The Tempered Radical

Using Microloans to Learn About the World

I realized the other day that it’s been awhile since I’ve written one of my This is Why I Teach posts, and that’s a real bummer.  Stopping every now and then to remember what it is that I love about my job is important because with the criticism launched at teachers from every turn, this gig can be a grind if you don’t find a rose to smell every now and then!

Thankfully for me, my kids have been throwing dozens of roses my way ever since my academic team decided to raise funds to start a Kiva club designed to make microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing nations of Africa and South America last spring.

Following the British tradition of Red Nose Day, we had our very first “Do Something Funny for Money Day” in March of 2009.  Our classes had to raise $250 in order to have free periods in all three of their core classes.  In the end, they raised just over $500. 

Crazy, huh?

(If you’re interested in hosting your own Do Something Funny for Money Day, here’s the handout I shared with my parents and students:  Download Funny4Money)

Next, we spent a few weeks studying South America---a continent covered in our required curriculum—with an eye towards identifying the countries where people struggle the most with poverty.  We then worked through several mini-lessons on the advantages and disadvantages of several different types of Kiva microloans before making loans to 16 different businesses—many of whom are featured on this Kiva Team page. 

(If you’re interested in seeing the mini-lessons that we used to make our decisions, here they are: Download Kiva_Gift_Card   Download Kiva_Group_Loans   Download South America Snapshot   Download Kiva_South_America_Stud   Download Kiva_Women_Loans)

Instructionally, this activity was primarily designed to give my students a real-world opportunity to learn about the world.  Sure, we could poke our way through the textbook to study the differences between life in Peru and the United States, but there’s something inherently authentic about studying Peru so that you can make the best decision about who to loan your money to.

My (Current) Data Nightmare

So, I may be playing a familiar tune here, but I’m tired of being asked to work in new ways without being given the knowledge, skills, time and tools to complete new tasks.  It’s the whole reciprocal accountability soap-box that I jump on a dozen times a year. 

In this case, I’m struggling with a common nemesis:  Using data to drive my decision-making.  Now, in theory, I completely embrace the thought of using concrete, tangible evidence of individual student learning at the skill level to:

1. Identify students in need of enrichment and remediation.
2. Identify and then amplify effective instructional practices across an entire hallway. 

Makes perfect sense to me.  Fits the “work smarter, not harder” ethos that defines the best practitioners in every field.  Ensures that every child has a learning experience tailored to their individual needs.  Heck, I’ve even written chapters in two different Solution Tree anthologies on assessment!

But I’m also frustrated with the lack of efficient tools to collect, manipulate and disaggregate student learning data at the skill level. 

The Anatomy of a Hoax Website

One of the skills that today’s students need to learn--and that many schools fail to systematically teach--is how to identify hoax websites.  In a world where content can be created by anyone, being a critical consumer of online content is not an optional skill. 

So I figured I’d introduce y’all to the anatomy of a hoax website—and finding one wasn’t too difficult at all!  Early in the week, a spammer in Twitter—who has since disabled his own account—sent me a message suggesting that I look into a new opportunity to work for Google from home!

Interested in any opportunity to make a bit of extra cash, I checked out the website that he’d sent along in his Tweet.  You should too because it is a perfect example of digital chicanery at its best!

Here’s the link

A quick glance at the site left me pretty impressed. 

(click to enlarge image)

The layout clearly looked professional, and the “As Seen on CNN” bar at the top of the page lent an air of credibility to the claim that regular folk like you and I could make thousands of dollars by spotting new sites and sharing interesting links with the the world’s largest search engine.

(click to enlarge image)

Being a guy who is constantly bookmarking websites and sharing them through my Twitter feed with friends, the site had my attention.  As I kept reading, though, my hoax radar started to zoom in on subtle hints that just didn’t seem to sit right with me. 

Reflections on Revisiting PLCs at Work

Sitting here on the morning after our four-day focused conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour on structuring professional learning communities, I find myself in a familiar place:  Trying to sort out exactly what it is that I've learned. 

While I'm sure that I'll be mentally wrestling with questions raised during our conversation for weeks, here are some initial reflections that I know I'm going to hold on to:

Professional learning communities depend on champions, and sometimes those champions end up completely exhausted:  One of my favorite strands of conversation became what Mr. Monkey described as his very own “PLC Intervention!”  Frustrated with his learning team, he’d pulled back a bit from collaboration, and dozens of digital peers spent three days trying to coax him back from the professional edge.

Mr. Monkey didn’t sound like the only frustrated teacher in our conversation, though.  David—who teaches high school in California—expressed similar concerns with the slow pace of change in his building. 

Their comments resonate completely with me because I’ve been-there and-done-that more than once in the past six years as my learning team and school community has muddled through the process of growing together.  Ask my colleagues and every one of them can probably tell you the story of some conflict or another that left them convinced that PLCs were nothing more than the greatest headache since the mimeograph machine!

What hurts guys like David and the Monkey is that their investments of time and energy end up looking like failure—and failure isn’t something that motivated educators are accustomed to.  To make matters worse, when you’re wrapped in conflict and struggling to move forward, it’s difficult to remember that individuals and organizations only move forward once they’re good and uncomfortable. 

For school leaders, this means that a critical requirement (responsibility?) for driving successful change is keeping a finger on the emotional pulse of those core staff members that push their peers in positive directions.  Take time to touch base with them often.  Celebrate their efforts privately and publicly.  Find ways to acknowledge and reward their efforts.  Ask for feedback about school strengths and weaknesses, and offer specific guidance for overcoming immediate challenges. 

If principals lose the emotional support and professional commitment of their best players, professional learning communities are doomed!

Professional learning communities ARE NOT about standardizing instruction and taking away teacher autonomy:  Ask any teacher new to professional learning communities about their greatest fears and you’ll get one answer:  “I don’t want to lose the right to make decisions about the instructional strategies that I use in my classroom.”

And their fears are warranted! 

Schools and districts have spent the better part of the past ten years trying to standardize instruction.  Rigid pacing guides are rolled out, detailing exactly how long teachers should spend on particular units and offering “suggested lessons” that many leaders expect to see being delivered in every classroom, every day. 

That’s why it was so nice to hear Rick and Becky DuFour both say time-and-again in our conversation that any school leader that uses the professional learning community concept to push for lockstep instruction has misunderstood the foundational principles of PLCs. 

PLCs, Rick and Becky remind us, ARE about standardizing only one thing:  The content that students are exposed to in the classrooms across our hallways.  Working to identify essential outcomes and to develop common assessments, learning teams eventually detail exactly what it is that students should know and be able to do at the end of a year’s instruction. 

From that point, however, good learning teams are constantly tinkering with instructional practices.  Cycles of action research are used to collect information about what works and what doesn’t in classrooms.  Practices are reviewed, refined and polished over time. While some standardization naturally occurs as teachers on collaborative teams identify practices that are particularly effective at helping students to learn, a spirit of experimentation ALWAYS drives the best learning teams. 

As a full-time practitioner who always feels pressured by district-wide pacing guides, it felt good to hear that message ringing loud-and-clear!

Perhaps the greatest tool to moving learning communities forward is a shared language and history:  During the course of our four-day conversation, participants kept touching on the idea that a shared language and history is a critical—albeit often overlooked—first step to moving learning communities forward. 

Participants asked for clear definitions of core terms and concepts like “common assessments” and “professional learning teams.”  The use of stories and catchphrases to communicate the fundamental beliefs of was discussed.  Examples of situations where the lack of a shared vocabulary led to misunderstandings were shared. 

It was almost amazing to hear participant after participant talking about the ways that language had become a stumbling block to their collective efforts.  Shouldn’t finding resources for enrichment and remediation be a bigger barrier?  Wouldn’t you expect manipulating data or designing schedules for school-wide interventions to be the source of greatest frustration for learning communities?

But it was also strangely encouraging to find out that something so simple was causing so many problems!  After all, shared language is easy to fix—Rick, Becky and Bob even included a comprehensive PLC glossary in Revisiting that might make a good first step to introducing key concepts in your building.

The only requirement for working through this challenge is a deliberate and intentional effort on the part of core faculty members to building—and consistently using—a collective vocabulary and shared memory that everyone can draw from when making decisions.  Leaving language to chance is a mistake that no one HAS to make!

Now it's your turn to reflect: If you stopped by our conversation this week, what lessons are you walking away with?  What ideas resonated with you?  What do you still need to wrestle with?

Most importantly, what do you plan to do TODAY to drive change in your building or in your community?  We can't just walk away from this conversation and return to business as usual, can we?

On a side note:  While commenting is now closed, know that our conversation will be available for viewing until the end of time!  You can share the link—found here—with anyone at any time who you think needs to learn a bit more about professional learning communities! 

Final Day: DuFour Conversation

It's hard to believe, but TODAY is the last day for participants to jump in to our conversation (see here) on the nuts-and-bolts of restructuring schools as professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour---authors of Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work.  After three days of brilliance from dozens of commenters, I feel good about what we've learned together.

If you're looking to get caught up on our conversation quickly, check out our summary posts (see here and here).  You can also check out the following strands of conversation which started yesterday:

Joel started an interesting conversation on Slide 3 by introducing participants to the four key ingredients of an authentic community, as detailed by Shane Hipps.  Those key ingredients include a shared history, permanence, proximity and a shared imagination of the future.  What we're wrestling with now is which of the traits PLCs tend to neglect the most often.  

(My answer:  Permanence.  That's plain hard in a profession where turnover is the norm!)

On slide 4---where we've been wrestling with common assessments---Parry detailed a conversation that he had with a group of social studies teachers today.  He wrote: "One of the things that they are finding is that their students are quite good at spitting back facts, but that they struggle with more open-ended questions...

So these social studies teachers are now beginning to create more open-ended assessments, and they are planning to track how their students do on these assessments, looking for patterns within and across classes. What is particularly satisfying is that these actions on the part of the SS teachers are a direct result of their collaborative conversations and decisions to create common assessments."

What's satisfying to me about this interaction between Parry---who is a building principal---and his teachers is that Parry has made pursuing alternative forms of assessment safe for his teachers by being involved in the conversation.  While this may seem to be a subtle step, it will have a huge impact on the willingness of the learning teams in his building to be inventive when it comes to assessing students.  

The fact of the matter is that there is HUGE pressure on classroom teachers to prepare students from end of grade exams.  Deviating from multiple choice assessments is just plain risky---a gamble that many teams are unwilling to take without the explicit permission and support of their building principals.  

The lesson to be learned from Parry's actions:  If you want your learning teams to experiment, take the time to explicitly support experimentation.  Doing so will give your teams a much-needed boost of confidence.

On slide 6, Andrew---who wins the "furthest afield award" after joining us from Cairo, Egypt---details the important role that collaboration around common assessments play in the professional growth of his teachers and the learning of his students.  He writes: "The practice of identifying essential learnings in a course or unit and using ongoing formative assessment as well as periodic summative checkpoints has helped our grade level subject area teams better understand how their students can get to, "Got It!" 

Andrew's comments pushed me into the confessional, where I made an admission that still embarrasses me:  I knew little about my required curriculum before working with my learning team to develop common assessments.  

To that point in my career, I'd made instructional decisions based on what I liked to teach, what other teachers thought was important to teach, and what the textbook laid out for my students to learn.  It was only after we sat down to determine the skills that we wanted to cover on common assessments that I really began to wrestle with what exactly was in my curriculum.  

Which leaves me wondering how many other teachers are wrapped up in the same assessment nightmare.  I can't be the only guy who had a thin grasp on what it was students were supposed to be learning, can I?

The takeaway for school leaders:  Not only can common assessments improve the quality of student learning in your building, they can improve the depth of knowledge that the teachers on your learning team have about the topics that they are supposed to be teaching.  

How's that for a win-win?

So stop by Voicethread today, huh? 

Find a way to contribute to this conversation before it closes to comments at 5:00 today!  While you'll always be able to access the dialogue and share the link with colleagues, this is your last chance to lend your thoughts to the collective knowledge we're building together. 

DuFour Conversation Highlights, Day 2

Have you had a chance to stop by our ongoing Voicethread conversation on the nuts-and-bolts of structuring professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour yet? 

If you haven't, you're missing one of the most amazing opportunities to learn more about professional learning communities. 

Not only are participants like Dan and Joel asking the kinds of provocative questions that make a guy think, Rick and Becky have been incredibly active in our conversation (and generous with their time!), providing the same kind of practical advice and suggestions that fill their newest book, Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work. 

Every time that I stop by the conversation, I learn something new----and learning something new ain't half bad!

If you're looking to get caught up quickly, check out this summary of yesterday's comments.   You might also be interested in these highlights from today's conversation: 

Slide 2 sees participants engaging in a great conversation about the role that formative assessments play in the professional learning community process.  Responding to Joel, who worried that common assessments limit a student's ability to demonstrate mastery of critical content, Rick DuFour laid out a powerful argument for developing a balanced approach to assessing students that includes more than one measure of student mastery. 

Which has me wondering how many learning teams do a good job balancing the types of assessments that they use to measure student understanding.  I know that our learning team probably over-relies on multiple choice assessments simply because multiple choice assessments make data quick and easy to collect. 

But I haven't spent enough time thinking about what the consequences of an over-reliance on one type of assessment really are. 

(Note to self:  This is an area where my learning team can improve our practice!)

Slide 4 is an important slide for district level leaders to visit because when answering a question asked by Parry Graham (the co-author of my new book on PLCs), Rick lays out three key criteria that successful district-level leaders do in order to facilitate the work of the learning teams in their districts.  What makes Rick's response so interesting is that it is drawn from research that he's just completed on three districts doing great things with professional learning communities.
 
On Slide 6, Joel---who has challenged my thinking more than once in our conversation so far---asks a question that feeds right into my digital brain when he writes, "Clayton Christensen suggests in his book Disrupting Class that the next trend in education will move us toward individualized instruction and individualized assessment through computer software. As software improves, educators will play the roles of learning monitors and learning trouble-shooters, rather than instructors and assessors. Can the PLC model accomodate this shift in paradigm?"

Great question, huh?  Joel is right in his argument that the cutting edge thinkers about education would like to see digital tools used to individualize instruction for EVERY student...and my guess is that someday, we'll get to the point where that is more non-fiction than science-fiction. 

But what does that mean for PLCs?  

(My slightly pessimistic guess:  My learning team will completely perfect a system of regrouping students to provide remediation at the skill level just about the time when individualizing instruction will be made ridiculously easy by digital workstations!)

On Slide 10, Becky DuFour gives an incredibly thoughtful response to Kerri---a media specialist in Wake County---who asked how schools and districts could structure meaningful professional learning community experiences for singleton teachers.  Becky's answer (which was also right up my professional alley):  Think about electronic teaming!  Why can't digital tools like Skype and Voicethread be used by collaborative partners working across geographical boundaries. 

Honestly, I'd love to see more electronic teaming----not because it is a perfect replacement for human interaction, but because it would give more teachers experience with collaborative tools that are becoming more common in the workplace, and once teachers start using digital tools in their own work, they are bound to be more likely to use the same digital tools in their teaching. 

If you haven't stopped by our conversation yet, you should!  Here's the direct link.  I guarantee that you'll learn something.

If you have stopped by already, here's your day three challenge:  Rather than posting something new to the conversation today, go in and find a comment made by another participant to respond to.  It could be something that made you think.  It could be something you completely disagree with.  It could be something that you want to know more about.

Make today a day of interaction by interacting with an existing participant. 

After all, that's what good collaborative dialogue looks like in action, right?

DuFour Conversation Highlights: Day 1

So our conversation on professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour has gotten off to a great start, seeing librarians, school principals, professional developers and classroom teachers stopping by to learn and to lend advice. 

Here are some highlights:

On slide four, Rick and Becky argue that one of the primary responsibilities of a school leader in a learning community is to maintain a "laser-like focus" on student learning.  My question for school leaders is a simple one:  Is maintaining that laser-like focus easy?  What barriers end up distracting you from a focus on student learning?

Better yet, what do you do to make it clear to everyone in your school community that student learning is your first priority?

Slide 5 sees participants tackling a familiar topic:  Finding opportunities to celebrate successes and to keep momentum moving forward.  Melissa Smith, however, brought an interesting twist to the celebration conversation when she mentioned her school's tendency to celebrate missteps, too!  

She writes, "One of our school's staff commitments is to celebrate success as well as missteps on our quest towards improving student learning and achievement.  As we see it, you cant make mistakes if you are not trying anything new, so last year  along with kuddos at staff meetings and the sharing of grade level success with SMART goals, we also had a party, sparkling cider, cake and noise makers to celebrate the mistakes we'll never have to make again!"

(I'm stealing that one, Melissa!)

On Slide 7, Dan Greenberg---a professional developer from Houston---brings an interesting question to the group when he asks, "In what ways do those of you who function within PLCs formatively assess your PLC practices?"  I'm not sure about you, but my own professional learning community doesn't spend nearly enough time assessing our PLC practices----so I'm looking forward to hearing the ideas that other participants share for measuring the progress of PLCs. 

On Slide 9,  Mr. Monkey---who wins the award for best Voicethread identity name---has all of us thinking because he sounds professionally exhausted.  Frustrated by a learning team that runs contrary to his own deeply held beliefs about teaching and learning, he's chosen to step away from his team for the time being. 

The question worth considering is what can school leaders do to make sure that motivated teachers like the Monkey----who could be champions for PLCs in their corners of a school---never feel so frustrated or exhausted that they are ready to give up?

A pointer for participants:  Many users have asked whether it is possible for one person to leave more than one comment on each slide.  The answer is yes---and I hope you will!  Ongoing dialogue between participants around one concept is what makes a conversation healthy.

When you do, though, you won't see a new icon added around our focusing quote.  In order to keep a slide from getting cluttered with icons, whenever a participant adds a second comment to a slide, Voicethread adds the comment to the conversation without adding a new icon. 

Other participants will know that you've added a second comment by looking at the timeline found beneath each slide, where they will see a new yellow comment tab.  They will also see a yellow box---and a groovy yellow speech bubble---surrounding your icon.

Here's to hoping that you'll take the time to stop by our conversation before it ends on Friday!  Not only will you learn a ton....we'll learn a ton from you!

DuFour Conversation Starts Today!

Here it is, Radical Nation: The first day in our four-day conversation on the nuts-and-bolts of restructuring schools as professional learning communities with Solution Tree authors and school change experts Rick and Becky DuFour.

Interested in joining the conversation?

Then click this link:  Enter Revisiting PLCs at Work Conversation 

You might also be interested in this set of directions on how to make digital conversations work for you and this set of directions about how to sign up for a Voicethread account. 

If you struggle at all with your own Voicethread login, you can use this generic login that I created this morning:

Username: billguest@wcpss.net

Password: billguest

You'll find a small box in the bottom left hand corner of the presentation that will let you change to any of a range of generic identity icons.  The only hitch with using this generic login is that only one user is allowed to login under an identity at a time!  If you struggle to get in using the generic login, consider waiting for 20 minutes and then coming back.

Something to know about navigating Voicethread conversations:

While working in a Voicethread conversation, participants can choose to hit the "Play" button at the bottom of any particular slide and watch the conversation around that slide from beginning to end.  That's probably the best strategy the first time you stop by our conversation with Rick and Becky because you'll get to hear my opening questions, Rick and Becky’s initial responses, and the thinking of other participants.

As you revisit pages, however----something you should do once or twice over the course of the week to see how conversations are developing----you can click on new icons surrounding the quotes that you are interested in to hear new comments that have been added.  You can also click on individual comments in the "Timeline" bar that appears at the bottom of each slide.

By doing so, you won't have to listen to every comment every time that you stop by our conversation!  Instead, you can focus your attention on the thoughts of new participants or participants you’re most interested in learning from.

Let's knock this out of the park, huh?

Take some time in the next four days to add what you know, to allow your thinking to be challenged and to challenge the thinking of others.  Be committed to walking away from this conversation with new information that you can use to push your building forward.

Professional learning communities can be powerful tools for driving change in our buildings, but only when the pieces are laid in place properly---and the first step towards assembling the puzzle is building shared knowledge together. 

Voicethread can help us to do that together.

DuFour Voicethread Conversation Tips

So who's planning to stop by our Tuesday through Friday conversation on professional learning communities with Rick and Becky DuFour?  

I know that Rick and Becky’s newest book Revisiting PLCs at Work has gotten me all fired up about learning communities again, providing me with a set of practical ideas about how to move my own learning team forward----and I’m hoping that a conversation with other readers will only serve to strengthen what it is that I know about supporting professional learning communities in schools.

If you are planning on stopping by---and if you've never been involved in a digital conversation before---here are a few tips and tricks to keep in mind:

Make a commitment to being a productive participant:  Digital conversations---like any good conversation between colleagues---are only as valuable as the contributions made by their participants.  That means if you're stopping by and you have something meaningful to add or a really interesting question for everyone to consider, take the time to make a post!

Lurkers----or participants who quietly listen----are learners, too.  It's just that their silence is a loss for the rest of us!

Listen first, comment second:  Speaking of listening, it is impossible to underestimate how important it is for participants in a digital conversation to review the comments made by other participants in a strand of conversation before making a new post! 

Listening accomplishes two key tasks:  First, you might find a question asked by another participant that you can answer, building a bit of digital karma with the group.

But more importantly, if you don't review the comments made by other participants, the thoughts that you add might be off-topic or the questions that you pose might have already been asked.  Without listening first, you end up being that kid in your third block who raises his hand and throws the flow of the whole class out of the window by sharing something completely bizarre!

Skip the simple responses:  If you think about face-to-face conversations, there are TONS of simple responses exchanged between participants designed to show that one listener agrees with/acknowledges/disagrees with another.  For example, I probably say, "Yeah, Yeah," or "Right, Right" ten times when talking with my peers to let them know I'm listening. 

(When I'm completely jazzed, I tend to shout "Straight up, brotha!" while standing on a table, but that's a different conversation altogether.)

Those kinds of simple responses only clutter a digital conversation with tons and tons of comments----so most people don't bother adding them.  The advice I always give is to make sure that every comment you add is a meaningful contribution to the conversation----asking a question, responding to a listener, challenging a thought, turning things in a new direction.

That way, learners aren't swamped by simplicity.

Remember that there is no ONE expert:  Digital conversations are incredibly cool because they bring together people from around the globe who all have different backgrounds and experiences.  It is that collection of backgrounds and experiences that adds richness to digital conversations.

The media specialist from Australia may have some incredibly cool examples of how to solve a common problem in your learning team.  The math teacher from Wisconsin may have a question that challenges you to think about things in a new way.  The principal from Columbia might articulate a thought you've been wrestling with for years.

Take advantage of the "collective intelligence" in a digital conversation.  Don't expect one or two people to ask and answer all of the good questions.  Instead, interact----because interaction means we learn from everyone.

Find and follow strands that interest you:  I surveyed my kids not long ago about why they enjoy digital conversations, and one theme repeated time and again:  Digital conversations---unlike whole class conversations---allowed students to focus on strands that challenged their thinking and to ignore strands that were boring.  As one of my boys so eloquently explained, "In our digital conversations, I don't have to listen to Emily blather on about horses for an hour!"

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?  When you're in a whole group, face-to-face meeting, you're forced to listen to conversation that might just mean nothing to you.  Quickly, you tune out and end up disengaged and unmotivated.

(Think: Faculty Meetings!) 

Digital conversations are different because you get to CHOOSE the strands of conversations---and the commenters----that you want to follow.  When I'm involved in a digital conversation, I NEVER read every comment or respond to every participant.  It's just too time-consuming to be valuable.  Instead, I find one or two topics that catch my interest and I invest my time and energy into those questions.

Anyone else have tips and tricks for participating in digital conversations that you want to share?  The way I see it, the kinds of conversation that we're going to share from September 8th through the 11th are going to become more and more common in the professional growth of teachers, so learning how to navigate them is something we've all got to master!

Embracing What Could Be?

Download Protectingwhatwas