Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

I’ve gone to many conference, read books, articles and been involved with Professional Learning Communities in its official form for about 5 years. Assessment For Learning which is so tightly tied to effective PLC’s is also something I’m very comfortable with. Today as I listened to many qualified, knowledgeable and engaging speakers and presentations, I kept thinking something’s missing.

The focus of most of these presentations were around improving student achievement. Terms like “pyramid of intervention”, “common assessments”, “standards”, “accountability” and “collaboration” were used frequently. All good stuff. It was hard to disagree with much but my focus on the changing classroom and all that relevant and engaging learning looks like, forced me to question where the ideas of this conference take us. While improved student achievement is great, I”m still questioning what their achieving.

If they’re just achieving better grades, better study habits and better test taking skills, it doesn’t seem all that important to me.  Now I realize that none of these speakers would say that’s what this does and they even reference rigorous standards and I think I heard the term 21st century learning (whatever that really is), I’m still fearful that the zeal to improve scores and test results leads to the perpetuation of school as we knew it and still know it.  The strategies of PLC’s and assessment, if not combined with a real understanding of what kids ought to be doing in school leave use just doing a better job of the schools of the 1950’s.

While the stories were told of improved schools, homework programs, reteaching of material, I kept thinking envisioning schools where iron-handed principals and teachers lovingly force kids to do the work, the work of outdated curricula and outdated teaching methods.

Again, I know that’s not the vision they intend to create but those in the audience I fear do not have an understanding of how to become a learner first and lead kids to understandings and experiences that will matter.  Can you have a discussion about improving schools and not mention things like connecting learners, consumers not producers, digital citizens? Are we putting the cart before the horse? Does it matter what we consider first?  I think it matters.

Maybe it’s just me.

(I won’t even mention the brutal PPT’s by all the speakers!  No kidding one slide had 12 bullet points!  Oy!)

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I’ll take a crack at some live blogging. I think Doug Belshaw might be “irritated” but here we go:

My thoughts are in UPPERCASE. I can see much of this might be incoherent…if there’s value or need for clarification or discussion, leave a comment.

Conference page

Doug Reeves: Four Questions

• What do students need to learn?
• How do we know they’ve learned it..before the tests?
• What are the most effective teaching and learning strategies?

Speaking about accountiblity for central office administrators…everyone is accountable

STARTING TO HATE THAT WORD.

Reassess what you’ve learn with PLC’s and dig deeper…don’t retool…I LIKE THAT

Equity Gaps

Clear evidence to say that reducing this gap is not about outside factors such as socio-economic factors…it’s about what schools and teachers do

Brand names or programs are a myth….deep implementation of a few things makes a difference

Leadership Map

Lucky…high achievers…replication of success unlikely

Losing…low achievers… replication of success unlikely

Learning….low results…replication of success likely

Leading…high achievers…replication of success likely

Don’t use scores alone….demonstrate and account for learning that doesn’t yield high test scores…focus on improvements

What is your level of implementation? No need to do one more new thing. Just do it better and deeper…research has been out for a while…if 90% of teachers participate

• Recognition of Achievement….do you have a trophy case? Teachers who systematically recognize achievement see better results
• Aligning Standards….
• Assignment of teachers based on needs…instead of teacher preference
• Modeling and Mentoring of instructional strategies
• Engaging Classroom Environments….posting standards and excellent work POSTING WHERE..IN THE CLASSROOM? I THINK THERE’S A BETTER PLACE
• Deep Content of Analysis
• Monitoring
• Teaching Strategies

These are not new things….but they’ve never been deeply implemented…we assume too much…we haven’t done these things well

It’s their Culture …how to we deal with minority issues or in our case First Nations.

evidence shows that blacks and hispanics popularity declined as grades went past 3.0

2nd grade students when asked, “who do you want to be like?” focus on other high achievers

7th grade students are wanting more and more to be like lower achievers

Rules of games are consistent…grades aren’t…after a while, kids don’t want to play anymore….of things that are important, we have consistency….why not grading

I LIKE THE PRINCIPLE BUT DOES THIS LEAD TO STANDARDIZED TESTS AND DUMBING DOWN OF WORK IN ORDER TO MANAGE IT?

Toxic Grading Practices and Alternatives

• Zeros for missing work….instead…apply Larry the Cable Guy’s practice…”git ‘er done”
• Average/Mean…instead…evaluate best representation of work

Semester killer-one project or test…multiple evidence of learning

Change Killers

• Toxic Feedback….set teachers up with success….tell them what you’re looking for and give them feedback the same day
• Hierarchial Communication…Networking is better….WHERE HAVE I SEEN THIS BEFORE IN ACTION?
• Blame…those who believe achievement is due to teacher decisions as opposed to those who blame kids and other factors

Effective Change

• Do we watch just kids or teachers?
• What and who are the cause of achievement?
• Evaluation…is it working?
• Differentiated PD
  • 4,3,2.,1
    • I will lead
    • I will model
    • Iknow about this but don’t use it
    • I’m not familiar

    Holistic Accountablility

  • Science Fair for adults..sharing and transparency…I CALL IT BLOGGING
  • Conversations
  • Remove excuses
  • Watch those that do it right

  DOUG OFFERS SOMES GREAT STUFF AND TO ME IS CHALLENGING TYPICAL CLASSROOMS….COMBINE THIS WILL TOOLS OF ENGAGEMENT AND MEANING AND I THINK SCHOOLS AND CLASSROOMS WOULD LOOK QUITE DIFFERENT

Technorati Tags: plc, conference, dougreeves

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Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) continue to get a lot of attention as new models of Professional Development for learning.  I’ve been part of formal PLC’s for about 6 years. In the new school district I work for, many of our teachers and schools are new to PLC’s and are discovering their power.  Some of these teachers come from small, rural schools where they teach mulitple grades and classes and only at the end of the day can they come up to breathe. Some have had very little support and have learned to operate in isolation.

What they have experienced in their PLC’s is a feeling of support and access to resources and ideas that have lightened the load and made teaching manageable and more fun. Initially, groups needed time simply to get comfortable with the idea of social learning and sharing. Initially it might be described as “collaboration lite”;sharing units and tips but avoiding the real tough questions.  The goal is to get teachers to work together to examine the hard questions of teaching and learning and begin to work to improve student learning. Working together with people of like mind. This seems pretty straightforward and natural but classrooms and teachers have been designed to be isolated. Most of our classrooms still do not have a phone and sharing has not been a part of the culture of education.  Many teachers welcome collaboration and sharing but haven’t experienced it all that much and are having to learn what that really means. Transparency and candidness take trust and time.  Fortunately, this is developing among our staff.

We all know many teachers who prefer isolation. These have not seen PLC’s as very effective and truthfully, many are not functioning as effectively as they could. It’s easier just to do it themselves. Collaboration is just too hard and messy. I usually challenge this group by stating, “if you’re working on something that’s easier to do by yourself, you need to change your focus”. The power of collaboration comes in wrestling with ideas and issues you can’t handle all on your own. I can’t think of many who haven’t had the need for support.

My friend Ewan, loves PLC’s. He loves to go to local pubs and socialize and learn. His teach/meet sessions take place in local pubs, coffee shops and maybe even in schools. Learning is social and fun.  For some classrooms the words “social” and “fun” are rarely used or actualized.

I believe that in the not too distant future, students will be able to complete their entire education online and never attend a traditional school. It probably could be done today. In the light of this I’ve asked principals, “What will your school offer that would cause a student to choose to attend when they have access to better courses, experts and learning online?”  The answer to me, lies in social learning. Learning can be fun. I’m sorry if that offends some but it’s true. Social learning is what I experience everyday. While I’d love for all teachers and students to experience the type of learning and fun I’ve had both online and in person, I understand that their is some work to do before they get it. But they can begin with building social networks within their classrooms first. Once that happens, the inclusion of online social networks will only add value to learning.

Clarence Fisher is going to be doing a very cool experiment this year with Lucy Martin. Their classrooms will be a true and living version of face to face and online learning. You can read about it here. These teachers understand how important it is for kids to have access to other kids at anytime from anywhere. PLC’s begin to get at this notion and if teachers get that, maybe, just maybe they realize how critical it is for kids to experience this as well.

[tags]sociallearning,professionallearningcommunities,plc,ewanmcintosh,lucymartin,clarencefisher[/tags]

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It’s been amazing to be able to virtually participate in a number of conferences thanks to bloggers and servcies like hitchhikr.

Alan November’s Building Learning Communities in Boston would have been another great conference to attend.

Steve Dembo’s post on Dr. Andy Hargreaves keynote has caught my attention. I’ve been involved in supporting teachers establish and build professional learning communities for the past several years. I would be the first to admit that it hasn’t always been smooth. The issues that have been most difficult to deal with has been time and focus.

PLC’s need time. We’ve relied on the work of Rick Stiggins and Rick Dufour (good luck finding a suitable hyperlink to Dufour) for much of our framework. Both recognize that teachers likely need at least an hour a week in these teams. That has not been the case for the majority of our teams. We’ve been lucky to get them together once a month for a hour.

We’ve also struggled with finding a focus. Initially we started by giving teachers a wide open format for their choice of focus. This ranged from teachers wanting to develop webpages to unit creation to working on instructional strategies. The teams were all over the map in terms of focus and satisfaction. We decided to steer them more towards a data driven team where the focus would be on student learning. This concept might be good but my fear was/is if teachers are asked to make this shift with little time, it will turn into a focus in increasing scores and that would be lead to shallow learning.

I think this is the essence of Hargreaves address.

Professional learning communities, what passes for professional learning communities is often teachers thrown together to look at test score data in math and literacy. It’s rhetoric. And it’s definitely not a learning community. Professional learning communities are about more than just throwing groups of teachers together after school to look at achievement data and figure out quick ways to raise their scores. It’s about challenging each other to move ahead.

It’s the previous paragraph that really interests me.

Successful schools promote stimulating conversations that are also committed conversations, that translate into some kind of action over time. It’s not enough to discuss the ideas, they need to influence actionable decisions that transform the school community.

Stimulating conversations. That’s what I experience daily. That’s what excites me about my job right now. I fear that teachers for the most part do not experience stimulating conversations as often as they’d like and need. This is partly due to time but also due to our obsession with data and scores. Yes, even in Canada.

Where I think I’m still struggling is what we mean by “student learning” and if it is always measureable? I also think that if teachers were engaged in stimulating conversations aobut learning, the scores would take care of themselves.