We often hear that policy makers are looking for a "silver bullet" that will cure what ails public education. Here are two free ones.

This summer at one of first PD sessions at my new school, my principal said two things I've not forgotten and I'd never heard before from a school leader.  He said them calmly, matter-of-factly, but took a rare moment to say them--and be heard.  

1. "We don't yell at kids. It's very rare that that ever gets us the outcome we're looking for."  

2. "We don't talk over kids" (meaning if students are chatting with one another during a lesson, we don't continue teaching while they do this).   

These are two rules of thumb that seem obvious, and yet no one had taken the time--since I was a student in graduate school, and even then it seemed too obvious to dwell on--to make the expectation explicit.  Out in the field, however, especially in high need urban schools, it is quite common for adult staff members to resort to yelling and/or allowing students to have side conversations as they address a group of students.  I have been in situations where it's been extremely challenging not to do this, and I am familiar with the conditions that can create such situations.  Of course, these actions by adults send a confusing message to students about what appropriate school behavior looks and feels like.  (Note: I do see a difference between raising your voice at times, or speaking in a firm tone with students, and yelling.  Also, occasionally applying the strategy of consciously ignoring attention-getting behaviors is not the same thing as just teaching through students' side conversations.) 

I call these two rules silver bullets, because I am amazed at what a huge difference it makes for students to go through the day without being yelled at at all, and with a clear expectation that the teacher will not speak over them, and they should not speak over the teacher.  The tone of the school is much more calm, which is an important working condition for both students and teachers.  The adults are in control, which makes the kids feel safe, which is the bottom line.  

If policy makers could do something to support teachers and principals in creating schools that can follow these rules of thumb, they should.  Ideas? 

[Image credit: drivereducationbrisbane.com]

I've been preparing a solo presentation for the 2010 Big Ideas Fest in Half Moon Bay, California, hosted by ISKME--The Institute For the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.  I'm especially excited about this, not only because I get to spend several days on the West Coast, but because the conference, or festival, promises to be something special.  It is described as "three dynamic days of experts and creative thinkers inspiring and modeling ways for education to become relevant to learning, which includes rapid fire presentations on cutting-edge innovations in education, and design-thinking workshops that make real innovation actionable."

I know the conference will be special because of the way ISKME has supported and challenged me to prepare this presentation.  I am to give one of the rapid fire presentations about "teacherpreneurship," which was a key concept, or emergent reality, in the TeacherSolution 2030 team's vision of the future of teaching, soon to be released in our book, Teaching 2030.  Preparing for the Big Ideas Fest has given me a great opportunity to push the idea even further.  

In past presentations, I have been given a topic and told to speak about my experiences.  For example, "we'd like you to talk about teacher retention" (one of my favorite topics, and one that teacherpreneurship has a lot to offer...)  I am pretty comfortable talking about my own experiences.  I usually discuss with colleagues, prepare some notes, talk myself through them, revise, and go. Sometimes there is a Powerpoint to go along with it.  

Not so with the Big Ideas Fest.  First of all, Powerpoint is discouraged!  I like this already... nothing wrong with Powerpoint, when coupled with a dynamic presenter, but too often it is the crutch for a boring presentation.  

The format of the day itself is unique too.  Usually I might be told, "you'll be speaking in the segment about teacher retention." In the Big Ideas Fest, each presentation fits within a four part design cycle.  My presentation will be the "Identifying Opportunities" part of the particular design cycle I'm a part of. Though my topic fits pretty naturally into that category, I had to keep this in mind when planning my piece.  (You can read more about the design cycle, called "Action Collabs," here.)

Next, I had a long conversation with the president and founder of ISKME, Lisa Petrides, to work through my presentation idea.  Lisa pushed back in several areas that helped me locate the heart of the story I want to tell about teacherpreneurship.  She emphasized the importance of story to an impactful rapidfire presentation (Think Tedtalks).  As an English teacher, who believes stories and storytelling are valuable to our society way beyond the realm of actual literary works, I was really happy to be pushed in that direction.  Later I received an email with the running notes she had taken during our conversation, with a few comments intejected.  This is a tool I use with students when they are working with ideas and writing--take notes on what they say, then print and let them be a reference.  I was glad to find the notes as helpful for me as I've always hoped they were for students!

Now, I need to get my presentation outline finished!  I'm nervous and excited for the final product.  It feels good to be pushed to do something unique and creative.  By the end of the Big Ideas Fest, I expect to have some new thoughts--or big ideas, he, he--about making teacherpreneurships a reality.  And I'm not forgetting, we never said we needed to wait 'til 2030.  

[image from iskme.org]

I was talking earlier today with a friend, Jennevee Frias, who is a successful professional singer and financial advisor, about the value of good teachers.  She said, as many people do, that she can trace many of her life decisions back to specific teachers who encouraged her and helped her find her way.  

One teacher in particular, her high school music teacher, pushed her to realize her potential.  She had always been serious about singing, but when she became a teenager, she lost motivation to sing, and didn't think it was something she could really do.  "I didn't think it was a real gift I had, even though it had been--for my my whole life--something that saved me. When that was gone I felt like I had nothing, but that teacher gave it back to me."  Her high school music teacher recognized her talent and also her uncertainty and need for direction at the time.  

"He made it almost impossible for me to leave music behind.  He went after me and told me, 'this is your world. You have to do this.'"  When she didn't try out for the high school musical, the casting director called her and told her her name was on the list for tryouts.  She knew that her music teacher had signed her up.  She ended up trying out and landing the lead.  "I felt like I had every reason to give up singing, but he made me feel like I had every reason not to.  It was very much a difficult time in my life, and I needed music more than ever," says Frias.  In addition to her career in finance, Jennevee continues to sing and act, and is recording an album of original music with her band, Lo Primo.  

The difference this music teacher made in Jennevee's life was invaluable, yet it probably had little direct impact on her standardized test scores.  Students need teachers who see it as part of their mission to recognize and help students develop their strengths as well as make strong decisions.  Most of us have benefitted at some point from a teacher like this and we would want the same for our own children.  

Taking this story into account, two things need to change in how we measure teacher effectiveness:

(1) Teachers need to be rewarded for the impact we have on our students, beyond their performance on standardized tests, which is far too narrow, and beyond their performance in the year that we actually teach them.  Some lessons show up much later, as we saw in the story of the $300,000 kindergarten teacher.  

(2) Current programming and accountability measures discourage teachers and students from focusing on the arts.  Arts programs are virtually non existent in city schools today and are not part of the testing movement. I'm not advocating for arts to become tested subjects, but I am advocating for them to be valued and developed.  They can, in fact, save lives.         

Though the work of a teacher is never ending, there are several things my school does with technology that make my day go by more efficiently, thereby saving time.  Maybe I'm just not good with paper, but organizing the paper flow of a teacher's "office" has always been difficult for me and often sent me in circles looking for something.  Check out these paperless options.

1. Laptops.  Instead of a teacher's lounge with desktops, like many schools have, or a few desktops in the classroom, each teacher is loaned a laptop for the year.  The school is new, so the laptops are new Macbook Pros, and they are fast and reliable. (Each year the school brings on new staff, so the cost of this isn't so far from the cost of maintaining and updating a computer lab at the school.  

2.  Gmail accounts.  Every faculty member and every student at the school has an email with their first initial and last name on the schools google server.  This makes it easy to email anyone without hunting for their email.

3. Google Docs.  Every meeting agenda is sent out ahead of time as a Google doc.  One person a the meeting takes notes on the Google Doc.  Action steps are easily accessible, and the doc can be updated at the next meeting without anyone hunting for their notes.  I used to have a HUGE binder full of notes and handouts from meetings. Now I just have my laptop!  This means that I cannot forget where I put notes or handouts.  It also means that everyone has the notes, not just the facilitator. 

4. Google Calendar. If I want to meet with someone, I check their schedule in Google Calendar and invite them to a meeting, or vice versa, instead of hunting through schedule documents that are often not accessible to me anyway.  And if I want to sign out the laptop cart for my classes?  Each laptop cart has it's own calendar.  I just check to see that it's not already "busy" and invite it to my classroom!  This is way quicker that having to walk to a central location in the school and check through a calendar in a binder.

5. Teacher Pages.  As part of our google sites, each teacher has a page or his or her classes.  We update the homework and provide other helpful information about our classes.  Not every student has internet access at home, but the majority do, so this is an easy way to help students and parents stay on top of the work. The google site has limited capabilities, but is extremely easy to work on as opposed to some other sites I've tried to use.  

6. Gradespeed.  I've been using an online Gradebook for a while.  For anyone not using one, it takes about 15 minutes to figure out how to use and it is a huge timesaver.  If your school doesn't subscribe to one, there are sites you can use yourself that cost less than $50 a year.  But what I like even more about how my school uses Gradespeed is that we take attendance on it.  I have my laptop open on my desk.  After the first five minutes of class I enter attendance.  That means if a student comes late to my 4th period class, I enter that, and the school can easily access data about which students are chronically late to class.  Detention is assigned to students who are late a certain amount in a week.  I also can't count the times that I filled out or forgot to fill out, the old paper attendance sheet and then couldn't find it when the attendance person came to collect it.  Gradepeed and other online grade books can be set to send automatic email messages to parents about lateness or missing homework.  I've never used those features, but would be interested in trying at some point.

7. Google Spreadsheets for Parent Phone Log. Instead of every teacher having his or her own way of logging parent contact, there is a form that becomes data in a spreadsheet that I fill out when I make parent phone calls.  I just enter the students' name, my name, whom I contacted, the reason and the result, and press submit.  Somehow, typing that information seems much easier than filling out a graphic organizer by hand or finding the students' note card and recording the same information.  I'm actually getting faster at typing now than hand writing...

8. SchoolNet.  This program allows multiple choice tests to be scanned and graded electronically.  It does take some time upfront to load a test into it, but it eliminates the grading of anything that can be done in the multiple choice format (you can do short answer or essays, but have to grade them yourself, then enter a score for that question on a bubble sheet).  I think I will need to address this more fully in another post.  Of course, I don't give that many multiple choice tests. But, for example, practice state tests can be given and graded immediately.  You can link each test question to a state standard, and get data about how students scores in relation to specific standards.  Finally, using that feature, I'm working on a way to grade student writing on a rubric I've created, then creating a "test" where each category of the rubric is a "question" tied to a standard.  Then I can plug in students' rubric scores for each test question and have data about how your students perform on different areas of their writing, and track that throughout the year.  This is still a work in progress for me as a timesaver, but the capabilities of SchooNet open up a lot of opportunities--and why take time to do something a computer can do faster?

One of the only things that remain in paper form is student work. What would it be like if every student had a laptop and internet access at home?  I know some schools and districts around the country are doing this.  That will have to wait for another post.

[image credit: faqs.org]

I've been thinking lately about how much memory is involved in the process of reading, especially in reading story.   I've been discussing this with the students in my reading tutorials.  They noticed that we must remember what came before in the story, in order to understand the meaning of what's happening now, and what will come next.  They added, the end of the story usually makes sense only if you remember the beginning and what happened along the way.  Students also noticed that they had to remember more basic things like the meanings of words, recognize sight words, and memorizing the alphabet, in order to read.  

This paper, Memory and Reading, by psychologist Heli Numminen provides a very helpful look at the uses of memory in reading. Like my students noticed, the paper explains how working memory is essential for reading on a number of levels, and, more importantly, that there are reading comprehension difficulties that are caused by issues with working memory.  For example, "in ADHD the contents of the working memory are constantly inflicted with extra impulses. Reading comprehension is difficult because there is so much competing information in the working memory during a reading event."  In particular, longer sentence constructions and more complex words require more working memory--one has to remember what idea came before within a single sentence to make sense of what comes next.

I'm thinking about this at the same time that I'm noticing how many things I used to have to remember that I don't anymore, due to technology.  I used to have at least 30 phone numbers memorized at any given time.  Some in short term memory, others, which I still know be heart (my parents homes and a the homes of my oldest best friends from way back), in long term memory.  Today, I know very few phone numbers by heart.  I don't know the number of the school where I work, most of my friends' numbers, and the cell phones of my family members, because they're all in my cell.  I don;t have to memorize addresses or directions. I have all of that in my iphone whenever I need it. I don't even print out directions anymore. 

There are so many things I don't have to remember, because they're readily available on the internet, through my phone or computer, that I wonder how it's affecting my memory use in general... and what about my students' memory use?  

I asked students what they have to memorize these days.  They did list a few things: video game codes, school schedules, email passwords.  Maybe it's the same amount, just different stuff...but I doubt it.  I don't think most people today have to memorize as many things as we did.  

At the same time that I don't have to spend time concentrating on memorizing information, I am more free to multitask.  I may be holding a lot more at one time in my working memory than I used to, being constantly wired.  The use of working memory, according to Numminen, is extremely important in reading.  

How do the changes in the way we are using memory affect the new generation with their reading process?  If we can identify these changes, how can we address these shifting needs in our teaching?

[image credit: animetric.blogspot.com]