I've been doing a ton of writing lately for my fourth book -- a title set to tackle the five frustrations of a Professional Learning Community -- and thought you might be interested in a few of the quotes that I've stumbled across while researching. 

The first comes from school change expert Doug Reeves, whose most recent title -- Finding Your Leadership Focus -- is a must read for school leaders. 

Reeves writes:

"In other words, educational leaders and policymakers can make a large number of changes to improve the lives of teaching professionals, but if they fail to address the fundamental issue of focus---giving classroom teachers more time to focus on fewer priorities and giving teachers a voice in what those priorities are---then that failure to focus will undermine every other reform."

(p. 76)

NOTHING could be truer, y'all.  When classroom teachers have the time to focus on a small handful of priorities, remarkable things happen for students and for schools. 

Reeves goes on to recommend that EVERY school and district complete an initiative inventory every year, warehousing projects that aren't making a measurable impact on student learning no matter how essential they seem to be:

"For school leaders enduring the withering assault of initiative proliferation, the challenge of focus may seem insurmountable.  After all, they are near the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid of a traditional of a traditional school system and, along with classroom teachers, they bear the brunt of multiple demands of policy, procedure, and prescription...

By asking the right questions, focusing on the factors with the greatest leverage, guarding a culture of success, and embracing the power of teacher leadership, school leaders can be at the point of a diamond rather than at the bottom of a pyramid." 

(p. 65)

So here's a simple question for you:  What one initiative are YOU going to ditch tomorrow?

If you need some help deciding, you might find this initiative monitoring handout from my first book on Professional Learning Communities helpful.

_______________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Decorating the Christmas Tree with Initiatives

Make Like an Obstetrician and Deliver

The Importance of a Clear Vision

Did you get a chance to read my recent post on creating a culture of "doing" instead of "knowing" in schools?  It has sparked a ton of interest and a bunch of great thinking -- both here on the Radical and in the other spaces that I mentally wrestle in. 

The strand that challenges me the most, however, was best articulated by John Spencer, who wrote: 

I don't think it's a culture "of this, instead of this." Paulo Freire was right when he said it needs to be a cycle of action and reflection. Too much of one and it becomes shallow, close-minded activism. Too much of the other and it becomes useless intellectualism. They're both necessary.

John's point is a simple one:  "Instead" thinking is often unhealthy when it creeps its way into schools -- and to suggest that knowing is fundamentally unimportant would be foolish.

In fact, it would be nearly impossible to successfully take action without a foundational understanding of the content behind the issues and ideas that you care the most about. 

Bradley Zakarin shared similar thinking in Twitter when he wrote:

@plugusin Artificial lines b/t do/know (or action/research) hinder student pursuits at both ends of spectrum. Can DO better w/ KNOWLEDGE.

— Bradley Zakarin (@bzeducon) January 29, 2012

Long story short: Balance matters, right?

Here's the thing, though - There IS no balance in schools today.  Curriculum writers and politicians have slapped together courses of study that leave NO ROOM for doing. 

Take the North Carolina sixth grade science curriculum as an example.

We tackle everything from a study of the layers of the earth and the formation of minerals to the way that light, sound and heat transfer energy.  We look at why humans should protect soil, how space exploration has benefited mankind, and how species adapt to their habitats. 

We talk about the differences between the planets.  We look at earthquake and volcano patterns.  We learn about convection and conduction.  We wrestle with symbiosis, mutualism and parasitism.  We examine food chains.  We study the parts of waves -- both transverse and longitudinal.  We look at convex and concave lenses.

We study the parts of the eye and ear.  We discuss the Law of Conservation of Energy. We explore the differences between potential and kinetic energy.  We learn about how the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon influence the earth.

Are you starting to get a sense for just HOW massive the knowing part of our curriculum really is?

The results are really quite simple:  There's not a whole heck of a lot of time for doing in classrooms.

Here's a tangible example of how this changes the instructional decisions made by teachers:  Marsha Ratzel -- a buddy of mine teaching science in Kansas -- introduced me to the Science for Citizens website yesterday. 

She describes it like this:

Science for Citizens offers regular folks like me (if I'm regular I guess) the chance to participate in science projects from right where we live, doing pretty normal stuff and then sending in what we learn to the principal investigators.

Can't get much more "doing" than that, can you? 

But here's the hitch:  While I LOVE the idea of getting my kids involved in projects that would give them a chance to be a part of a much larger community of practicing scientists -- a lesson I think is pretty darn important for them to learn -- I literally WORRY about incorporating any of the projects into my classroom because I'm already  a month behind in my curriculum. 

The moral of the story is that I believe in balance too.  We can't throw the content baby out with the bathwater.  "Instead" thinking really isn't any healthier for schools than "Yeah, But" thinking.

But let's not pretend that what we have in schools now is a finely balanced knowing-doing experience. 

From my point of view, we're not "doing" much more than sprinting our way to know-where.

Any of this make sense?  Do y'all feel that the knowing-doing balance is out of whack in your worlds too, or do your kids have plenty of chances to take an action-stance towards their content -- and more importantly, their communities?

____________________________

Related Radical Reads:

What If Schools Created a Culture of Do INSTEAD of a Culture of Know?

Stuffing Kids with Content

Brainpop and the Overloaded Curriculum

Skills Matter More than Tools

Blogger's Note: Excused the rough feel of this post, y'all.  I'm running late this morning but I wanted to do some transparent reflection before heading back to #educon.  Hopefully something here will spark your thinking too.

__________________________________________

So I'm here in Philly this weekend for #educon -- one of the highlights of my professional year -- and I left last night's panel discussion on sustaining innovation with a TON of unanswered questions.  Here's just a few that are roiling through my mind right now:

Can innovation happen without remarkable leadership?

I've spent the past month reading I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59.

One message that comes across loud and clear in the book is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the driving force behind Google. Their choices and attitudes and ideas and believes permeated through every decision and action and organizational direction in the early days of Google. 

That made Google much more than just another startup company in Silicion Valley to Larry and Sergey.  Instead, it was literally an extension of their core beliefs -- about the role companies should play in the world, about the ways that workplaces should be structured, about what "don't be evil" looks like in action.  

Don't you think that's true for The Science Leadership Academy too?  Don't you think that in some ways, the remarkableness of SLA is an extension of their remarkable principal Chris Lehmann?

So the question for me is what happens to SLA after Chris is gone? 

Isn't it possible that SLA's next principal will be a well-intentioned guy or gal who unintentionally squelches what SLA has become? 

The sad truth is that there just aren't a ton of Chris Lehmanns out there, so can we really believe that SLA will remain the inspiring place that it is today under the stewardship of someone else?

And if not, shouldn't school districts spend more time and money on principal professional development programs to find and to feed and to grow their most innovative leaders?

What role does accountability play in either encouraging or hampering innovation?

At one point in last night's conversation, every panelist preached about the important role of failure in the life of an innovator.  Successes were just the tip of their professional icebergs, argued robotics genius CJ Taylor.  Failures are adorable added Alex Gilliam -- the founder of Public Workshop.

Their thinking lined up nicely with Steven Johnson's work on the evolutionary nature of sustainable change.  Growth doesn't depend on out of the box thinking.  Instead, it depends on a willingness to think at the edges of your box -- even if that thinking results in failures because you are pushing your intellectual comfort zone. 

But I couldn't help thinking about the impact that consequences have on our willingness to push ourselves to the point where failure is a possibility.  Aren't we more likely to stand squarely in the center of our boxes if we know that failure will lead to embarrassment or professional and personal ridicule?

And if so, how do today's grading -- and cudgel-based school accountability -- programs stifle innovation in our schools?  More importantly, is there anything that we can do to foster innovation even when we remain shackled by these practices?

Is innovation even possible in large organizations?

When they were asked to define innovation last night, the panelists used words and phrases like "nimble" and "ready to react and respond."  A sense of action shaped their perceptions of innovation -- and that resonates with me.

But as a guy who works in one of the 20 largest school systems in America, that also has me worried because there's nothing nimble about my district -- and while I think our leaders have a commitment to innovation, I worry that it will never happen simply because we're so huge.

Is it possible that small schools and districts have greater innovation potential than large schools and districts?  And if so, why the heck are we still building 2,000 student schools and cobbling together 100,000+ student school districts?

More importantly, why are we so fixated on standardizing everything in education?  Wouldn't we be better off if we looked at schools as innovation incubators -- an idea that Clayton Christensen pushes for in Disrupting Class -- and encouraged as much diversity within the local context as possible?

Finally, what the heck are we thinking when we put our faith in the federal government's ability to successfully encourage innovation in schools?  Are we REALLY convinced that centralizing educational choice at the national level is going to make us MORE nimble and responsive and innovative as a system?

I'm not.

_____________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Innovation Interview Questions

Innovation and Intellectual Collisions

Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

Our school has always required that teachers maintain websites as a tool for communicating with both parents and students.  For most teachers, "maintaining websites" means housing updates and classroom resources in Blackboard -- a popular service that our district has been using for years.

I ditched Blackboard last year, though, for about a thousand disgruntled reasons.  I decided to use Posterous -- a site that I'm admittedly tech-crushing on right now -- for my classroom website.

Here's three reasons why I think YOU should use Posterous for classroom websites, too:

You can post directly to your website from your email inbox.

If you're anything like me, you're flippin' buried under email for half of your planning period, right? 

That makes getting content posted to your website difficult simply because you have to remember to go to a completely different site with a completely different password and sign in whenever you actually want to make a post.

By the time you're done deleting, responding, forwarding and cursing your way through your inbox, what are the chances that you're REALLY going to want to head somewhere different to post content on the web?

Right. Darn close to zero.

That's one of the reasons I like Posterous so much. 

I've got a unique email address for my site.  All I have to do to post is open a new email and send it to the right address.  Posterous converts the subject line of the email into the title of a new post.  The message body becomes the content for the new post.

For me, posting from my email inbox simply saves time.  I'm there already.  I don't have to navigate anywhere or play frustrating password guessing games.  For tech-hesitant teachers, posting from email inboxes makes updating websites a HECK of a lot more approachable because there's nothing new to learn.

#thatmatters

Parents can receive updates any way that they want 'em.

After spending the better part of the past decade as a Blackboard junkie, one lesson became painfully clear - the VAST majority of my parents weren't even bothering to look at the content I was posting.

The reason was simple: THEY were too busy deleting, responding, forwarding and cursing their way through inboxes to go and check a separate site for content, too. 

With Posterous, your audience can choose to receive instant email notifications every time you make a post.  Or they choose to receive a daily -- or weekly -- summary email including links to the new content you've posted.

Or they can subscribe to your site using an RSS feed reader -- or they can even choose to navigate straight to your site on the Internet if they want to. 

Want numerical proof that this kind of "consumption flexibility" matters?  As of right now, 52 (out of 120) of the families that I serve are signed up for email updates.  More convincingly, my posts are averaging 150-200 views EACH.

That means moms are looking at my content.  Then, they're forwarding it to dads who are forwarding it to kids.  Sometimes dads look first and forward to moms who forward to kids.  I'll bet grandmas even see my content too.

The point is simple, y'all: When you give people choices over how they can consume the content that you're creating, they'll actually READ what you are writing!  

#ifyoubuildit

You can easily embed ANYTHING in a Posterous blog post.

For me, the real value in a class website has more to do with sharing content with kids than it does sharing content with parents. 

Sure, I want mom and dad to know that there's a field trip on Friday. But it's WAY more important that Johnny can easily find new copies of the 17 handouts that he's lost in the bottom of his backpack. 

On Blackboard, uploading content was an INCREDIBLY cumbersome process.  The last I checked, it took something like six different clicks to actually get a document into my website -- and I could only add 'em one at a time. 

When I want to upload content to Posterous, I just add attachments to the email messages that I'm sending to my site.  Through the magic of Posterousness, the content is AUTOMATICALLY embedded -- and made downloadable -- in a new post.

It works GREAT for documents -- here's a handout that I uploaded earlier this week -- but what's REALLY groovy is that it works GREAT for audio and video content too.  Look at how an audio recording that I made is embedded WITH a player in this post. 

Both the document and the audio file started their Posterous lives as email attachments, y'all.  I didn't have to go to another service and upload the content first.  I didn't have to figure out where embeddable text was hidden.  I didn't have to copy and paste computer code into an HTML editor.

I just had to send an email to the right address with the right attachments.

#easysqueazylemonpeasy

No joke: If you're looking for a ridiculously easy tool that can save you time and hassle all while helping to ensure that your parents actually read the content that you are posting on your classroom website, Posterous rules.

It's so good I'd even PAY to use it. 

#loveitTHATmuch

________________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Tool Review: Google Search Story Creator

Tool Review: Tripline

Tool Review: Spreaker

As most Radical readers know, I'm the author of Teaching the iGeneration -- a title designed to introduce teachers to ways that technology can be used to design lessons that give students opportunities to experiment with essential skills like collaboration, information management and persuasion. 

It's probably the title that I'm most proud of because it is incredibly practical. 

I've shared everything that I know about good teaching in the 21st Century.  Readers -- especially those teaching middle and high schoolers -- should be able to pick up Teaching the iGeneration and begin changing their work immediately. 

That's why YOU -- or the teachers in YOUR school -- might be interested in a series of two-day workshops that I'm delivering this spring.

Sponsored by Solution Tree, I'll be in Boston, Orlando and Dallas in March and April. 

Each workshop is designed to help teachers find logical first steps towards integrating technology into their instruction.  We'll look at the changing nature of today's learners and discuss the disconnect between the learning spaces that we've created and the learning spaces that our kids crave. 

We'll talk about the strategies that efficient learners take to manage the crush of information in today's hyper-connected world.  We'll examine the differences between students who use social spaces for networking and social spaces for learning. 

We'll explore the changing nature of persuasion in a visual world and talk about how students can generate their own audiences for the issues they care about.

Most importantly, we'll look for overlaps between the work we are CURRENTLY doing and the work that we SHOULD be doing in schools.  We'll innovate at the edges of the box and build bridges between what we know about efficient learning and what our students know about new tools. 

Interested in learning more? 

Then check out the slides that I used for a Teaching the iGeneration workshop in Union County, North Carolina last week and check out the session wiki where most of the resources for my iGeneration workshops are housed:

Teaching the iGeneration: Union County 2012
View more presentations from wferriter

Then, explore the thoughts that Lesa Goodman -- an eighth grade teacher in Union County -- shared on her blog after spending two days learning with me:

Lesa's Day One Reflection

Lesa's Day Two Reflection

Finally, you can learn more about me -- and the digital work that I do with students -- by checking out my presenter page on the Solution Tree website. 

What I hope you'll find is that my status as a full time, real live, bona fide practicing classroom teacher brings credibility to conversations about teaching and learning with technology.  Everything that I share with audiences are lessons learned through experience -- and that matters. 

Hope you'll consider coming to a workshop this spring -- and bringing friends! 

There's nothing that I like more than a room full of passionate practitioners who are interested in reimagining the work that we do with kids.

_________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

What are YOU Using Technology For?

Making Good Technology Choices

Innovation and Intellectual Collisions