So my recent post detailing how limited technology budgets leave my students wondering grabbed a bunch of attention today—and the comments y’all are leaving are fantastic. 

I wanted to address a few of them directly in a new post simply because I think the answers are important enough to stand alone. 

Here are three in particular that I think are worth drawing attention to:

In an email I got early today, a reader named Tom wrote, “You’re being awful hard on your school, don’t you think? Most systems are doing the best they can with what they have.”

After rereading my piece, I agreed with Tom. 

My original draft did make it seem like the blame for the lack of access to information in my school was the fault of the people who work for our system. 

So I did some revising and rewording to try to make it clear that many of the challenges that we face are the result of working with limited technology budgets. 

Today’s schools are forced to make tradeoffs all the time—and often, technology comes up on the short end of the stick.

Now, that doesn’t change my belief that districts have got to look into bring your own device programs. 

There’s just no excuse for cash-strapped systems to overlook the tools that our students can bring to class with them.

Sure, it’ll require some investments in infrastructure.  Sure, it’ll require some careful policy crafting.  Sure, it’ll require some new thinking on the part of IT staffers.

But an inevitable digital shift is occurring all around us that’s just plain impossible to ignore.

Another comment that caught my eye came from Kerry, who wrote, “I wonder how any of us managed to learn anything before computers were invented?”

The answer’s easy, right? 

Before computers were invented, my kids would have trudged down to the library and cracked open the World Book Encyclopedia to find the answers to their wonder questions.

Their answers wouldn’t have come for a few weeks because they would have had to wait until we could sign up for time in the library. 

Then, they would have had to flip through dated paper texts looking at simple illustrations and hoping to understand text that may or may not be written at their reading level. 

What’s REALLY crazy is they wouldn’t have complained at all because they wouldn’t have known any better.

Here’s the thing, though:  Today’s kids aren’t nearly as intellectually patient. 

They KNOW that instant answers are possible.

Worse yet, as long as they’re not at school, most kids have a device that can connect them to an endless supply of interesting and interactive content somewhere in the same room with them.

Which only makes schools look foolish and useless to them. 

Let’s face it:  The expectations that our kids have for their learning spaces—and paces—have changed, y’all.

If we hope to keep their attention, we’ve got to create the kinds of always-on, anytime-anywhere learning environments that they already realize are possible.

And finally, Clix—one of my favorite Radical readers—wrote, “Bill, wouldn't it have been possible for you to take your laptop online and have the students suggest websites or search terms?”

Sure, Clix—it would definitely be possible.  I’m actually lucky enough to have a laptop and a data projector, so we do whole class exploring all the time.

But my argument is that if we find a way to safely give kids access to our existing wireless network, it would be equally possible to have a bunch of kids researching their own questions all at once.

They wouldn’t have to hope that I finished searching out the questions asked by other students before the end of class forced them to leave with their own questions unanswered.

We constantly hear about how important it is for schools to begin differentiating learning opportunities for kids.

Differentiating learning, though, requires differentiating the opportunities that kids have to access information that fits their abilities and interests.

That’s far more likely in a room with multiple access points (read: student-owned wireless devices) than in a room where we’re working with one device—and therefore one question—at a time.

In the end, my dream would be to have 5-10 wireless devices—either student or school owned—in every single classroom. 

I’d have them sitting at table stations for individuals or student-groups to turn to whenever an interesting question popped to mind. 

Of course, we could also use them to create new content, to respond to poll questions, to Skype with other classes, or to backchannel during Socratic Seminars, too.

But mostly, I just want to give my kids a chance to answer their questions as soon as they have them simply because that kind of immediacy will encourage them to keep asking new questions—which can’t be a bad thing.

Does this make any sense?

A few weeks back, I was digitally introduced to Ryan Niman, a high school social studies and English teacher in the Edmonds School District north of Seattle. 

Ryan’s a brilliant guy—and more importantly, he’s a brilliant writer. 

He’s also one of the new voices that the Center for Teaching Quality—my long-time mentors and blog benefactors—has landed for their soon-to-go-live TransformED blog, which will give several real-live, full-time classroom teachers a platform for talking about the realities of educational policy from perspective of practitioners.

I wanted to introduce y’all to Ryan because I love his voice—and I think you will too—so I asked him to write a guest post for the Radical. 

The following bit is his take on our struggles to recognize and reward teachers for bringing intangibles to the table in their schools. 

Check it out and tell him what you think—both of his point of view and his voice!

____________________________________________

Rewarding Teachers for Doing More

By Ryan Niman

I spent my spring break as the stereotype of the overpaid teacher who gets tons of time off: lounging on a beach in Mexico. It felt like a long, long way from “Cribs: Teacher Edition” on The Daily Show.

While there I read Charles Kenny’s book Getting Better.

I won’t get into how I feel about his thesis (succinctly encapsulated in the subtitle: ‘Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More’), but suffice it to say that I was feeling very privileged about my position in the world.

Of course, the trip itself had more to do with the kindness of family than my outlandish public school teacher salary.

Furthermore, reality came crashing in upon my return.

In the month since Spring Break I’ve easily put in more hours outside my contract time than I had off during that week.

I’ve found out that next year I’ll be splitting my time between two buildings for the first time in my career. Class sizes are bigger, we have less money to spend on classroom supplies, and we continue to be told we have to do more with less.

And I do want to ‘do more.’

It is human nature to want to ‘do more’. I find that many colleagues, like myself, want to have a larger impact on our students, our schools, and the system.

Unfortunately, the overall system that we’re creating, with a focus on standardized tests, standardized curriculum, and standardized teachers, isn’t conducive to this ‘doing more’.

So we ‘do more’, for the time being, by doing things like setting up film festivals, bring guest speakers to school, taking students on field trips, running clubs and coaching, purchasing supplies out of our own pockets, advocating through politics, participating in online discussions, working with groups like CTQ .

You know: all the things that ‘do nothing’ within that ‘standardized’ framework to improve student test scores on those standardized tests or leave a numeric trail that proves we are good teachers.

It is a ‘do more’ system based on volunteerism and goodwill and it is not sustainable, either individually or systemically, in the long run.

Yet those are the things that get students interested in learning, might keep a student from dropping out, might help another student choose a career, get parents involved in their schools, so on and so forth.

And those are the things that most of us remember looking back at the ‘good’ teachers we had in school.

As we as a nation move forward with evolving the role and evaluation of teachers, we need to keep this in mind: good teachers are those teachers that aren’t only effective vis a vis standardized assessments, but also do a lot more on top of that.

If we want to increase the number of good teachers in our schools we need to create a system that supports our ‘do more’ activities instead of pushing them to the fringe.

_______________________________

Ryan Niman teaches English and Social Studies at Mountlake Terrace High School in the Edmonds School District, north of Seattle where he has co-chaired the English department for the past four years.

He is also Building Representative for the Edmonds Education Association and a member of the Edmonds District Technology Advisory Committee and Professional Excellence Committee, where he is planning technology levies and working on a new teacher evaluation system.

Back before the budgets started shrinking, Ryan spent one year working part-time as the district Secondary English Curriculum Coordinator.

Now, he moonlights in two roles with the Center for Teaching Quality: as a founding member of the Center for Teaching Quality's Washington New Millennium Initiative and as a blogger with TransformED.

I hope you’ll continue to follow Ryan’s writing—here on the Radical, on TransformED when it launches in late-May or early-June and on Patch Edmonds. 

He’s definitely a new voice worth listening to.

(This bit is cross posted over at Simple K12)

If you were to ask any of the thousands of teachers who attended one of the 26 edcamps that have been held in the past two years to describe the most important characteristics of effective professional development for educators, you might be surprised by one of their first answers:

A blank bulletin board and a bunch of empty classrooms.

You see, edcamps—free learning conferences organized by educators and for educators—all begin with participants joining together in a central meeting place deciding on topics worth studying and creating an ad hoc schedule of sessions for the day.

Anyone can volunteer to lead a conversation on a topic that they are interested in at an edcamp.  Passionate about the role that social media can play in teaching and learning?

Add it to an open slot on the scheduling board.

Motivated to learn more about teaching science to middle grades students?

Add it to an open slot on the scheduling board.

Deeply interested in finding ways to integrate arts into classrooms across the curricula?

Add it to an open slot on the scheduling board.

“It surprises me every time,” says Dan Callahan—one of the founders of the edcamp movement and a digital friend of mine. “You walk in and that schedule board is empty and by the end of an hour it is full of more stuff than you can get to.”

From there, participants design their own learning plan for the day. 

They pick sessions that pique their interests or meet their professional needs—and more importantly, they join together with other educators who share the same interests or who are tackling the same professional needs.

By the end of the day, participants walk away energized—and empowered by a collection of new ideas and individuals to learn from.

That’s crazy-talk, isn’t it?

Teachers—who have a bad reputation for groaning every time that they’re asked to be learners in the traditional PD sessions planned and delivered by districts—are willingly joining together to  spend their weekends engaged in powerful conversations about teaching and learning?

This dichotomy between the reaction teachers have towards traditional professional development and the experiences they have at edcamps shouldn’t be surprising at all argues West Clermont Schools district superintendent M.E. Steele-Pierce in this piece for the Washington Post.

She writes:

“Unconferences matter because they harness the power of authentic learning.

Here’s what I know:

• The learning revolution is about moving from expert-driven learning to self-authorized learning.

• The expert voices are already among us.

• Differentiation is as important for adults as it is for students.

• Powerful, adult learning occurs when it is personal, social and voluntary.”

Makes a heck of a lot of sense, doesn’t it?  Essentially, edcamp proponents like Steele-Pierce understand that teachers aren’t resistant to learning. 

Instead, they are resistant to the forced marches through topics unconnected to their personal interests or needs that pass for professional development in most schools and districts.

So how can you make sure that the adult learning in your school and/or district becomes more personal, social and voluntary?

Consider these five suggestions:

Begin releasing control over professional development choices.

Let me make something perfectly clear:  I understand just how scary it must be for school leaders—who are held directly accountable for the performance of teachers—to release control over professional development choices.

Heck—if I was going to be held directly accountable for the performance of dozens of adults with a wide range of abilities, I’d probably micromanage every professional development choice, too.

I also understand that the edcamp approach to PD is messy. 

It IS hard to believe that meaningful learning can start and end with a blank bulletin board—especially when you are charged with driving growth and change across entire schools and/or districts.

Tight-fisted approaches to adult learning inevitably backfire, though, because teachers—like any student—need to be invested and engaged before they can truly learn.

Integrating elements of the edcamp approach into your professional development plans sends powerful messages to your classroom teachers. 

When you find ways to release control over some of the professional development choices in your schools and/or districts, you are saying, “We believe in what you know and can do when you study practice together.”

You’re also saying, “We trust that you know your personal needs and that—when given the time and space—you’ll work to improve.”

And those are exactly the type of messages that professional learners thrive on.

Use clear vision statements to guide the professional development choices of educators.

I’ve spent the better part of the past week in an intellectual cage match with a buddy of mine about the important role that vision statements—clear, precise descriptions of an ideal future state for classrooms, schools and districts—can play in school improvement.

While many educators underestimate the importance of vision statements, they can be invaluable for school leaders interested in releasing control over professional development choices, especially when they are precise and specific—like these that guide the work of the social studies department at Adlai Stevenson High School.

You see, once teachers and learning teams have a clear set of vision statements to guide their work, you can ask—even require—that their professional development choices be connected to individual statements.

That provides teachers with the freedom to pursue studies customized to their own needs and school leaders with a measure of confidence that time spent in edcamp style sessions will still move schools forward in a a somewhat systematic fashion.

 

Don’t limit authentic, teacher-driven learning experiences to unconferences.

One of my only worries about the edcamp movement is that it will get swallowed by the educational hierarchy.

Convinced that some level of choice in professional development programming makes sense, well-intentioned school leaders will create once-a-year district level edcamps where teachers spend eight hours sowing their “design-my-own-learning” oats.

If that happens—and I’m way convinced that it could—the edcamp movement would be a failure simply because authentic, teacher-driven learning experiences should be a part of the everyday work of every district.

For school leaders, that means finding ways to encourage ongoing, teacher-directed, collaborative learning at the building level.

And nothing encourages ongoing, teacher-directed collaborative learning at the building level better than professional learning communities.

Need proof?

Then look at how PLCs have changed my practice.

 

Remember that teachers will need help in learning how to learn with each other.

As confident as I am that teachers should be given more control over their own learning, I’m also realistic enough to know that there are a lot of specific skills that we will need to master in order to direct this growth in a productive and meaningful way.

We need to know more about instructional reflection skills like prioritizing our choices based on an understanding of student needs and making the results of our learning transparent to our peers.

We also need to know more about team-based collaboration skills like conducting effective conversations and coming to consensus around important issues worth studying.

We need to learn how to manipulate data to identify important trends in learning results, how to identify the relationship between instructional practices and student learning outcomes, and how to embrace team-based conflict as a tool for collective growth.

By systematically building our skills in these areas, school leaders increase the likelihood that teacher-driven professional development opportunities will be meaningful and efficient—and will yield tangible results for schools and for students.

 

Find ways to reward the learning that teachers do away from schools.

I’m going to tell you a frustratingly uncomfortable truth:  I learn FAR more away from school than I do in school.

By regularly interacting with other eduthinkers in my Twitterstream, my Google Reader, and my own blog, I am almost always learning something that is directly connected to the work that I am doing in my own classroom and/or school. 

Just this morning, I spent about 2 hours studying iPad Apps that might be useful for my students, the characteristics of effective professional development, and the way that conversations about assessment in classrooms need to shift.

ALL of that learning is  directly connected to the work that I’m doing with students and teachers in my school, but I won’t earn ANY professional development credit for it. 

That’s just nuts.

The solution is relatively simple:  School leaders must advocate for—or create on their own—policies that allow teachers to earn licensure credit for the learning that they are doing on their own.

What could it look like in action? 

Here’s a tracking document that I created for my next book that could serve as a starting point for conversations on how to reward teachers for being independent learners.

 

Does any of this make sense?  Basically, what I’m arguing is that teacher choice in professional development programming is essential if schools are ever going to really see significant changes in teaching and learning.

More importantly, I’m arguing that introducing teacher choice into professional development programming doesn’t have to be a risky proposition for school leaders. 

By relying on clear vision statements, helping teachers to learn more about the skills connected to collaborative learning, and designing policies that reward teachers for anytime-anywhere learning, school leaders can begin to release control over professional development programs AND ensure that school improvement efforts are systematic all at the same time.

If you've spent any time poking around the Radical recently, you know that I've been hammering on the idea that schools need to create sets of clear, concise, actionable vision statements in order to be truly successful. 

In an instance of kharmic synergy, I found out this week that David Allen---one of the world's leading experts on personal and organizational productivity and the author of Getting Things Done (2002)---believes in the importance of vision statements, too!

For Allen, vision statements matter the most in knowledge-driven workplaces. 

He writes:

In the old days, work was self-evident.  Fields were to be plowed, machines tooled, boxes packed, cows milked, widgets cranked. 

You knew what work had to be done---you could see it.  It was clear when the work was finished, or not finished.

Now, for many of us, there are no edges to most of our projects.

(Kindle Location 174-179)

This lack of edges to our work causes stress and confusion for most of us.  It leads to an almost crippling inability to figure out what to do next in order to move in a productive direction---and that crippling inability is only magnified when people are working together on complex problems. 

When we take the time, Allen argues, to pause and to write down the "very next physical action required to move the situation forward"---a process that parallels my beliefs about writing vision statements in schools---we put ourselves in a more productive position:

You'll be experiencing at least a tiny bit of enhanced control, relaxation, and focus.  You'll also be feeling more motivated to actually do something about the situation you've merely been thinking about till now...

The situation itself is no further along, at least in the physical world.  It's certainly not finished yet.  What probably happened is that you acquired a clearer definition of the outcome desired and the next action required.

(Kindle Location 328-343)

Please don't underestimate how important this process is. As simple and as ridiculously-common-sensical as it seems, there are too many teachers working on too many learning teams in too many schools who have NO IDEA what it is that they're supposed to be doing with each other from day-to-day or month-to-month.

Sure, we've all heard the "you should be studying your practices" and "you should be looking at data" lines about a thousand times.  We've heard the "you should be deciding what your students should know and be able to do" line, too. 

And we're with you.  We WANT to be productive.  We see the value---for teachers and students---in collaborating with one another around practice.

But "studying practices" and "looking at data" and "figuring out what students should know and be able to do" are general terms.  Allen would call them tasks with no edges---and tasks with no edges leave professionals frustrated and lost. 

What is so darn aggravating to me is the nearly universally negative response that educators have towards vision statements.  Most---including building principals---will tell you that vision statements are nothing more than a waste of time that no one pays any attention to. 

Allen sees this resistance to clearly defining a vision all the time.  He writes:

Thinking in a concentrated manner to define desired outcomes is something few people feel they have to do.  But in truth, outcome thinking is one of the most effective means available for making wishes reality.

(Kindle Location 356-360)

What should this mean for you?  How can you translate the lessons that Allen has learned from decades of helping individuals and organizations to move forward? 

Easy.

No matter what the cost in time or energy---no matter how skeptical your teachers are, no matter how divided your faculty is,  no matter how many other things you think you need to be doing----you ought to find a way to lead your faculty through a visioning process that results in a set of tangible action steps that teachers and learning teams can work towards together. 

Rick DuFour and Bob Marzano call this giving teachers the gift of significance:

To be the best leader you can be, link the vision of your district, school, or classroom to the hopes and dreams of those you serve.

Work with a guiding coalition to develop the specific actionable steps you will take to move toward the vision. 

(Leaders of Learning, 2011, in publication)

Does ANY of this make sense? 

 

I've been thinking a lot about the quirky kids in my classroom lately:

 

Download Slide_SchoolsValuingQuirky

 

I'm not sure that I like my own answer to this question----but shouldn't it be a question that we think about a little more carefully as we sprint towards a common core?

#justsayin

 

 

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Original Image Credit: Confused, Alone and Scared Today by Nina Mathews Photography

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21560098@N06/3621797460/

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on April 10, 2011