The Tempered Radical

Unleashing Your Inner Author...and Getting Published!

An interesting email landed in my inbox the other day.  Mike—a special education teacher in a Chicago school—asked: 

I read your article in the ASCD magazine "Educational Leadership", I like articles written by teacher-practicioners as opposed to university professors.

Could you offer some advice on getting published? How did you go about getting a book contract?

I would imagine you put together a proposal of some kind. I am interested in doing this kind of stuff but not sure where to start.

Here’s my reply—which may be of interest to other readers trying to figure out how to unleash their inner-author.

 

Hey Mike,

First, good to hear from you and thanks for your kind words on the content that I create.  I'm always curious about whether what I'm writing makes any sense to practitioners.  While I feel good about what I'm sharing, feedback is always the best indicator of whether or not I'm succeeding.

As far as getting your foot in the educational publishing door goes, I'd probably recommend the following steps:

Suggestion 1: Start a blog

Sometimes I still have to pinch myself when I think that I'm actually a published author because it's not something that I ever expected to be in my lifetime. 

In fact, until I joined the Teacher Leaders Network and met John Norton---a TLN co-founder and one of the most important mentors in my life---I wasn't much of a writer at all.  Over time, however, John prompted me to write a few teacher diary entries for the TLN website.

The bits were 600-1,000 words long---the equivalent of 2-4 double-spaced pages----and I liked it.  It was fun trying to translate what I knew about the classroom into content that others would find engaging. 

The process of writing was rewarding, too, because it gave me time to reflect on my practice and my profession---something that I think few teachers ever really take the time to do. 

New Slide: Walking the Moral Tightrope

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Teaching Effectively with an Interactive Whiteboard?

So it turns out that one of the professional organizations here in North Carolina is offering a new online course titled Teaching Effectively with an Interactive Whiteboard.  Here's a bit of the course description:

        About This Course

Interactive White Boards (IWB's) are quickly becoming a common tool in many classrooms. Paired with a computer, internet access and supporting instructional software, these tools provide teachers and learners access to a vast library of resources for instruction and provide the added feature of interactivity. This course will help teachers develop an effective pedagogy for the an IWB environment. . .

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course. The class assumes an "entry level" knowledge of interactive classroom technologies. Because interactive classroom systems incorporate a wide range of technologies, a good instructional technology foundation will be helpful. Participants should be comfortable with common computer applications like word processing, presentation software like PowerPoint, and using projected media to present content in a classroom.

Notice anything sketchy?  Let's look at the prerequisite paragraph again---this time with a few highlights added for emphasis:

There are no prerequisites for this course. The class assumes an "entry level" knowledge of interactive classroom technologies. Because interactive classroom systems incorporate a wide range of technologies, a good instructional technology foundation will be helpful. Participants should be comfortable with common computer applications like word processing, presentation software like PowerPoint, and using projected media to present content in a classroom.

In two simple sentences, this course description serves as a perfect example of my beef with IWBs.  We describe them as "interactive classroom technologies" and then use them to "project media" and to "present content in a classroom."

Is it possible to use IWBs in more sophisticated ways? 

Absolutely---and I'll bet that the course instructors are going to provide terrific examples for participants to explore in action.  What we're looking at here, after all, is hopefully just the prerequisities for the course and not the foundational philosophies of the course creators on the role that IWBs can play in teaching and learning.

But sadly, IWBs playing the starring role in interactive lessons doesn't happen nearly as often as the used car salesmen Promethean folks say they do.  Instead, we're dropping tons of cashola on tools to jazz up our presentations.

 

Blogging for Real Education Reform Day: Testing is Destroying Schools

When I stumbled across Paula White’s post promoting the Day of National Blogging Promoting Real Education Reform this morning, my head started spinning simply because I’ve got so much to say about fixing our public schools that I wasn’t sure that I could say everything that I wanted to say in just one entry—let alone get everything written in just one day.

I mean, I’m passionate about:

• Seeing the teaching/learning transaction change in our schools.
• The damage that standardized testing has done to teachers and students.
• Seeing funding structures change in recognition of the reality that high needs schools need more resources than the suburbs where I’ve spent my entire career.
• The fact that current policy efforts to recruit teachers to high needs schools are destined to fail.

I’m also passionate about:

• Redesigning teacher professional development. 
• The role that teacher leaders should play in driving change. 
• Global education and preparing students for a global economy.
• Redesigning instructional supervision practices in buildings.
• Seeing new assessments designed for our students.

And I’m WAY passionate about:

• The money schools waste on Interactive Whiteboards!

(Sorry.  Had to get that dig in.)

But if I had to pick one thing to write about today—one thing to draw the attention of policymakers to—it would be the damage that current teacher accountability models focused on testing results are having on our teachers and our schools.

Watch This: Clay Shirky on the Cognitive Surplus

One of the writers who has literally changed the way I think is Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. 

In this Ted Talk, Shirky explains how he believes the world will change as a result of the time that we spend networking with one another in collaborative spaces instead of staring at the Boob Tube.

 

What I wonder is how schools are adapting to this new reality. 

Are we doing a good job at taking advantage of the Cognitive Surplus in the lives of our students?  Are we showing students how to take advantage of their own Cognitive Surplus?

And if not, why not?!

My Edublog Award Nominees. . .

Really and truly, there's not a whole heck of a lot more important to me in my professional life than the people I learn from online every day.  That's why the 7th annual Edublog Awards celebration is so important to me. 

It's my chance to say thank you to people who have changed who I am---as a teacher, as a learner, as a colleague, and as leader---whether they know it or not. 

Download Slide_Gratitude

And while my list of people to thank is almost never-ending, I want to keep my nominations list short because it feels more powerful to me that way.

So here's who I'm nominating.

Examining Promethean’s Recent Report on IWBs.

Anyone who has spent any time poking around the Radical knows that I’m a pretty outspoken critic of Interactive Whiteboards (see here, here, here, and here).

My beef with IWBs—a tool that many district technology directors and school principals seem to love—is a simple one:  Interactive Whiteboards do little to change instruction in today’s classroom.

They facilitate a presentation culture in a time when our students are craving opportunities to participate.  They encourage and enable teachers to hold on to traditional practices that need to be buried if our schools are going to stay relevant to kids.

Oh yeah—and they cost a heaping cheeseload of cash, consuming already limited technology budgets that could be better spent elsewhere.

The Importance of a PLN. . .

In response to a recent blog post that I wrote about Twitter as a tool for learning, Pauline---a college student following my blog as a part of a class project---wrote:

I'm still working on my PLN, but I'm failing to see the importance of it. I think that most of the time when people have questions, they just research and read blogs and websites and so forth when the question arises.

I could be wrong, of course. I know that's how I think. I'm following a few people on twitter for my EDM class, but again, I'm failing to see why it's so important. Maybe you can explain it better?

Good questions, Pauline---and for many people who are new to building a PLN, their benefits might seem sketchy at best simply because we've become so comfortable with our current learning practices and processes. 

I can tell you, though, that my own digital learning network has changed the way that I work.  In fact, rarely a day goes by that I don't learn something---a teaching technique, how to use a new tool, what's happening in the world of education beyond my own building----from the people that I join together with online. 

Let me point you to a few posts that I've written that might convince you to invest a bit more time into your PLN building efforts:

Twitter as a Tool for Professional Development

In this post, I give several practical reasons why I've decided to use Twitter to build a PLN.  It's a great post if you're interested in an overview of why digital forums can be sources for real learning for teachers. 

Do We Even Know We're Irrelevant?

I came across this interesting slide today, created by Mike Fisher and built from a Joe Bower quote. 

Paired with the interesting results Scott McLeod discovered in a recent Tech Learning survey on teacher perceptions towards technology use, it’s got me wondering whether teachers even realize that they’re becoming irrelevant to their students.

Slide Credit:  Irrelevant by Mike Fisher

 

 

 

 

New Slide: Change Agents and Cannonball Kids

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