Articulation

For the past 8 months, I have been involved in an amazing educational experiment where we through the use of edge technology, we have attempted to bring to scale high power instruction throughout our school.  I have been tinkering around the edges of school improvement (thanks to Larry Cuban) as a middle school principal for the past seven years.  We have tried all the traditional changes including schedule changes, teaming teacher differently, working through using coaches to improve instruction, and looking at the design of the school.  Throughout all the tinkering, our focus more or less focused on ensuring there was good standards based instruction in the classrooms. We developed walkthroughs, did professional learning targeting areas that arose from observations and needs inventories.  We looked at the PLC work and tried to take those parts of it that we liked. We tried to do Understanding by Design and took the parts that we like. We set a mission and vision and belief statements.  Those have been consistent for us throughout the last five years and they all focused on mastery learning and our ambiguous definition of what that meant. We even put in place a pretty aggressive push for blended learning in all classrooms without any funding, without one to one computing, without a wireless environment, and without a significant amount of training on what is good instruction online and what isn't.  Through it all, we did have one primary focus.  We were going to teach kids from bell to bell everyday and we were going to do with an opening, a mini-lesson, student work time, and a closing.  That expectation stayed throughout all the other initiatives that we played with.  Then, along comes the opportunity to put some real structure and framing and consistency to the instructional design that ensured that there was tight task structure, that worked to decrease the cognitive load on my teachers, and that created changes to the instructional program that were proximal to students. 

The project required us, as a cohort of volunteers and then as an entire school, to adopt a common lexicon.  This shared language allowed us to talk about instruction using the same understanding about the work before us, but not making any assumptions. We hashed out our meaning as a school for what the lexicon truly meant.  We agreed upon a task structure that was organized and tight and had common components that John Hattie and Bob Marzano have proven in meta-analysis after meta-analysis are high power strategies that make kids learn. Basically, we created a common schema around what we must accept as the tenets of good instruction and then the edge technology we use helps ensure that we do those parts in every lesson we engage students in doing.  Its only take 8 months to do some really great work with our teachers.  I have changed my views on blended learning and believe that its more about how we are using technology to help support individualized instruction for our students.

Starting another school year...

In a two weeks, teachers will be back at school doing all the regular getting ready for Open House and the first day things that we do before welcoming students on August 1.  For the past three years, we have been attempting to create a blended learning environment for our students.  We have pushed our teachers beyond their limits of creativity, technological savvy, and willingness to work with dated machines and a lack of training and knowledge.  And they have risen to the challenge.  They have created meaningful work for students in our LMS, they have learned to manage it well, and they have learned that there is power to using software that promotes and supports learning beyond the school day.  They have also learned that limited resources truly limits what can be accomplished. 

I have lamented on this blog before, how difficult it has been to implemented our version of a blended learning school when we have 60 laptops (20 of which don't really work and another 10 that are missing so many keys that they might as well not work) and one computer lab for teachers to show kids how to gain access to the LMS, what the work is, what it looks and feels like, and maybe even to do work on.  It has been a mighty struggle to personalize education and to harness the power of an LMS and coursework and instruction that is digital and automated when kids can't get to it.  Its been even more of a struggle trying to turn my dedicated teachers into developers.  Our district doesn't have the funds to buy hardware and they surely don't have the funds or the will to buy content for our online course work beyond a great math intervention tool that is purchased for our special education students.

There is high hopes that we will be able to do more as the special purpose local option sales tax is floated to the community in November that we will raise the money to outfit schools with the basics needed to really start to fly.  But, we aren't there yet. 

As I watch the two symposia responsibility for assessment under RT3 and I watch our state DOE develop evaluation systems based on survey data and value added growth assessments and I watch the cheating scandal in Atlanta unfold, I am struck that technology could really provide efficient and effective tools to combat some of the logistical problems associated with all of those items.  The discussions and cultural shifts that go along with the logistical issues are clearly leadership challenges that will push our ability to understand adult learning theory and change theory.  But, many of the solutions that technology answers require their to be end user devices in the hands of the students and teachers.  It requires their to be bandwidth to give students with those devices to access the Internet and the web-based tools they need to do the productive work of learning. 

We have a fairly well off district.  We are not considered poor, although we are inching our way in that direction as the housing boom continues to send after-shocks from the fall out.  We are better off than most in the State of Georgia.  We have been good stewards of our dollars.  There are one hundred other districts in Georgia in a similar or worse position.  There are countless districts around the country who may have the will, but not the way to adopt technology tools that could really disrupt and innovate. 

I am waiting for it....

The movement... thoughts on the National Charter Schools Conference.

Just finished with the general session on Day 2 of NCSC 2011 and feel definitely inspired by the key notes.  Marian Wright Edelman and Doug Hense spoke eloquently, passionately, and intelligently about the role we play as educators in making the lives of children better.  I was struck by the references to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and how the promises of Dr. King and the Freedom Riders are still there as promises and not so much as realities for so many American children. Although we have made great strides in opening schools to all children, in providing more equitable access to educational resources to all children, and to opening doors of opportunity, we have not done a satisfactory job of pushing the beliefs into children's minds that they must do better.

Its challenging to think of educators and schools where the belief is that only some kids will achieve.  Its frustrating to believe that the view of so many who are so influential in the lives of students is that there are winners and losers in the game of life.  I see so many that believe that motivation is the key to success and that kids are not motivated and that is where their failure is rooted.  But, they don't ask the questions or worse yet, only rhetorically ask, why are the kids not motivated.  Edelman told the story of a 12 year old black male student she spoke with in the DC schools in the days just after Dr. King's assassination who she was imploring to not but his future at risk and go out and loot and riot and get arrested.  He looked in her eyes and said, "But, I ain't got no future, I have nothing to lose."  He saw no reason to get an education, no reason to push through what could be the challenges of reading, math or history because the promise of segregation and walls he had no control over were all he saw.  Today, those walls of law and tradition have been torn down, but the image of students still creating those walls in their minds persists.

Our role as leaders of schools, whether it is a grass roots charter in downtown Atlanta or a traditional school in the suburbs or a "failing" school in any city is to provide BOTH the motivation and the path by which kids can be successful.  Schools must be a refuge for strength, sanity, routine, and success in the lives of so many kids that experience the opposite outside of schools.  Schools and educators must be the influences that push kids to be more than they want to be. 

There are many paths to success for schools.  Best practices of good instruction breed success which breeds pride which breeds high expectations for students.  Poor practices breed failure which breed excuses which lead to low expectations.  The behaviors of successful schools and students create the mindsets of success.  That is what you see in good private schools, good charter schools, good traditional schools.  That is what is scalable and possible.

20 minutes to boot up and Icloud...

We have this old computer, by old I mean nearly 10 years,  that sits upstairs in the office that we rarely use now that we have wifi and laptops.  This old e-machine takes 20 minutes to load because I haven't run anti-virus on it in 2 years as it only gets booted up when we find a song we thought we had purchased through Itunes is saved on it or if there is a document we neglected to transfer when backing it up to thumb drives. 

Last night, I had to boot it up because my wife got a new Iphone 4 for her birthday and her original Iphone information is synced to the old geezer machine.  So I trudge up there, bringing the modem and wifi router with me that is normally downstairs to provide better coverage in the parts of the house we use. Of course, the desktops have no wireless so I have to hard wire it into the modem to be able to get to Itunes to be able to make sure that the sync is done correctly on the old phone so we don't lose anything.

As I am waiting for the machine to boot up, I start reading on my lap top about iCloud and I get really excited that all this syncing to the old geezer may be a thing of the past.  As I am reading about it, I am syncing the old Iphone 3 that is now my son's Ipod Touch with my new laptop and I have my Iphone next to me and my work BlackBerry next to that.  So there I am with 4 smartphones, a lap top and two desk top computers and I realize that maybe I need a break.

Not that iCloud is the best thing ever, but it did all the sudden allow us to sync my wife's new Iphone 4 without having to plug it into a computer. We got her music, her contacts, her videos, and her apps without any hassle.  The pictures haven't worked yet, but it was a blessing.  I got to boot down old Bessie and maybe never have to boot her up again.  It will be said to say goodbye to the machine that built so many memories with digital pics of my sons first 2 years and our first 4 years of marriage, but I won't miss the 20 minutes it takes to get to them.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there...

PLCs and Technology

Our district is jumping into the world of PLCs and working to try and get each school to create in itself a PLC and then expand those beyond the walls of building.  As we work to join the movement that started over a decade ago, it makes me wonder how we will be able to push ourselves into that world more quickly using technology and Web 2.0 tools.  We are struggling to find our own digital footprint as a district and to determine what we are going to be on the web and how we are going to leverage the power of the web to help our students demonstrate mastery learning.  We are currently, probably like many districts, inching our towards it.  It is my hope that we can begin to really push.  Our school has been trying to create blended learning classrooms for our students with very limited infrastructure, training, support, or financial backing and have seen tremendous gains in the achievement of our students through our efforts. 

Not only is the blended learning helping to personalize the work for kids, it has begun the process of helping to make our instruction public.  One of the key tenets of the PLC work by Eaker and Dufour,etc. is to talk about instruction and learning as a public enterprise that involves several professionals working in conjunction to meet all the needs of the students in our community.  It is about being public with the work we ask of students, the teaching moves we make, the questions we plan to ask, and the ways that we make decisions in class to maximize learning for our students.   The blended learning model we put in place has made teacher-developers out of our staff as they are creating all the content for their classes.  In order to tackle the overwhelming task of creating content, they have been forced to collaborate in new ways and been forced to review each other's work.  We are looking at the work we are asking kids to engage in, but we are not yet at the point where we truly working collaboratively to meet all the needs of each of our kids.

It is exciting and engaging work that requires a lot of change, a lot of paradigm shifting, and a lot of loss of the old ways of doing things for our staff and faculty.  But it is the right work and the right shift and it will ultimately be the way that we meet the needs of our students and push them to be able to demonstrate mastery in all their work.

Come along.

Chick-fil-A

Reformation or Revolution

After reading Tribes and putting the drive and inspiration that Godin suggests to work, I was reminded of the work of Sir Ken Robinson.  He came to speak at our district leadership seminar about three years ago and I was struck by his focused talk on how schools are killing creativity.  At the time, it seemed that the district would head in a new direction and that perhaps this work was going to push us there.  But, budget woes took hold of our district, as I am sure it has many others, and constrained our thinking to staying alive.  I see the budget constraints as a time and opportunity to think differently about how we deliver basic services to students, when we deliver them, and why.  Instead of working to minimize the losses, lets think differently about what the purpose of schooling is and why we do it the way we do.  Let's monopolize on the structure, flexibility, and accountability that online learning offers students and districts.  Let's look differently as seat time vs. mastery learning and jump into it.

  We can start slowly, by filling the voids that have no services.  In Georgia, at least in our area, that void is really around meeting the needs of accelerated students who don't really know they aren't getting what they could.  We already do a job at meeting the needs of strugglers.  We even use online learning for summer school and credit recovery programs at the high school level.  But, we have not even begun to think well about how we can push students to accelerate their learning.  If we could develop a course of study for, say 6th grade Language Arts, that was aligned with the curriculum and had students do enough higher level thinking work within the modules in the course and students could finish it in 4 days a week, why not let them have the fifth day off. This provides a time for students who need extra time with the teacher to have it in class with smaller class sizes, but still funding at the same levels.  For those parents that don't want their child at home, we provide extension/extra-curricular/interdisciplinary work.  It is the time to do those activities all teachers want to do but feel like they shouldn't because of the looming state test.

You could change the way schools operate on both ends.