The Tempered Radical

Blagojevich and Education's Sad Reality

I'm somewhat ashamed to admit this, but I am a Reality TV junkie.  Plain and simple. 

As addicted as they come. 

Jersey Shore is my morning chaser, Judge Mathis is my afternoon fix-of-choice, and I've been known to spend days on the couch hooked by marathons of Cops and The Real World. 

Heck, my wife almost divorced me when she found out that I was watching Cheaters with my infant daughter during our 3 AM feedings!  Something about inappropriate content for a minor.  

So it should come as no surprise to you that I spent two hours soaking in a bit of Celebrity Apprentice last night, right?

This season---Trump's ninth as a talent-spotter in the board room---has a cast like you've never seen before, all competing for charities of their choice.  Cyndi Lauper makes me laugh every week with mindless babbling that Sharon Osbourne barely tolerates. 

The men are anchored by their own music superstar---Brett Michaels from Poison (the greatest band of all time, by the way)---and the one-time world's fastest man, Michael Johnson.

 

My favorite celebrity of Season 9, however, has to be the disgraced former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich.  I mean, how can you not like a guy whose hair is horrible but not half as bad as his decision-making?  

Learning from the Met: Great Expectations?

One of the greatest shames that I carry with me is the one year that I spent working outside of suburbia.  Needing a professional change, I transferred from a school where less than 10% of my students were living in poverty to a school where just over 30% were living in poverty.

Now, I know what you're thinking:  "This guy's lost his mind if he thinks that a school where 30% of the students living in poverty is a difficult place to work."

But even working in a school that many of my peers in more challenging buildings would describe as "easy," I knew that I'd made a mistake from the day that I walked in the front door.  You see, we had a faculty meeting where the results of our state's testing program were announced and my new staff celebrated wildly over the fact that they'd met---rather than exceeded---the state's testing expectations for their students.  That meant every teacher would earn a $750 bonus.

For me, though, that meant a $750 pay cut because the students in the affluent suburbs where I'd spent the previous 10 years of my career always exceeded the state's testing expectations, earning teachers a $1,500 yearly bonus.

It didn't take long for naive little me to figure out why meeting expectations was such a cause for celebration in my new school. 

The work was HARD.  My classes were full of small handfuls of students struggling through the social wreckage that poverty inevitably causes.  I had kids who were homeless or whose parents were imprisoned.  I had kids who'd never been to museums or to libraries.  I had kids who came to school hungry on a regular basis. 

Life was a fight for each of them---and that fight constantly spilled over into my classroom. 

Having fallen behind their peers academically, an all-too-common pattern for students living in poverty, many of the kids in my classes struggled to draw from background knowledge to understand new topics, to apply basic skills to new situations, or to produce sophisticated final products. 

While many had the potential to do well, it took high levels of commitment and determination to complete tasks that students living in middle or upper middle class neighborhoods worked through easily.

The result:  Complete frustration. 

New Slide: Is School Relevant?

I started reading Seth Godin's Linchpin last week and while Seth's primary audience is likely to be corporate types trying to survive and advance in a cutthroat world, I am finding all kinds of relevant implications for educators. 

In fact, one of Godin's central contentions---and one that he revisits throughout Linchpin---is that the standardized preparation that students receive in our factory-model of education leaves them woefully underprepared to be noteworthy contributors when the enter the work world, where innovation and risk-taking are rewarded.

 
Download Slide_SchoolFrisbee

It's funny, isn't it, that while policymakers continue to push for a more business-like approach to schools built on "rigor," "accountability," and "results" (Read: firing teachers and failing students based on nothing more than test scores), progressive business thinkers like Daniel Pink, Roger Martin and Seth Godin are pounding away at the very same approach, arguing that the factory must die.

I can't decide whether to laugh or cry. 

So whaddya' think?  Is anything about school really relevant to success in today's world?  Are we preparing kids to be the kinds of key players that American business needs in order to continue to thrive in a competitive world, or are we holding on to a system that has seen its better days?

What can we be proud of about American education?  What should we criticize?  What are you convinced we need to keep?  What could we pitch tomorrow?

Let's do a bit of dreaming about what should be.

(Image credit:  That's how you take half!  by David Swayze, licensed Creative Commons: Attribution.)

Teaching the iGeneration. . .

Regular readers have probably noticed a bit of a slow-down in the rhythm of the Radical recently.  Typically known for a Sunday-Wednesday posting pattern, I’ve only gotten one post a week up in the past few weeks. 

That’s because I’m in the final stages of revising my second book, Teaching the iGeneration: 5 Ways to Introduce Essential Skills with Web 2.0 Tools—and it’s going to be GOOD!

Unlike my first book—which focused on building professional learning communities—Teaching the iGeneration attempts to pull together everything that I've ever learned about preparing today’s children to be influential, responsible citizens in tomorrow’s world.  While writing it in just under 6 months nearly killed me, I’m super proud of what it has become.

 

Here’s an overview from the Executive Summary to whet your whistle:

You know what the iGeneration in your classroom looks like. They’re the students willing to experiment their way through anything, confident that trial and error can crack the code better than reading manuals or following directions. They’re turning to the Internet first and the library second when assigned research projects.

Their minds are working fast, but not always as deeply or as accurately as the adults in their lives would like. Yet teachers can capture the attention of the iGeneration and help them grow by integrating technology into classrooms in a way that focuses on the skills that have been important for decades.

The purpose of Teaching the iGeneration is to help teachers find the natural overlap between the work that they already believe in and the kinds of digital tools that are defining tomorrow’s learning. Each chapter introduces an enduring skill—information fluency, persuasion, communication, collaboration, and problem solving—as well as a digital solution that can be used to enhance, rather than replace, traditional skill-based instructional practices.

These solutions include blogs, wikis, content aggregators, asynchronous discussion forums, web conferencing software, video editing applications, and social bookmarking and annotation tools. In addition, Ferriter and Garry end every chapter of Teaching the iGeneration with a collection of handouts and supporting materials tailored to each skill and tool type.

Reintroducing rigorous and systematic study to the iGeneration—a generation that has grown up connected but has failed to understand the power of connections—requires nothing more than a teacher who is willing to show students how the tools that they’ve already embraced can make learning efficient, empowering, and intellectually satisfying.

I think what’s most exciting about Teaching the iGeneration is that it is truly the product of a thousand conversations with all of you!  The skill based focus is an idea that Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach planted in my head years ago, and every time I read, I hear the voices of dozens of people like Sylvia Martinez, Kevin Jarrett, Dean Shareski, Lee Kolbert, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Jenny Luca. 

Without the never-ending motivation and inspiration provided by the people in my PLN, I could have never churned this sucker out.  That makes it as much my book as it is yours.

Look for it in June of 2010!

Twitter as a Tool for Professional Development

Painful note to educational leaders:  As a career teacher, I rarely learn anything useful in professional development sessions simply because the majority of the professional development sessions are presented once and never referred to again.

What’s more, the content covered in professional development sessions never seems to target my own teaching strengths and weaknesses and the structure of professional development sessions never seems to give teachers the opportunity to interact in meaningful ways with one another.

As a result, I can’t think of too many formal professional development opportunities that have changed who I am as an educator.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to mean more and more to me every month.  I figured I’d try to organize my thoughts here in yet another attempt to convince skeptics that Twitter’s worth a try.

Here’s why Twitter works for me as a meaningful form of professional development:

NCAA Tourney--Book Geek Style!

March is a beautiful month for us sports fans, right?  I mean when you eat and breathe basketball, what could be better than curling up on the couch for hours worth of uninterrupted hoop. 

And inevitably, the tourney makes it's way into our classrooms as well, doesn't it?  Math teachers talk about probabilities, language arts teachers talk about the metaphor of sport, and marketing teachers pour over commercials all in an attempt to engage their kids in content that is fresh and exciting.

But is it REALLY exciting for every kid?  I mean, how likely is it that the hard core book geeks in your class are rolling around with brackets in their pockets and arguing about the upcoming Sam Houston State versus Baylor matchup?

Right.  They're not.

That's why you've GOT to stop by the blog of the Salem Middle School Guys Read club---run by my brilliant friend Mike Hutchinson.  Recognizing that following brackets would be a whole lot more fun if books were competing against each other---instead of random MEAC tourney champions----Hutch and his Guys Read gang of middle schoolers assigned each team in this year's tourney a book that they believe deserve an equally high ranking.

They're calling this book-lovers' March madness The SMS Guys Read Books and Basketball Challenge.

So a #1 seed like Duke becomes a #1 book like The Hunger Games in their minds and on their brackets----and Duke's #16 matchup (either Arkansas-Pine Bluff or Winthrop) becomes a #16 book like Airman in their minds and on their brackets.

Brilliant, isn't it?! 

I mean, I can JUST IMAGINE some of my boys rooting RABIDLY for Duke simply because they don't want The Hunger Games knocked off of their brackets.  It's THAT good of a book.

Personally, the first round matchup I can't wait to watch is in the East.  In the SMS Guys Read Tourney, #3 New Mexico is ACTUALLY The 39 Clues Series and #14 Montana is ACTUALLY The Lightning Thief.  Normally, I couldn't give two rips about a New Mexico v. Montana matchup, but I'll be pulling for the Lobos HARD because I HATE THE LIGHTNING THIEF!

Hutch is also going to be Tweeting about the SMS Guys Read Books and Basketball Tourney, too.  While he doesn't Tweet a ton, he's pretty darn witty and he's read every stinking book in the tournament, so I suspect that what he writes will be fun to read.  You can follow him at @hutchinsonjm

So if you've ever felt out of place and awkward in the bar as everyone else pours over their brackets in some kind of strange adult athletic ritual that you never quite understood, get involved in the Books and Basketball Tourney.  You'll suddenly start to care again!

And your book loving kids might, too!

Fun stuff, Mike. Thanks for putting this together. 

The Teacherpreneur. . .

An interesting email landed in my inbox this week from Amanda Gladin-Kramer, a policy associate at the Center for Teaching Quality.  Committed to redefining teacher leadership, CTQ has a long history of innovative projects designed to elevate teacher voice into important policy conversations.

CTQ’s most recent project is a full length book being published by Teacher’s College Press that lays out a vision for what teaching might look like in the year 2030.  Built from the voices of my brilliant Teacher Leaders Network colleagues and coordinated by Barnett Berry and TLN moderator John Norton, this book promises to be the first teacher led conversation about the future of our profession. 

Amanda wanted to pick my brain a bit about a concept that may be new to you:  Teacherpreneurism. 

She wrote:

As we’re working on the book on the future of teaching and learning, we’re trying to share a few present examples of advanced teacher leadership and “teacherpreneurism” - teachers who have found the flexibility and influence to act as social entrepreneurs in a way, both marketing their own skills and being catalysts for change.

We have in mind things like teachers blogging and Anthony Cody’s Teachers Letters to Obama project – and also the platform you’ve build through your blog and doing consulting work and writing your book with Solution Tree. We’re making every effort to share teachers’ direct voices as much as possible in the book, and here’s one area I’d love to get your thoughts on.

Amanda went on to ask me a series of questions about my work as a teacherpreneur beyond the classroom.  I figured I’d convert my answers into an interview-style post here on the Radical.  I hope you enjoy it.

Bam and Arne Get It Wrong Again. . .

When Barack Obama was elected and subsequently named Arne Duncan the Secretary of Education, I had real hope that we’d see meaningful improvement in our schools and communities. 

Change we could believe in, right?

But aside from the occasional speech where Bam and Arne say interesting things about promoting innovation or ending testing, the past year has been nothing more than a long series of serious disappointments.  The most recent failure:  Bam’s comments defending the decision of a Rhode Island school board to fire every teacher in a high poverty high school. 

Speaking at an event where he promised to send more federal cabbage to districts that shake up their lowest achieving campuses, the wise one said:

"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability…And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests -- 7 percent."

See, Bam, here’s the thing:  Is it really just the school that is failing students in high poverty communities year after year after year?