PLCs

More on PLC Vision Statements. . .

In response to my recent post about the vision statements I am drafting for my learning team, Glenn wrote:

Bill, I think you threw everything AND the kitchen sink in there.

It is not a vision statement, it is a treatise on the philosophy of the department. Have you considered trying to whittle it down to a true vision STATEMENT? Can you, in no more than two or three sentences and no more than five or six statements, clearly articulate what you are trying to do?

I am not trying to be too critical, but it seems that you are so broad that the audience you are trying to reach will tune out before they really reach the end of the list.

Your emphasis on clarity definitely resonates with me, Glenn---but I think you and I have different definitions for vision statements!  Like many conversations on education, we lack a shared vocabulary, which makes shared thinking challenging. 

In most of the reading that I've done about vision statements---largely DuFour driven material---you really are supposed to come close to throwing the whole kitchen sink at the document!  Vision statements are designed to show what your school would look like in action if you were completely meeting your building's mission.

Vision statements become a form of a multi-year plan for schools.  All decisions and actions are connected directly to individual items in the building's vision statements.  While the list can seem overwhelming at first, it is manageable in that each of the items included can be approached individually. 

Once a team clearly defines what their school's mission would look like in action, they can begin to prioritize their actions.  In DuFour's work, the narrowed down lists of priorities that schools and teams tackle each year are values statements.  Values statements often start with the phrase, "We will."  They describe specific actions that members of a school community will take in the short term to meet items included in the building's vision. 

What's interesting about values statements is that they can differ across stakeholder groups.  DuFour actually recommends that each stakeholder group draft their own values statements each year because the kinds of actions groups can take to meet a building's vision will naturally differ depending on the role that they play in the school. 

Here's how all of this would play out in my situation:

1.  If I had my way, my learning team would pick one of the vision statements listed in the previous post to focus on this year.  Specifically, I like 6th bullet under curriculum:  Incorporates right-brained lessons that emphasize design, play, story, symphony, empathy and meaning.

This statement is motivating to me because it's something that our building doesn't do particularly well.  Like most schools, we've been sucked into responding to standardized testing---even if that means moving away from learning experiences that are valuable yet difficult to test. 

2.  Once we'd settled on a vision statement to be our area of focus, we'd write values statements describing the actions that we would take to work towards making that vision a reality.  For the sample above, our learning team might write:  "We will develop one lesson or unit that is tailored specifically to each of the right-brained traits explained by Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind."

3.  The other stakeholder groups in our building would write values statements that support the same vision statement.  For example, principals might write:  "We will place priority on right brained thinking skills in our teacher evaluation process this year."

4.  Once every group had written values statements, measureable goals could be drafted that would include specific timelines for taking action and tools for assessing progress.

Does this make sense to you? 

I guess what I'm saying is that a school's vision has to be incredibly detailed primarily because a lack of specificity can cause "false consensus."  People end up feeling like they're in alignment with one another about the direction of your organization, yet behaviors and practices across the building indicate otherwise. 

Narrowing down focus---as you suggest in your comment---is ESSENTIAL simply because it would be impossible for a school to tackle every task in one year.  But narrowing down only happens once a clear picture of what a highly accomplished school would look like in action has been developed between all members of a school community.

Thanks for pushing my thinking!  You're helping me to articulate my beliefs about how buildings create shared understandings of purpose.

(Image credit:  Kitchen Sink by Eggybird, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution) 

 

Whaddya' Think of This Vision?


So, I've been writing recently about the importance of clearly articulated vision statements for learning teams, right?  Well, here's what I've put together for my group.

Check it out and give me some feedback.  Have I touched on key elements of accomplished vision statements?  Does my vision for student learning resonate with yours?  What do you like?  What did I leave out?

Here's what I've written:

If
our learning team is going to be successful at creating a collaborative
community, ensuring high student achievement and valuing the unique
needs of each learner, we must articulate what each of those terms
looks like in action.  Without a shared vision serving as a standard
for collective decision making, it will be impossible to meet the high
expectations defined by our mission statement.  The following vision
statement is designed to serve as a living guide for all stakeholders
interested in seeing our students succeed:

Curriculum

A
team committed to ensuring high student achievement and valuing the
unique needs of each learner provides all students with a strong,
fundamental education focused on the standards defined by the State of North Carolina's Standard Course of Study.
While clear emphasis is placed on core academic subjects, a strong
commitment to educating the whole child is also evident in the
development of top-quality art, music, drama, foreign language and
other elective experiences for students.  Finally, a team committed to
ensuring high student achievement recognizes and respects the changing nature of the learning and work environment in the 21st Century. 

On such a team, the curriculum:

  1. Focuses on a handful of essential outcomes identified after a careful examination of student performance measures. 
  2. Provides integrated learning experiences, enabling students to make connections between different subject areas.
  3. Encourages student-centered exploration of content rather than teacher-driven presentations.
  4. Allows students to engage in study of topics of deep personal interest.
  5. Remains consistent across classrooms.
  6. Incorporates right-brained lessons that emphasize design, play, story, symphony, empathy and meaning.
  7. Equally values non-tested learning that has been recognized as valuable by the community.   
  8. Introduces students to tools for managing and evaluating information.
  9. Structures
    frequent opportunities for students to create, communicate and
    collaborate with others, both in and beyond their communities.

Teachers

Research---including the results of the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey---has shown time and again that the single greatest determinant in the
success or failure of students is the quality of classroom
teachers.  Pairing a deep understanding of their content and the
characteristics of the students that they serve, accomplished educators
tailor learning experiences and environments that both ensure student
success and value the unique needs of every learner. 

To maximize the human capacity in a schoolhouse, exemplary teachers:

  1. Believe that all students can learn and accept responsibility for results.
  2. Join as participating members of collaborative teams that share knowledge about high-quality instruction.
  3. Analyze data to identify and amplify effective practices.
  4. Demonstrate a commitment to constant professional growth by researching, reading and reflecting on learning.
  5. Use their school's mission, vision and values statements as guideposts for every decision. 
  6. Consider,
    confront and/or abandon practices that appear to be inconsistent with
    their school's mission, vision and values statements.

Attention to Individual Students

Decision-making
on a middle school learning team that is committed to ensuring high
student achievement and valuing the unique needs of every learner is
driven by the distinguishing characteristics of preteen learners.
Still developing physically, cognitively and emotionally, middle grades
students present more classroom diversity than their elementary and
high school counterparts.  Struggling with organization, task
completion, consistency and a developing identity, the students of most
middle school classrooms will face moments of great challenge at some
point during their sixth, seventh or eighth grade school years.   

These differences are recognized and respected on exemplary middle school learning teams where:

  1. Multiple opportunities to master academic content are offered.
  2. Structured feedback about content mastery AND productive work behaviors are provided to both parents and students.
  3. Ongoing support is offered for students struggling with social interactions and personal development.
  4. A range of extracurricular experiences are developed that provide every child with a place to belong.
  5. Celebrations of student success are frequent and take many forms.    

Students

While
still developing physically, cognitively, socially and emotionally,
students can---and should---play a valuable role in ensuring their own
success.  With the support of their teachers, students on exemplary
middle school learning teams:

  1. Begin to accept responsibility for their own learning. 
  2. Identify and pursue areas of deep personal interest. 
  3. Actively track their own academic progress, identifying areas of strength and weakness.
  4. Seek out connections between the content that they are studying in school. 
  5. Understand
    their role as a co-learner in a classroom and respect the different
    personalities, opinions and abilities of their peers. 
  6. Allow their own thinking to be challenged and actively challenge the thinking of their classmates.

Parents and Community Members

Perhaps
the saddest reality in schools today is that parents and community
members are often marginalized.  While schools expect constant support
from the communities that they serve, there are few formalized
opportunities for parents and volunteers to be actively engaged in
efforts to ensure high student achievement and to value the unique
needs of every learner. 

Exemplary middle school learning teams recognize the power of parents and community partners by:

  1. Regularly communicating with parents about the academic, social and emotional successes and struggles of students.
  2. Establishing meaningful volunteer opportunities that support the academic, social and emotional development of students.
  3. Engaging parents and community members in conversations about school programs.
  4. Developing
    community orientation programs that introduce interested citizens to
    the content and curriculum of the middle grades classroom.
  5. Eliciting support and guidance for school programs from local businesses. 

(Image credit:  DPW-20070805-203502-NIKON_D200-105 by Digiphotoworks, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

The Vision-less Learning Community. . .


Several years ago, I had the opportunity to join the faculty of a brand new school that was opening as a professional learning community.  Our administrator was nothing short of remarkable---one of those top ten-percenters who was able to single-handedly inspire passion and develop a shared sense of commitment and purpose. 

And our early work was nothing short of amazing! 

Perhaps most meaningful were our conversations around our school's mission statement.  Unlike the overly generic mission statements posted in almost every school that I'd worked in early in my career, our mission statement became a great source of pride for our building because we created it together!

The process was powerful, forcing us to wrestle with core ideas about teaching and learning.  Specifically, we struggled to decide whether or not our school's mission should be to "strive for high student achievement" or to "ensure high student achievement." 

While this may seem like a small semantic shift, "ensuring high student achievement" seemed pretty intimidating to us.  Like many educators, we immediately began throwing out all kinds of reasons why ensuring student achievement was impossible.  "What about the kids who don't do their homework?" some argued.  "Surely, we can't ensure high-student achievement for them!" 

"Right!" chimed in others.  "And what about the kids from families who just don't care?  I'm not about to promise to ensure anything that I can't control."

But simply promising to "strive for" high student achievement didn't sit well with our principal.  He wanted to see something more out of our building, and he said so:  "Guys, I actually believe in you.  If I didn't think that you could ensure high student achievement, you wouldn't be sitting in this room right now. 

"More importantly, ensuring high student achievement is the right thing to do, isn't it?  Shouldn't the parents of our students know that we are going to do more than just give it the good ol' college try?  The success of their children is too important to just hope that teachers are striving for excellence."

Because of our commitment to him---and because he had so obviously shown faith in us---the thinking in the room slowly shifted.  Instead of being intimidated by "ensuring high student achievement," we saw it as a moral obligation.  Our final mission statement reflected that sense of deep purpose, reading:

Our school is a collaborative community that ensures high student achievement and values the unique needs of each learner. 

Our principal had appealed to the core of who we were as professionals, inspiring us to take on a challenge that many schools shy away from.  There wasn't a person in that room who didn't believe in him because he had made constant efforts to show us that he cared about us as professionals and as people. 

This attention to relationships allowed him to move us from what Kenneth Williams calls---in his chapter of The Collaborative Administrator---compliance to commitment:

"Ensuring the learning of every student requires more than compliance,
however.  Learning for all students requires deep levels of commitment
from all stakeholders, and that is nurtured through principals
developing relationships with teachers that foster trust, integrity,
collaboration, and ownership.  The ambitious mission of learning for
all can only be accomplished through the deep commitment of teachers."  (page 73)

For the next three years, our mission statement drove every decision in our school.  There wasn't a moment when "ensuring high student achievement" was far from our mind.  In fact, every time that we ran a new idea by our principal, his first question was always, "Can you show me how this ensures high student achievement or values the unique needs of every learner?"

We got to the point where we'd carefully research everything, making natural connections between best practice, our proposals and our school's mission statement.  We knew that the more evidence that we could pile behind our plan, the more likely our principal was to support us in our actions. 

We also knew that if our decision couldn't be clearly connected to "ensuring high student achievement" or "valuing the unique needs of every learner," we'd be answering a collection of difficult questions from the bossman!  He'd either turn us away---or he'd force us to refine and revise until our ideas aligned with our school's mission. 

This all sounds great, doesn't it? 

Isn't the goal of any professional learning community to establish a powerful, shared mission that is used to drive the actions of stakeholders?  And shouldn't principals serve as the protectors of the mission, questioning decisions that seems out of alignment with the overall goals of the community?

Absolutely!  In fact, the "principal as guardian" role was recently described by learning community expert Rick DuFour in The Collaborative Administrator:

"Both their words and their actions convey what must be 'tight' in
their schools and districts--those imperatives that all staff members
are expected to observe and honor.  Furthermore, they do not hesitate
to insist that staff act in accordance with the purpose and priorities
of the organization.  They are vigilant in protecting against the
erosion of core values. 

They are empathetically
assertive when necessary.  They are not weak leaders, quite the
contrary.  They are strong leaders who demonstrate a different kind of
strength than the authoritarian control of traditional hierarchies.

They enlist colleagues in a fundamentally moral endeavor---making a
difference in the lives of students---and then work with those
colleagues collectively and collaboratively to succeed in that
endeavor."  (page 3)

But our building made one significant mistake:  We failed to take the time to develop a set of written vision and values statements to support our school's mission. 

Vision and values statements in a professional learning community seek to define what your mission statement looks like in action.  They give clarity to vague phrases like "ensure high-student achievement" and "value the unique needs of every learner."  As Rick DuFour and Robert Eaker first wrote in Professional Learning Communities at Work:

"An effective vision statement articulates a vivid picture of the
organization's future that is so compelling that a school's members
will be motivated to work together to make it a reality."  (page 63)

Vision statements force teachers to detail the specific steps that stakeholders---from parents and students to teachers and principals----must take in order to fulfill the stated goals of a building's mission.  The resulting transparency prevents false consensus from destroying the collective action of a building. 

Vision statements can be used by existing members of a school community to evaluate new decisions and set priorities, by parents and community leaders to hold schools accountable, and by teaching candidates interested in determining the fit between the beliefs of a building and their own core philosophies.  Finally, vision statements can be used to find short-term successes worth celebrating! 

Here is an example of a set of vision statements that I'm currently polishing with my new learning team.  Notice how we're explicitly making connections between our mission statement and the kinds of decisions that a school must make on a daily basis.  Also, notice how our vision statements are specific enough that we can take real actions to meet them.  They are based on behaviors, rather than beliefs. 

When they are complete, these vision statements will serve as practical guides for the day-to-day actions of everyone in my learning team. 

Looking back, I've realized that the teachers and parents in our building did have a shared vision guiding our day-to-day actions:  We believed in our principal and were willing to work with (and for) him.   

He was what we had in common.

And he was masterful at using strong relationships to guide our school towards decisions and actions that ensured we met our mission.  In fact, I'd bet that if you were to ask him to write out a collection of vision statements for our building, he could have done so in no time---and they would have reflected the general consensus of our school and our community. 

The problem is that like most accomplished administrators, he eventually moved on---and when he left, our shared sense of purpose collapsed.  Without his careful work to guard our efforts to "ensure high student achievement" and to "value the unique needs of every learner," our decisions began to drift into contrary directions. 

While faculty members still believed in our mission statement, "ensuring high student achievement" began to mean different things to different people.  Some believed that students needed to be taught responsibility and punished for missing assignments, while others believed that content mastery---rather than task completion---was the best way to help students to excel.

We struggled with decisions connected to technology's role in instruction.  We disagreed with the roles that professionals beyond the classroom should play in student learning.  We didn't see eye-to-eye on the best ways to provide remediation or enrichment to students. 

Had our previous principal remained with our faculty forever,these challenges would never have caused our building to struggle because he would have used his skills as a relationship-builder to guide us towards solutions that met his personal vision----and we would have happily followed because of our faith in him.  Our shared belief in our principal was the thread holding our faculty together.

The DuFours would argue, however, that a clearly articulated set of vision statements should serve as the thread holding a faculty's decisions together.  Taking the time to write detailed vision statements from day one eliminates fundamental disagreements, forcing educators to work through conversations about core issues, and detailing consensus for future reference. 

Does any of this make sense to you? 

Have you ever worked in a building where shared vision statements guided the actions of everyone?  What about in a building where an accomplished administrator served as the visionary---until he or she moved on to a new position?

How does your school go about making shared decisions about direction?

(Image credit:  MF 225 by Jeltovski, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

Efficient Sharing in a Learning Community

As most Radical readers know, I'm pretty fascinated by books that explore group dynamics and collective intelligence.  I guess when you're an active member of a sixth grade professional learning team that is working together to improve the instruction in their language arts and social studies classes, knowing as much as you can about the dynamics of human interactions is just plain valuable!

And if you haven't picked up on it yet, I'm also a bit of a digital junkie.  I've spent the better part of the past few years exploring how digital tools can be used to make good teaching easier, to engage students and to make my own work more meaningful and efficient.  I guess that all started when I joined TLN---which some members describe as a "digital teacher workroom on steroids!"

So you'll understand why Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody---which focuses on the complex changes that digital tools have had on the work of groups has left me completely jazzed!  Finally, someone is describing in approachable terms the changes that I'm experiencing first-hand as I introduce the teachers of my team to online applications that can change the way we work together.

Early in Everybody, Clay explains that group activities often scaffold upon one another, starting simply and becoming more complex over time.  In his thinking, the three levels of group interactions are sharing, cooperation and collective action.  Each of these levels, Shirky argues, can be supported by digital tools. 

For anyone that has ever worked with new learning teams, Shirky's levels feel right, don't they?  Rarely do teams jump into complicated tasks that require deep collaboration from day one.  Lacking shared experiences with one another---and the trust that those experiences generate---teams tend to focus on simple tasks that are focused on meeting the immediate demands of the classroom. 

Often, those early tasks involve the sharing of resources.  Teachers create digital copies of handouts or presentations that address elements of the required curriculum and pass them along to their peers.  They also identify websites that can be used in instruction or preparation.   Articles are gathered, assessments are written, and  videos are identified. 

While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences. 

What's more, resource sharing will play a permanent role for most learning teams---even as they move beyond the novice conversations described above.  Highly accomplished teachers and teams are constantly wrestling with and reviewing their practices----which by default means that highly accomplished teams and teachers will always be identifying and generating new materials for use with students. 

The challenge, then, lies in managing the flood of potential resources, right?  With limited time, how can teams sift through materials, select those that are of value, and communicate new discoveries with their peers? 

For my learning team, this has always been a difficult challenge.  Each of us is nothing short of incredibly motivated to improve----and as a result, we've always got new materials to share with one another.  Until recently, sharing those resources most frequently happened by sending an email to our team mailing list.   We'd insert links to new websites or attach documents that we thought our colleagues would find valuable. 

And while email was serving its purpose, there was one huge hitch:  I hate email!

I don't know about you, but I drown in digital messages.  If I don't check my email every three hours, I spend another three hours trying to dig through complaints from parents, emergency messages from Nigerian princesses, updates on the fire drill schedule, pictures of the new faculty baby and urgent changes to the supply ordering procedures.

So the resources that my team sent out on an almost daily basis were getting lost in the electronic shuffle.  As much as I wanted to check out every new website that someone had discovered, I wanted to curse the email that it came in!

My solution was a simple one that's going to take a bit of explaining.  Are you comfortable with the challenge of reading a bit about digital ideas that may seem intimidating at first blush?  If so, keep reading:

I turned my team on to two of my favorite tech tools:  Delicious and Pageflakes.  Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to keep online records of the resources that they are exploring.  In its simplest form, that's all Delicious needs to be. 

But Delicious also allows users to add tags to the sites that they find.  Tags are short titles that are added by users that define the category that they believe best describes a particular weblink.  Once tagged, the resource that you've labeled is grouped with every other resource that has been tagged with the same label---and is available to any other Delicious user poking through the "Delicious Library" by tag!

So if you found this blog post interesting, you might tag it "PLCs" because it describes the work of a learning team, "Tech" because it describes how to use digital tools, or "Tempered_Radical" because it is a piece that you found here. Better yet, you might tag it with all three phrases----making it easier to find for Delicious users interested in any of those three topics! 

(Not that I'm trying to promote my piece or anything?!)

Knowing that sharing websites was something that was super important to the members of our team---and that our email only system of sharing was ridiculously inefficient---I convinced everyone on to sign up for a free Delicious account and download the Delicious browser buttons to their computers.  By doing so, they could instantly begin bookmarking and tagging websites that were related to the topics we were studying in class. 

In order to make following one another's tags easy, though, we had to decide on a common "tagging language."  A tagging language is nothing more than a set group of categories that we all agreed to use when we were bookmarking websites for school. 

We sat down in a meeting and decided on the kinds of resources that we typically find and share with each other.  For language arts, that included reading, writing, problem solution, evaluation and poetry resources.  For social studies, that included Greece, Rome, World Wars, Middle Ages, Europe, South America and current event resources. 

Together, we created a set of common tags that we would add to each website we bookmarked in Delicious.  Our tagging language looks like this:

salem6la_reading
salem6la_writing
salem6la_ps
salem6la_eval
salem6la_poetry

salem6ss_rome
salem6ss_greece
salem6ss_ce

(Is this starting to make sense to you?!)

Now I know what you're thinking:  This all seems a bit confusing, right? 

It really isn't!  Bookmarking a site in Delicious is no different than adding it to your favorites in any web browser.  The only difference for our team is that we add a specific tag to each site we bookmark.  By doing so, Delicious automatically sorts our sites for us and allows us to easily see any other resource that shares the same tag.

The other neat thing about Delicious is that it provides an RSS feed for every tag.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication---and its a bunch of digital gobbledygook for a really easy way to automatically see updates to websites or lists that are constantly changing.  (Check out this neat tutorial that explains RSS in Plain English.)  Tools like Pageflakes allows users to follow changes to websites with RSS feeds. 

To take advantage of the ability to follow changes to our Delicious groups automatically, I created a Pageflakes Pagecast that included lists of all of the new resources posted in Delicious by our teachers.  You can check out the Language Arts Pagecast here and you can check out the Social Studies Pagecast here.

What you'll see is exactly what the teachers of our team see:  A collection of boxes that contain weblinks to each of the topics that we study in our classes.  If you hover over one of the links, you'll also see a short description of the resource.  So now, whenever we want to see what resources the other members of our learning team has been exploring, we come to these two Pagecasts. 

The best part:  RSS feed readers like Pageflakes update themselves automatically!  As long as members of our team remember to use the right tag language when bookmarking something in Delicious, Pageflakes will find those new resources and add them to the right category in our Pagecasts. 

That's it.  Nothing more.  Visit one Pageflakes link and see everything that has
been found by every other member of our learning team.  No writing
emails.  No reading emails.  No jotting notes or sharing rambling
conversations on the way to the restroom!

Oh yeah----and Delicious and Pageflakes are completely free services.

It's hard to beat free, ain't it?

For our team, this system has been nothing short of remarkable.  In Shirky's terms, we've decreased the "cost" of each of our group's transactions.  No longer do we resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. 

Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning (Our meeting to decide on shared tags and install Delicious took 40 minutes, then I spent 60 minutes pointing Pageflakes to each of the groups of resources we were growing in Delicious), we've made sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.

If you're interested, here's a handout that I used to introduce the process of tagging to my team:

Download Salem_Sixth_Grade_Delicious_Tags.pdf

(Image credit:  MG_8663 by Nicolas Raymond, licensed Creative Commons: Attribution)

    

The Digitally Speaking Learning Community

Sometimes, my colleagues groan when I propose new uses for technology.  "That's just Bill being Bill," they say, "Where there's a will, there's just gotta be a digital way with that guy!" 

And while their groans drive me a bit crazy sometimes, I really am convinced that digital tools have a ton of potential for helping professional learning communities do powerful work more efficiently. 

My most recent efforts have been focused on using digital tools to facilitate asynchronous conversations between learning teams.  While digital dialogue may seem initially strange in a profession driven by human relationships, I'd argue that electronic forums can make conversations on challenging topics more approachable to all faculty members. 

In my eyes, asynchronous conversations offer three direct advantages to schools functioning as professional learning communities:

Asynchronous conversations give individuals the freedom to participate in ongoing conversations at times that are convenient:
If your school is anything like mine, it is probably an incredibly busy place where teachers and teams on different grade levels and in different subject areas can go for days or weeks without seeing one another.  As strange as it may seem, the barriers of time and place are as great a challenge for the teachers within my building as it is for cohorts of colleagues working across continents.   

Asynchronous conversations allow busy professionals to communicate at times that work within their own personal and professional schedules.  Posting questions, seeking advice, sharing resources and supporting one another can be done early in the morning, during planning or late at night.  Stated simply, asynchronous conversations can connect teachers regardless of their teaching schedule—or your school's meeting schedule.

Asynchronous conversations allow teachers to quickly and easily work with a large cohort of teachers as members of a learning community:  Research has shown—and you have long known—that the best support opportunities for teachers involve partnerships with others in cohort groups.  Collaboration just plain makes professional growth more meaningful, and teachers who are from similar grade levels and content areas offer the best guidance and support to one another. 

Asynchronous conversations facilitate the work of cohort groups.  Conversations can happen quickly and easily, in a targeted and focused manner that is often lacking in large group settings.    In digital discussions, individual questions can be posed and answers can be provided in an efficient and effective way as participants self-select areas of conversation pertinent to their own needs and interests.  Finally, reflection happens fluently as group members offer different perspectives on similar topics. 

Asynchronous conversations give teachers the ability to participate in a semi-anonymous, pressure-free setting:  Let's face it:  Faculty meetings can be pretty intimidating places—especially when your school is working through powerful conversations about teaching and learning!  Passions inevitably run high, Type A personalities take over, and half of your staff end up sitting silently waiting for the dust to settle.  It's not that they don't have meaningful things to share.  It's just that they need a chance to breathe, to think, and to speak! 

Asynchronous conversations allow teachers to carefully consider their comments before sharing with the entire faculty.  They can revise and polish ideas, think carefully about their responses, and participate without waiting to get a word in edgewise.

Teachers engaged in electronic conversations come to know the positions of their peers while working from the privacy of their own homes.  No one feels rushed or threatened in digital forums—and no one has to "think quickly" before sharing opinions.

This ability often makes educators feel "safe" while sharing alternative viewpoints—and conversations that elicit alternative viewpoints result in defensible consensus far more often than the one-sided affairs that faculty meetings can sometimes become!

So what exactly can an asynchronous conversation between members of a learning team look like? 

Check out this Voicethread presentation that is being used to focus conversation around the vision statements of a learning community:

Pretty powerful stuff, huh? 

Did you notice how the participants in the conversation were freely challenging one another's thinking?  That is the kind of collective dialogue that is often missing from full staff faculty meetings.  Also interesting is how some participants chose to use their real names, while others chose to work with pseudonyms----and how participants used text, audio and video comments to make their points. 

Why does this matter? 

Because digital conversations can provide the members of your faculty with multiple avenues for participation that align with their personal levels of comfort---both with technology and with their peers.  Digital conversations also allow school leaders to get a better sense for the general thoughts and understandings of their faculties----and provide teams with a permanent record of their developing thinking and collective decisions. 

Think about how similar conversations can benefit the work in your building.  Would your teachers embrace digital opportunities to interact?  Would having time to think through responses and interactions result in more meaningful contributions to your building's professional conversations? 

Do some members of your learning team end up isolated in full faculty discussions by more assertive teachers?  Do you find that teachers shy away from sharing controversial opinions for fear of alienating colleagues?  Would participating become "safer" electronically?

Or am I just crazy in thinking that digital conversations can play a meaningful role in the work of professional learning communities?

(Image credit:  Dialogue of the Day by ElektraCute, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

"There's Nothing Like" Thinking. . .

I've stumbled into a conversation with Joe Henderson and Nancy Flanagan that I'm really enjoying.  Both---along with Dina Strasser---are critical friends when it comes to teaching with technology---and they're forcing me to refine and revise my own thinking about digital tools. 

You see, neither completely buys the idea that technology is having a positive impact on teaching and learning, instead wondering whether or not technology is reducing the number of "real-world" experiences that our students have or decreasing our commitment to human relationships and the natural world. 

And I'm not sure that I agree!

Recently, we've been talking around a post that Joe recently wrote for his blog titled Bill and Joe's Excellent Adventure.  Here are some of my reactions/responses to their ideas:

Joe wrote:

In my experience, I have found that many educators are seduced by the flashiness of technology and use it sans, you know, any sense of pedagogical research or any sort of acknowledgment of hierarchies of need. It just becomes another way of doing the whole “sage on the stage” style of teaching. Funny that there isn’t much evidence that it increases achievement or learning when used that way. Wonder why that is. If that research is out there, I’d love to see it. I think Bill and I agree here.

I do agree, Joe, that teachers need to back up their instructional decisions with evidence that those decisions are increasing student achievement and learning.  That's just plain responsible practice---and something that far too many teachers avoid, whether they're using technology or not! 

I'm certain we can all point to a teacher in our careers who taught a massive unit on pirates or dinosaurs or space or holidays around the world in the best "Ms. Frizzle" fashion (consider this teacher, for example) that went on for months and had no direct connection to the curriculum---but as long as the kids were having fun, no one thought twice about condeming that teacher for irresponsibility! 

I also agree that teachers using technology bear an even greater responsibility for documenting the impact of their instructional practices and decisions primarily because there is so little practical research in the "field" right now.   

Unlike more traditional instructional practices (which have been studied to no end---primarily by "experts" who are trying to sell their systems as silver bullets to districts under threat of closure by accountability demands. Does Reading First ring a bell?), few practitioners have worked to systematically document the results that instruction with technology has had on achievement.

But it is happening----I know that I've recently started writing about the impact that blogging and podcasting has had on student involvement in my classroom.  I've also got mini-bits of "teacher research" on the impact of digital discussion forums and wikis on student learning results in my classroom that I'll polish and post soon. 

While my research isn't "formal" by any means (remember, I'm a full-time practitioner), they're impressive nonetheless (consider the 260 ungraded comments added in the past two weeks by students in this digital conversation about hatred.)

My greatest fear, however, is that attempts to document the impact that instructional technology has on student achievement in my classroom will fail miserably----not because I'm beholden to tech and would be unwilling to change an ineffective practice, but instead because our definition of "student achievement" is pretty narrow today, don't you think?

Anyone who poked around the digital conversations that these students are having about genocide in Darfur would recognize elements of critical thinking, characteristics of collaborative dialogue, and levels of verbal articulation that are impressive times ten. 

Would it shock you, then, to know that the teacher responsible for promoting this kind of work had the worst test scores on the entire hallway?

True story----those kids are mine. 

So what do I do?  Should I move away from digital opportunities for kids to interact because those efforts aren't producing results on the multiple choice end of grade exams we've seemed to embrace as measures of "achievement?"  Or should I continue to use technology to engage my kids in higher level conversations, knowing that those outcomes are probably more important than testing results?

My mental wrestling continued in the comment section of Joe's post, where Nancy wrote:

Tech tools have injected a healthy dose of real creativity into music education–it’s amazing that kids can play a tune, add harmony and timbre variety, print it up and play it, all at a single screen. But will they stop learning to appreciate the reedy beauty of a bassoon, the majesty of a symphony orchestra, the discipline of practicing for excellence, the incredibly rich body of literature for ensemble playing...

There is nothing like playing in a large musical group, one person contributing to a glorious massed chord. You can hear it digitally, day or night (and buy it for 99 cents)–but that does not compare to the satisfaction of being a cog in a human music-making group. I hate to see music reduced to a combination of individual indulgence and a spectator activity.

So I'm about to say something that may rustle a few feathers.  I hope that Joe and Nancy and Dina will take them as another contribution to this ongoing conversation: 

I'm beginning to wonder whether or not our aversion to instructional technology is really more a result of  the pleasure that we take from our own approaches to learning. Is it possible that we see “the best” learning as the way that we learn best?

Do we inherently (unintentionally?) discredit new forms of learning because they don't remind us of what we value the most in the teaching and learning process---or because the final products aren't the kinds of final products that "look right" to us?

Think about Nancy's language to open her second paragraph:  "There's nothing like playing in a large musical group."  This sounds like a strongly held opinion, doesn't it? ”There is nothing like” seems pretty exclusive to me.  A strongly held faith in “the way things were” as opposed to “the way things could be?”

Even if Nancy does feel strongly about "the way things were," she's clearly not alone!  Don't most teachers think this way about their favorite instructional practices?    Don't we all feel passionately about what we do with students each day, convinced that our approach is best?

(I know that I do.  It's a constant battle for me to be open to new ideas---primarily because I don't have the time to change what it is that I'm doing!)

And if so, what consequences does that hold for our ability as a profession to adapt to the changing interests and needs of our learners? Do you think that “pure-ism” (for lack of a better word) is one of the reasons that teaching practices seldom change?

Here’s a specific, music-related example:

I’ve got a kid who completely loves Apple’s Garage Band. He sits behind his computer day and night churning out musical tracks than he then shares with our kids and with digital music forums for commentary.  He anxiously awaits critique from peers, who suggest different tempos, beat patterns and arrangements----which are easily added to his piece.  Revision and reflection---combined with articulation of his "musical vision" are a part of his everyday activities.

Oh yeah—and he can’t play an instrument to save his life. Here’s a kid that would never have been engaged in music creation in any way—let alone “practicing” his skills at music creation for hours and hours a day had it not been for technology.

Does that have any value at all?

How would he respond to Nancy's "There's nothing like playing in a large musical group" comment?

What "There's nothing like" statements do you make----and is it possible that they might become a barrier to your ability to change what it is that you do with your students?

 

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