The Tempered Radical

Who's teaching kids about hard drives?

After making a bit o’ cash by moderating a conversation between Rick and Becky DuFour and their readers last month, I decided to splurge on a new computer. 

Now—as I explained to my wife—I had a bunch of good reasons for the purchase:  My old computer, an HP that I bought something like 4 years ago, was a big,glitchy beast that I’d written two books, two chapters and thousands of pages of blog content on. 

It had seen better days.

More importantly, I’ve got three pretty big presentations this summer, so reliability is a priority.  It would be pretty embarrassing to have computer meltdowns in front of audiences that I’m trying to impress.

Perhaps most importantly, though, my mom and dad have spent twelve years running a desktop with Windows 98 on it—and EVERY time that I’ve been home in the past three years, I’ve spent half my trip trying to make that thing work! 

“A new machine for me,” I explained to the Missus, “means a hand-me-down for ol’ Dad…and a hand-me-down for Dad means less headaches for me!”

In the process of overhauling my old computer for mom and dad, though, I learned something interesting about myself:  I knew almost NOTHING about safely disposing of old computers. 

Read This: Investor offers $20M for Principal PD

The former manager of Fidelity Investments' Magellan Fund is making a $20 million investment of a different kind, with a return he hopes will be measured in stronger leadership for Boston's schools.

The gift to Boston College from Peter Lynch and his wife, Carolyn, will be used to establish a program to train and mentor principals in the city's public, charter and Catholic schools.

From Ed Week

In one of my first professional gigs beyond the classroom, the Center for Teaching Quality put me to work on developing a collection of resources designed to improve school leadership in North Carolina schools as a part of their early Teacher Working Conditions projects. 

It was a funny gig for me, considering that I've always pressured principals.  But it was an important one, too, because it reframed how I feel about school change.  Before the project, I would have encouraged every educational foundation to drop their dimes into improving classroom teaching.  "Raise salaries," I would have argued, "and give us access to the kinds of tools that we need to do our job well."

It wasn't long, though, before I recognized just how little schools and districts typically invest in principal professional development.  While we're always ready to spend a bit more on teachers, principals don't typically attract the same kind of attention.  I guess it just isn't sexy to spend more to develop good leaders because they're seen as a step away from the kids. 

And that's a shame because I can't think of a single good teacher who is willing to work for a struggling principal.  Take a look at the recruitment and retention patterns in any district and you're bound to discover that the best principals attract---and more importantly hold on to---the best teachers. 

That's why Peter Lynch's investment in the principals of Boston area schools makes so much sense---and why I hope educational foundations will follow his lead. 

Maybe then we'll start to see the kinds of changes in our schools that our students deserve.

What DOES Work. . .

In a comment on one of my recent posts about Interactive Whiteboards, Jake asked:

I have heard you talk about about your feelings on IWB's for quite some time, and I must admit you make quite the compelling argument. And, to be quite honest, I agree with you for the most part.

However, what I haven't heard is what are some strategies that DO work. Every professional conference (with the noted exception of the DuFour Conference) talks incessantly about what DOESN'T work but I just haven't heard a lot about what does.

I have heard the occasional strategy that is sort of effective but what I experience more than anything when I try and get my kids to interact (in class) with material is they spend the majority of time gossiping.

To sum it up, I would just like to hear about some strategies that you (or anyone else that reads this) does that is not the Sage on the Stage model. Am I making sense?

Interesting question, Jake, and one without a simple answer because every group of students is unique!  What might “work” with this year’s class could completely flop next year.  Even worse, what might “work” with my upper middle class suburban students could be irrelevant to kids in rural or urban schools.

What make my answer even more interesting is that if I were to talk about “what works” with kids, I’d never start the conversation with reflections on digital tools. 

The REAL Replacement Needed. . .

I'm not sure if you had the chance to see Alana Carpenter's comment on my recent post regarding Interactive Whiteboards, but it was brilliant.  Check it out:

When teachers are no longer interested in trying learn new ways to teach and learn and only rely on standing in front of a student audience droning on about what is and what is not it is time for a replacement. Not with a new expensive board, but a different teacher.

How awesome is that?!  More importantly, how accurate is that?  The problem with American schools isn't the tools that we're trying to use----it's the teaching strategies that we're trying to implement.  That's where the real changes in our schools need to happen.

And while Alana's conclusion that we need to replace teachers instead of tools may be a BIT oversimplified---after all, teachers aren't always given the freedom to choose the instructional practices that we're using in our classroom AND we never control the composition of our classes (innovative teaching can be a challenge in a classroom with 30+ kids who have an almost ridiculous range of academic abilities)---focusing on the quality of teaching is always going to produce better results than focusing on tools.

Read This: Some educators question if whiteboards...raise achievement

Fairfax County public schools began installing interactive whiteboards several years ago, one of which landed in Sam Gee's classroom at W.T. Woodson High School. On a recent morning, the popular history teacher dimmed the lights, and his students stared at the glowing, $3,000 screen.

As he lectured, Gee hyperlinked to an NBC news clip, clicked to an animated Russian flag, a list of Russian leaders and a short film on the Mongol invasions. Here and there, he starred items on the board using his finger. "Let's say this is Russia," he said at one point, drawing a little red circle. "Okay -- who invaded Russia?"

One student was fiddling with an iPhone. Another slept. A few answered the question, but the relationship between their alertness and the bright screen before them was hardly clear. And as the lesson carried on, this irony became evident: Although the device allowed Gee to show films and images with relative ease, the whiteboard was also reinforcing an age-old teaching method -- teacher speaks, students listen. Or, as 18-year-old Benjamin Marple put it: "I feel they are as useful as a chalkboard."

via www.washingtonpost.com

Not long ago, a reporter from the Washington Post contacted me and asked a few questions about my perception of the role that Interactive Whiteboards are playing in classroom instruction. Anyone who has read the Radical for long enough can probably guess in advance what my answer was!

Essentially, my beef with Whiteboards has always been a simple one: I just don't think they're as engaging and effective as classroom teachers believe them to be----and considering the tight budgets that schools are wrestling with, that makes them out to be a cold, hard waste of already limited cash.

Now, I'm willing to be proven wrong. In fact, I've asked over and over again for people to describe to me the best IWB supported lessons that they've ever seen taught. Sadly, no one has given me much reason to believe that IWBs are changing anything significant about the work being done in our classrooms.

Take the spotlighted quote from the Washington Post article above. Do you notice how the instruction being described in Mr. Gee's IWB-equipped classroom is still completely teacher-driven?

Our schools have always been defined by a culture of presentation: I'll stand in front of you and give you the information that you need to learn. You sit in front of me and absorb it. While IWBs might make the presentation a bit more flashy, it still doesn't change the fact that we're presenting and our kids are absorbing.

Making matters even more complicated is the reality that our kids have grown up in a participatory culture. They text all day long. They IM each other while watching television and doing their homework all at once. They check their Facebook pages a million times a day. They connect to others over the Web to play video games.

When you drop kids who are driven by participation into classrooms that are defined by presentations, "engagement" is unlikely at best.

Which is why we shouldn't be surprised that the students in Mr. Gee's classroom weren't terribly interested in the work that he was doing at his Whiteboard. Their lack of interest is a direct result of the lack of any kind of opportunity to participate.

Long story short: Technology alone can't reform American schools, no matter how many dollars the Feds drop into the laps of our states and our districts. The only way to "Race for the Top" is to change the way that we're teaching---and that's, sadly, something we've never been all that good at.

Good Structures = Good PLCs

One of the key messages that I like to send to any professional learning team that is just beginning their work together is that getting good collaborative structures in place can make or break any group of teachers. 

What do I mean by “collaborative structures?” 

Collaborative structures are the practices and processes that you use to coordinate your work. Meeting agendas are collaborative structures.  Decision-making protocols are collaborative structures.  Conflict resolution processes are collaborative structures. 

Here are three tools that I think are good starting points for teams trying to build collaborative structures:

Team Meeting Agenda:  Team meeting agendas are the simplest yet most important structuring tool for any professional learning team.  Agendas help to provide structure for every meeting.  Sadly, teams often have poorly developed agendas that result in unfocused collaborative time.  If that sounds like you, give this agenda a whirl. 

Structuring Data Conversations:  Let’s face it—the best professional learning teams are having meaningful conversations around data sets, but MOST professional learning teams just haven’t mastered the art of a good data conversation yet.  This document is designed to walk teams step by step through a positive, healthy review of results. 

Managing Team Based Conflict:  Managing conflict is probably the PLC process that is most important AND most intimidating.  Until your learning team can productively approach and resolve conflict between members, it will never get to the point where conversations are significant and meaningful.  This handout should provide a tool for working through professional disagreements with your peers.

I sure hope that these collaborative structuring tools—which are a part of the tools that Parry Graham and I share in Building a Professional Learning Community at Work—are helpful to your learning team!

The Elusive Professional Development Conference

So I’m heading out to Las Vegas tomorrow morning to both present and participate in a Solution Tree PLC Institute.  Joining together for three days with a bunch of great minds who are interested in seeing collaboration in schools work is going to be nothing short of remarkable. 

What is sure to make it even more remarkable is the fact that I can’t remember the last professional development conference that I went to!  Those kinds of events are few and far between for teachers nowadays. 

Making matters even more interesting is the fact that I certainly wouldn’t be going to this session if Solution Tree weren’t paying my way!  There’s absolutely no  chance that my school could have scraped together the travel dollars and registration costs for a conference like this. 

I think what aggravates me, though, is the fact that even local professional development/teacher leadership opportunities are few and far between for us classroom types.  Instead of sending teachers to district sessions, it is far more common to send media specialists, assistant principals or instructional support teachers.

Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution

Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have led eerily parallel lives. Both grew up in Midwest university towns in the 1970s, where they spent their formative years watching television after school and at night. Both later went to Yale (a BA in painting for Shirky, a law degree for Pink). And both eventually abandoned their chosen fields to write about technology, business, and society.

Now their paths are intersecting. In December, Pink, a Wired contributing editor, came out with Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The book digs through more than five decades of behavioral science to challenge the orthodoxy that carrots and sticks are the most effective ways to motivate workers in the 21st century. Instead, he argues, the most enduring motivations aren’t external but internal—things we do for our own satisfaction.

And in June, Shirky is publishing Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, which mines adjacent territory. He argues that the time Americans once spent watching television has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. (For an alternate perspective on the influence of the Internet, see Nicholas Carr’s essay) And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake.

Wired had the two sit down for a conversation about motivation and media, social networking, sitcoms, and why the hell people spend their free time editing Wikipedia.

via www.wired.com

What I really love in this particular interview is Clay Shirky's idea of "Cognitive Surplus." Essentially, what he points out is that people are spending less and less time in front of the television simply absorbing information and more and more time creating and communicating with each other online.

For Shirky, this means that there is a HUGE potential to develop the knowledge of the world. When thinking minds become active instead of passive---something enabled by the Web 2.0 world---we are unleashing unparalleled knowledge that we can take real advantage of.

Cool idea, isn't it?

Now here's the hitch: Schools are doing very little to take advantage of this cognitive surplus, are we?

Instead of recognizing that our kids are sitting at home waiting to be connected to one another and giving them meaningful, knowledge driven tasks to interact around, we're ignoring that potential and leaving our kids up to their own devices online.

My argument---which I've pushed ever since creating my first discussion boards for students years ago---is that we need to create opportunities for our kids to interact with school-based content beyond school hours. Creating discussion forums around content is so easy nowadays that it is almost inexcusable for schools to ignore the potential that rests in tapping the cognitive surpluses (surpli?) of our students.

To borrow a cheesy cliche, "If we build it, they will come."

So the next logical question is what are you doing to give your kids the chance to interact with content beyond the classroom?