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Super Teacher's Job is Never Done!
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Friday, June 8, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Are FB and Twitter Good or Bad for Education?
Once an advocate for using social media applications and cell phones in class, this English teacher has changed his stance on the kinds of technology teachers should incorporate into their instruction.
Why Twitter and Facebook Are Not Good Instructional Tools
I remember feeling like a rebellious trailblazer when I first asked my 8th grade students to take out their cell phones for a class activity in the fall of 2009. The 8th graders’ eyes lit up as they reached into their pockets, prized gadgets finally allowed to breath open air after being crammed in with gum, pencils, and crumpled papers. After all, school policy prohibited the devices from being out at all during the school day. I was the cool teacher, seeing beyond the anachronistic policy and bringing 21st-century learning into the classroom.
I’ve always been open to new technologies in the classroom—in fact, in 2010 I argued in an Education Week Commentary piece that we were doing students a disservice by not incorporating cell phones into instruction. But over the past two years, I’ve seen or read about too many teachers and students who have become enamored with—even addicted to—social media and cell phone applications that fail to offer true pedagogical advantage or promote critical thinking. While summarizing is a real skill, do we really want students to further fragment their thoughts and attention in this age of incessant digital distraction and stimuli with 140-character blurbs? Do we want students to spend even more time in front of a screen, bypassing opportunities to converse and collaborate face-to-face?
Back in 2009, I discovered Poll Everywhere—an easy-to-use Web texting service—that allowed students to respond to open-ended or multiple-choice questions by text message. I tried it as an exit card, to reflect briefly on a lesson on sentence structure. I also tried having students publicly summarize what they read during independent reading. They loved seeing their answers pop up almost immediately on the digital projector screen. But some students didn’t have texting on their phones—if they owned one—and a few students thought it’d be hilarious to anonymously post derogatory remarks for the whole class to see. After a month-or-so trial, I decided that old-fashioned note cards and verbal responses were more efficient and ensured more class participation.
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Questioning 'Tech Savviness'
Using Poll Everywhere turned out to be more gimmicky than useful. It increased initial engagement in the activities, but the overall benefit was marginal. After all, I wasn’t promoting any critical thinking skills, but rather just using phones and the Web service to get students' attention—though in a way that took more time and effort than more traditional strategies. Other Web applications and social media tools such as Prezi, Wordle, and Xtranormal might initially seem to have worthwhile educational use, but theirs is limited as well. I’m tired of hearing how "cool" Prezi is, when really it’s just a better-looking, slightly more interactive version of Powerpoint. I don’t want students to become dependent on technology that requires too many templates, cheapens thinking, or relies on flashy graphics and movement. These gimmicks do not develop genuine technology competence.
A recent report by the Economic & Social Research Council refutes the notion that today’s youth, the "net generation," is truly tech savvy. After interviewing and collecting data from 2000 first-year college students in Britain, researchers found that only 21.5 percent of students had blogged, and only 12.1 percent of students had used wikis. Too few students are familiar or engaged with these sorts of technologies that are structured to promote academic rigor; instead, they opt to use Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, most often as distractions from their studies rather than learning tools.
I've come to agree wholeheartedly with the study's findings. Do many students you interact with know how to do much more than Tweet, post to Facebook, or browse YouTube? Email is antiquated to students; after all, many kids are so used to fragmenting their thoughts that writing a substantial email is drudgery. Twitter is all the rage for teenagers and is a constant source and depository of mindless banter and instant gratification. Being tech savvy should include the ability to synthesize ideas and media forms, and create something original. So how can we promote more thoughtful use of technology in schools?
Using Tech to Create
Despite my shifting beliefs about the efficacy of certain technologies in the classroom, I am a long way from giving up on technology altogether—indeed, I currently teach a digital media and storytelling course. There is tremendous power and potential in what we can teach students with sound, image, and video-based projects.
These days, instead of simply embracing Web 2.0 tools, I’ve decided to embark on creating a curriculum that utilizes technology as part of a larger creation process. Like the writing process, which requires planning, prewriting, drafting, editing, and revision, we can utilize audio, still photos, and video—all student-generated—to teach students to be tech savvy in a meaningful way.
In my digital storytelling course, for example, students learn how to collaborate using Google Docs, analyze images and video in the context of literature and narrative, and apply photo rules when they shoot, interview, edit, and sequence all of their raw footage and images. They create photo essays, audio slideshows, and short documentaries from start to finish, then critique each other’s work. I’m lucky to have collaborating professionals join class weekly. I’ve also learned that true tech savviness starts with people. If students can’t communicate face-to-face to conduct interviews or set up photo shoots, there is little point in placing a camera in their hands or a laptop at their desk. As educators, we must find a balance between screen time and “face” time.
If it’s simple—even mindless—to use or create with new technology, then we must question the pedagogical value of what we are doing. That said, I don’t regret using Poll Everywhere and experimenting with class blogs several years back. After all, as educators we must be willing to test out, and sometimes adapt to, evolving opportunities to teach and engage students. I’m still trying to figure out my curriculum, and will continue to test out new programs and technology applications to enhance the course. But until I'm convinced that cell phone and social media applications truly support deep thinking, my students will keep their devices in their pockets and backpacks.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Training for Principals on the CCSS? Yes, please!
After a slow start, a flurry of activity has occurred in the past six months to prepare principals for the new standards.
Common-Core Training for Principals on Increase
Principal Ryan Imbriale at Patapsco High School & Center for the Arts in Dundalk, Md., is one of the principals nationwide who is leading local implementation of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and mathematics.
—Matt Roth for Education Week
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A year ago, top officials in the school leadership world were worried. It seemed to them that principals were being overlooked in national conversations about how to get educators ready for the Common Core State Standards.
But that is changing. The past six months have seen a surge of activity to acquaint principals with the new standards and teach them how to lead their staff members through the profound changes that are required to turn the new expectations into classroom instruction.
“There is much greater awareness now about what we need to do to educate principals about what they should be doing for the common core,” said JoAnn D. Bartoletti, the executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
A year ago, as she took the helm of the NASSP, Ms. Bartoletti told Education Weekthat far too little was being done to prepare principals to lead common-standards implementation in their buildings. And while there is still much more work to be done to fully support principals in the common core, “I am more hopeful than I was last spring,” she said last week. “There is more going on now.”
Ryan Imbriale, principal of Patapsco High School & Center for the Arts in Dundalk, Md.
—Matt Roth for Education Week
Ryan Imbriale, the principal of Patapsco High School and Center for the Arts in Baltimore County, Md., said the past year has brought a spike in the amount of information being offered for principals on leading common-core implementation. Still, it can be tricky to figure out what’s high-quality guidance, he said.
“All of a sudden, a floodgate has opened, and there is a real focus on this,” Mr. Imbriale said. “Articles in journals, opportunities for seminars, summer trainings. I want to make sure I get the right information from the right people.”
Meeting a Need
The 30,000-member NASSP, based in Reston, Va., jumped into the void by partnering with the College Board to offer a series of six webinars that walked principals through some of the issues they will face as they work with their teachers to implement the new standards.
Mel Riddile, the NASSP’s associate director of high school services, wrote a series of columns on principals and the common core for the National High School Center, part of the American Institutes for Research, and sought to spread the message as well through an April webinar for the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based high school improvement group. The NASSP assembled the webinars and columns, along with articles from its blog and its monthly magazine, on a new common-core resources Web page.
The National Association of Elementary School Principals is also beginning to offer common-core information to its members, as it did in a May 3 webinar with the School Improvement Network. The Alexandria, Va.-based group hired a full-time staff member devoted to the standards, compiled a “checklist” aimed at helping principals take stock of what they must do to move ahead with the new standards, and set up a Web portal to house its new stock of common-core resources.
The two national principals’ groups have conducted recent joint trainings in Georgia and Michigan, supported by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the James B. Hunt Institute, a North Carolina nonprofit that supports the common standards. Lucille Davy, a former New Jersey commissioner of education who is now serving as a senior adviser to the Hunt Institute, said that the groups hope to offer more such trainings in states that want them.
Gail Connelly, the executive director of the NAESP, said she hopes those sessions can help fill what has until recently been a void.
“There is a tsunami that’s about to hit our schools, and I’m worried that our principals are not prepared,” she said.
Leading Change
Principals must understand many moving parts of school life to lead their staffs toward the common standards, the NASSP’s Mr. Riddile said. Not only must they grasp the content and pedagogical changes in the standards, but they also must recognize a host of other potentially necessary changes: grading practices, daily schedules, how students are grouped and their progress monitored, and implications for special education, English-language learners, Advanced Placement, technology, and counseling.
“If I were designing an implementation plan, the first thing I would want to do is get the school leader on board,” said Mr. Riddile, who led two Virginia high schools and was the 2006 national secondary school principal of the year. “They have to have the big picture of where this is going, how to work with the teachers.”
The ASCD has expanded its focus on principals, giving a common-core webinar
earlier this month that walked participants through the standards’ key ideas and how they should look in the classroom. The Alexandria, Va.-based professional-development group is also scheduled to run two-day institutes for principals in five cities in August.
earlier this month that walked participants through the standards’ key ideas and how they should look in the classroom. The Alexandria, Va.-based professional-development group is also scheduled to run two-day institutes for principals in five cities in August.
New York state created a number of resources for school leaders, including a principal’s guide to overseeing the key instructional shifts in the standards, and posted them on its common-core website, engageny.org. It describes what is expected in each such shift of students, teachers, and principals.
The 404,000-student Chicago school district is reaching its principals through its regional superintendents. In four meetings this year, those 18 regional superintendents explored the common core, said Steve Gering, the district’s chief leadership-development officer. They then worked with the district’s 625 principals and their school leadership teams. The idea, Mr. Gering said, is to create a structure that not only builds capacity among principals, but also enables them to customize the work to their school sites and offers ongoing support as they put the work into practice.
“We have to empower the instructional-leadership team, led by the principal, to adapt the information around the common core to the needs of their school,” he said. “The principal is the one leading the adaptation and design of the common core to their school site and is the one ultimately responsible for implementing it.”
Mr. Imbriale, the Baltimore County principal, said he has gotten help both from his state and his district in wading into the common-core work. Last summer, every principal took a school team to a Maryland education department summer training academy, where they learned about the new standards and designed a school transition plan, he said. The team from Patapsco High—Mr. Imbriale and his core-subject department chairs—has been at the heart of the work ever since, he said.
They brainstorm with other department chairs in the district at monthly meetings, returning to share what they learned with their colleagues, he said. He, too, uses monthly principals’ meetings at the district level to build his knowledge and bring it back to his staff.
“An administrator that doesn’t get that kind of support from the central office can feel very isolated,” Mr. Imbriale said. Also crucial, he said, is building a good team with his department chairs, since he depends on them to be key conductors of the work throughout the building.
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The biggest watchword in overseeing common-core implementation for Tracey Lamb is monitoring. As the principal of Fulton County High school in Hickman, Ky., she uses twice-monthly faculty meetings to hone teachers’ instructional focus and make sure they are gauging students’ progress regularly and adjusting instruction accordingly.
“It’s all about instruction and facilitating to make sure that what is supposed to be happening is happening,” said Ms. Lamb, Kentucky’s 2008 high school principal of the year. “Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring, and teaching, teaching, teaching.”
Principals must also be sure to carve time out of the schedule to let teachers work together on ways to teach the standards and analyze data from assessments of student work, Ms. Lamb said. Additionally, principals must take care to coordinate with feeder schools to align expectations, she said.
Collaborative Approach
As principals begin exploring their role as common-core leaders, some caution them against seeing themselves as solo players.
Rob Weil, the director of field programs for the American Federation of Teachers, urges them to approach common-core leadership as a joint project with their teachers, working as a team to define and observe classroom practice.
“Leadership isn’t one person,” said Mr. Weil. “It’s most effective when everyone is playing a role, working together.”
If common-core implementation is to be sustained over time, it’s not only current principals who must be prepared, but aspiring principals as well. And those engaged in that work say far too little is happening.
Margaret Terry Orr oversees one of the leadership-training programs at the Bank Street College of Education in New York. She also chairs a regional association of such programs and serves on a state task force that’s examining principal evaluation. She reports that little attention is being given to ensuring that new principals are prepared to lead their staffs in teaching the common standards.
“Principal-preparation programs just haven’t been doing very much with this,” she said. “The dialogue is just beginning.”
New York state officials have begun working with the public university systems to think about how to incorporate common-core ideas into teacher preparation, Ms. Orr said, but are not yet doing likewise with programs that prepare principals. “We fear that attention to leadership preparation will not be well addressed,” she said.
Top education officials in New York recognize and place a high value on ensuring strong common-core leadership in school buildings, but because of limited capacity, haven’t yet been able to focus a lot of investment in aspiring principals, said Ken Slentz, the deputy commissioner for the office of P-12 education, which, with the state’s office of higher education, oversees professional development for teacher and principal evaluation.
The state is focusing first on training those who evaluate principals, on the theory that the process can strengthen in-service school leaders by designing targeted professional development based on multiple observations and surveys of parents, students, and teachers, he said.
The education department recognizes that it must turn its attention to principal preparation, he said, so that both preservice and in-service programs build the instructional leadership of principals.
Monday, June 4, 2012
MD Receives NCLB Waiver.....
Interesting indeed......
www.baltimoresun.com/news/breaking/bs-md-state-nclb-waiver-20120529,0,2989417.story
baltimoresun.com
Maryland receives No Child Left Behind waiver
USDE announces eight states who will receive flexibility from federal mandates
By Erica L. Green, The Baltimore Sun6:39 PM EDT, May 29, 2012
| advertisement |
Maryland was among 25 states and Washington, D.C., to apply in the second round for relief from the federal law, which requires that every student in the country be proficient in reading and math by 2014 and has since labeled more than half of the country's schools as failures.
Last year, President Barack Obama offered states that have embraced his administration's key education reform initiatives — including Maryland — the opportunity to apply for a waiver from some of the elements of the Bush administration's 2002 signature education law.
So far, 19 states have been approved for waivers. Many of the states had also adopted reforms for the federal Race to the Top grants.
In addition to Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, North Carolina, Ohio, New York, Louisiana and Rhode Island also received waivers Tuesday. Seventeen states and Washington, D.C., are still under review.
In a conference call, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the states whose applications were strongest had three key elements: They were on track to strengthen college and career readiness programs, are focusing on teacher and principal effectiveness, and would apply strong accountability measures for their lowest-performing schools.
"States can only receive waivers if they are protecting children," Duncan said, "and these eight states have met that bar."
According to Maryland's application, schools should cut their achievement gaps in half in the next six years. Schools will be measured not just on how all students perform, but also on groups of students, including minorities, special education students and those who speak English as a second language.
"Federal officials are allowing Maryland to concentrate efforts on those schools in greatest need of assistance," Interim State Superintendent Bernard Sadusky said in a statement.
"We are not turning our back on accountability, and will continue to work to make certain all schools and students improve. At the same time, we are pleased the U.S. Department of Education will allow us to funnel resources into those classrooms with the most vexing issues."
Districts across Maryland have been anticipating the waiver, as the percentage of schools labeled failing — in even the highest-performing districts like Montgomery County — has increased every year, as the 2014 deadline approaches.
Currently, one-third of Maryland's schools, which have been deemed No.1 in the country, are considered failing under NCLB.
Under its application, the state will give each school an individual goal to meet in six years in reading and math. Using the percentage of its students who now pass Maryland School Assessments, the state will require each school to halve the number of students who currently aren't achieving. Groups such as special-education students would also have to make similar progress.
High schools will be judged on how well students do on the Maryland High School Assessments and on whether they are increasing their graduation rate.
A school that doesn't meet the goals will not be labeled failing and will not have to institute drastic overhauls that could include getting rid of the principal and most of the teachers.
"The goals in the application will help the entire state redefine progress," said Baltimore City schools CEO Andrés Alonso.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Baby and Child Care, the African Way....
I've just been reading a New York Times piece by Dayo Olopade:
"Baby and Child Care, the African Way"
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.
and thought it might be of interest.
She writes that "children here in Kenya and in other African countries are endowed with a lot more freedom and responsibility than their counterparts in wealthier regions of the world." She posits and cites positive outcomes that she thinks are a result of this independence.
One issue I have with this article are the judgements and misunderstandings about different parenting styles. Attachment parenting is standard in Africa. Attachment parenting means not being child-centered. On the contrary, it involves including your child in the real adult world and paying attention to their biological needs. Freedom and a long leash go in hand with that because the family trusts the child to be a capable human being, not prone to random acts of self-injury.
So, I did some further research on attachment parenting, and these two books have influenced countless parents on how to raise children:
There is a lot of misunderstanding about this parenting approach, recommended by Dr. William Sears, as questioned in the recent TIME magazine article. As always, there are several shades of gray which can be misguided by journalists.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Host a classroom spelling bee!
Here are the last 8 decades of winning spelling bee words…perhaps have an in-class spelling bee on Monday? Why not? J
Friday, June 1, 2012
Tour a Smithsonian museum this summer
What a great idea for you and your family in DC this summer!
Check the Smithsonian Website and plan a museum day. Tours are often scheduled between 10:00 & 2:00. Museum admission and tours are free.
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