The Tempered Radical

Feeling Blue about Being #isteless

This is a tough week for me. 

Not only is it the last week of the school year at the Salem Middle School—an exhausting time for any teacher—but I’m missing the ISTE conference in Philadelphia.

Now don’t get me wrong:  I wouldn’t trade the chance to say goodbye to my kids in for ANYTHING.

I’ve got a remarkable bunch this year that I’m going to miss times ten, and if missing ISTE means spending a few more days with a group that’s won my heart, so be it. 

In fact, if I were completely honest, it’s not even ISTE that I’m sad about missing. 

Sure, there’s bound to be some great sessions that would have taught me a little something new about learning in today’s world.  I definitely would have picked up a strategy or two on my three-day intellectual sojourn to Philly.

What I’m really sad about is the people I’m missing during my #isteless adventures.

You see, darn near all of the most influential minds in my PLN are at ISTE.  People like George Courous and Patrick Larkin are there—hanging out with Lyn Hilts and Meredith Stewarts.

Scott McLeods are there.  Eric Sheningers are there.  Chris Lehmanns are there.  Chad Sansings are there.

And while those names might not mean a whole lot to you, they are the kinds of people who have impacted my thinking time-and-time again in the digital spaces that we share.

That’s the beauty of social media spaces, isn’t it?

Simple tools like Blogs and Twitter and U-Stream and Elluminate and Ning have made it possible to learn from really bright people who live a world away.  

#itsafactjack

More importantly, simple tools like blogs and Twitter and U-Stream and Elluminate and Ning have made it possible to feel a real connection—an intellectual kinship, even—with people that I may never meet in real life.  

I care about the Georges, Patricks and Lyns in my learning network because they’ve shared what they know with me.  They’ve given freely of themselves and made their practices and their philosophies transparent. 

They’ve given me the courage to try things I would never have considered.  They’ve introduced me to peers that I would never have been introduced to.  They’ve asked questions that I would never have thought to ask. 

More importantly, they’ve pushed back against my own thinking—serving as the professional sounding board that I can’t always find in my own community. 

ISTE would have been a chance to cement those relationships.  To meet face-to-face.  To have an extended conversation in a real physical space. 

To add a touch of personal to my learning network.

#nuts 

___________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

The Importance of a PLN

Technology Facilitates Connections

Lathered Brilliance and Superman Underoos

Grouping Students for Successful Learning in a PLC

Had another interesting email land in my inbox this week.  Tom—a principal of an elementary school working to restructure as a professional learning community—asked:

This upcoming school year, I would like my teams to start leveling their students (high, medium, low) and team-teach by ability level.  What do you think of this idea as it pertains to PLCs? 

Have you had any experience with leveling?  If so, what do you do with those teachers who want to ONLY teach their own students?

I think it’s helpful for any leader of a PLC to remember the critical questions that Rick and Becky DuFour believe should guide the work of any educator interested in student learning:

1. What is it that we want students to be able to know and to do?  What outcomes are the most essential for student success?
2. How will we know when our students have mastered these collectively identified essential outcomes?
3. How are we going to monitor progress towards those essential outcomes over time?
4. What are we going to do as a school when students don’t master those essential outcomes—or when they’ve mastered those essential outcomes and need opportunities for deeper study?

What that means is that leveling in a traditional sense—dividing entire grade levels of students into high, medium and low groups early in a school year—is an ineffective practice.

You see, student mastery is too unpredictable for stagnant, level groups.  Kids who master content in some areas quickly and easily will struggle in others. 

Activity: Questions to Consider When Traveling Abroad

Here’s an interesting question:  When you have students who are going to be out of school for a week or two on a family vacation or a trip to an exotic location, what kind of work—if any—should you give them to do?

That’s exactly the situation that I’m in this week, as two of my favorite boys are heading to Sweden to play in an international youth soccer competition.

Recognizing that traveling on a youth soccer team isn’t always conducive to reflecting deeply about other cultures and countries, I whipped a few questions together for the boys to think about.

Figured I’d share them here.  Maybe you can adapt them somehow the next time you have a student hit the road for an interesting destination vacation.

___________________________________________

Dear Luke and Kurtis,

Trust me on this: When you travel to another country, keeping a journal to reflect on what you are seeing and learning is REALLY important—and really valuable.

Every time I’ve ever travelled to a new land, I’ve kept a journal and I LOVE going back and thinking about what I’ve learned even today.

So here’s your challenge—and your homework: Write about AT LEAST 4 of the questions below while you are travelling.

Sit down at night before you go to bed—or while you’re sitting on a bus before a game, or a train travelling from one city to another—and just write.

How long should you write for?

As long as it takes to work through your thoughts about what you are seeing and what you are learning.

Don’t go cheap and get it done quick. Really work at it. And do it every day—don’t leave it all until the very end of your trip.

Respect reflecting. It works—and it’s what smart people do.

Mr. F

Electronic Teaming for Singletons in a PLC

One of the questions that I’m asked all the time as an advocate for both professional learning communities and teaching with technology is, “How can digital tools be used to support the learning of singletons in our schools?”

The answer is that there are two steps in any effort to develop electronic learning teams.

First, many singletons need help simply finding peers who teach similar content areas and grade levels.  Tackling that challenge can start with Twitter.

A microblogging service that allows users to post short (140-character), public messages to the web, Twitter makes sharing ideas and resources with one another easy.

More importantly for singletons, however, Twitter makes finding peers to learn with—no matter how alone you feel—easy.

Guest Blogger: Education’s Chimera

A few weeks back, I introduced y’all to Ryan Niman, a high school social studies and English teacher in the Edmonds School District north of Seattle. 

Ryan’s a brilliant guy—and more importantly, he’s a brilliant writer. 

He’s also one of the new voices that the Center for Teaching Quality—my long-time mentors and blog benefactors—has landed for their soon-to-go-live TransformED blog, which will give several real-live, full-time classroom teachers a platform for talking about the realities of educational policy from perspective of practitioners.

Ryan’s first bit was an interesting take on teacher compensation.  Recently, he shared another piece with me on teacher evaluation. 

Check it out and tell him what you think—both of his point of view and his voice!

_________________________________

Education’s Chimera

By Ryan Niman

It was good to see the release of the Denver NMI’s first report ‘Making Teacher Evaluation Work for Students: Voices from the Classroom’.

As a member of the Washington NMI group (hoping to get our own report out soon), I was struck by how we are both dealing with state laws that require the use of student data in the evaluation of teachers.

The Denver NMI group is dealing with Colorado’s Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Educator Effectiveness law (EQuITEE, for short).

(Quick aside: Do they realize it sounds/looks like the name of a t-shirt company?)

Washington also has its own “landmark law”: SB 6696 (alas, no cute moniker here). It, too, requires that ’student growth’ be involved in a teacher’s evaluation.

However, here’s where things diverge.

Whose Pockets are YOUR Legislators Lining?

As regular Radical readers probably know, I’m generally disgusted by the negative attacks on educators launched by the hard-core conservatives recently elected to state houses all over the country.

The general theme seems to be the same wherever you live:

• Teachers make too much money.
• Teachers have it easy.
• Teachers aren’t worth what we pay them.
• Teachers have it easy.
• Let’s break the backs of the unions that protect bad teachers who are making too much money.

Here in North Carolina, recent conversations are pretty darn similar.

We’ve got a Republican legislature that has refused to extend a 1 CENT sales tax designed to shore up education funding that is set to expire even though over 70 PERCENT of surveyed North Carolinians support it. 

Their reasoning goes something like this:  “We were elected to cut big government spending.  The people want the government reined in.  It’s time someone stood up to schools and their unions and told them enough is enough.”

That’s why the actions of Republican House Leader Thom Tillis caught my eye this morning. 

You see, while the fiscal superhero Tillis just COULDN'T imagine extending a 1 cent sales tax in order to protect education, he DID find the cash to give his own employees raises between $12,000 and $30,000.

Let me put that into perspective for y’all:  The TOP of the North Carolina pay scale for a teacher with a master's degree is $64,000

And that's after 33 YEARS of work in our state's classrooms. 

That means IF the legislature ever decides to restore increases in teacher salaries here in North Carolina—something that hasn’t happened in 3 years now—a teacher would have to work for 15 YEARS to earn the raise that Tillis gave JUST to his general counsel THIS year.

#lunacy

#twofaced

What does this mean for you? 

Pay attention to what your elected officials are doing and saying because the very people screaming the loudest about cutting government spending just might be lining their own pockets in the process.

#yuck

Google's Reading Level Search Feature

In a comment on my recent post about teaching students to search for reliable information on the web, Debryc wrote:

I want to teach my students these skills of information curation but I don't know how. I find it challenging myself to find reading level accessible material for my fifth graders.

Are there any good blogs/books to read that can help us start purposefully planning lessons and learning experiences on information curation and research?

While I don't have a ton of time to write today, Debryc---we're hosting an end of the year pizza party for our Kiva Microlending Club tonight, so I'm icing down cokes and opening bags of chips as we speak---I wanted to point out a quick solution that might be a good starting point for you.

Google has just recently introduced a Reading Level feature to their searches.  You can find it by clicking on the "More Search Tools" link that appears in the left side bar of any Google search page. 

After selecting the "Reading Levels" option, all of the returned search results will be sorted into "Basic," "Intermediate" and "Advanced" categories. 

You might also be interested in this bit that I wrote on teaching kids to approach content with caution.  It includes a few structured handouts on spotting hoax websites and on using Google's Wonder Wheel to work through more structured searches. 

I hope that's useful to you!

Bill

PS:  My book---Teaching the iGeneration---also has an entire chapter on introducing students to strategies for information management.  You can check out the handouts for the book here. 

 

 

Kid Lit in Twitter’s Fast Lane

While he doesn’t Tweet enough himself, Mike Hutchinson—@hutchinsonjm on Twitter and the mind behind the Salem Middle School Guys Read club—remains one of the most knowledgeable experts on the best reads for middle schoolers.

He’s CONSTANTLY putting good books into the hands of our kids and has almost singlehandedly made reading “cool” for a heaping-cheese-ton of 12-year-old boys. 

The guy is money.

In a perfect synergy between tool and individual, Mike has sought out DOZENS of great YA authors to follow on Twitter.  I figured you’d be interested in knowing more about which authors are worth adding to your stream, so I asked him to put together a guest post for the Radical.

Hope you enjoy it—and share it widely.  I’m not sure how many people realize that YA authors are Tweeting too!

_______________________________________________

Kid Lit in the Twitter Fast Lane

By Mike Hutchinson

Many people put together many lists of blogs you should read, videos you should view and people you should listen to.

Bill asked me to jump into this list making world for my big educational passion, children’s literature.

Here are a list of my top eight young adult authors who are out there in a big way on Twitter. I have also added in two authors who have Twitter accounts but rarely use them—to the detriment of us all.

 

Neil Gaiman (Coraline, The Graveyard Book):

My Take: The cool uncle of the literature world. A million and a half followers can’t be wrong.

Recently Tweeted: "Just wrote "he gets rescued from pirates by a timetravelling dinosaur in a hot air balloon" as a note to myself for tomorrow. I love my job.

Need MORE Proof that Testing is Destroying Education?

Back in April, I spent a few minutes with one of my professional heroes:  Dick Sagor—whose work on action research has been a direct attempt to raise the professional status and credibility of educators. 

Our conversation was anything but optimistic, though.  Dick was convinced that the teaching profession in America was at a turning point and that our nation was going to head in one of three directions:

(1). We’re going to completely abandon formal teacher preparation programs and rely on TFA style staffing patterns—kind of like Switzerland’s volunteer army or the Peace Corps.

(2). We’re going to completely strip down teaching and script the crap out of it so that we can hire warm bodies instead of professional educators to staff our schools.

(3). We’re going to reinvest in education to make it a true profession, paying teachers richly, but at the same time, expecting them to be well-trained and capable.

Considering the miserable direction that conversations around education have taken in the kill-em-all-right-wing world we live in, which of those scenarios do you think we’re likely to see play out?

Things got worse for me this week, though. 

You see, I ran Dick’s thoughts past an AMAZING teacher and good friend of mine—let’s call her Jill—who happens to live in New York—a state that is sucking hard from the testing teat.

Crazy Talk on Control in Schools

So my recent bit about our determination to waste money on Interactive Whiteboards has certainly sparked a bit of conversation and debate about technology in the classroom. 

Easily the most instructive comment came from Anonymous, who—among other things—wrote:

This is the most ludicrous article. Schools that have the technology you mentioned aren't even using it correctly…

The problem with handing devices to students is that the teacher has to manage the use of those devices….

I don't think teachers want to regulate the use of devices by their students when they can make their lessons interactive using an IWB.

The IWB is the best investment because it impacts every student. Look at the research... IWB's do increase student achievement. It is an investment, but it is about time we invest in our youth…

Teachers expect their students to learn new things, and yet they aren’t willing to spend the time to learn how to use their IWB?

Get with the 21st century!

Outside of being a bit offended by the suggestion that my thinking about technology spending is “ludicrous” and that I need to “get with the 21st Century,” I learned a few lessons from Anonymous.

Here’s two worth thinking about.