Bill Ferriter

Three Simple Lessons for School Leaders. . .

I’m a pretty voracious reader who tends to be consumed by biographies.  For some reason, studying the lives of real people—especially those who live in developing nations or who face conflict and turmoil—resonates with me. 

One of my recent reads—Tenzing and the Sherpas of Everest—crossed categories for me.  Not only was it a fascinating look into the life of Tenzing Norgay—perhaps the most famous Sherpa of all time—it also centered on the early attempts to climb Mount Everest, a topic prominent in my personal library. 

What made Tenzing and the Sherpas of Everest even more interesting was that every page seemed to carry new lessons for school leaders. 

Consider this excerpt, detailing Tenzing’s actions on one of the most strenuous parts of early trips to Everest, the tedious, months-long hike through intimidating terrain to get dozens of expedition members and porters—not to mention thousands of pounds of supplies—from the nearest accessible town to base-camp:

“Like the great sirdar Ang Tharkay, Tenzing walked with them in stages, talked to them, bought them rakshi (homemade liquor) and tea at small teahouses en route, and tended to them when they were ill or injured.

Although a classless society, Sherpas do have social strata.  Tenzing was not a wealthy man but…he was a famous sirdar and highly respected by all who worked with him or knew of  him.  When such a man physically assists and keeps company with porters and local staff it is an extraordinary boost to their morale and cooperation.”

(J. Tenzing, 2001, Kindle Location 910-917).

Interesting stuff, huh?  Tenzing didn’t have to walk with his porters.  He was the sirdar of the expedition—and a well known one at that.  No one had more experience than Tenzing in the mountains, and that experience made him the most important Sherpa on any trip. 

He could have easily taken advantage of his position, walking with light loads and spending time with European climbers instead of the human mules carrying equipment in exchange for meager salaries.  Instead, he carried heavy packs and made a deliberate choice to recognize and respect the efforts of his men. 

The most influential school leaders make the same choice.  Understanding that morale and cooperation—the only two levers for driving change in any human organization—are linked to the faith that teachers have in their leaders, they check their titles at the door, roll up their sleeves and lead from the pack.

Instead of giving orders and then sitting on the sidelines expecting their teachers to do the heavy-lifting, they visibly participate:  Joining in conversations, finding solutions to problems, lightening loads whenever possible.  No one questions the commitment of the best principals because that commitment is on display from the time that busses arrive until the time that the last teachers leave. 

Tenzing was also tireless, the first to provide comfort and support to struggling colleagues on almost every climb.  Consider this excerpt detailing his actions in the face of a crisis on the Lhotse Face:

“To make a sad situation even worse, three Sherpas—Aila, Da Norbu and Mingma Rita, who were roped together—had lost their footing and tumbled down 200 meters to the ice below. 

Mingman Rita suffered a broken collarbone and cracked ribs; Aila’s face was so badly damaged he was unrecognizable; but Da Norbu somehow managed to survive with only bruising.

Tenzing had not been with them when these accidents occurred, but when news reached him he immediately hurried up the mountain to take care of his Sherpas whom he knew would be devastated and afraid.”

(J. Tenzing, 2001, Kindle Location 1019-1024)

While teacher teams are never going to be in the kinds of life-or-death situations that faced Tenzing’s Sherpas, they will lose their footing and tumble from time-to-time.  Collaboration is difficult at best, requiring a set of skills and behaviors that teachers are rarely prepared for.  Initial progress is often painfully slow and setbacks are common.

The most influential school leaders spot struggling teams quickly and  hurry to take care of their teachers.  They might offer extra time and attention:  Joining in meetings, introducing new tools and structures important for successfully overcoming obstacles, finding training opportunities to ensure that teachers are better prepared for the climb.

Or they might just encourage and support:  Pointing out the successes that teams have already had, reminding teachers to save energy for the entire journey, applying “psychological bandages” to exhausted colleagues.  Either way, the best school leaders act immediately when they realize that a team is in trouble, drawing from their own expertise to keep everyone moving forward. 

Not all of the selections  that stood out in Tenzing and the Sherpas of Everest had to do with Tenzing directly, however.  Consider this rather humorous bit detailing the actions of a Sherpa asked to carry a backpack of rocks collected and categorized by Swiss geologists down from a camp high on the mountain:

One Sherpa was given the task of carrying down the valuable rock specimens…Each specimen was labeled and catalogued and carefully packed to take home to Europe for study. 

However, this particular Sherpa felt it absurd to carry rocks down from Everest, so decided to make life easier for himself and tipped out his load!  He then climbed down to just above Base Camp where he collected a new pile…which he dutifully handed over to the Swiss. 

One can only imagine the horror of the Swiss scientists!  The Sherpa, meanwhile, was oblivious to all the fuss and lost no sleep over the matter.

(J. Tenzing, 2001, Kindle Location 989-996).

How many confused Sherpas do you have in your school and/or system? While us teacher-types generally know that we’re responsible for carrying out the tasks assigned to us by school leaders—principals, superintendents, district lead teachers, school board members—sometimes those tasks seem to be just plain absurd! 

And while teachers will almost always do what we’re told, the end result of any effort carried out in blind obedience is likely to be scattered and careless.

(Don’t believe me?  Ask a Swiss geologist!)

That’s why the most influential school leaders are diligent about building awareness and commitment in their faculties.  Each time decisions are made, those decisions are carefully communicated.  Clear connections are drawn between the actions a building is already taking and the new tasks that teachers are being asked to take on.  No one is confused about their purpose or how their work connects to broader organizational goals.

In the end, Tenzing’s story was encouraging to me.  He was a simple man with little formal education.  He didn’t have any degrees in organizational leadership or school administration.  He hadn’t served in the military or gone to any officer training programs.

And yet he learned how to lead anyway. 

Better yet, Tenzing’s leadership decisions didn’t require anything other than common sense.  He accepted responsibility for his men, set an example that couldn’t be questioned, and saw himself as the intellectual and professional equal of his peers. 

The results were nothing short of extraordinary for Tenzing.  He quickly became the first-choice for expeditions headed to the Himalayas.  He organized trip after trip—and was paid well in the process.  He raised his family’s status and quality of life, was respected and admired by everyone—Sherpa and European alike—and ended up conquering a challenge that few thought was possible. 

Having worked for dozens of principals during the course of my career, I can tell you that the school leaders who make the same choices can be just as successful.

Why Teachers "Give Up."

In one of the more interesting twists of digital fate, my recent post on interactive whiteboards has been making a bit of a splash in cyberspace over the past few days.  It was first picked up by Teacher Magazine.  Then, the Washington Post spotlighted it in their Answer Sheet blog. 

And while the majority of the comments in both places have been surprisingly supportive of my argument that IWBs are a waste of cash, there have been a few negative arrows slung my way.  One in particular---added to the Teacher Magazine post by a guy named Mr. D---caught my attention.

He wrote: 

I think the problems is that either you are
resistant to technology ie change, or you have not been exposed on how
to integrate it properly.  Bill
why would you give up so quickly in trying to implement it in your
classroom? Don't you have higher expectations for your students? Would
you let them give up so quickly?

What bothers me in Mr. D's comment is an attitude towards teachers that I see often in conversations about school change.  "Teachers all resistant to change and lazy!" the argument goes.  "If they'd just be persistent and determined, our schools would be saved."

I hear this kind of thinking across domains in education.  Talk about technology use---including some of my own posts here on the Radical---targets teachers who just won't "get on board."  Conversations about professional learning communities and collaboration are driven by those who "won't get on the bus."  The general belief is that teachers lack determination and commitment in almost every circumstance.

In many cases, that's a flawed assumption.  Want to know why your teachers "give up" in the face of new initiatives?  It's simply because the amount of effort that most changes take doesn't align with the corresponding benefits that change is designed to produce.


Download Slide_TransactionCosts

Like professionals in any field, teachers judge the transaction costs that change requires before taking action. When new practices or strategies require tons of investment---complicated planning, intensive research, sophisticated interactions with colleagues, specialized resources or tools---teachers must be convinced ahead of time that the benefits are going to outweigh these new costs of action. 

Take my whiteboard argument:  I "gave up" (to borrow Mr. D's lingo) because the amount of effort that it took to design truly innovative, student-centered learning experiences with my IWB was almost overwhelming.  The software wasn't designed to naturally facilitate the kinds of teaching that I believe in and limited access to the hardware required that I restructure learning time in my classroom almost every day. 

Was it possible to make the IWB work in my room?  Sure---I'm a pretty talented teacher and I could probably figure out how to create meaningful lessons with any tool or technique---but the benefits were limited and the costs were high.  That's a recipe for failure every time. 

It might also surprise you to know---considering that my first book on professional learning communities was published in September---that I was ready to give up on collaboration after the first few months of working with my colleagues.  Why?  Because collaboration was completely exhausting.  Designing common assessments required difficult and time-consuming conversations.  Identifying instructional strategies that work required compromise.  Remediation and enrichment required research and restructuring of traditional practices.

Nothing that we created together during those first few months seemed to be of any real value.  Sure, we had simple successes---but those successes paled in comparison to the time and energy that we had to invest in learning to work together.  I still remember the anger that I felt every time I heard our principal---a guy I still respect and admire more than most any school leader alive---wax poetic about how great PLCs really were.  He, after all, wasn't having to plug through new work with little support and/or guidance.  

The key for school leaders interested in seeing change efforts succeed, then, is simple:  Work diligently to reduce the costs of new changes for your teachers.  Begin by identifying the practices that are the easiest to implement and introduce those early and often. Teachers will see instant benefits with little effort---and instant benefits with little effort builds momentum and confidence.

Then, target increasingly sophisticated practices that are likely to carry greater costs and find ways to make that work easier for your teachers and teams.  Provide exemplars and templates.  Hire specialists to come in and advise.  Create additional time for teachers to work with new practices on the clock.  All of these actions can balance the costs and benefits of change---and balancing the costs and benefits of change is the only way that you're going to get your teachers to truly embrace anything new!

Richard Elmore, an educational leader, once wrote,
"Accountability must be a reciprocal process. For every increment of
performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to
provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation. Likewise, for
every investment you make in my skill and knowledge, I have a
reciprocal responsibility to demonstrate some new increment in
performance."

Instead of harping on "those lazy teachers" who won't embrace change, true instructional leaders work to build capacity by decreasing the transaction costs associated with change efforts and by ditching practices that will always require more energy than they are really worth. 

Any of this make sense? 

I guess I'm just tired of being told not to give up in the face of practices that I know hold little value for my students.  Change is about more than determination, you know.  It's about careful choices. 

Performance Pay Will Kill Our Schools

Ever since the board of the Houston Independent School District voted to use standardized test scores to reward and punish teachers, I’ve been wrapped in a dark, dark funk. 

I guess I can’t really blame HISD.  After all, they’re just one of many states (see here, here and here) that are scrambling to grab some of the billions of dollars made available to schools through Race to the Top grants—which must all include redesigned teacher compensation and evaluation plans. 

Obama made ‘em do it. 

Now, I’ve got a billion complaints with any state and/or district that ties teacher compensation to standardized test scores—and I’ve written about them more than once.  My greatest concern, though, has always been the impact that an undue emphasis on testing will have on the instructional practices in our classrooms.

I feel like a bit of an expert, considering that I’ve spent the past 16 years teaching a tested subject to sixth graders.  I’m almost ashamed of the way that my instruction has changed over time in response to testing pressures.  I’ve gone from being a guy whose classroom was defined by higher level learning opportunities—Socratic seminars, independent studies, open-ended questions—to a guy who follows a set of scripted lessons pretty closely.

Why did I buckle?  Because each year, I’m given an “effectiveness index,” a metric that our district generates that allows comparisons between the test scores of students in different classes across buildings.  While my effectiveness index doesn’t stink—my students are making expected growth—it has been the lowest on the hallway for as long as I can remember.

The tension between what I’m actually doing in my classroom and what I think I should be doing in my classroom has gotten to be almost unbearable.  I don’t believe that I’m preparing my students to be successful in a world driven by innovation and creativity, but the ONLY tangible indicator of my performance—standardized test scores—says that my students are not as “accomplished” as students in other classrooms in our school and district.

If I worked in Houston, they’d be showing me the door!

What makes me laugh is that while judging teachers based on standardized test scores is seen as a long-needed innovation in education, business leaders are starting to recognize that a never-ending focus on measurable results can have disastrous consequences. 

Take Roger Martin of the Harvard Business Review who recently argued that number-crunching locks businesses into the prisons of the past:

Analyzing the past, crunching the existing numbers to produce the future can do nothing more than extrapolate the future from the past. So if you stick to measuring what you can already measure, you cannot create a future that is different than the past.

For that to work out at all well for any institution making its decisions on that extrapolation, the future needs to be remarkably similar to the past — or bad things start to happen. If an institution is all geared up for a future that is like the past and the future changes radically, then the institution becomes an anachronism, like a Motorola or GM.

Beautiful, isn’t it?  Comparing our schools to Motorola or GM might actually wake up Crazy Bill Sanders and his “let’s reward teachers based on test scores” crowd, considering how miserably those two organizations failed at adapting to a rapidly changing future. 

Few would argue that the future of schooling is going to be “remarkably similar” to the past, so making important decisions about teacher evaluation and compensation based on nothing more than numbers is a failed policy that will encourage antiquated instructional practices.  We’lI end up with a heaping cheeseload of students that can pass standardized tests, but will those same students be ready to work in a world that values divergent thinking?

Martin goes on to propose a new frame of thought that must find its way into today’s businesses.  He writes:

We need to get away from all those old sayings about measurement and management, and in that spirit I'd like to propose a new wisdom: "If you can't imagine it, you will never create it." The future is about imagination, not measurement. To imagine a future, one has to look beyond the measurable variables, beyond what can be proven with past data.

What I wouldn’t give to work in a world that rewarded teachers for innovative attempts to imagine and to create new learning environments.  I’d have my kids solving complex, open-ended problems with one another.  We’d be working to find solutions to global challenges with peers on other continents.  Independent projects focused on areas of deep personal interest would serve as the vehicle for teaching basic skills.

Instead, I’ll probably remain stuck in a backwards professional culture convinced by nothing more than numbers for the rest of my career.  The momentum to reward or punish teachers and schools is just too great for states to resist, isn’t it?

The best part of the“we gotta punish ‘em to get ‘em to work harder” culture is that science has shown time and again that IT JUST WON’T WORK—for teachers or for students—a fact that Daniel Pink pointed out in a recent interview with the Public School Insights blog.

Pink wrote:

There is 40 years of science that says that for complex, conceptual, creative tasks—the sort of things that most white-collar workers are doing now that the more simple routine work can be offshore or automated—carrot and stick motivators don't work. Or I should say they rarely work, and they often do harm. And this is not even close in the field of science.

So what you have now is this gap between what science knows about motivation—which is that carrot and stick motivators work in a narrow band of circumstances and that if you really want high-performance on more creative conceptual tasks you have to have a different operating system built more on our internal drive do interesting things and to do something that matters.

Imagine that:  One of the most noted thinkers in the world today believes that education—which is perhaps the MOST complex, conceptual and creative task—might actually be HARMED by the kinds of teacher evaluation plans that states are churning out like too much sour butter in their race to the top. 

Pink goes on to address pay for performance plans directly:

Truth be told, until I looked at the research—and there is really 40 years of research on the science of motivation—I actually thought performance pay for teachers was a good idea. I was for it. Then I read the science, and I said, “No, I am not for this.” Because what is pretty clear is that it is a very problematic thing to get right…

The way that money is most effective as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so that they are not focused on money, but they are focused on doing their job well. My experience has been that 85% of teachers out there just want teach and do right by kids. If you raise their base salaries and give them some autonomy, they’ll do that.

If you also give either building principals or superintendents the ability to get rid of—and I am just estimating here—the 10% or 15% of teachers, like the 10% or 15% of any profession, who are duds, I think that is a simpler solution. It is not perfect, but it has far less collateral damage than tying [pay] to standardized test scores or doing these elaborate performance measurements.

Can I get an AMEN from the choir, please?  And can I get it before we stumble down yet another wrong path that will leave our schools open for still more criticism and scorn?

Businesses are starting to turn away from performance pay, committed to creating the kinds of intrinsically motivating work environments that attract the most accomplished employees, produce the kinds of tangible results that matter in knowledge-driven professions, and allow for rapid adaptation in an ever-changing world. 

When will schools do the same?

Exploring Good Wikis

After posting Part One and Part Two in my Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects series last week, I had several friends and colleagues—both here on the Radical and in my work in the real world—ask me to provide some samples of good wikis that they could explore with their students. 

Here are some of my favorites:

Carbon Fighters:  This wiki was created by a middle grades language arts class in North Carolina. It was designed to give students opportunities to practice problem-solution essay writing while studying issues related to alternative energy and the use of fossil fuels.

Be sure to explore the “For Teachers” page which gives an extensive overview of the rationale behind this project.

Horizon Project 2007:  This wiki—recognized as a finalist in the 2007 Edublogs award competition—was a collaborative project between high school students in five different countries who were developing a vision of what classrooms of the future might look like after studying the 2007 Horizon Report released by the New Media Consortium and Educase.

Be sure to explore the “Project Review” link which provides extensive details about how this wiki was organized and developed.

British Romanticism:  This high school English wiki was created as a part of a study of British Romanticism. It includes 500-700 word articles detailing the art, music and poetry of the British Romantic area.

Be sure to explore the “Discussion” tab of each page in this wiki, which provide an interesting look into how students can use the discussion boards on wikis to plan their collective efforts—and to build a sense of community with their peers.

Monster Project:  This fun wiki project is being created by a collection of second and third grade computer students from five different states.

Participating students designed a monster using digital tools and wrote a set of directions for redrawing their monsters. Then, students from another state attempted to recreate the same monsters by following the written directions provided. Final images of rendered drawings were uploaded to the Monster Project wiki for comparison.

Some of the best examples of final products can be found on “Ms. Graham’s 2nd Grade” page.

Remember that you can also use this handout to learn more about the characteristics of quality wiki pages and this handout to track your thinking while looking at several specific wiki pages. 

Also, remember to share examples of good wikis in action in the comment section of this post.  The larger the library of high quality work that we build, the better our chances are of seeing wiki work spread across classrooms. 

Part Two: Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects

On Wednesday, I posted an excerpt from a book I’m writing about teaching with technology titled Part One:  Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects.  Here’s the second—and final—post in that series, detailing four additional thoughts for teachers interested in using wikis with their students:

Discussing wiki vandalism: The openness encouraged in communities that embrace wikis as a tool for knowledge building can also lead to the intentional destruction of content. Users with no real attachment to wiki projects sometimes decide to delete entire pages or to add inaccurate—or inappropriate—content to wiki pages on purpose. Work that students have spent hours creating can literally be erased in an instant.

Users who intentionally destroy the work done on wikis are called vandals—and any teacher interested in wikis must reassure their students that vandalism is not a cause for major concern. Because wikis save every version of each page separately, work can be quickly restored as soon as vandalism occurs. While replacing damaged pages can be frustrating, it is important for students to know that nothing is lost forever on a wiki.

Keeping wikis open for viewing but closed for revision: All wiki services provide users with a wide range of viewing and editing settings. Wikis can be completely closed, requiring users to log in to see and/or edit content, or completely open, allowing anyone to view and edit without invitation. The best starting point for classroom wiki projects is to leave your wiki open for viewing, but to extend editing privileges to just the students in your classroom.

By doing so, you’ll ensure that your students benefit from the motivation of creating work that can be seen by a larger audience while also ensuring that the content created by your classes can’t be destroyed by outsiders simply looking to cause trouble. Extending editing privileges to just the students in your classroom also means that you’ll be able to monitor the kinds of work that each student in your class is doing online.

If you choose to grade contributions to classroom wiki projects, you can quickly identify the changes made under each student’s username—and if wiki vandals strike, you’ll be able to hold students accountable for their digital decisions.

Using RSS feed readers to monitor changes to wiki pages: Monitoring the content posted on—and changes made to—classroom wikis is often a concern that teachers wrestle with early in new digital projects. Wanting to ensure that students are acting responsibly, teachers worry when they are unable to see what kinds of work their classes are doing online together.

To make monitoring manageable, consider using an RSS feed reader—discussed in more detail in Chapter 1—to track changes to individual wiki pages. While enabling RSS feeds on wiki pages will require that your wiki remain open for the world to see (a digital risk that some teachers are unwilling to take), you will quickly and easily be able to skim the contributions—new comments, edits, images, and content—being added by the students in your class.

Naming and training student editors: Even after setting up RSS feed readers to track the content being added to classroom wikis, teachers may find that monitoring ongoing wiki projects for quality can be simply overwhelming—especially when students are highly motivated and making dozens of revisions per day.

Uncomfortable with unmonitored pages and unable to find the time to keep up with the new work being added to classroom wikis, teachers end up pulling the plug on projects rather than risk being embarrassed by poor final products. To avoid this all-too-common end result, consider training student editors to be responsible for tracking the changes made to individual pages in your classroom project.

Student editors can visit wiki pages several times a week, checking new contributions for accuracy and appearance. When errors are found, student editors can make instant changes—or can contact student authors and ask that they polish the work they’ve added. Page monitoring responsibilities can be assigned based on a student’s demonstrated interest in a topic of study, motivation to revise and edit content, or willingness to take responsibility for a classroom’s collective efforts.

While page monitoring responsibilities will be limited as groups begin shared projects, class wikis are likely to cover enough unique topics over time that every student can take responsibility for one page of content.

 

So whaddya’ think of my Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects?  Are there any important concepts or practices that I’ve left out?  Did I argue in favor of a practice that you disagree with? 

If you were to rate the suggestions that I’ve made in order of importance, which suggestion would you place first?  Why? 

What barriers are keeping you from starting classroom wiki projects in your room?

(PS:  You can find a collection of resources and handouts designed to support classroom wiki projects posted here.) 

Part One: Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects

If you’ve noticed even more technology entries here on the Radical than normal, that’s because I’ve been doing a lot of writing recently for my second book. 

Titled Plug Us In: 5 Easy Steps to Integrate Technology into Your Classroom and scheduled to be published by Solution Tree in the fall of 2010, my goal is to show teachers how to use technology to introduce students to the kinds of enduring skills that we all value—information management, collaboration, communication, problem solving etc.

Today, I finished polishing a set of teacher tips for wiki projects that resembles my recent series of teacher tips for classroom blogging projects.  I figured you’d be interested in seeing an excerpt from Plug Us In where I share a series of 8 suggestions with teachers interested in integrating wikis into their work with students. 

Here are the first four suggestions:

Once your students are comfortable with the characteristics of good wiki work and aware of a set of specific, defined roles for participation, you will be ready to start projects using wikis as a tool for the coproduction of content. To make this work more approachable and productive, consider:

Starting with one classroom wiki: At their core, wikis are about sharing information. Students working together can use wikis to document what they are learning about concepts connected to the curriculum, to organize their thinking on topics of deep personal interest, or to generate shared solutions to problems built from the collective intelligence of a group. The challenge, however, is finding enough content to fill a wiki!

That’s why it is best to keep your initial efforts simple and clean, creating wiki projects that are completed by entire classes instead of individual students. Consider having small groups design, monitor and manage stand-alone pages in shared classroom wikis focused on classroom content instead of creating and maintaining entire wikis on their own. Doing so will ensure that your wiki builds quickly without overwhelming anyone with your first digital efforts!

Modeling classroom wiki projects around Wikipedia pages: Whether traditional teachers like it or not, Wikipedia will likely remain the most visible example of wikis in action for a long, long while. It has caught the attention of millions of users already, it is built on simple and sustainable software, and it taps into the natural human desire to share.

Because of its size and influence—and because your students are likely to have used Wikipedia as a research source at some point in their school careers—consider using Wikipedia as a model for your own classroom wiki projects.

Creating a classroom encyclopedia covering the content you are studying in class or a comprehensive collection of solutions to one common problem will be a motivating and productive task for your students. Groups can be assigned particular topics to tackle or charged with detailing the strengths and weaknesses of one potential solution, creating pages mirroring the format of Wikipedia entries.

Conceptually, using Wikipedia as a model for your classroom wiki project will make your expectations approachable—and give students samples to refer to while completing their final products.

Providing groups with initial structures to follow and content to explore: While using Wikipedia as a conceptual model for your classroom wiki may provide your students with a sense for what it is that you are trying to create, it may also completely backfire.

Wikipedia is, after all, a vast resource with sophisticated and polished entries on an almost mind-boggling number of topics. Looking at your blank wiki on the first day of your classroom project and knowing that Wikipedia is the standard that they are to be compared against, your students may end up absolutely intimidated!

To make initial efforts seem more doable, work to add extensive content to your classroom wiki ahead of time. Create page templates complete with tables of contents that detail required content—Description of Problem, Potential Solutions, Fatal Flaws, Final Thoughts—for each group. Design one or two sample pages that students can refer to.

Include extensive collections of supporting materials that students can use while researching. Share simple step-by-step directions for using the wiki tool that you have selected, post checklists and rubrics that can guide student work, and point to sources of embeddable content—photo warehouses, video sharing sites, free digital tools for creating interactive content—that students may find useful.

Systematically frontloading your classroom wiki can help to convince your classes that their efforts can produce an impressive final product rivaling Wikipedia.

Using wikis to enrich and/or remediate: For many classroom teachers, finding differentiated learning opportunities for students who’ve mastered—or are struggling with—required concepts can be an intimidating task. Classroom wikis, however—especially those designed to detail solutions to problems connected to required classroom content—can make independent work simple for everyone.

Because classroom wikis are constantly changing, they are natural sources of never-ending opportunities for students in need of differentiation. Advanced students can create new pages for your wiki, introducing challenging concepts in approachable ways.

Students who finish work early can proofread content for accuracy, correcting factual errors, adding essential information, and pointing out flaws in the solutions proposed by their peers. Students in need of remediation can explore links embedded in classroom wiki pages to learn more about topics being studied.

Using classroom wikis as tools for remediation and enrichment will help to make the time and energy that you invest into organizing wiki work worthwhile—and will help your students to see your wiki as a valuable learning tool instead of simply as a graded task to be forgotten.

More on Interactive Whiteboards. . .

I’ve enjoyed the conversation that we had here on the Radical this week about whether or not Interactive Whiteboards are really valuable tools for redesigning schools.  Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect, considering that Ed Week ran this article on the impact of whiteboards on Friday. 

While there were dozens—literally—of great comments left by Radical readers sharing the full range of perspectives on the role of IWBs in teaching and learning, I wanted to spotlight and respond to a few in particular. 

First, Karen R. noticed an all-too-common phenomena that occurs in IWB classrooms when she wrote:

I do know teachers who love their whiteboards as they lend an air of interactivity to their lessons without fundamentally changing the way the classroom functions.

Acreelman agreed, writing:

Good discussion. It's another case of how we use technology to maintain the traditional classroom paradigm instead of radically rethinking the whole process of learning and education. We use technology to support familiar methods instead of starting from scratch and seeing what new things we can do with the amazing resources available today.

For me, this is really the crux of the issue.  Teachers like to talk about how IWBs have changed their instruction, but then they give descriptions of classrooms that sound pretty darn traditional to me.

Need an example?  Here’s the way Ed Week described the work being done in a particularly progressive IWB classroom:

Interactive is the key word in Gilley’s class at Kent County High School here, a quality that is facilitated, she says, by the high-tech whiteboard mounted on the wall in front of the classroom.

Students take turns tapping the board with the controller pen to move the shapes into categories or calculate a complex problem. Later, they pass the pen quickly in a tag-team challenge at the board and use hand-held remote controls to show what they’ve learned about the day’s lesson.

When did tapping pens and rely games become our definition of an interactive classroom—and how, exactly, has the $5,000 whiteboard hanging from the wall changed those practices in meaningful ways?

The only thing that I see here that adds value are the student responders being used to collect formative assessment data at the end of the lesson, and despite what that snarky IWB salesman may have told you, you can get responders without buying a single whiteboard. 

Gary Ball argued in favor of IWBs in our conversation when he wrote:

[My IWB] HAS changed how students can access what I have taught. I now record and publish (to the internet) much of what I teach. The IWB allows me to capture the lessons and make them available to our chronically absent students. The IWB allows me to create content that I could not easily do otherwise.

Gary’s point about using IWBs to record content comes up time and again in whiteboard debates, including in Ed Week’s article:

The large, computerized screens—which allow Internet access, video and audio presentations, digital assessments using remote clickers, and recorded lessons for replaying later—are seen by proponents as an investment in modernizing classrooms to meet the needs of the digital generation.

Here’s my take: Recording and archiving presentations for students—whether they were absent or not—is a GREAT instructional practice, but using an IWB for this purpose is a lot like using dynamite to fish for Bluegills!  It’s just plain the wrong tool for the job. 

Cheap and easy software—both for desktop machines and based on the web—can make recording presentations possible for a lot less money.  I used Camtasia to build my library of instructional videos for students.  It cost me something like $80 bucks. 

And if I had to do it all over again, I’d use Dim Dim, a FREE webinar tool that allows presentations to be recorded.  Free, as my buddy Mike Hutchinson likes to say, is the nice price. 

Even the “Internet access, video and audio presentations, and digital assessments” that Ed Week spotlights can all be done with a data projector alone.  The actual whiteboard does nothing to enhance any of these activities. 

Finally, K. Borden made me laugh out loud when she wrote:

What a crazy coincidence! It must be “interactive white board” day.  Just today I bought two wipe-off white poster boards at $1.49 each.

I love these. They are lightweight, allowing me to tape them to tabletops, windows, doors, walls, floors, mirrors, trees... The interactivity doesn’t come from the whiz bang features of the IWB’s you discuss, but they have accomplished a great deal for this often mobile instructor.

Need a sharable erasable medium for group work in a awkward location? These are great. They really drop and drag!

There’s nothing like having a group of learners engaging each other over the medium just about anywhere/anytime for just a $1.49. (and you can cut them up to have erasable index cards.  Try that with an IWB!)

While K may not have realized it, her discovery is an extension of the conclusions that Bob Marzano—edu-superstar himself—has drawn about whiteboards.  Ed Week described Marzano’s conclusions like this:

That finding highlights one of Marzano’s key conclusions…The teachers who were most effective using the whiteboards displayed many of the characteristics of good teaching in general:

They paced the lesson appropriately and built on what students already knew; they used multiple media, such as text, pictures, and graphics, for delivering information; they gave students opportunities to participate; and they focused mainly on the content, not the technology.

Now, Marzano goes on to argue that he’s an ardent believer that technology can make good teaching easier—and he’s right.  But Interactive Whiteboards don’t. 

Instead, they are disarmingly insidious gadgets—so stinking sexy to people making purchasing decisions that they're almost irresistible whether or not there are proven strategies for meaningful implementation.

Need an example?  Listen to how James C. Corns, the supervisor of educational technology in Kent County—a district that has spent a half a million dollars on Whiteboards—explains the training program teachers go through before they’re given an IWB:

“The teachers have to agree to go through this rigorous process so that we know they are going to use the technology to augment instruction.”

When any rigorous—and undoubtedly expensive—technology training process results in relay games, sexy has definitely trumped logic and we’re all in a world of hurt. 

Nope.  I’m definitely not a fan of Interactive Whiteboards.  Not at all.

Wasting Money on Whiteboards. . .

Blogger’s Note:  I’m a bit worked up today, so this post has rant written all over it.  It’s heavy on the Radical and light on the Tempered.  Read at your own risk. 

I’ll admit that there aren’t many topics that I’m more passionate about than Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom. 

Seen as the first step towards “21st Century teaching and learning,” schools and districts run out and spend THOUSANDS of dollars on whiteboards, proudly hanging them on walls and showing them off like proud hens that just laid the golden instructional egg. 

I gave mine away last summer. After about a year’s worth of experimenting, I determined that it was basically useless. 

Sure, my students thought it was nifty, but it didn’t make teaching my required curriculum any easier.  I probably crafted two or three neat lessons with it, but there was nothing unique about those activities—I could have easily crafted similar lessons using the computer stations I already have in class and any number of free online tools. 

That’s why I spent last night following Twitter’s Ed Chat about Interactive Whiteboards even after an appliance meltdown, a minor flood, and a 2 hour trip to the Laundromat.  There’s no way that I’m going to watch a conversation on whiteboards slip away—even if I’m exhausted and wearing dirty clothes!

Thankfully, there was a lot of wisdom in the Ed Chat room last night.  Few people spent any meaningful time praising the instructional goodness of Interactive Whiteboards and the majority of the participants recognized that without time and training, whiteboards become nothing more than really expensive overhead projectors. 

I’d go even farther, though, and argue that even WITH time and training, Interactive Whiteboards are an under-informed and irresponsible purchase.

They do little more than reinforce a teacher-centric model of learning.  Heck, even whiteboard companies market them as a bridging technology, designed to replicate traditional instructional practices—making presentations, giving notes, delivering lectures—in an attempt to move digital dinosaurs into the light.

Do we really want to spend thousands of dollars on a tool that makes stand-and-deliver instruction easier?

My biggest beef with Whiteboards, though, is that they are poorly aligned with the vision of instruction that most people claim to believe in.  Ask a principal what the best classrooms look like and she’s likely to say something like this:

“In the best classrooms, students are involved in creating knowledge together.  They’re studying topics, designing experiments, collaborating with peers, and challenging one another’s preconceived notions. While the teacher is always present to guide and to facilitate, the students are empowered to discover and to grow independently.”

Sounds great, doesn’t it?  If we could turn control of learning over to students, we’d probably see motivation AND academic growth levels rise all at once.  Classrooms would become innovative places that students were drawn to instead of the snooze palaces that they seem to be for so many kids today.

If those are the outcomes we most desire, then why are we wasting money on Interactive Whiteboards—tools that do little to promote independent discovery and collaborative work?  Sure—you could argue that when used as an instructional center, whiteboards become more interactive, but that is one REALLY expensive center, don’t you think?!

I’m also peeved because schools rarely have any kind of system in place to evaluate the impact that whiteboards are having on instruction.  We spend a heaping cheeseload collecting whiz-bang gadgets and then completely fail to reflect on whether or not they have helped us achieve the outcomes we most desire.

Isn’t that called hoarding?

What bothers me the most is that it seems like most school leaders don’t really care whether or not whiteboards change instruction in meaningful ways in their classrooms because whiteboards aren’t an instructional tool in their eyes.  Instead, whiteboards have become a PR tool—a tangible representation of innovation that can be shown off to supervisors and parents alike. 

Heaven forbid, after all, that you run a school without whiteboards if your colleagues down the street have taken a bite of the 21st Century fruit.  You’ll look like a hayseed at the next PTA meeting, won’t you?

I think Sylvia Martinez—who writes over at Generation Yes—said it best when she wrote:

you can't *buy* change, it's a process, not a purchase. the right shopping list won't change education

Most of the time, Interactive Whiteboard programs are nothing more than vain attempts to buy change.  Rarely paired with a clear vision of the classrooms we’d like to see, a set of tangible objectives that can be measured, or any systematic attempts to evaluate outcomes, Interactive Whiteboards are sad examples of the careless decision making and waste that are crippling some of our schools and systems. 

(Whew—can you tell that I needed to blow off a bit of digital steam?)

iTunes Playlists = Stronger Relationships

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me one of my favorite gifts:  An iTunes gift card!  Ever since buying my first iPod—which strangely enough was only two years ago—I’ve been consumed by finding interesting new music to listen to.

That’s the beauty of iTunes, I figure.  With about a bajillion songs to choose from—and with gadgets and gizmos that recommend new songs every time you make a purchase—you can spend hours browsing and buying. 

(Don’t tell my wife, huh?!)

One of my favorite ways to find new songs is to ask groups of people that I know to make recommendations for dedicated playlists.  I’ve got an entire alternative collection—complete with bands like Atreyu, The Used and Four Year Strong—recommended by a niche group of eighth graders that look up to me.

I’ve got a playlist recommended by my middle school soccer team—which for some strange reason is loaded with hip-hop and Mexican rappers—and a playlist full of suggestions from this year’s language arts and social studies students. 

What’s been fun—outside of listening to new music that I would have never found without the help of my iTunes Army—is the sense of community that each playlist has helped to develop.  In their simplest form, each song tells me a bit more about the individuals who recommended them.  I can see inside their minds, learning about their experiences and their attitudes.

What’s more, I can learn about the general trends in each of the networks that I’m a part of.  Do they like edgy music that challenges preconceived norms?  Are they interested in the world beyond the United States?  Did they grow up in the same generation as me?

Most importantly, though, each playlist gives me another shared experience with the individuals that I know.  Each time that I hear new songs, I smile and think about the source of the recommendation.  Inevitably, something they’ve said and/or shared with me comes to mind—and the next time we interact, I feel like I “know” them a bit better. 

There’s something deeply personal about sharing song recommendations with others that resonates—particularly with my students.  Knowing that their songs are on my iPod really matters to the tweens and teens that I teach.  Each time they turn a list of suggestions to me—which, not surprisingly, they spend far more time on than their homework assignments!—they carefully explain which songs they think I’ll like the best, which songs they’re sure I’ll hate, and which songs mean the most to them. 

And they’re usually lined up at my door early the next morning to find out what I thought of the music that they love! 

That’s cool.

Given my commitment to using playlists to learn more about the people that I know, I figured it was high time to create a PLN playlist that included songs recommended by the people I learn from online each day.  After all, the relationships that I’ve formed here on the Radical, as a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, and in my Twitter Stream are some of the most important in my professional life.

So I sent out a Tweet yesterday morning:

All: I want to make a PLN Playlist with a $25 iTunes gift card I got. What ONE song---title and artist please---do you want me to add?

And here are the recommendations I’ve added to my playlist so far:

Linda704  A fave of mine: Cinema Paradiso by Chris Botti http://bit.ly/5Ct2zF

jwindsor  2010 PLN playlist suggestion: "More Than A Feeling" by Boston

chrisludwig  Representing electronica for your playlist: Organ Donor by DJ Shadow

TNschatz  anything by Antigone Rising - like, She's not Innocent.

mikepoluk  My all time favourite is I Was Made For Lovin' You by KISS.

bivey  "Hands" - Jewel. Favourite line: "In the end, only kindness matters." The SBS Rock Band which I teach once performed it, superbly.

RussGoerend  This song sums up my 2009 better than any other: http://bit.ly/5oGlaN

joelz  "War on War" by Wilco

PJVermont  Inside Job, by Pearl Jam

janesingh  Alive by Pearl Jam

wcarozza  Show The Way from David Wilcox.

artykel  I vote for ANY Sting songs.

msstewart  Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues

allonsdanser  PLN playlist. Grace Potter's Big White Gate. Nice bluesey tune.

edtechsteve   hmmmmm. I'll say eric hutchinson- rock and roll. @tgwynn intro'd him to me so I'll pass it along...happy new year!

langwitches  from Argentina: Color Esperanza from Diego Torres

raventech  If you are still looking, "Banana Pancakes" by Jack Johnson is a must!

jennyluca  Heard it through the grapevine - Creedence Clearwater Revival. Oldie, but goodie.

mrscienceteach: I’m a Dave Matthews guy.  Why I Am from Big Whiskey.

What I love the most about my 2010 PLN Playlist is that I only owned two of these songs before yesterday—and there are no fewer than 16 artists on this list that are brand new to me!  Until yesterday, I owned no Bob Dylan or Grace Potter at all.  I’d never heard of Antigone Rising or Diego Torres.  And I sure as mess didn’t have any Organ Donor on my iPod!

So not only do I have an interesting new collection of music to listen to, I’ve got an interesting and diverse collection of minds to learn more about!  I knew that my Twitter stream included people with an almost incredible range of backgrounds and experiences, but I would never have guessed that one list of tunes would be so eclectic—and different from the music that I already own!

Moral of the story:  Building relationships—with colleagues, with digital friends, with family, with students—depends on shared experiences.  Until we know more about what drives our friends and acquaintances, we can’t possibly maximize the power found in the human bonds that join us.  And because music is a deeply personal choice, sharing tunes is a great way to share oneself. 

Customized playlists really can be a valuable networking tool!

Oh yeah:  And it’s just plain fun to listen to unique music every now and then!  I’ve got my ear buds in right now, rocking out to a collection of tunes by Danish bands recommended by a friend in Odense.  How many people can do that at 6 AM on a Saturday!

(PS:  If you’ve got a song that you think I should add to my iPod, leave the title and the author in the comment section, huh?  I’ve got another gift card to spend!)

Part 2: Digital Conversation Matters

Regular Radical readers know that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the role that digital conversations can play in classroom teaching recently. 

My primary goal is to articulate a position that convinces school leaders and classroom teachers to create more opportunities for students to interact around school-based content online.  To me, such opportunities are a simple first step towards redefining our traditional visions for schools and moving towards blended learning environments that pair brick-and-mortar schools with borderless online experiences.

Here’s the second part in my digital conversation series:

Knowing that their students are already gathering with local peers in digital forums for communicating, accomplished teachers are working to craft school-based conversations that catch the attention of teens—who have traditionally turned away from online activities that seemed too academic. The key, not surprisingly, is to build forums around interesting content.

Students don’t automatically reject online conversations with learning related outcomes and higher levels of adult participation. They do, however, draw clear lines between opportunities to interact informally with peers and opportunities to study topics of deep personal interest.

As the researchers behind the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Youth Project concluded, “Friendship-driven and interest-driven online participation have very different kinds of social connotations…friendship-driven activities center on peer culture, adult participation is more welcome in the latter, more ‘geeky,’ forms of learning” (Ito, Horst, Bittanti, boyd, Herr-Stephenson, Lange, Pascoe & Robinson, 2008, p. 2).

Digital teens are also drawn to learning experiences that:

1. Allow for self-directed exploration: In new media environments, students are surrounded by opportunities to experiment with new skills and ideas, to explore without predetermined outcomes or goals in mind, and to receive immediate feedback from diverse audiences.

2. Allow peers to demonstrate authority and expertise: In new media environments, students regularly learn from one another—whether they are showing friends how to defeat a shared video game or being shown tips and tricks for working with new tools. These opportunities have fundamentally changed how today’s teens view authority and expertise.

3. Allow students to wrestle with meaningful issues: Schools have traditionally been charged with preparing students for meaningful careers. As a result, instruction emphasizes the mastery of skills seen as essential for success in the workplace.

In new media environments, however, students are often exposed to concepts that are far more complex and morally pressing. Preparing them to play an active role in public conversations around these issues resonates.

(Ito et al., 2008)

The implications that the rapidly changing communication practices of the 21st Century teen hold for educators are clear.

First, our students are more connected to their local peers—friends from church, teammates, neighbors—than ever before. While digital tools allow for communication across geographic boundaries, most teens remain primarily interested in communicating with people that they already know (Ito et al., 2008). That means motivation levels for school-based conversations should be high.

What’s more, the persistent, searchable and replicable nature of digital conversations can create opportunities for marginalized students to gain social status in front of their peers (Ferriter, 2005). But in order to guarantee participation, school-based conversations must revolve around meaningful content, allow students self-directed opportunities for exploration, and respect the expertise and authority of all participants.

The challenge, however, is that one side effect of the standards and accountability push in education during the past decade has been a tendency to push self-directed learning and exploration aside in today’s classroom as a response to external pressures.

Communities convinced that end of grade exam scores are reliable indicators of the success and/or failure of students and schools have taken steps to systematically script instruction, crafting series of instructional practices that teachers are required to implement without variation (Perlstein, 2007).

While results—in the form of higher passing rates on standardized exams—show the kinds of positive trends that leave policymakers and district leaders convinced that our schools are succeeding, we end up with classrooms defined by instructional practices that are poorly aligned with the learning environments our students are creating for themselves beyond school using new media tools for communication and collaboration.

The question for Radical Nation, then, is what steps are you taking to create learning experiences that might just resonate with today’s teens?  How often do your lessons allow for student-led exploration around meaningful issues?  Are you willing to turn control over to your students, or are your hands tied by district guidelines and expectations?

What has to happen before the learning that your students do in your school better resembles the learning that your students are doing online?

 

Works Cited:

Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., boyd, d., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lange, P.G., Pascoe, C.J., & Robinson, L. (2008). Living and learning with new media: summary of findings from the digital youth project. Chicago, IL: The MacArthur Foundation.

Ferriter, W. (2005, July 1). Digital dialogue. Tech & Learning. Retrieved from http://www.techlearning.com/article/4224

Perlstein, L. (2007). Tested: One American school struggles to make the grade. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.

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