts the answer, there is no incentive for further discussion.

This can be solved by splitting -- having only individual answers or collaboration in small groups -- but this removes the very thing that makes social technology exciting: collective intelligence on a scale above what is possible with in-person interaction. Imagine, for instance, having a problem not just group-solved by your individual algebra class, but by every algebra class in a school.

There's ways around this, like:

1. Personalized data: Students might figure out the square area of a room in their house. So every student does their calculation on something different, and then statistical methods can be applied to the data as a whole.

2. Required estimates. In a mathematics modeling problem, students try to match real-world data with an equation. While there are "best-fit" equations this can be done by hand, so that there isn't one correct answer.

Unfortunately, neither method fully taps into the power of the group dynamic. The individual contributions don't rebound and augment each other like an open-ended discussion. So I'll ask: what are the best ways to set up a collaborative online assignment in mathematics?

The best solution I can think of is to get students to explain process. The class could essentially write its own textbook with a wiki; the assignment one week might be to finish the online explanation of graphing parabolas, and every student has to pitch in. I have yet to try something like this, so if anyone has, drop a line in the comments.

Jason Dyer, Guest Blogger

The Calculator Wars

The use of a graphing calculator is considered an integral part of the AP Calculus course, and is permissible on parts of the AP Calculus Exams. Students should use this technology on a regular basis so that they become adept at using their graphing calculators. Students should also have experience with the basic paper-and-pencil techniques of calculus and be able to apply them when technological tools are unavailable or inappropriate.

(From The College Board's AP Calculus calculator policy.)

Yesterday's post was about a sticky tech issue. This one's more about ideology.

Fierce debate raged in the 1990s over whether graphing calculators should be used in mathematics education at all. Proponents thought graphing calculators opened new vistas of understanding, as students could play and experiment, and see instantly how functions are affected by different tweaks. Detractors said graphing calculators killed the ability to work things out by hand; that they're a crux, and true understanding is only obtained by pencil-and-paper repetition of the proper methods.

Arguably, the issue ended (in the United States) with the AP test adoption of the graphing calculator. What resulted was a deeper and more difficult test; not only did students still need pencil and paper methods, but they had to apply the calculator to answer higher-level questions.

(No, not every student will make it to AP classes, but I believe curriculum should be written with the assumption that some will.)

However, the issue never truly died, because there was (and still is) a hidden ideological struggle going on:

Should our primary focus in algebra be on symbolic manipulation, or is visualization and synthesis an important aspect?

In other words, are graphical methods and applications just an afterthought?

While this doesn't seem to relate directly to social technology, the interesting enhancements computers can offer don't attract the interest of a symbolic-manipulation-only teacher. Alternately, graphing calculators can be thought of as the gateway application -- take a teacher comfortable with them, and it's easy to hook them on related Internet apps. For the Internet to be truly useful, teachers need to see there is a world beyond factoring binomials.

So, if you're a technology coordinator with a resistant math department, there's one question you might ask: are there teachers who haven't taken their class set of calculators out of their boxes? If so, there might be more going on than mere tech resistance.

Jason Dyer, Guest Blogger

On the Typesetting of Equations

Don't get me wrong: there are options to put equations on a computer. Most computers have at least Equation Editor if not MathType. Scholarly papers in mathematics often use LaTeX and it's also possible to blog LaTeX equations using Wordpress. I have used these before (my Pre-Calculus students are currently working on blog posts with LaTeX equations) and they are fine in their own context.

However, I consider these typesetting solutions. What I mean is most closely analogous to the difference between a word processor and a desktop publisher. In a word processor the text can be played with, experimented with, refurbished and remodeled in a manner easier than even pencil and paper. The layout of the text, however, is secondary. With a desktop publisher the placement of text is key, or at least a distraction to a student still trying to figure out their sentences need verbs.

In the course of a normal math class, parts of equations need to be crossed out, circled, arrowed, underlined, and spaced out. When I laid out my solution to a general conic, I couldn't use just an equation editor; I had to manipulate the parts in an image editor.

To put it another way, it's difficult to think the equations directly to the computer screen; sometimes I have to work things out on paper first and then translate them visually. That's hardly conducive to a live collaboration. It's certainly still possible, but the pragmatic teacher has to ask if the loss of fluidity is worth the gain of remote interaction.

(Before you post about your brilliant online class and how everything is done on computer, keep in mind I am simply trying to explain where objections are coming from. I'm hoping it's clear at least why the hurdle for mathematics is different than for language-based curriculum. Now, if you've seen these problems and have found neat ways for getting around them, post away.)

There are ways with technology to translate writing directly to digital form; on a SMART Board or a digital writing device. Some teachers will upload their SMART Board presentation to the Internet immediately after class, including any writing that happened. If anyone has done a particular lesson with these tools, feel free to share your ideas.

The ideal would be for the word processing equivalent of an equation editor. I'm not sure how that'd work; somehow it have to include the crossing out, circling, arrows and so forth we have students do in an entirely natural manner. There wouldn't just be the ability just to write equations line by line as in a textbook, but to drop a single row and move a variable by using the inverse without any worry of typesetting. Take a look at my general conics example again; if that sort of layout could be done easily, with just natural typing, mathematics teachers would flock to your door.

Jason Dyer, Guest Blogger

A Clarification on Mathematics Technology

Before I go on, I need to clarify something: I am addressing the use of social technology, not technology in general. (Although an aversion to technology in general is related to my graphing calculator point.) My example of a tech cynic is not a technophobe by any means. I am referring to what is supposedly the "new wave" of blogs, Twitter, wikis, and so forth. Additionally while it could be argued math teachers in the United States don't use enough of it, I am not discussing project-based curriculum. That's been around for a long time and while it can be augmented by new technology, being a technophobe (by any definition) doesn't mean shunning it either. So while a comment like (courtesy Glenn)

If the something that you're asking them to do is take a test. Well. Never mind. Sorry, didn't mean to waste your time.

might apply to some teachers, I am presuming a faculty past that point but yet fussy about all the new gadgets being thrown at them. I am trying to explain why they're fussy, and that it's not just because their teaching isn't Modern enough in an overall sense.

Jason Dyer, Guest Blogger

Idealism and Reality in Mathematics Technology

So, you’re making your technology pitch to the school. You’ve just been to the conference and still feel the warm buzz of The Future, and you want the teachers to embrace the blogs, the wikis, the collaboration with schools in different cities, different states, different continents.

Then you meet resistance.

You up your game: you set up workshops, seminars, buy new software, buy new hardware, try to convert a few followers hoping entire departments will follow.

Maybe you grab the English department and suddenly have every student in school with their own blog. Perhaps the technology people are putting student-produced videos on YouTube. You hear the foreign language folks are using Skype to call Mexico and work with a network of 5 classes.

(Ok, ok, idealism here. But these things are at least possible.)

But hit the math department –

And all I’m saying is, look, I’ve got some math to teach over here. And until I can count on two fingers the number of math teachers who are building a meaningful practice out of tech, until this stuff begins to approximate the importance of a cash register to a grocery store checker . . .

which is the good reaction. (Quote from Dan Meyer.)

A lot of technology-coordination-types seem puzzled by this – why should math be any different from other subjects when adopting modern tech? – but it is, and there are (at least) three major reasons why.

The difficulty in working with equations on a computer

Sure, high school math teachers do statistics, and graphs, and even the occasional art project, but the meat of the content is working with equations. Even something easy to type like

Solve for x: 2+x = 3

can be a bear to demonstrate the steps on, and maybe could be done with fixed fonts and a fiddle like

2+x=3
-2  -2
  x=1

but this is a post-understanding sort of kludge, and it’s not simply possible to work with things as easily as paper.

Students 3.0

The first graphing calculator was introduced in 1985, and it’s been a battle ever since.

One camp is fundamentally opposed to the notion of using graphing calculators, while the others think graphing calculators should be used at every level. This is still ongoing even though the AP Calculus tests require a graphing calculator and college expects students to arrive with the skills. (At one university I know of, they give incoming students a list of calculator tasks and say “if you don’t know how to do these, figure it out, because we’re not going to teach you.”)

Because the acceptance of graphing calculators is nearly a prerequisite for many modern math apps, arguments get stalled at the door. In other words, upgrading to wikis and the like is version 3.0, and 2.0 is still in beta.

Sometimes there really is only one right answer

With disciplines where multiple viewpoints are all equally valid, it's easy to have a collaborative discussion where every contribution is valued and important. When solving a problem with only one right answer, snarls can hit. Maybe one student dominates the discussion, or things shut down too early, or everyone is stuck in a way that requires massive teacher intervention. These issues often aren't discussed, and the edict to focus on process rather than solution gets messy in practice. (Although it's a start, and even if there's only one solution there may be multiple ways to get there.)

How this week will roll

I’m going to switch between general assessments of what’s going on and specific examples. I’m going to make a wish list for what I'd like to see in modern technology, because my sentiments match closely with the quote above.

I'm going to need your help. Some things I'm wanting really don't exist, but I'm hoping there's hidden gems out there I haven't come across yet. If nothing else, maybe a developer will take notice and fill the gaps.

Jason Dyer, Guest Blogger

Where I'm Coming From

My run officially starts tomorrow, but I wanted to get my standpoint up.

I'm a high school mathematics teacher, and I focus on my class. I spend most of my time thinking about curriculum, not theory. I take a pragmatic approach and always ask, primarily: does it work?

However, I'm willing to try anything once. So I'm going to break open this week and take on one of the Big Issues: why is it so hard for mathematics teachers in particular to use social technology, and what's needed to fix the problems? Mathematics teachers are often frustrated, because the generalizations about social technology don't answer the question: so what do I do with it? There's a lot of technology coordinators out there (greetings!) and I want to bridge the gap, so you understand where we're coming from.

I believe both tech optimism and tech pessimism are dangerous. Too much optimism can blind one to failure, and too much pessimism can cause something to be discarded after only a single failure (when all it needed was a retooling). I'll be aiming at the middle road, trying to balance practical reality and unrealized potential.

I'll be out of my element, but feel free to compliment or criticize or add or subtract. I'm not going to have all the answers alone, but maybe together we can work this out.

Jason Dyer, Guest Blogger

Open Thread: Square Pegs

Aside from serving as one of two Assistant Principals in my high school, I am also lucky enough to supervise three departments, one of which is Special Education.  I do not manage IEPs, conduct testing, or get involved in the legalities of Special Education.  I merely manage the day to day happenings with the Special Education staff, work with the scheduling and budgets, and assist the Director of Special Services and Child Study Team.  I wish I had time to do more.

I have worked in three school districts in the last eight years.  I am embarrassed to say that the Special Education programs have all been rather disappointing.  I've seen watered down curriculum where handouts and worksheets are the standard of classroom practice.  I've had conversations with Special Education teachers and heard some sad educational philosophies regarding Special Education students.  I've seen and heard some unethical things in the highest offices of public school districts - things that would cost people their careers.

On the flip side, I've met (and currently work with) some of the best people for Special Education students; they are supportive, encouraging, and serve as life coaches and mentors for their students.  They desire to be the best teachers they can for their kids.  I've also been blessed to have strong school leadership role models in my life who keep me hopeful and guide me through the rough waters of Special Education law, practices, and education. 

Since this is my last post for Dr. McLeod, I thought it would be helpful and intriguing for all of us if we left an open thread (a la Beyond School's popular one).  Open threads seems to me to be chock full of good advice, insight, and some remarkable stories.

So here it goes...

What practices have you seen in your experiences with Special Education?  You can discuss a Special Education program that is worthy of publicity, or a teaching practice that deserves attention.  If you are tempted to expose the troubles of Special Education, you may - but I would like this post to be helpful, not critical.  So please, with a criticism, offer a potential solution.
   

It's been an honor to share with all of you. Mike Parent, Guest Blogger

Guest blogger - Jason Dyer

Mike Parent has done a fantastic job this week of guest blogging. If you like what you've read from Mike, check out his blog, The Schoolhouse Dissident.

Jason Dyer will be my next guest blogger in 2008. I asked Jason for a short blurb about himself. Here’s what he sent me:

Jason Dyer started out with a degree in Fine Arts Studies, intertwining music, media arts, and computer science. After the dot-com crash of 2000, he picked up a mathematics degree and now teaches high school in Arizona. He still has a soft spot for his multimedia roots and has movie posters hanging on his classroom wall. The school mascot is the Warriors and his normal blog of residence is The Number Warrior.

Jason has an ambitious series of posts for us next week and I’m looking forward to reading his thoughts on math, education, and leadership. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, let me know!

No Need for "Brown Eyes"

Thus far, I have posted about educational conspiracy, challenging the competitive nature of schools, and assessing assessments.  What follows is a topic near and dear to everyone's career and workplace.  This is a post I have been looking forward to sharing with all of you.  It's a bit lighthearted, but a serious topic for school leadership.

Let me begin with a disclaimer.  A tantalizing and possibly offensive word will be used throughout this post.  The word is not common to the professional language of Dr. McLeod or his readers.  However, since I will be using the word in the context of a theory, it should be understood that I am not trying to be edgy or shocking.  I am merely using the word for purpose of clarity.

The day before Christmas break I am browsing through a book store looking for a good gift for my principal.  In the management section I spot a small book with an intriguing title - The No Asshole Rule.  I first think this must be some kind of gag gift.  But a ten-minute perusing of the book tells me something else.  The author, Robert Sutton, is a well known and respected writer.  He's not joking here.  He is only using the lay terminology for "difficult people", "hardened hearts", or "combative individuals".  I bought The No Asshole Rule (TNAR) for my principal, and a copy for myself.  Now we're both equipped to handle this obnoxious faculty member.

TNAR is a much needed common language leadership book.  I know many of as are fans of many different education leadership authors (Fullan, Heifetz, Wheatley, and Gardner) .  These books are chock full of ideas, principles, and theories that are sound, sensible, and applicable.  But Sutton is onto something different here.  His deliberate use of the word "asshole" to describe those - well, assholes - that we work with, sit through meetings with, receive directives from, and must collaborate with every day, is refreshing.

Though TNAR is written mainly for those employed in the private sector (where hiring and firing is fast and furious - unlike public education), it does have some practical applications for schools.

For instance, how many administrators, teachers, or staff members have you worked with or encountered that have indulged in Dr. Sutton's "Dirty Dozen" list of actions that assholes use?

1. Personal insults
2. Invading one's personal territory
3. Uninvited personal contact
4. Threats and intimidation, both verbal and non-verbal
5. Sarcastic jokes and teasing used as insult-delivery systems
6. Withering e-mail flames
7. Status slaps intended to humiliate their victims
8. Public shaming or status-degradation rituals
9. Rude interruptions
10. Two-faced attacks
11. Dirty looks
12. Treating people as if they are invisible.

Check out Dr. Sutton for yourself.

A few things anyone can take from this book are Sutton's suggestions on dealing with assholes you can't get rid of:

1. Deal with their asshole behavior immediately and make it known that you did.  Don't let asshole behavior go on.  Even if it hurts to confront an asshole, do it for the greater good of the organization.  People are watching to see how you react to the known asshole.
2. Marginalize them.  Make them irrelevant and their influence minimal.
3. Don't be confrontational with assholes, but don't be a doormat either. 

His final word of advice is one that we should all take to heart.  Don't hire assholes.  Those of us in positions of authority to hire faculty, administrators, and staff must seriously consider candidate's personality as much as we consider their knowledge and ability.  I'll remember that as we begin our annual hiring carnival this Spring and Summer.

Lastly, Sutton's book will give you some great tips on how to deal with those pesky, pernicious, parents whom we lovingly call (in the copy room) "assholes".

PS- Just for fun: take the asshole quiz.

Mike Parent - guest blogger

 

Assessing Assessments

This is not an advertisement for The Education Trust, nor is it an endorsement of all that The Education Trust stands for.  This post is merely my commentary on one aspect of The Education Trust's practices - assessing standards in practice.

In 2003, I was working at a semi-urban high school near Paterson, NJ.  Our school was seeing a major transition in demographics; more ELL students, Hispanic students, and first generation Muslim-Americans were enrolling.  It was a regional high school, so we did not have a handle on the K-8 curriculum.  Basically, what we were sent, we had to deal with.  Literacy rates were suffering and our students were in need of more basic reading and math skills.  In short, we were aware of the achievement gap that was present in our building; the honors courses and AP courses were completely Caucasian and the general level classes were nearly all minority.  We weren't ready for this.  We had no plan other than to offer the mundane BSI courses.  But a crafty Assistant Principal, Jim Jencarelli (who is now the Superintendent of a NJ high school) had the novel idea of bringing in The Education Trust to help us with our achievement gap problem, curriculum redesign, and shifting of paradigms.

One of the first things The Ed Trust does when they come in to your school/district is to meet with the teachers and administration to discuss their Standards In Practice protocol.  I can remember the meeting very vividly - teachers were appalled at the presenters statement that one reason an achievement gap exists is due to the pity parties that teachers have for minority students and students who have less than stable home lives.  In essence, teachers and schools do no students favors when they lower the expectations based on the perceived inabilities or emotional concerns that teachers and schools have for struggling students.  What the Ed Trust ultimately condones is the practice of teaching every child as if they were college preparatory material. 

Standards In Practice consists of the following (you can view Ed Trust's presentation below):

1. Creating teams of teachers to review, analyze, and critique assignments
2. Having these teams honestly look at the standards (usually state standards) and see if their assignments reach the expectation, or fall short.  (NOTE: you would be surprised how many tests and quizzes are comprised of recall and rote questions.)
3. A rubric is followed whereby the assessment is measured.  If need be, the assessment must be redesigned to meet the standards.
4. The teams meet regularly and each team member is on the "hot seat" - no one is immune from the clinical exercise.

| View | Upload your own

What I found most intriguing about Standards In Practice was not the protocol.  Of course I learned a lot from the exercise (I disappointingly found that my assessments were far too "dumbed down") and gained insight into how to construct rigorous assessments, which, in turn, forced me to redesign my approach to students, lessons, and teaching.  No, what intrigued me most was the philosophy of the Education Trust.

Ed Trust is committed to narrowing the great divide between minority students and others.  I can't tell you angry I get when I see school leadership revel in the glory of "beating" other schools at high stakes testing.  I take no pride in the following facts:

• 32% of White adults (ages 16-65) read at the Basic or Below Basic proficiency in Prose literacy. (2003)
• 67% of Black adults (ages 16-65) read at the basic or Below Basic proficiency in Prose literacy. (2003)
• 53% of Hispanic adults (ages 16-65) read at the basic or Below Basic proficiency in Prose literacy. (2003)

Notes: Prose literacy refers to the knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts. Source: NCES Table 379.

What I have come to understand is that while we scurry to find new ways to meet AYP, get our students over the hump, and keep our schools out of the editorial pages, there is a quiet epidemic of illiteracy spreading in our urban schools.  The Education Trust (while not completely perfect) is trying to address the issue through their programs and protocols.  They seek to shift the paradigm of teachers and schools, not throw money at the urban schools and hope that a miracle happens. 

For my part, I can say that The Education Trust shifted my paradigm.  I now see the problem and a potential means of addressing the problem.

Whatever happened to that high school I worked at in 2003 where we brought in the Education Trust?  The Principal and Superintendent though it was too expensive and unnecessary.  Jim and I left for brighter futures and more open minds.  Yet, we are both committed to bridging the achievement gap... however, I now know that the achievement gap is a symptom of nothing more than institutional racism.  When any school thinks that a curriculum must be watered down in order to help the minority student, simply because that student comes from a family or neighborhood that is less desirable, then that school is acting in a nearly criminal manner.

Please examine your state's literacy rates.  Is there a widening literacy deficit?  Are you in a school or district that seems to have more than a fair share of minority students either classified as LD or stuck in Basic Skills?  Once you have that answer, ask yourself if your school or district assesses students to the standard set forth by your state or county?  How much rote and recall do you see in your classrooms?

Mike Parent - guest blogger

It's About Quality, Not Victory

What follows is an actual conversation between me and a dear friend who is also an administrative colleague. His name has not been changed, since he is guilty and cannot be protected like the innocent.

Setting: About four o'clock on a wintry afternoon in Vice-Principal Jim's office in NJ.  The office's aged, mint green walls are adorned with motivational quotes from great NFL, NBA, and MLB coaches.

ME: "So Jim, what do you think the Superintendent is going to say about the proposed change to the school's grade scale?"

JIM: "You know what, whatever gets the kids working harder.  I just think the weighting of AP and Honors courses is going to throw off the ranking system."

ME: "Good.  The ranking thing should go.  We're not about competition - we're about learning.  If it were up to me, I'd do away with grades, scales, ranking... all that."

JIM: "You're nuts!  We have to keep ranks and grades.  How else do we know who is doing better or well in a subject?  And we rank to see who is the best in the class.  Besides, competition is good for kids.  They have to compete to get into college."

ME: "So you're saying that it's okay to have a number one student?  That means, Jim, that to have a number one, there must be a number two, then a three, and so on.  You're saying it's okay to have kids at number 100?  We shouldn't have them compete, we should have them collaborate and learn.  The weak helped by the strong.  Competition is for the field, not the classroom."

JIM: "That's why I'll never work for you at a school you run."

I love Jim.  He's an honest man, a good father, a great mentor for lost adolescents.  But he's dead wrong about competition in the schoolhouse.   To make him upset and aggravated,  I sometimes use facts and ideas from Alfie Kohn to combat his arguments.  Jim listens, but thinks I am  too rebellious for my own good.

One article from Mr. Kohn that I use frequently to argue my point about the need to eliminate competition from the schoolhouse is entitled "Against “Competitiveness”: Why Good Teachers Aren’t Thinking About the Global   Economy".  It appeared in the September 19, 2007 edition of Education Week.

Janet Swenson at Michigan State University points out that   “we’ll all benefit from the best education we can provide to every child on   the face of this planet.  Do you care if it’s a child in Africa who finds a   cure for cancer rather than a child in your country?” she asks.

Bravo Ms. Swenson.  When NCLB was proudly announced as the law of the land, schoolhouses became battlegrounds; each school district against another, each factor grouping against another, each state against another - which really only translates into each child against the other.  NCLB may have "raised the bar" (whatever that means), but it also made schools places of gaming, not learning. 

And now for my close-to-home moment.  Try not to gag or vomit on your keyboard when you read the comments of one Dr. Larrie Reynolds, Superintendent of NJ's Pequannock Schools.  Dr. Reynolds is a newly hired Superintendent from the great state of Texas (known for its educational leadership, of course).  Mr. Reynolds was featured in the February 18 Bergen Record.  The title of the story: "Pequannock Goes For Gold".  Here are some excerpts.

The Gold Academy will be the most rigorous and selective program the high school has to offer. It's more selective than honors classes, which require only a teacher's recommendation.

It was designed to address concerns that some of the best students leave the district after middle school for private schools.

"That is why our high school scores are not very good, or not as good as they should be,'' Reynolds said.

Wait, there's more...

He heard that 22 eighth-graders were considering leaving the district in the next school year. In the last four years, 64 students, 10 percent of the high school enrollment, left for private schools.

"If those 64 students were still in our high school, how would our high school have been different?'' Reynolds said.

"I suspect we would have had better achievement results, higher SAT scores, we'd have better results in the classrooms,'' he said. "We would have had a better school.''

He ends his unbelievable comments with this:

"If we can celebrate and recognize and honor talent on the athletic field, then public schools had better be willing to do the same thing on the academic field,'' Reynolds said. "In many ways, it's more important.''

Rumor has it that if you call Pequannock Schools, you will be greeted by the salutation "Pequannock Schools, striving to be number one...".  Apparently, this is what anyone who answers a phone in Pequannock is ordered, by Dr. Reynolds, to say. 

So what do we do about ranking and competition in classrooms, in schools, in districts, in states, in our country?  Do we just ignore it and accept it?  Apparently so.  Not many states have given back the ransom cash Washington D.C. ponied up to get us to buy into NCLB.  Not many schools have stopped the practice of ranking students.  Monthly and weekly publications still sell out copies of the issues that rank colleges, universities, and high schools (NJ is famous for its yearly ranking magazine articles).  I think we like it.  We are Americans; we are supposed to thrive on competition.  The problem is, I don't see where the competition is taking us. Or maybe I do - and that's what I can't tolerate.

As you embark on your journey to school today, I ask you one question.  Did you eat your Wheaties?

~ Mike Parent - guest blogger

What Have We Become?

One could hardly call me a conspiracy theorist;  I don't put much stock in Area 51 theories, alternate possibilities of the JFK assassination, or any such popular underground thoughts.  But I do believe that American Public Education has been usurped.

John Taylor Gatto's "Some Lessons From The Underground History of American Education" appeared in the 2002 edition of Everything You Know Is Wrong (EYNIW).  The EYNIW synopsis outlines the original intent of education and the historical (widely secret) events that have shaped what we now consider education's purpose to be.  Educational institutions began as places where intellectual curiosity, worldliness, and spirituality were explored, fed, and cultivated.  Yes, they were bastions for the elite and public schools originally were established to counter the elitists.  But something went very wrong in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Gatto writes that public education had become the vehicle for social management and the premiere institution for societal construction where the commoner was to be kept common.  Since Reconstruction, public education has become merely an extension of both private industry and government.  Gatto utilizes the words of famed educators like Ellwood P. Cubberely, Edward Thorndike, and Benjamin Bloom and others to make his case.  To maximize his point that public education was forged into a social engineering tool for the commoners, Gatto provides some startling quotes:

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata,careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow, the prescribed custom.  This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." ~ William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education 1889-1906

"...We shall not try to make these people [the lower and middle classes] or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.  We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters.  We shall not search for the embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply.  The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way." Rockefeller's General Education Board, Occasional Letter Number One, 1906.

These men, their publications, and the reform movements birthed from their ideas has essentially taken education to a place that centers on creating good common citizens, productive workers, and contributors to the status quo.  If you think otherwise, just read your district's - or any public school district's - mission statement.  Is the phrase "productive citizen" or the word "citizen" present? These are the remnants of said philosophies.

Gatto's work (available online) resonates with me and many others who have a deep sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the aim of our public education system.  Those of us who reject the idea that schools are to first and foremost produce good citizens and skilled workers are increasingly being marginalized by the "great machine" -  a term I use for the seemingly unstoppable train of political movements, think tanks, boards of education, and state organizations who seek to hold schools accountable (particularly high schools) as training grounds and indoctrination camps.  A close-to-home case in point:

The New Jersey High School Redesign Steering Committee is "...composed of the leadership of New Jersey’s major education organizations, is working to build public awareness and support for a more rigorous high school experience, one that allows students to succeed in the workforce or in pursuing higher education... The Steering Committee grew out of the New Jersey Education Summit on High Schools convened in 2005 and supports the work begun at the National Education Summit on High Schools held in Washington, DC in February of that year. The Steering Committee is co-chaired by New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine, Prudential Financial Chairman and CEO Arthur F. Ryan, and Montclair State University President Susan A. Cole and is composed of the leadership of New Jersey’s major education organizations."

The Committee was formed a few years ago to address the perceived inadequacies of NJ high schools as preparatory institutions for the workplace.  The Committee claims that though NJ high schools may be graduating over 90% of their students, have  "good" SAT scores, and have a high number of students going on to  post-secondary education, we are not producing good workers.    They tell the public (at their numerous public meetings) that NJ businesses are facing certain outsourcing of jobs - not because of the economic realities of the "flat world" - but because our students are not skilled enough.  The Committee's aim is to hold high schools to a higher industrial standard; produce better workers, produce a better middle class, produce better earners.  The Committee has a plan - to institute Regents-style exit exams in math, science, and language arts and to have students partake in workplace readiness activities in high school. 

As a high school administrator in NJ, this is my new professional reality.  This is what my government says my new mission as an educator is to be.  I should not think of creativity, of cultivating a love of learning and life for my students, of offering my students opportunities for personal and spiritual growth.  I am to make good workers of them.  I am to foster a stronger middle class.  I am to produce producers - not inspire or lead students to self actualization... not unless the leading leads to a good job.

Public education has been hijacked.  Not in this generation, but many moons ago when compulsory education was legislated.  The public scorn for mandatory education was so strong, Bruce Curtis, in his book Building The Education State 1836-1871, notes that:

"Many schools were burned to the ground and teachers run out of town by angry mobs. When students were kept after school,  parents often broke into school to free them. At Saltfleet Township in 1859 a teacher was locked in the schoolhouse by students who "threw mud and mire into his face and over his clothes,"  according to the school records---while parents egged them on."

As a result of generations of social engineering, it is no wonder the homeschooling movement has become so popular.  Many parents have rejected the government's means to and end and the end to those means.  Private schooling, too, is an alternative for the disenchanted - though, admittedly, many private schools are also guilty of the same sins of public education.

As and education leader, I face a dilemma.  How do I swim in the current of the public school agenda while holding true to my deepest convictions about children, learning, and the point of learning?  How do you?

- Mike Parent, guest blogger

Guest blogger - Mike Parent

Justin Medved and Dennis Harter have done fabulous jobs this week as my guest bloggers. I appreciate their willingness to contribute to this community! My next guest will be Mike Parent. I asked Mike for a short blurb about himself. Here’s what he sent me:

I'm married to a wonderfully supportive woman and I am the father of two boys (our third son is due February 28), all of whom give my life purpose and meaning.

Professionally, I'm an Assistant Principal and Supervisor for Music, World Languages, and Special Education in a Bergen County, NJ high school. Primarily I deal with discipline issues ranging from the mundane to the unbelievable, however I also engross myself into curriculum issues and technology teaching to keep my sanity. I truly enjoy my work; the students, my administrative teammates, and my faculty are very supportive and a pleasure to share time with.

I suppose anyone who has worked with me will call me a dreamer (sometimes in the most derogatory sense of the word); I believe a radical and risky overhaul of "the system" must occur if we want to keep public schooling relevant and alive. In the most base terms, I dream of (and work toward) an equitable, technology laden, intellectually rigorous, student-supportive, grade-free, ranking-free, community-collaborative, team-based, and child-loving school system. Call me crazy. I call me "Sisyphus."

Very cool! Mike will be blogging next week (a little close to that due date, Mike?!) and I am lining up some other guests on the calendar. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, let me know!

Part 5 - Moving forward - from rhetoric to reality.

So where do we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) go from here?

Over the past week we have taken some time to reflect on our process of creating a meaningful and usable framework for embedding "21st century literacy" into our school curriculum. Part 1, 2, 3, 4 sought to guide you the reader through our thinking and seek out feedback and friendly criticism. Blogs are such a great venue for conversations like this.

Our final post asks for advice on how to make it a reality.

Our framework was designed with the International School of Bangkok and its teachers in mind. While we feel it could apply to any educational setting we are not bound by any external curricular limitations other than that which the International Baccalaureate sets out in grades 11 and 12.  Our school is heavily invested in the UBD (Understanding by Design) approach to unit/curriculum planning and as a result we have chosen to use "essential questions" to guide our framework.

To quote from an earlier post:

Looking at Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design approach to curriculum and unit design we liked how big "essential questions" and "enduring understandings" had helped us plan and design units when we were teaching math and social studies. What if this same "best practice" approach could be applied to the way technology was used and talked about in the classroom?  If this was good curricular design practice, why should technology and thinking curriculum be any different?  What if that same approach was used in the way we looked at connecting technology and learning across the curriculum? What if there were only a few manageable questions that even the most tech-resistant teacher could see value in?

Best practices regarding meaningful technology integration vary world wide. As technology is a real and relevant teaching and learning tool, we felt that our approach should leverage internationally-recognized best practices and current research if it was to truly gain acceptance in our school.  Whether you use the new NET Standards as a framework or something else, it is important that you meet your teachers where they are and stay consistent with what is accepted and established practice in your own school environments.

When we walk into school every day we are confident that kids are learning how to read, write, and do math.  Our teachers are trained to teach these subjects.  We trust in their professionalism and in the belief that these teachers want to prepare students for their futures. 

In our embedded curriculum model, we have tried to ensure that the nature of "what teachers have to teach" seems accessible to them and just as importantly doable - that the conversations involving technology are conversations that teachers are already having about truth, safety, communication, and collaboration.

But theory is not practice.

• What are the best ways to get teachers not only on board and trained, but fundamentally believing in the importance of including this curriculum into "the way they do business"?
• How do we get to a place where we have the same confidence in students learning information literacy skills as we do in the other subject areas?
• If your school is on the right track and doing this, how have you made it happen?
• What has been the tipping point to go from talking about it, to doing it?

This is where we want to go.  We would like your input.  It's time for the collective intelligence of the Web 2.0 world to kick in.

None of us is as good as all of us .

Please chime in.

Thanks for joining us this week.  In particular, thanks to Scott for lending us his audience. 

We've enjoyed the conversation.

Justin Medved, Dennis Harter, Guest Bloggers

Cross Posted at: Medagogy  and Thinking Allowed

Part 4 - Refining the idea and creating understanding

Yesterday we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) spoke about our efforts to broaden the conversation that we had been having within our department with our wider school and the leaders within it. It became very clear to us early on that unless there was a shared understanding of concepts like "21st century literacy" and why our classrooms needed to educate for it then we would be stuck in a curricular holding pattern. There is lots of talk about the need to broaden student literacy to encompass and address the skills needed to navigate the new visual and information landscape, but what does that look like in practice and how do you write it into the K-12 curriculum in a way that is manageable and meaningful. 

Our initial work led us to form five essential questions that we felt met the needs of a 21st century learner. It was our feeling that a curriculum focused on just five questions would be much more manageable for the average teacher. These questions speak to thinking, critically evaluating, analyzing, and communicating. They value responsible behavior and knowing yourself as a learner. In a world in which it is impossible to predict what technology children will be using as adults, it is the "answers" to these five questions that will provide students the opportunity to succeed and thrive in the 21st Century. The power of these Essential Questions, lie in their applicability to all ages and to discussion more important and broad than technology standing alone.

A grade 1 teacher can and should have valuable discussions with students about being safe or recognizing truthful information. Who are the people you trust? What about them makes you believe what they say? What makes one "source" more valuable than another? Those same questions can be asked throughout a child's schooling, but the answers begin to include more sources and more critical examination of their world. And eventually, they begin to include technology. If experimentation and data analysis is a way to know something is true, then you will have to learn how to use the technology needed to analyze that data. If being safe is valued, then learning about responsible use of social networking sites, issues of privacy, and web 2.0 technologies inevitably will be discussed at a time appropriate to students' use. It was our feeling that the broad nature of these questions makes them accessible to teachers whose responsibility it is to embed this curriculum into their students' learning.

Teachers believe that they can teach effective communication.

They don't believe they know much about PowerPoint.

Nor should effective communication be limited to a software title anyway. The answers to these Essential Questions are higher-order thinking skills and issues of global citizenship. These are the skills we NEED students to have and the ones that will serve them well once they leave the arena of formal education.

These were our beliefs and they had come from hours of conversation and reading about the subject. If we wanted to move our ideas forward others would have to own them as well. So we assembled some key players and leadership from around the school to come together to refine our idea.

Our google collaborative document was the perfect venue to allow this to happen. It was fascinating to watch as 12 people debated and edited the same document at the same time. What a powerful tool! Our first challenge was to answer the question "What do we want our students to learn?" Our framework provided much of this information, but it was also important to outline what we wanted our students to be once they finished at ISB. From the perspective of this framework we all agreed that the ideas could be synthesized down to three areas.

We wanted out students to be:

Effective Learners

Effective Communicators

Effective Collaborators

From this starting point and as a result of much discussion and collaboration, we all agreed that our ideas and five essential questions could be refined further down to three new questions.

How do I responsibly use information and communication to positively contribute to my world?

How do I effectively communicate?

How do I find and use information to construct meaning and solve problems?

With these questions we then proceeded to flesh out the enduring understandings that went with them. It was our feeling that these should always be evolving to address the changing face of communication, collaboration and information. The curriculum would be in constant beta. A testament to the ever expanding nature of the skills it was attempting to map.

What do you think?

Do the 3 questions miss anything?

Is this accessible to the classroom teacher?

Could you sell this to your admin?

What barriers do you see?

Justin Medved, Dennis Harter, Guest Bloggers

Cross Posted at: Medagogy  and Thinking Allowed

Tomorrow's post: Part 5 - Moving forward - from rhetoric to reality.

Part 3 - Curriculum 2.0 - Building buy-in and shared understanding

In our last post, we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) shared with you our 5 essential questions for the 21st Century Learner as well as our thinking behind how and why we felt the need to re-shape the way "technology" curriculum is embedded into classroom learning. We built our work on our new literacy wiki - as a collaborative environment for us, but also in anticipation of wanting needing to share our work with a greater audience for feedback and ultimately contribution at a later date.  The wiki was the perfect environment for this. By documenting the evolution of this curricular journey in a public venue we hope to garner feedback and critical friending that will hopefully lead to a better and stronger framework.

Besides isn't this "shift" all about the power of sharing and networks?

While it's focus is on making "technology integration" more accessible to teachers and more meaningful to students, it actually attempts to articulate an approach and create a through line that run beside all other subject curricula.  Finally an answer to the question "who is going to teach these skills?"........... Everyone is.

We called it Curriculum 2.0.

Once we finished the initial framework it was time to get some feedback.

Involving our Curriculum coordinators, Technology Director and our new colleague, Kim Cofino (how lucky were we?!), the conversations that emerged were awesome. We felt it important to shop the concept around to as many different people as possible in order to get a balanced perspective. Teachers ultimately want to know "what will this look like?" and "how will be it be supported?" and we had to have some answers ready.  Through conversation, challenging questions, and true collaboration, we were able to fine tune our original 5 questions into three focused roles of technology in 21st century learning.  More on this and the on the philosophy behind our structure in our next post, but until then you can ruminate on the diagram below.

In this post, we wanted to focus on the conversations that got us here.

In addition to working with key people at ISB, we presented our work at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai in mid September.  The feedback was very positive.  It was validating to see that other technology coordinators were experiencing the same sort of difficulties with past IT integration scope and sequences.  And it was energizing to see that our work was striking a chord.   [side note: Dennis will present the work further at the EARCOS Teachers' Conference in Kuala Lumpur in March.  If you are there, it'd be great to see you at the session.]

With positive vibes flowing all around, the next step was to include our school leadership.  As we mentioned in an earlier post, we work closely with our school Leadership Team in a distributed leadership model with them often looking to us for guidance - leadership in a different direction.  Over the past year, we have been presenting various technology tools and ideas to the LT to give them a better sense of what to look for in classrooms and what to expect in educational change in the coming years.

Here in the edublogosphere, we often preach to the converted.  In general, there is a lot of agreement on how education needs to change and technology's role in that change. We recognize the shift that is happening and the impact that will have on our students and should have on their learning.  We commiserate on how administration or faculty just don't get it and celebrate together when they do.

We seldom talk about how important the process to bring them along is - that is a conversation that matters.

Our work with the LT brought this to light for us.  To a large degree, they trust us.  And that's a great start, but to enact major curricular change, we had to first convince them of the need.  We had to describe an inevitable world that required innovators, thinkers, collaborators, and communicators.  One in which knowing something was less important than creating something and in which working in a group meant talking to people around the world and being able to communicate in more than one way.

We had to create a shared understanding of what 21st century learning is and why it's important.  We had to allow them to help frame the context in which this could work at ISB.  With that individual, personal input, you can achieve buy-in.  Then you can challenge them by asking, what are we going to do about it?

Our point:  you can't skip these conversations.

As other schools or technology folks begin to use our framework to develop their own integration plans, we remind them, make sure you have the conversations.  Use our work as a starting point for conversations that encourage questioning and challenge thinking.  If we can't defend our rationale for a curricular model like this, then it isn't worth doing.  Give stake holders a chance to process, question, and understand. (sounds like good teaching!)

Whether it comes via top leadership or from another direction, in order for school change to happen, buy-in has to come from shared understanding.  And that only comes from conversations that matter.

For us, the next steps are to flesh out our framework and bring it more formally to teachers, where again, conversation will lead to shared understanding.  It's what didn't happen at T.C. Williams and why all the tech in the world isn't improving student learning there.

No matter how "right" we know we are, you must get buy-in and shared understanding.

You can't skip the conversations.

Justin Medved, Dennis Harter, Guest Bloggers  

Cross Posted at: Medagogy  and Thinking Allowed

Tomorrow's Post:  Refining The Idea

Part 2 - Birth of a question and paradigm shift

Last year, we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) sat down to tackle the big question, "How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century."  As Technology and Learning Coordinators at the International School of Bangkok this question was important to us for three reasons.

1) 2006-7 was a WASC accreditation year for ISB and we were charged with taking a look at the K-12 Information Technology curriculum and creating a plan of action to improve it.   

2) The discussions and writings coming out of the edu-blogosphere last year were rich in ideas all about "shift" , "re-thinking" and "who is teaching these new skills?". It was hard not to feel like there was some momentum building around a fresh educational paradigm and a shift away from the "integration of technology" in the classroom, moving towards "embedding" it in the way schools "do business".    

3) Prior to our roles as coordinators we had both taught in schools with elaborate technology scope and sequence plans which we felt had little to no impact on learning and often became outdated the moment they were written. We also felt that the previous NET standards were too bulky and disconnected from the average classroom teacher. We wanted to create something that could stand the test of time and be manageable to the average teacher.

With initiative and a purpose driving us forward we sat down to write a rationale to guide our approach. We came up with this:

"We believe that technology is a tool that can help and enhance learning. Everyday we see technology used as a tool outside of formal schooling for communication, collaboration, understanding, and accessing knowledge. It is our goal in developing an integrated curriculum to ensure that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology.

Technology is in a constant state of evolution and change. Access speeds, hardware, software, and computer capabilities all evolve and improve on a monthly basis. This change occurs at a rate at which it is impossible for schools to keep up and adapt. Is it not time that we create a curriculum model that understands and this fact and works with it rather than tries to control it?

Too often typical information technology curricula have focused heavily on skills and their scope and sequence across the curriculum. The hard reality of this approach was that they became outdated as soon as they were printed due to changes in software, hardware and the skills that students came equipped with.

Instead of asking the question "What technology skills must a students have to face the 21st century?" should we not be asking "What thinking and literacy skills must a students have to face the 21st century?" These skills are not tied to any particular software or technology-type, but rather aim to provide students with the thinking skill and thus the opportunity to succeed no matter what their futures hold."

We felt strongly that for too long that way technology was integrated with learning  focused more on the tool and less on the curriculum/content that it could be used to support. To compound this fact ,since technology changes so rapidly it became almost impossible to map what "skills" students needed to learn from year to year as new technology arrived on the scene and old skills trickled down age groups.  It wasn't long ago that spreadsheets were the domain of high school students in accounting classes.  Now we introduce them to fifth graders doing graphing and data analysis.

Typically teachers saw teaching these technology hardware and software skills as "someone else's job."  IT skills to be learned in isolation.  Yet schools rightly began to insist that technology be integrated into classroom practice. 

Under this technology skill curricular model, faced with teachers ill-equipped and not believing that it was their job, IT integration was doomed to failure.

We had to think bigger different ........   

Looking at Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design approach to curriculum and unit design we liked how big "essential questions" and "enduring understandings" had helped us plan and design units when we were teaching math and social studies. What if this same "best practice" approach could be applied to the way technology was used and talked about in the classroom?  If this was good curricular design practice, why should technology and thinking curriculum be any different?  What if that same approach was used in the way we looked at connecting technology and learning across the curriculum? What if there were only a few manageable questions that even the most tech-resistant teacher could see value in?

Over the school year we fleshed out these questions and ideas and came up five essential questions that we felt addressed the core elements of a comprehensive technology and learning curriculum - one focused on the thinking that was needed for the 21st century learner, rather than the technology.             

•         How do you know information is true?       
•         How do you communicate effectively?       
•         What does it mean to be a global citizen?       
•         How do I learn best?       
•         How can we be safe?

You can read into the elements of each of these questions at our curriculum wiki - http://newliteracy.wikispaces.com/

What do you think of the approach?  We'd love to hear your thoughts.



   

Justin Medved & Dennis Harter, Guest bloggers

Cross Posted at: Medagogy  and Thinking Allowed

Tomorrow's post: Curriculum 2.0  - Creating buy-in, shopping an idea and refining through collaboration  

     

Part 1 - Change from within - leadership in a different direction

tWhen Scott put out his initial request for guest bloggers on school leadership, we (Justin Medved and Dennis Harter) considered whether we fit the bill.  We are not school heads or principals, but rather a different kind of leadership that is emerging in this current era of technological change and efforts in education to use this change positively.

We are Technology and Learning Coordinators at International School Bangkok.  Our primary role is to lead teachers toward embedded technology use, enhancing learning opportunities in the classroom and beyond.

More and more however, we find that school leadership looks to us to guide and inform on all sorts of decision-making, ranging from curriculum to hiring practice to processes involved in running the school. 

This defines a new kind of leadership in schools – one that breaks down typical hierarchical set-ups into one of collaboration and deferred expertise.  One that is less top down and one that is more shared – at least in some areas.  Ultimately, the buck continues to stop at the top, but input and influence seems to be growing from the "middle".

Currently, many school administrators and curricular leaders are not “up-to-date” or savvy on current ed tech thinking or even on current technology tools.  They lead from an understanding of traditional schools attached to isolated IT classes with computer labs for student use.  They don’t grasp the possibilities of a participatory web or realize the true potential of the "network" (social and hardware).

For the most part, this is not because they don’t want to change, but because they don’t know what’s possible.  This speaks less to their skills as an administrator and more to their backgrounds as educators.  It is a credit to those administrators who recognize a changing landscape and ask for guidance from those in the know.

So they come to us.

We work in this dual role, convincing administration of directions we need to move, while at the same time working for teacher buy in.  Administration defers to our expertise in these matters. 

Both may be considered the jobs of the administrators, yet both jobs fall on the guys with the ideas and the people skills to get it done.

Do you have a similar situation in your schools?  If you are reading this as a technology-type, what is your role in this alternative leadership?  How much responsibility/say do you have?

Justin and I often tackle the question,

what does it take to bring administration on board to make significant change in schools, curricular or otherwise?

This week we’d like to share with you the process that we went through from both a leadership side as well as a curricular side.  We are in the process now, because we are trusted to do so, of moving ISB forward into a model of embedded technology founded on the Essential Questions of the 21st Century Learner.  This curricular model has come directly from us rather than the curriculum office because we see a need for a different way to approach learning with technology. 

In the coming posts, Justin and I will take you through our thinking on this curricular model with two purposes:

1. To get feedback from you and to push our thinking forward.
2. To hopefully inspire thinking at your own schools about how to best "embed" technology into classrooms so that is accessible to teachers and agrees with the way children live with technology.

This is a terrific opportunity to speak to a different audience than the readers we have already have at our own blogs (and those who have seen us present), so thanks, Scott. We are looking forward to the week.

Justin Medved, Dennis Harter, Guest Bloggers

Tomorrow's Post: "Birth of a question and a concept" - How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century?

Cross Posted at: Medagogy and Thinking Allowed

Guest bloggers - Justin Medved and Dennis Harter

Wow. Greg Cruey sparked a lot of conversation and set a high bar for my guest bloggers in 2008. Nice work, Greg!

Stepping up to the plate next is a pair of guest bloggers, Justin Medved and Dennis Harter. I asked them for short blurbs about themselves. Here’s what they sent me:

Justin Medved is currently the PreK-5 technology and learning coordinator at the International School of Bangkok. His roots began as a high school geography and physical education teacher and he has held posts in Cairo and Toronto before settling in Asia. He is passionate about the strategies, techniques, and approaches used to engage learners in the 21st Century. You can read his thoughts and ideas at MEDagogy or NextGen Teachers.

Dennis Harter has been an international educator for 15 years, starting as a math teacher before becoming a technology coordinator. He currently serves as the Middle School and High School Technology and Learning Coordinator at the International School of Bangkok. He shares his own thoughts on education, technology, and learning at Thinking Allowed.

I love the names of their blogs! I’m sure that Justin and Dennis (who’s a William & Mary alumnus like me and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach) will give us a lot of food for thought this week. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, let me know!

Thanks, Scott

I've enjoyed the week. I'll continue to watch for comments and respond to them for a week or so. And I'm sure I'll be back regularly to the blog.

My best wishes to your readers...

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

The Purpose of School

I will not reduce public education to an economic institution.

It has become popular over the last few decades with the growth of the 21st Century Initiative to talk as though school is primarily a preparation for work. That idea is demeaning and dehumanizing.

When Thomas Jefferson envisioned universal education in America, he saw its purpose as the equipping of leadership for the nation’s meritocracy. That idea never really worked because the best and the brightest have generally used their education to pursue personal goals (often in the business world) instead of in public service. In America, they have that right. But I point out Jefferson’s views to show that we seem to have come full circle - from education being about producing good people who could service society to education being about a student’s personal preparation for work.

I’ve talked elsewhere about the purpose of school. Our school system provides a huge number of safeguards for society - starting with ensuring that all our kids have had the polio vaccine and been inoculated against measles by the age of four or five. Having lived in the Third World for a few years, I don’t take that lightly.

The motto of my school is that we are a place committed to creating lifelong learners. That’s an elementary school motto. And when I look at the pre-K kids standing in the bus line at the end of the day, I hope that as a faculty we’ve managed to whet their intellectual appetites that day enough to make them want more tomorrow.

I hope that when I contribute to a math class for third graders or discuss figurative language and poetry with fifth graders that I find a way to peak their curiosity, to help them enjoy learning, and to equip them with the tools they will need later in life to make learning itself an enjoyable activity.

I’m concerned with the jobs my students get - especially with the jobs my special education students get. But I’m more concerned with the sort of people they become. And what of the minimalist approach that looks at children and teenagers and thinks first (or only) about their place in society’s economy? I find it insulting to core. It makes me want to heckle public speakers and defend the values I imbibed as a student of the liberal arts.

What place does the world of work have for Hemingway for the average American? Is there a reason related to future employment to take kids to the Barter? What happens to Monet and Yo-Yo Ma in a school system that thinks primarily about your future job?

I’ll leave you with this thought: Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. The words belong to William Butler Yeats...

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

How Many More Graduate Hours Do I Need?

I’m tired of going to school.

I don’t mean the elementary school where I work. I actually like that.

When I entered the classroom I was told that the state appreciated me having an undergraduate degree already (B.A. in Psychology, 1983) and that it was especially nice that I even already had an M.S. (Adult & Technical Education, a non-certification degree designed to further my career at the college level, 2003) . They thought that my 18-hour graduate diploma in linguistics was interesting but told me that the Australian National University wasn’t accredited in America, and that they couldn’t do anything with those hours and it didn’t really matter whether the ANU had produced Nobel Laureates, they weren’t accredited. So with 54 graduate hours already to my credit, I went back to school. Night school. Summer school. The school of inconvenience….

I learned stuff. It was good for a time.

It was also two grand a class because I live out of state and West Virginia won’t give me a break on tuition just for teaching their kids. In three years I spent $30K to keep my license.

If you know what HQT stands for, you can probably guess part of where I’m going. I’m not, technically a highly qualified teacher. With three degrees to my credit, I had to send home a note with a third grader this year explaining to the child’s parents that I’m not actually qualified to teach him math or reading despite my eleven or so years of college.

One of the things that most ticked me off about going to school myself was that there seems to be a plan in place to prevent teachers from going past the masters degree level. I can take classes that count toward a certification (for $2,000 a pop) or I can take classes that lead to an Ed.S. (for $2,000 a pop). But not both.

There was a time in my life when I actually wanted to be Dr. Cruey. The material in this piece pretty much put me off that for good.

At some point I started asking why I had to keep going to school. I have 108 graduate hours and a GPA better than 3.8. Can’t I, like, take a test or go to a workshop? Especially since I’m not pursuing any academic credentials?

I was pleased recently to discover that the answer is “yes.” I recently discovered a state where, if you already have a license in something, you can add other certifications based on a test alone. I’ve passed the test there for a PreK-5 certification, for a middle school math certification, and for some increased special education credentials. In March I go take the test for reading certification.

I don’t understand why there isn’t a national program to access what an educator knows and could be allowed to teach. If I’ve passed the Praxis test for the Principles of Learning and Teaching, and I’ve worked in the classroom, and I’ve had positive evaluations, and I can pass a test on middle school math, why shouldn’t I be allowed to teach math without taking 21 graduate hours of math? The cynics among us at the classroom level sometimes argue that it’s because the colleges would go broke if such a system was in place.

In the face of a teacher shortage in specific essential areas, eventually there will just have to be a better system for licensing teachers. And academic credentials will have to be separated from professional ones.

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Technology and 21st Century Learning

You've probably heard of the 21st Century Learning Initiative. There's a good chance you think it is mostly about technology in the classroom. But that's a misconception.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative has more to do with applying a Constructivist approach to learning to the pedagogy of the classroom than it has to do with technology. If I had to describe the 21st Century Learning Initiative, I would phrase it something like this: It is the conceptual space where modern brain research, Constructivist learning theory, school reform, and the demands of the 21st Century workplace come together.

One of the fascinations that I have with the movement is this. On the one hand, I'm a special education teacher; special education, more than any other field of education, seems to cling to Behaviorist learning theory. On the other hand, I have a background in linguistics and a profound interest in reading education, and I know that language behavior is the place where Behaviorism is least useful in explaining or predicting learning.

Ultimately, the 21st Century Learning Initiative seems to be about promoting higher level thinking skills in the classroom and making the educational experience (particularly at the secondary level) relevant to life outside the classroom and after high school. That is where technology comes in. Technology is a tool for the 21st Century, it is a context for life in the coming decades. Students need to be able to cope with it and use it productively. But while productivity might imply familiarity with the tools, it places more emphasis on what students actually write when they use a word processor than on whether the students can use a word processer.

An example of this idea is a book I reviewed recently by Ted McCain. McCain is a technology person and an educator who writes and speaks about 21st Century Learning. I reviewed his book Teaching for Tomorrow: Teaching Content and Problem Solving Skills. To be honest, I was pretty hard on McCain. While he said things I didn't like, the truth is that chapter three of his book provides an excellent approach to teaching problem solving. And his book illustrates my point: he's a technology person who seems (in this book at least) more concerned with thinking skills than technology proficiency.

For any of you who have read McCain's book, I'll leave you with this question: Was I too hard on McCain?

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Midnight in the Garden of Rural Poverty

The first school I taught at when I entered the classroom at a few years ago was Big Creek High School. You may remember the movie the school featured prominently in: October Sky I taught home ec as a long term substitute for about two months. It had a parenting class, a careers class in social services, a personal adjustment class for freshmen, and cooking (which was no biggie since I like to cook). Fortunately the sewing curriculum had been done during the first semester or I might have bled to death…

The county is slowly getting new schools. There was a time when almost every little bottom and hollow had a small K-8 school with a few dozen students. I now work in one of the last of those. My school has 90 or so kids in pre-K to fifth grade. Our middle schoolers were moved a few years ago to a larger school.

When I think about what our schools need in my county it is very hard to prioritize the things that come to mind. Many of our buildings date back to FDR or before. And yet replacing them with larger, more modern centralized schools seems to tear at the fabric of local society.

Education is not high on the community agenda. Why should it be in a county where the real unemployment rate (the percentage of working aged adults who don’t have regular jobs) hovers at around 50%? Elementary schools serve a community function. But many in the community don’t see much benefit to going to school beyond high school.

I suppose I’m a hillbilly, though many of my friends and neighbors aren’t sure I qualify. My father was in the Army and I grew up outside of Appalachia. But on both my mother’s and my father’s sides, many of my ancestors have lived in an area between Knoxville, Tenn., and Christiansburg, Va., since before the Revolutionary War. A little over a decade ago, I came home - to live and work here for the first time in my life. I teach in a county that the Appalachian Regional Commission designates as "distressed." While my heritage and values might make me a hillbilly, I’m the most traveled hillbilly I know. Between my father’s military career and ten years myself with a volunteer service organization after college, I’ve lived on four continents and in 14 time zones. I bring a unique perspective with me to the classrooms I work in.

I stood today on a little bridge our kids cross to get to their buses, looking down into the water that flows under it. Our kids cross the Tug Fork (of Hatfield-McCoy fame) twice a day over that bridge. The feud was some miles downstream from us.

I wanted John Edwards to be President. It’s easy to become a populist when you work with kids in a place where the median household income is about $19,000 a year.

Midnight has come. I suppose my point is just that life itself seems to complicate any consideration of education in poor rural communities. People who tell me that the times are a-changing and that we should get used to the economic demands of the coming days and change our approach to education accordingly engender a resentment in me at times that I don’t fully understand. When I look at the poverty and the needs of my school’s community, I find it difficult to clarify the issues in the same pattern that the rest of the country seems to be pursuing. I suppose I’ll leave it at that and go to bed, committed to an effort to be most substantive with my issues tomorrow…

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Black Wednesday (Dressing for NCLB)

Because education is largely a government function, there seems to be little hope of ever disentangling politics and education.

Today I'll wear black to school. I've worn black to school almost every Wednesday since November 3, 2004. Why that date? On November 2nd of that year I spent 13 hours helping people cast their ballots for President in a polling place in Virginia. I went home, had a short but sound night of sleep, and woke the next morning to discover that George W. Bush was still President. I wore black to work that day, and I've worn black almost every Wednesday since - 168 out of the last 171 Wednesdays. The exceptions? The day after Democrat Tim Kaine won the governor's race in Virginia I wore more festive colors to work. (Since I work in West Virginia, half my co-workers never fully understood why.) I also dressed quite colorfully on the Wednesday after the most recent midterm election - the one where Democrats won back Congress.

There was also a day earlier this year when we had Monday off and I just lost track of what day of the week it was. My co-workers thought that was funny...

I know that President Bush has his fan club. And I know that there are plenty of people who dislike him for reasons other than education policy. But in my mind, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is among the low points of Bush Presidency.

I have several specific complaints about NCLB.

• I don't like the way it has reduced the scope of curriculum. I think it has de-emphasized the arts, for example, in favor of the most basic, pared down core.
• I don’t like the focus it brings on mediocrity. The goal of education under NCLB is to move students who are barely failing on high stakes tests to the place where they are barely passing on high stakes tests. There is no reward for excellence. getting by is the goal.
• I don’t like the unrealistic and punitive nature of the accountability provisions. The eventual goal of NCLB is 100% grade level mastery. Every fifth grader, for example, should function at the fifth grade level (unless they have some profound disability). Schools that don’t comply, don’t meet this standard, are punished. The problem is that so many of the factors related to a student’s performance fall outside the school’s reach. Basic issues of poverty and social fabric impact a school’s ability to achieve these goals; but the school has little power to address them. The simple truth is that there will always be at least one or two kids who don’t make the grade no matter what teachers do. And eventually NCLB’s accountability provisions will result in almost every public school being deemed a failure. It is a standard no other modern nation strives to achieve. It is unrealistic.
• I think the law is underfunded. The requirements of NCLB at onerous in terms of both time and money.

You don’t have to be a complete cynic to think that maybe, just maybe, NCLB’s accountability provisions are a poison pill in the law. The intention could be to make public schools look bad – worse than they are – to justify the privatization of education through the use of vouchers. And right there in Bush’s 2009 budget, what do we have? Proposed funding for a voucher program.

NCLB has failed. The task now is to replace it with a law with broader vision, a law more supportive of public education. Hopefully Congress will be wise enough to call for far more input from the educational community than they did in 2002.

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Day One: Are You Following the Script?

Today was Day One in the script of the new reading program we started this year. Not to be confused with Monday (which, obviously, it wasn’t). Unless school is cancelled due to bad weather, next Tuesday (Feb. 11) will Day One again in our five day reading cycle. But our county is having an instruction support day on February 18; students stay home that day, and when they come back on Tuesday (Feb. 19) it will be Day Five. Day One will get bumped to Wednesday…

Such are the joys of a scripted curriculum. We used to have spelling tests on Fridays. Now we have them on Day Five, whatever day of the week that happens to be. It took some getting used to, but it works okay now that everyone (including the parents) is used to it.

I’m a member of the International Reading Association. They have a listserv that I subscribe to and, frankly, the concept of a scripted curriculum has taken a beating there in the last year or so. Among the complaints:

• The authors of this or that curriculum can’t really know and understand my kids (all of whom are unique, different from other kids in the world).
• A scripted curriculum curtails academic freedom (a complaint usually accompanied with a degree of emotion).
• Educators in the classroom have more “real world” knowledge of what needs to be taught and how it needs to be presented.

You get the idea…

We’ve used our new, scripted reading curriculum (I won’t mention the company) since the start of this school year. Personally, I think it’s a step forward from the past. It provides a degree of continuity in an environment where a significant number of our kids are transient and move every few months to another school in the county. It provides some level of assurance that we are actually implementing recent research in our reading classrooms. For example, it scripts in tasks for building background knowledge related to a story – an essential (but sometimes overlooked) component of comprehension. It provides shared tools for monitoring student progress. It provides a measure of quality control.

It also, to be candid, makes it easier for an administrator to decide whether teachers are doing their jobs. If my boss comes in tomorrow and figures out that we’re not on Day Two there may well be weeping and gnashing of teeth. At the very least, some profound explanation is likely to be required. Heaven help me if that becomes a regular occurrence. If I am at least on the right day, my boss can now easily assess whether I am teaching the script. It is not a word-for-word script; but it is pretty explicit as to what activities take place today, what graphic organizers get used, how much time students are to have for this or that activity, what assessments are to be employed, etc.

So to begin to evaluate my performance, my boss can ask a simple, immediate question: “Is he following the script?” In the past my boss had to ask, “Is what he’s doing working?” That was a far more difficult question to answer.

Today we started a five day “week” that emphasizes the skill of generalizing and practices the comprehension strategy of prediction. Day One always includes a pretest on this week’s spelling words. Day One always includes a read aloud that develops listening skills. Our question for the week has to do with how people adapt to their physical limitations. We introduced vocabulary for the story. We used our SmartBoard to begin a concept web that we’ll return to throughout the week to help reinforce background knowledge. And even though we’re trying to impart reading skills during this time, most of this week’s content is science oriented in our daily reading block.

I understand the complaints that people have about working with a scripted curriculum. As we climb through the grades, I think those complaints are more valid in high school than they are in kindergarten.

After six months with our particular reading curriculum, at the moment I’m a fan of it. We'll see how the year finishes out...

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

What exactly IS leadership?

Is the term leadership a euphemism? If so, for what?

Since about half of America is holding a primary or a caucus today, that question seemed relevant. I’m not sure most people know what leadership is.

I’ve been listening to what the presidential candidates are saying about themselves and each other over the past few weeks. One of the most interesting discussions is between John McCain and Mitt Romney over the question of which of them is more qualified to be president. Romney, in a nutshell, says McCain lacks some important basic skills. Romney says that his own Harvard MBA, his business resume and his executive experience as a state governor give him the theoretical background knowledge and the experience needed to fix our government and economy. John McCain’s response, basically, is that he doesn’t think Romney was that great a governor, and that he can hire someone with a Harvard MBA and some business experience to work for him when he becomes president. McCain says that Romney’s background makes him a manager in a country that needs leaders. And (surprise) McCain, of course, thinks of himself as that leader.

Whether you agree with either of them, the discussion provides some contrasting images of just what might constitute leadership. I think that one of our problems in education (or in America, for that matter) is that we’re not sure what leadership is. The fact that two men who both want to be president are having this discussion seems to indicate that even our leaders don’t know clearly what leadership is – or at least they don’t agree on what it is.

I think one of the problems is that leadership, whatever that is, is usually only one component of most administrative jobs. School administrators do have to manage. They also do have to remain educators. As basic as that sounds, I’ve met principals who didn’t think it was their job to be an educator anymore. They didn’t think they were obligated to keep up with the research or changes in best practices. They thought their job was to manage and that the school had other people who were responsible for all that educational stuff. Heck, they’d become a principal partly because they didn’t really like education very much!

The corollary to this is simple, but also often overlooked. You don’t have to be an administrator to be a leader. In almost every educational environment I’ve ever been in, some of the most effective leaders weren’t administrators; they were just committed educators whose character and values required them to lead.

I can’t articulate a definition of leadership that satisfies me. I know what it isn’t. I know it overlaps with many things. But I’m still looking for a crystalline definition. I worry sometimes that because the idea is difficult to define, people will think it is a euphemism for administration and thus miss the real nature of leadership.

I do know that I don't have to be an administrator to be a leader.

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Can We Prevent Learning Disabilities?

Is it possible to prevent learning disabilities? There’s a policy push to do just that, and it was the main focus of the 2004 revisions to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

My afternoon today was consumed with meetings. When I worked at the college level we used to joke that meetings were the logical alternative to work. But today’s meetings were less frivolous…

Normally I spend my afternoon working through some very scripted reading interventions with small groups of students that I pull out of their classrooms – some fifth graders, some fourth graders, and a mixed group of first and second graders. Today those students stayed in their classrooms, and my afternoon was instead spent in a series of IEP meetings.

If you’re not familiar with IEP meetings, let me introduce the concept. The acronym stands for Individualized Education Program. Students who have been determined to have an educational disability under IDEA have an IEP, a document that describes how their school is accommodating that disability at the moment.

The meetings were chaired by my principal and they took place in her office. A specialist for the central office was present today. Obviously I was in the meetings. The classroom teacher that has the child also sat in on each meeting and contributed to the discussions that took place. And when we’re lucky, the child’s parent comes to the meeting. At this school, we’re generally lucky in that way; but today we didn't have parents in most of meeting - although we'd talked to them about what was going to happen in the meetings.

Five of the six meetings today were routine, almost formalities. We had meetings to discuss whether a particular student needed to continue seeing this or that specialist for a particular problem. We had two meetings to discuss the status of a child’s disability; a requirement that comes around every three years.

One of the meetings was not particularly routine. It was a meeting to decide whether a particular student had a disability – whether, under IDEA 2004, they were eligible for services as a special education student. For obvious reasons of confidentiality, I can’t say much about the child or the meeting. But I can tell you that the process of identifying some disabilities is vague and slippery.

Emotional disturbance (some states call them behavior disorders) are very real. But federal law is so vague that they are almost impossible to legally define. Children with emotional disturbances make up only a very small portion of those who qualify to be served under IDEA. But students who have learning disabilities make up a much larger portion of the special education population.

Until 2004 we had a pretty clear definition of learning disabilities. It wasn’t a very good one. We called it the discrepancy model. It was clear as a bell – a mathematical definition of a disability. Unfortunately, it was a time consuming definition to satisfy and it often meant allowing a child to fail a grade as proof that they needed help. For years we did this to kids…

IDEA 2004 came up with an entirely new definition of learning disabilities. Conceptually, it’s rather clear. A learning disability is evidenced by the failure of a child to respond to academic interventions designed to bring his or her achievement up to grade level. Those are my words, not a technical quote. The difficulty now is that we are grappling with just what those interventions should be, and what level of response is sufficient to avoid the determination that a child does in fact have a disability. And as a result, there’s not nearly as much certainty in the process as there once was.

If you are an idealistic optimist you will say that one of the main goals of the new law is to use intervention to prevent a child’s problems from ever developing into a disability. If you are a cynic you will scoff that the new law’s goal is just as I phrased it above - to avoid the determination that a child has a disability, even if they really do. But either way, you are begging the question of what actually constitutes a learning disability. It's a question I expect to keep begging for a few years.

So I go back to my original question: Is it possible to prevent learning disabilities?

The irony of the new law is that a breakthrough in medical research that occurred at about the time the new law was passed challenges some of its assumptions. Somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of children classified as having learning disabilities are thought to be dyslexic. And about the time the President signed the new law on educational disabilities, a medical researcher published findings that showed that a dyslexia gene exists. A year later, two more genes connected to dyslexia were discussed at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.

The question of whether we can prevent learning disabilities may now be largely a question of whether or not we can prevent a genetic condition. And as for identifying them, a cheek swab or simple blood test at birth may soon accomplish that.

I suspect that the policy makers will all have to rethink learning disabilities again soon – maybe before the 2004 revisions to IDEA even get fully implemented in most states…

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Time to Get Dressed

How was your weekend?

I'd be willing to bet you watched at least a little football yesterday. I'd be surprised if you didn't think about politics once or twice this weekend. Probably you did other things to relax...

Me? I watched the Game. I slept late on Saturday. The weather was nice (especially for February) so I took my dog out and played with it some. I blogged a little. My wife and I went to an auction house that we visit on a semi-regular basis. I cooked a couple of meals (I enjoy cooking). I drank a little Burgundy from a brandy snifter I got at the auction a year or two ago and read some Hemingway. We watched some TV - Numb3rs on Friday night (a whole show about math, how cool is that?), Some football on Sunday night.

How's your Inner Person? I took a graduate class a couple of years ago that used a text by Marsha Speck. The book was The Principalship: Building a Learning Community. In it she looks at the different roles a principal has to play - educator, manager, leader - and concludes that those roles are all held together, more or less, by the principal's "inner person." In her own words, "The inner person is a term used to describe the personal beliefs and internal balance that the principal needs to keep..." (p. 21). She goes on to devote a chapter to the subject and, among other things, says that the Inner Person helps to keep a balance between work and life outside of school.  While Speck is writing specifically about principals (something I'm not, but might be someday), my guess is that she'd agree that the concept applies to most educators, and maybe to most people.

Did I do anything related to work this weekend? Sure. I looked over my lesson plans and touched them up. I spent a little time preparing for some meetings later today. And I mailed off some paperwork that I hope will resulted in some additional certifications being added to my license.

I'm not suggesting that I don't think about my Inner Person during the week, or that work should completely disappear on Saturdays and Sundays. But the weekend gives me some extra time to think about my Inner Person. So I'll ask again: How's your Inner Person? Speck's contention is that if you neglect your Inner Person, you probably won't be a leader for long.

While you think about that question, I'll get dressed and go to work.

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

My Hope for the Week…

I know I don’t really start until tomorrow, but I thought that I’d publish one blog post today to try and create a little context for the things I’ll probably say this week.

I’m a teacher. I had to make myself some business cards not long ago and I struggled with what to put on them. Teacher is really a little non-descript, in my mind at least. I eventually settled on “Educational Interventionist.” That’s what I do; I intervene (as part of a larger team) in situations where students aren’t succeeding in learning. Much of the time that means doing the things that a special education teacher does. And after all, that’s my actual title and my position at the moment. I’m the only special education teacher at a very small elementary school. But the changes that were made in 2004 to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mean that I spend part of my day “intervening” with kids that haven’t been placed in special education yet – and maybe will never be.

While my business card might say that I’m an Educational Interventionist, the truth is that I’m an educator in the broadest sense. I’ve taught phonemic awareness to kindergarten kids and math to fourth graders. I’ve worked with special education students at the middle and secondary levels. I’ve taught a few college classes as an adjunct. I’ve taught Sunday School at a Baptist church. I’ve taught grammar and vocabulary to ESL students in both high school and college. And I’ve taught senior citizens how to use a mouse and find their way around Windows.

Along the way I’ve thought about what I do. When I took the Introduction to Leadership at Marshall University some years ago, one of the things they emphasized was professional reflection. I bought into that, and I suppose it is one of the reasons I write about education (or anything else); writing helps me reflect, helps me clarify my thoughts…

I’ve thought about why my school system can’t find the teachers it needs. I’ve thought about how we treat students with disabilities and about why Johnny (sometimes) can’t read. I’ve thought about vouchers and charter schools, about scripted curriculums and the role of technology in our classrooms, about high stakes testing and about where we go from here. And who will lead us there.

This week I hope to share some of those thoughts with you, to make you think about what the issues really are. If you think leadership is primarily about compliance and paperwork, about audits and personnel management, you’ll probably find me at least vaguely annoying. If you think leadership is about vision and purpose, about service and about shaping the future for the greater good of society, I’d like to think you’ll find what I have to say thought provoking.

Well, I have to go get ready to watch the Super Bowl...

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Guest blogger - Greg Cruey

My RFP for guest bloggers has gotten some responses. I'm excited!

First out of the chute is Greg Cruey. I asked Greg for a short blurb about himself. Here’s what he sent me:

Greg Cruey is a career changer; he became a classroom teacher a few years ago, at the age of 43. Two graduate degrees and a decade of overseas travel earlier in life have left him with, among other things, an abiding interest in education policy and a love for learning and for children. Today he teaches in a small, rural elementary school in an impoverished portion of Appalachia. Greg blogs regularly at his personal blog.

Wow! I can’t wait to read his thoughts on school leadership!

Greg will be blogging next week and I am lining up some other guests on the calendar. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, let me know!

Guest bloggers wanted

Occasionally I have a guest blogger here at Dangerously Irrelevant just to spice things up a bit. You can read past guests' contributions by clicking on the Guest Bloggers category. Usually I invite people personally, but I thought it might be fun to put out a RFP (request for proposals)...

Want to blog here on a topic (or topics) related to K-12 school leadership or leadership preparation? Looking for greater exposure for some of your ideas? Read over my guest blogging page and then drop me a note with your ideas for a 5-day series.

You don't have to be a blogger to participate. If you are, however, cross-posting is both allowed and encouraged. Also, you can blog about school leadership issues generally rather than just technology leadership issues specifically. And, yes, past guests are welcome to blog again...

Hope some of you are interested!

From Thailand: Leadership training from a global monk

This is the 3rd of this week's blogs from the California School Leaders in Thailand.  They are participating in an international post-graduate leadership program in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Phra Saneh Dhammavaro is as far away from what we imagine what a global leader would be.  He is modestly clothed with an orange robe, and has very little or no use for anything else except for a pair of footwear.  After spending a few hours with him, however, we were floored as our preconceived notions were instantly shattered.  He speaks with the gentlest of voices as he shared his thoughts and described his way of life.  What he was really doing was speaking to our hearts as leaders.

We listened to Phra make comparisons between our western way of life and his practices, beliefs and ideals.  He shared with us the importance of establishing balance between mind and body.  As visitors, we took care of the body’s needs satisfying the senses with Thailand’s sights, food and massage.  Phra challenged us that the mind equally needs the same attention.  From this message we were reminded that sometimes leaders must remove and place themselves above tangible material things and non-tangible items such as politics and competing ideas that clutter decision-making and focus on what is right.

He talked about world events and offered a simple solution to everyday crisis and social ills that are readily applicable to our day-to-day lives as school administrators and most importantly our personal lives. Following the way of the Buddha, he suggests, “Instead of finding fault in others, look to your own misdeeds.”  He implored us to look within our own selves and strive to find UNDERSTANDING as a way to avoid conflicts.  While this idea is not new, it is often forgotten in the context of our everyday lives and our work at schools.  Towards the end of our time together, he asked us to meditate with him.  We closed our eyes and listened to him describe a happy place free of hate, violence and pain.  He then filled the void full of love, peace and comfort- an ideal environment we strive to achieve as educators.  In closing our eyes, our consciousness opened we were reacquainted to the reasons why we entered this profession.

In search of a place for training on global leadership, one might look towards a metropolitan city such as London, Tokyo, or New York.  Perhaps Chiang Mai should be included in this list.  Thailand’s 2nd largest city of is dotted with Thai wats or temples reminding its citizens of Buddhism’s ancient and lasting legacies.  Its people especially the Thai monks, at first glance, are seemingly unaware of things taking place around them and probably have nothing to offer to us.  All of our notions were immediately dispelled after meeting Phra Saneh Dhammavaro, Director of Academic Affairs at Buddhist University in Chiang Mai. It seems as if he has known us for while, where we came from and the weight of the baggage we carry.  The way he framed and made sense of our work in the context of our world demonstrated not only his knowledge but also his understanding.  And in doing so, he moved some of us to tears as we realize how much further we need to go not only as leaders, but most importantly as human beings.

Daniel Gumarang, School Improvement Facilitator, Los Angeles Unified
School District and
Craig Knotts, Assistant Principal, Celerity Nascent Charter School
Participating in the Thailand for School Leaders Program

Leaders in Thailand: Elephant Conservation Center

Elephant Conservation Center

After an intense week of late nights working and fast-paced assignments, several members of our cohort took a needed reprieve Saturday to visit the beloved and endangered Asian elephants.  We were aware that elephant population in Thailand has declined from 5000 three years ago to less than 2000 now.  This decline has resulted from mistreatment, neglect, or abuse by trainers or owners, often vying for tourist dollars.  We also know that poaching and devastation of the elephants’ natural habitat have greatly contributed to their decline. We wanted to find a place where the elephants would be treated humanely.  Because the all-day visit to the Elephant Nature Park did not fit our schedule, we visited the Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang Province, south of Chiang Mai.  This is a government-run establishment with a unique “elephant hospital” that nurses back elephants before they are returned to the jungle.

We also had an opportunity to appreciate the skills and intelligence of these magnificent animals in an elephant show. The show was a re-enactment of the work elephants would perform in the logging industry. They have transferred these skills to entertain an enthusiastic audience. Walking in single file, holding each other’s tails, as they do in their natural habitat, the elephants enter the large corral. Guided by the ‘driver’ these enormous creatures perform their task with ease; pulling, pushing and stacking logs.  We were then treated to a musical performance and painting on canvas, done by the elephants!  Several of us purchased these paintings to hang in our homes.

Watching these animals demonstrate these amazing skills, our minds are drawn to the fact that there are similarities in what we have been experiencing as a leadership cohort.  We have all brought our unique qualities to this learning environment in an amazing country.

We have been encouraged by our teacher or ‘driver’ to perform many tasks, utilizing our inherent and transferable skills. We are all performing at a level we never thought possible! This unique environment allows us to open up to the possibilities of a new vision of leadership in the future. Our challenge is to bring this home and share our new canvas with students and staff in our schools.

JoAnne Motter & Minh Tram Nguyen

[JoAnne is Assistant Principal in the Tustin Unified School District & Tram is Principal at EnCompass Academy, Oakland Unified School District]

Greetings from Chiang Mai, Thailand!

Greetings from Chiang Mai, Thailand!

We are a cohort of 10 administrators from California who decided to take a risk and look at leadership from a global perspective. We’ve had the opportunity to experience educational programs from a fresh viewpoint.

However, there is a sea of differences in the schools we visited. The variety ranged from a university demonstration school, to a private school, to a public welfare school. Each site greeted us with openness, warmth and a willingness to share. Friendliness and grace has been experienced in each place we’ve gone and with almost every Thai we’ve encountered.

In each of the schools, they presented their program with the same pride and passion for their students and their work that each of us feels about our own work. All this was communicated even with the cross cultural differences and language barrier. In one school, we saw needy children who live in dormitories, do their own laundry, help with the cooking, and who may receive parent visitors at most twice a month. In spite of all these obstacles, the students were happy and learning.

In both places, Standards were more similar than we expected. Along with the content that our California students receive, Thai students receive religious, vocational and cultural education as well. As educational leaders developing a greater global awareness and sensitivity, at the schools we visited, we were surprised to find that this is already a part of a Thai child’s education.

Daniel Guliasi & Joann Kennelly

Daniel is Principal in the Novato Unified School District & Joann is Director of Special Education in Centinela Valley Union High School District

Guest blogger - Linda Orozco

I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Linda Orozco, Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University - Fullerton, will be my guest blogger next week. Linda is interested in technology leadership, diversity, legal, and other K-12 school administration issues and has graciously agreed to join us for a few days from her educational leadership program in Thailand. We're looking forward to your posts, Linda!

Traveling Light!

There was a time not so long ago that I would cart along a laptop and a Palm device, in my case a Tungsten T3, wherever I went, whether on the road or even to a local school.  If I was making a presentation I would bring an LCD projector, which as we all know back in the day was about the size of a Pullman suitcase.  Needless to say, the equipment I lugged around was bulky, weighty, and it was all somewhat inconvenient.  But it was necessary.  As time went by, though, everything got smaller, faster, and more powerful (and often cheaper).  So I’ve been able to shed much of what I previously carried.  But there is a bigger question.  What does a person really need to maintain optimal productivity and connectivity when outside the office?  One of my goals in life is to travel light (another one is that I don’t wait in lines if at all possible, but we’ll save that for another day).  It never ceases to amaze me what I see people cramming on board airplanes in the guise of “personal carry-ons.”  It just makes me more determined to stay connected, productive, and most of all, LEAN.  Anyway, all I carry these days are (1) a cell phone; and (2) a U3 4GB Cruzer.  No more laptops, no more LCDs, no more Palm devices.  The key that makes it all work is the Cruzer.  It is more than a flash drive on which you can store and transport files.  In fact, given online storage sites, even GMail as a good example, you hardly need thumb drives.  The beauty of Cruzer is that you can load your commonly used applications (for me, Firefox and OpenOffice are the main ones) and launch them directly from the Cruzer, a USB drive.  This allows much better security and utility when using a computer away from home or office.  And there is hardly a place anymore where you can’t find an online computer to use—that’s why I dropped the laptop.  Anywhere I present I call to make sure they have a decent projector setup but they all do these days … no more Pullman-size LCD gear.  The Palm device is basically redundant with cell phone features and web-based storage and applications.  So, my advice is:  Travel light!

Wheat and chaff

How much technology does a school need and how does a school leader ensure that the right technology is in place?   Well, those are a couple of tough questions but since administrators are paid to make the tough decisions, allow me to offer a few thoughts on the process.   As I mentioned yesterday, my motto that I pass on to my graduate students in the school principalship program here at Central Michigan University is “technology cannot be stopped and youth will be served.”  As we all know, it is a never ending challenge to stay on top of technology developments, even just a “slice of the pie,” such as those that impact teaching and learning.  No one person can do it, let alone a principal who has myriad other duties.  But, again, that’s part of what we are paid to do, so how does one tackle this issue?  Here are a few ideas.

1) Cozy up to your technology director.  Like a lot of other aspects of leadership, trust and delegation are going to be key.  A tech director should be a bountiful source of information that you can filter through your leadership lens and apply to your school.

2) Remember that newest is seldom best in a school setting.  The “latest” technology (e.g., Vista) is going to cost more and not be compatible with a lot of your current hardware and software.  That is something of a blessing in that dollars are so tight to begin with, at least here is one reason to hold off on buying new hardware & software.

3) Even though we may delegate some of the work in this area to others there is no excuse not to stay on top of it.  Resources that are helpful include: The International Society for Technology in Education; my local favorite, the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning; and, of course my national favorite, School Tech Leadership.

Tomorrow I will talk about personal productivity in technology for school leaders.

How much technology is too much?

A few years ago there was a prototype appliance that merged a refrigerator and the Internet. It had a computer monitor in the door and the cooler was online. As I recall, the idea was to have instant access to thousands of recipes; the online tie-in was to increase access to databases of cooking and recipe Web sites and even notify someone who is mobile to pick up a dozen eggs on the way home in order to have a complete set of ingredients. My memory is a bit hazier on this next one, but I believe the same general idea was applied to a microwave oven. As far as I know, this idea never took off and I haven’t heard about it for a few years. But I was reminded of it again this past weekend while browsing through PC Today, a freebie left in my Atlanta hotel room. An article discussed a service called E.V.A., an “electronic virtual assistant.” For a minimum of about $60.00 a month the busy professional can call (or e-mail) E.V.A. and a real live person will take a message and in turn e-mail the message to the intended recipient. This made me wonder, how much is enough? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to call the person, or e-mail her yourself? My two teenage daughters both bought new phones recently that have Web and e-mail capability. As with everything in the cellular world, these sorts of add-ons to phoning capabilities will be ubiquitous soon enough. Why would someone pay $60/month for a third-person party to do what either voice-mail, e-mail, or a phone call would do? My point is there is a time when we reach saturation with technology. More is not always better.  I’m not a curmudgeon on such things and I do realize that pioneers in any field are going to miss a few before they hit a home run. In fact, I rather like experimenting with new technology. I dived into Vista probably before it was prudent and have been updating hardware and drivers left and right since. Of course, the flood of technology is not likely to slow. I tell my graduate students in their educational technology for school leaders that my motto is “technology cannot be stopped and youth will be served.” So the question becomes, how does one separate the wheat from the chaff, especially in a school setting? More on that tomorrow.

Guest blogger - David Whale

I'm pleased to announce that Dr. David Whale, Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership Department at Central Michigan University, will be my guest blogger next week. David is interested in technology leadership, data-driven decision-making, and other K-12 school administration issues and has graciously agreed to join us for a few days. We're looking forward to your posts, David!

Leapfrogging less developed nations

I previously posted about wireless technologies in less developed nations. Kofi Annan supported this view nearly 4 years ago! One cool indigenous Wi-Fi innovation, is the Cambodian motoman. Here, motorcycle drivers equipped with with Wi-Fi contraptions, drive past schools and health centers to download and retrieve email.

"As they pass each school and one health centre, they transmit the messages they have downloaded and retrieve any outgoing mail queued in the school or health centre computer, also equipped with a similar book-sized transmission box. They then go on to the next school. At the end of the day they return to the hub to transmit all the collected e-mail to the Internet for any point on the globe."

Less developed nations are indeed making strides to leapfrog old technologies. This leapfrog effect can be seen in education, health care, information, energy, economies, and more. Thomas Friedman wrote how globalization has essentially created a 'flat' world. The globalized processes Friedman refers to have really made possible the leapfrog effect.

The question remains, how will these nations tap into digital possibilities and genuinely leapfrog industrialized nations?

ICT and sustainable development

Wired magazine ran an interesting story in their April 2007 edition about an entrepreneur in the Ivory Coast who bought a cell phone, rigged up a 'telephone booth' and earned $200 the first month charging community members 80 cents per minute. The same man bought a PlayStation and charged 10-20 cents to play a game earning him $20 in the first three days!

I mention this story because with ICT in international development, there is much promise and a lot of the best solutions are indeed indigenous (Thanks John). A main role for ICT4D planners and policy makers is localizing technology to the needs of the community. This is evident from my experiences in Cambodia where outside experts were not in touch with the needs of the teachers yet some teachers simply found applicable ways to use the skills that were outside of the scope of the training.

ICT has promise in the less developed world. However experts from more developed countries have the onus to not just plop ICTs into a nations without thinking about localization and sustainability. After all, development is not about giving fish, it is about teaching others to fish for themselves!