The Tempered Radical

What If Schools Created a Culture of "Do" INSTEAD of a Culture of "Know?"

Here at Educon yesterday, I had the chance to learn a bit more about design thinking from David Jakes. 

David's central point was that schools and teachers often get stuck in a "Yeah, but..." mindset when thinking about change. Instead of dreaming about what's possible -- taking a "What if" stance towards the challenges standing in our way -- we're all too ready to trip over the hurdles in front of us without even attempting to jump. 

David asked each table group to come up with a "What if" question spotlighting a more positive -- and possible -- future for classrooms and then to break that question down into the tangible steps that schools and teachers would need to take in order to move towards that future.

Here's a graphic organizer detailing what Kristen Swanson, Patrick Larkin, Larry Fliegelman and I came up with:

(click to enlarge)

 

Our key question is a good one, isn't it? 

What IF schools created a culture of "DO" instead of a culture of "KNOW?" Doesn't that action-oriented stance reflect the kind of real-world learning environment that we know resonates with kids? 

More importantly, don't we WANT kids who see themselves as living, breathing contributors to the world around them rather than simply as little people locked away behind our walls waiting to be released?

Of course, we'd have to work to take active steps to redefine almost everything about our schools if a culture of "Do" is really going to be possible.  Grading will need to change -- from a focus on content mastery to a focus on demonstration of an ability to apply content in novel situations.

Purchasing and budget decisions would have to change -- from a commitment to buying containers holding content (read: textbooks) to a commitment to giving kids opportunities to interact with their worlds. 

The rules that govern how kids advance from one grade level to the next would need to change -- from an emphasis on hours spent in seats to an emphasis on the use of artifacts to prove levels of mastery that we're comfortable with.

So this all sounds great, right -- but how do you move forward with what seems like such a significant change?

That depends on your role in the system.  As a principal, Larry was ready to start rethinking purchasing decisions starting on Monday morning, placing an emphasis on spending that encouraged doing instead of just knowing. 

Patrick -- also a principal -- was ready to begin moving towards creating a separate track in his high school that parents who were interested in a "doing" experience for their kids could opt into, knowing that it would be non-traditional in almost every way. 

Kristen and I are convinced that most teachers could begin creating learning opportunities that allowed our kids to work independently -- and interdependently -- on meaningful tasks without much trouble.

The key point -- as David would argue -- is that EVERYONE needs to move forward.  Find a step you can take tomorrow.  Find a step that you take a week from now.  A month from now.  A year from now.

But move forward.  Give up the "Yeah, buts" and start asking "What if . . ."

Three Innovation Questions Left Unanswered

Blogger's Note: Excused the rough feel of this post, y'all.  I'm running late this morning but I wanted to do some transparent reflection before heading back to #educon.  Hopefully something here will spark your thinking too.

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So I'm here in Philly this weekend for #educon -- one of the highlights of my professional year -- and I left last night's panel discussion on sustaining innovation with a TON of unanswered questions.  Here's just a few that are roiling through my mind right now:

Can innovation happen without remarkable leadership?

I've spent the past month reading I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59.

One message that comes across loud and clear in the book is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the driving force behind Google. Their choices and attitudes and ideas and believes permeated through every decision and action and organizational direction in the early days of Google. 

That made Google much more than just another startup company in Silicion Valley to Larry and Sergey.  Instead, it was literally an extension of their core beliefs -- about the role companies should play in the world, about the ways that workplaces should be structured, about what "don't be evil" looks like in action.  

Don't you think that's true for The Science Leadership Academy too?  Don't you think that in some ways, the remarkableness of SLA is an extension of their remarkable principal Chris Lehmann?

So the question for me is what happens to SLA after Chris is gone? 

Isn't it possible that SLA's next principal will be a well-intentioned guy or gal who unintentionally squelches what SLA has become? 

The sad truth is that there just aren't a ton of Chris Lehmanns out there, so can we really believe that SLA will remain the inspiring place that it is today under the stewardship of someone else?

And if not, shouldn't school districts spend more time and money on principal professional development programs to find and to feed and to grow their most innovative leaders?

 

What role does accountability play in either encouraging or hampering innovation?

At one point in last night's conversation, every panelist preached about the important role of failure in the life of an innovator.  Successes were just the tip of their professional icebergs, argued robotics genius CJ Taylor.  Failures are adorable added Alex Gilliam -- the founder of Public Workshop.

Their thinking lined up nicely with Steven Johnson's work on the evolutionary nature of sustainable change.  Growth doesn't depend on out of the box thinking.  Instead, it depends on a willingness to think at the edges of your box -- even if that thinking results in failures because you are pushing your intellectual comfort zone. 

But I couldn't help thinking about the impact that consequences have on our willingness to push ourselves to the point where failure is a possibility.  Aren't we more likely to stand squarely in the center of our boxes if we know that failure will lead to embarrassment or professional and personal ridicule?

And if so, how do today's grading -- and cudgel-based school accountability -- programs stifle innovation in our schools?  More importantly, is there anything that we can do to foster innovation even when we remain shackled by these practices?

 

Is innovation even possible in large organizations?

When they were asked to define innovation last night, the panelists used words and phrases like "nimble" and "ready to react and respond."  A sense of action shaped their perceptions of innovation -- and that resonates with me.

But as a guy who works in one of the 20 largest school systems in America, that also has me worried because there's nothing nimble about my district -- and while I think our leaders have a commitment to innovation, I worry that it will never happen simply because we're so huge.

Is it possible that small schools and districts have greater innovation potential than large schools and districts?  And if so, why the heck are we still building 2,000 student schools and cobbling together 100,000+ student school districts?

More importantly, why are we so fixated on standardizing everything in education?  Wouldn't we be better off if we looked at schools as innovation incubators -- an idea that Clayton Christensen pushes for in Disrupting Class -- and encouraged as much diversity within the local context as possible?

Finally, what the heck are we thinking when we put our faith in the federal government's ability to successfully encourage innovation in schools?  Are we REALLY convinced that centralizing educational choice at the national level is going to make us MORE nimble and responsive and innovative as a system?

I'm not.

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Related Radical Reads:

Innovation Interview Questions

Innovation and Intellectual Collisions

Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

 

The Sad Truth Behind Mr. D's Take on Assessment

After my recent rant on the sad state of technology in schools, Gerry Varty -- a regular Radical reader and good friend working as an assistant superintendent for the Wolf Creek Public Schools in Canada -- dropped me an email looking to cheer me up.

He pointed me to this hilarious clip from a new Canadian #educentered sitcom.  In it, Mr. D figures out a new way to speed-grade essays written by his students and then ropes a buddy into helping him work through the stack over beers at the bar:

 

 

Here's what worries me, y'all:  I've BEEN Mr. D more than once during the course of my career.  The truth is that grading essays can be a grind -- and even when I use rubrics to give targeted feedback or when I focus on ONE criteria -- student voice, proper mechanics, organization, content -- to save time while grading a written task, I end up overwhelmed. 

This is nothing more than a function of simple math:  I serve 120 students every day.  Giving good feedback on an individual essay takes about 5-7 minutes.  That's 12 hours of grading per task.  After attending meetings, filling out paperwork and answering my email, I have about 30 minutes free each day to plan and to give students feedback.  

The result: I skim my way through papers on a good day and I completely stop asking challenging questions that require anything more than multiple choice responses on a bad one. 

To be honest, that confession leaves me just short of completely ashamed. 

Out of all of the tasks that I'm charged with, NOTHING is more important than giving my students tasks that challenge their thinking and force them to demonstrate sophisticated understandings of the content and skills that we all care about.

More importantly, NOTHING is more important than giving my students timely, targeted feedback on their levels of mastery.  Without detailed feedback highlighting strengths and weaknesses, students don't grow as learners. 

But NOTHING about the current structure of schools makes timely, targeted feedback on tasks that require complex responses from kids doable.  Our class periods are too short, our student loads are too large, and our time away from students is increasingly filled by requirements that draw us away from important individual tasks like planning and grading.

#frustrating

#frightening

#anotheredufail

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Related Radical Reads:

Is REAL Formative Assessment Even Possible? 

Assessment's Either/Or Conundrum

Assessing Learning the Danish Way

Your Data Dream. My Data Nightmare

Tool Review: Posterous Spaces

Our school has always required that teachers maintain websites as a tool for communicating with both parents and students.  For most teachers, "maintaining websites" means housing updates and classroom resources in Blackboard -- a popular service that our district has been using for years.

I ditched Blackboard last year, though, for about a thousand disgruntled reasons.  I decided to use Posterous -- a site that I'm admittedly tech-crushing on right now -- for my classroom website.

Here's three reasons why I think YOU should use Posterous for classroom websites, too:

The Straw Breaking My Professional Back

Cranky Blogger Warning: From time to time here on the Radical, I feel like a ranting lunatic driven by emotion rather than solution-oriented blogger driven by reason.  Now might just be one of those times.  Take what I write tonight with a grain of salt -- or a gallon of gin.  Dealer's choice.

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Poke through my thoughts about technology's role in public education and you'll hear me preach over and over again about the importance of working to transform teaching REGARDLESS of the number of computers you have in your classroom.

That's a very personal message simply because I don't live in a 1:1 world. 

Heck, I don't even live in a 10:1 world.

Like most teachers, I've spent the better part of the past decade making due with limited access to labs with dozens of computers in need of Flash updates.  Sure, we've got a few laptop carts -- but they've sadly become dilapidated wrecks that we can't afford to replace. 

#soundfamiliar?

For the most part, I've tried to be tolerant of that reality. More importantly, I've consistently encouraged anyone who bothers to listen to be tolerant of that reality, too.

"It's not like your schools and districts don't WANT to provide you with access to the kinds of digital tools that you need in order to change teaching and learning in your classroom," I'll say.  "It's just darn near impossible to appropriately outfit classrooms given the limits of district budgets."

There's some truth in there, right?

Times HAVE been unusually tight.  Geez - here in North Carolina there hasn't even been money to give teachers cost-of-living adjustments in the past 4 years.  Where ARE we supposed to get the cash to invest in classroom technology.

#soundfamiliar?

But I'm sick of being tolerant, y'all. 

I'm sick of hearing critics hammer teachers for being resistant to change while I'm STILL sitting in cut-and-paste classrooms full of textbooks, glue sticks and safety scissors.  I'm sick of educational soothsayers conjuring up visions of 21st Century learning environments that I'll NEVER be able to create with the three working computers plugged into the corner of my classroom. 

I'm sick of telling my students that they'll have to wait until they get home to answer the questions that they care the most about.  I'm sick of standing in line behind twelve other teachers waiting to make photocopies because handouts are the only instructional resource that we have consistent access to. 

#soundfamiliar?

Most importantly, I'm sick of pretending that I stand a chance of convincing kids who understand just how personalized and engaging learning can be that my ridiculously quaint, completely unplugged, intellectually standardized classroom is anything OTHER than a big, fat waste of time.

The genie's out of the bottle, y'all. 

Like Scott McLeod recently argued, our kids KNOW that traditional learning environments are irrelevant -- and pretty much everyone with a pulse KNOWS that our schools need to change, but NO ONE is willing to put their money where their mouths are. 

You (and I don't care if "you" are a pundit, a parent or a politician) want to see my instruction change?

Find a way to give me some new tools to experiment with. 

I don't care how you do it. Force through some ridiculously sick bond referendum earmarked for technology and technology only.  Figure out a way to make Bring Your Own Device Programs work in your communities.  Pass the hat at Chamber of Commerce meetings. 

But whatever you do, quit ranting about the crappy job I'M doing until YOU'RE actually willing to pony up some cabbage or to help cut through red tape to create solutions that give me a fighting chance of actually doing my job well.

Quit crying about the dioramas my kids are making when the supply closet is chock-a-block full of crayolas.  Quit acting so surprised that my kids aren't networking with the world when the only lenses that we have to look through are dated textbooks.  Quit asking for "timely feedback" when I'm collecting data by hand with clipboards and post-it notes.  

I guess what I'm saying is quit asking me to perform instructional miracles.

My well of professional tolerance has run dry. 

#soundfamiliar?

(Glad I got that off my chest.  I almost feel better already.  Now where's my red checking pen? I have 130 essays to grade.)

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Related Radical Reads:

How Limited Technology Budgets Failed My Students

More on the Challenges of Wondering in Schools

Your Data Dream. My Data Nightmare

 

Looking for an #edtech Workshop? Come Learn With Me!

As most Radical readers know, I'm the author of Teaching the iGeneration -- a title designed to introduce teachers to ways that technology can be used to design lessons that give students opportunities to experiment with essential skills like collaboration, information management and persuasion. 

It's probably the title that I'm most proud of because it is incredibly practical. 

I've shared everything that I know about good teaching in the 21st Century.  Readers -- especially those teaching middle and high schoolers -- should be able to pick up Teaching the iGeneration and begin changing their work immediately. 

That's why YOU -- or the teachers in YOUR school -- might be interested in a series of two-day workshops that I'm delivering this spring.

Sponsored by Solution Tree, I'll be in Boston, Orlando and Dallas in March and April. 

Each workshop is designed to help teachers find logical first steps towards integrating technology into their instruction.  We'll look at the changing nature of today's learners and discuss the disconnect between the learning spaces that we've created and the learning spaces that our kids crave. 

We'll talk about the strategies that efficient learners take to manage the crush of information in today's hyper-connected world.  We'll examine the differences between students who use social spaces for networking and social spaces for learning. 

We'll explore the changing nature of persuasion in a visual world and talk about how students can generate their own audiences for the issues they care about.

Most importantly, we'll look for overlaps between the work we are CURRENTLY doing and the work that we SHOULD be doing in schools.  We'll innovate at the edges of the box and build bridges between what we know about efficient learning and what our students know about new tools. 

Interested in learning more? 

Then check out the slides that I used for a Teaching the iGeneration workshop in Union County, North Carolina last week and check out the session wiki where most of the resources for my iGeneration workshops are housed:

 

Teaching the iGeneration: Union County 2012

View more presentations from wferriter

 

Then, explore the thoughts that Lesa Goodman -- an eighth grade teacher in Union County -- shared on her blog after spending two days learning with me:

Lesa's Day One Reflection

Lesa's Day Two Reflection

Finally, you can learn more about me -- and the digital work that I do with students -- by checking out my presenter page on the Solution Tree website. 

What I hope you'll find is that my status as a full time, real live, bona fide practicing classroom teacher brings credibility to conversations about teaching and learning with technology.  Everything that I share with audiences are lessons learned through experience -- and that matters. 

Hope you'll consider coming to a workshop this spring -- and bringing friends! 

There's nothing that I like more than a room full of passionate practitioners who are interested in reimagining the work that we do with kids.

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Related Radical Reads:

What are YOU Using Technology For?

Making Good Technology Choices

Innovation and Intellectual Collisions

 

A Minute for Change: Biographies Matter [Podcast]

Let me come clean with y'all:  I LOVE reading nonfiction.  In fact, if you were to look at the 200 titles on my Kindle, you'd find about 12 that are fiction. 

More importantly, I think we do students a disservice when we fail to introduce great nonfiction reads to middle schoolers. 

The fact of the matter is that the majority of reading students will do to prepare for careers will be nonfiction. That means they've GOT to learn to love it -- and that's why I think biographies are so important.

Because biographies resemble the stories that kids have spent their whole lives reading, they are the PERFECT gateway into the world of nonfiction.

That's the theme of this week's Minute for Change podcast:

 

 

Here's three biographies that your students are likely to love:

The Great and Only Barnum : Not only will kids chuckle at the hilarity in Barnum's life story, they'll love wrestling with the morals behind a man who made money hand-over-fist by putting bearded ladies, Siamese twins, and crippled old women on display for the entire world to gawk at. 

Escape - The Story of the Great Houdini : There's something magical about magic, isn't there?!  And even today, there's something magical about the life of America's greatest magician.  Even in an era where seeing it is believing it, the stories of a long-forgotten Houdini will capture your kids' imaginations.

Mao's Last Dancer : Let's face it - Middle schoolers are passionate about wrestling with what's fair and what's unfair.  That makes any book connected to life in Communist China -- a place of almost incomprehensible injustice -- an interesting read. 

This title -- which details the life story of a poor Chinese boy who grew up hating America only to discover that everything he'd been taught was nothing but a lie -- gives students the chance to think about the role that governments play in keeping people down. 

So when ARE you going to start taking practical steps to introduce students to interersting biographies. 

#theymatter

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Related Radical Reads:

Reading is NOT Optional

Real Men Read

 

 

Message from Myers: Reading is NOT OPTIONAL

On January 10, noted YA author Walter Dean Myers will officially begin his two year term as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and while these kinds of titles usually seem completely useless to me, I'm pretty excited by Myers for one simple reason:

His passion is making sure that EVERY kid -- especially those living in the kinds of tough circumstances that he grew up in -- embraces reading.

Download Slide_ReadingIsNotOptional

 

Myers minces no words in this interview with Publisher's Weekly. He writes:

“We all know we should eat right and we should exercise, but reading is treated as if it’s this wonderful adjunct...We’re still thinking in terms of enticing kids to read with a sports book or a book about war.

We’re suggesting that they’re missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life.

If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.”

Listen to those words, y'all.  Let them roll around in your mind for a few minutes.  Stew in them.  We ARE condemning kids to a lesser life when we turn the urgency of reading into an option. 

But all too often -- and especially for kids who grow up in families that don't celebrate and model reading -- that's EXACTLY what we're doing. 

We're convinced that simple incentive programs, or trendy genres like graphic novels, or finding just the right book, will EVENTUALLy hook reluctant readers, so we show foolish patience instead of attacking literacy struggles with a passion.  

That kind of professional tap dancing around the truth is nothing but a waste of time -- and I'm completely jazzed to see that we've finally got a spokesperson who is willing to say so. 

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Related Radical Reads:

Real Men Read

The Unintended Consequences of Incentive Programs

Wondering (Worrying?) About Graphic Novels

 

 

Original Image Credit: Syringe by Andres Rueda

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on January 6, 2011

Five Tips for Creating PowerPoint Slides that WON'T Bore Your Audience

After stumbling across my collection of PowerPoint slides on Flickr and here on the Radical, Dov Emerson -- a digital friend from Long Island reached out with this question:

 

@plugusin - working on a presentation - any wisdom u can impart on your strategies/approaches for designing your awesome slides?

— Dov Emerson (@dovemerson) January 1, 2012

 

Dov's question is a good one, isn't it?  After all, presenters -- particularly educators -- CONTINUE to create disastrous slides that do little more than bore their audiences. 

So let's take a look at some simple tips for creating more engaging PowerPoint slides. 

I'll use this bit -- which I created for a presentation on visual influence -- as an example:

Download Slide_ZombieCreed

How to Use Podcasting to Personalize Your Blog

Not sure if you know it or not, but I'm a pretty big fan of Dean Shareski, a Canadian #edtech guru who has changed my own thinking about teaching and learning over the past few years. 

Recently, Dean blogged about the power of a person's actual voice. 

He wrote:

I think about the way a person's voice builds connection and relationship is unique and important. It's amazing how, if I've heard someone's voice in person or online, I read their stuff in that voice.

Makes sense, doesn't it? 

I know that when I'm reading text-based blog entries, I almost always make up imaginary inflections for the authors -- and I LOVE meeting people in person to see if their real voices align nicely with my imagination. 

In today's day and age, y'all, incorporating audio and video into your blog is ridiculously easy.

Whether you decide to roll hardcore and use YouTube's Video Recorder or keep things simple and whip up content with your cell phone, there is NO REASON that your readers should have to wonder what you sound like in real life. 

To personalize the Radical, I've decided to use Spreaker -- a free service complete with an Android Mobile App -- to start my own semi-regular podcast called A Minute for Change focused on the #edreform and #schoolchange questions that are spinning my intellectual wheels. 

Here's the first episode -- which is built around a conversation that I had with Steve Goldberg and wrestles with the notion that schools just aren't doing enough to measure the skills that parents really care about:

 

 

Now let's be honest: The audio quality on my Spreaker recording isn't fantastic.  While I was experimenting with different podcasting apps, I found SEVERAL voice recorders that produce a far better final product -- particularly Tape-a-Talk. 

But Spreaker does a TON of other things REALLY well. 

Most importantly, I can post new episodes to my Spreaker page on the web as soon as I'm done recording them on my cell phone.  That eliminates all kinds of second and third steps that I'd be unlikely to take if I were using other services.

Spreaker also automatically generates embeddable text for each episode that I post.  That makes it really easy for me to put players like the one above in my blog. 

That made Spreaker the most "all inclusive" service that I explored.

I'm certain that some of y'all won't bother to listen to the podcast episodes that I share.  Listening takes more time than skim reading, right? 

For those of you who crave the human connection that text struggles to convey, however, here's to hoping you'll get a kick out of my podcasting adventures!

And get ready:  There are DEFINITELY video episodes on my agenda!

#mybeautymaydistractyou