Please help me help a friend of mine.

I received an email this week from a good friend asking for help that extends beyond my capacity, and I’m hoping that there are some people somewhere who can step in and provide some guidance and assistance. Because it could mean the world to some students.

The situation:

My friend started teaching three sections of a senior English class this year for students who have recently exited the ESL program but aren’t yet ready for a remedial-level general education classroom.

There is no curriculum for the course, and the only real feedback and guidance my friend is getting from within his department is, “you’ve got to give them blowoff movie days once every couple of weeks to keep them motivated.”

Many students in the class live with extremely challenging life circumstances that do not leave them motivated to engage in the class or the process of learning to be literate. Some of them very much resent that they are in school at all.

After two months of trying to find answers and working to create meaningful learning experiences, my friend is growing exasperated. Because it isn’t working.

So, the question. Does anyone have any resources, contacts, insights, ideas, or any other way to help my friend? I give him great credit for admitting he needs help.

I hope we can get that for him.

The echo chamber. So many people love to hate the idea. Hang around Twitter for a bit, and you’ll invariably see someone complain about it. You’ll see people fret about it. You’ll see people walk away from it. You seldom see people defend it.

That’s good. And bad.

What’s the opposite of an echo?

In the sense it’s usually discussed in regards to thinking, the opposite of an echo amongst ideas is typically diversity. People often advocate for diversity of thoughts, ideas, and discussions. Hang around the same people with the same ideas talking about the same things and you risk entering the echo chamber where the same ideas are espoused and echoed around by everyone in the group. Or, you run the risk of groupthink.

So, people talk a great deal about diversity. I know I’ve advocated for introducing and entertaining as many different perspectives and ideas as possible when building programs or making important decisions. But, I’m starting to rethink that a bit.

I started listening to David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know this week, and chapter 4 discusses the notion of scoping diversity. The idea brings us back to the echo chamber. Weinberger doesn’t encourage us to entirely abandon or bemoan the presence of echo.

As Weinberger indicates in the chapter, there is a balance needed for diversity. It isn’t desirable to have too much or too little. There is a point where the right amount of diversity helps a group “work together and make itself smarter, as opposed to either falling into groupthink or falling apart because people just disagree too fundamentally.” I keep coming back to those last eight words.

In our great haste to flee the echo chamber, I fear too often conversations fall apart because we’ve run too far in the opposite direction. You see it all the time online. In politics. In discussions about education.

Try it. Go talk to someone with the opposite political affiliation as yours. Go talk religion with someone with an opposite worldview. Go convince a PC person they should become an Apple person. Go tell iPads to become netbooks.

You won’t get anywhere, and almost always, neither will the conversation.

This is why committee work is often such a challenge. We convene a group that is so divergent, the conversation can’t get past the first step from the gate. You need some degree of commonality. You need some amount of echo.

So, what’s the takeaway? That’s what I’ve been turning over in my mind. What does it mean for us? I think there’s something very important in Weinbergers four heuristics. Having had a little time to consider it, here are a few of my own reflections.

1. Diversity is good, but to move an idea forward with a group might require accepting the idea there might be a “right amount.”
2. It’s ok to have some echo in the chamber. We might be preaching to the choir, but many times the choir needs to hear the preaching just like anybody else. Or, at least, be in the same building to be able to hear the preaching.
3. Consider diversity when creating a committee. Or, setting goals for the committee to accomplish. It’s a waste of time to hope the committee can advance an idea like how to use technology in learning if many in the group don’t see the value of using technology in the first place.
4. It’s ok to let a conversation go when you realize it’s not going anywhere. Some people call this a taffy pull. A whole bunch of talking with nothing getting done.
5. Use human moderators in the process to find some commonality when the chasm between positions is too great or to introduce differences when the echoes start getting too loud.
6. Sometimes, too much diversity will make an issue fall apart.

It still doesn’t feel quite right to admit there’s such a thing as too much diversity. Or, the wrong kind of diversity. I’m not sure why that is.

Perhaps I’ll convene a committee to figure it out.

Image courtesy of TimOve

School districts have found themselves in a challenging position over the past several years regarding social media. It often makes school attorneys nervous. Administration, too. The issue is trying to regulate the medium. As a district administrator, I get the challenge. We have certain responsibilities for things like eDiscovery and litigation holds. No fun for anyone who has been part of such an exercise. If you’ve never had the chance to understand what challenges those pose for schools, read this.

I believe, however, that many districts end up taking a hyper-conservative stance on this issue. Social media, when used well, can prove an excellent communication, and even learning tool. Districts concerned about their staff using the service can satisfy the eDiscovery requirement by using a service like this or this.

District also get very nervous about all the “what if” scenarios when thinking about staff, students, and parents interacting online. I’ve talked about it before, but I’ll say it again, interactions between teachers, students, and parents are paramount to the profession. We should seek out all viable options to make these interactions as effective as possible. Districts shouldn’t enact policy that precludes the use of social media. Just be smart, and set policy that reinforces the policy already in place regarding professional practice and behaviors. I’m pretty proud of what our board adopted last year. I think something like this is a great approach.

This past week, we sent out an email to our staff inviting them to use social media and reminding them about guidelines that can help them as they consider using social media in their practice. The letter is below. It’s encouraging to hear the positive reports and see the links from teachers using the medium starting to roll in.

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Good Afternoon,

We’ve had a number of staff inquire about the possibility of utilizing social media to increase communications within the classroom. We welcome you to make use of these effective communications tools, and we’d like to help you successfully implement their use in your classroom with the following guidelines.

The board of education passed policy specifically related to social media last spring. You can read the policy here. The policy essentially reminds staff to keep all interactions between students and parents professional, public, and appropriate. All of the current policy regarding teacher interactions and professional behavior apply when utilizing social media.

Also, if you post any photos of students, please check that they have a media release on file, and do not use their last names associated with their photos. Please read the entire policy to get a complete understanding of the expectations for the use of social media as a learning and communications tool.

If you are using Facebook, please set up a specific fan page for your classroom that parents or students will utilize for communications. Inform your building principal and send me a link to your page, so we can provide you with any support needed.

We encourage you to utilize the disclaimer language found on the district’s Facebook page to inform your audience that you will be actively monitoring and moderating any and all postings on your page. You can find the language here.

Inform an administrator immediately if any inappropriate interactions take place on your site. We will help support and guide you through the proper response to any interaction that is in question.

We also encourage you to connect with others both inside and outside of the district using Twitter. To find out more about the district’s use of Twitter, including a listing of staff currently utilizing the service, click here.

We also welcome you to view our video about Twitter in D123 to find out more about how it all works. https://vimeo.com/36647045

Please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions about social media and its use in our district. We plan to offer additional educational opportunities throughout this school year to help you better understand and utilize social media with your students and as a communications tool for parents.

Over the next five days, around 13,000 educator-types will head to San Diego for the annual ISTE Conference. It’s a tremendous experience and one of the best opportunities to talk with a whole lot of incredibly smart folks.

With all these great minds in one place, I have a bit of a wish list that I hope, selfishly, will become reality.

1. Let’s try to really start figuring out what it means for education to have the level of access to information and technology that we now have.
2. Let’s remember creativity.
3. Let’s stop fighting about the device (I’ll do my part as well).
4. Let’s stop talking about new ways to do old things that weren’t really all that good when they were the new ways.
5. Let’s figure out how to give up the worksheet. The analog sort and the digital.
6. Let’s write more.
7. Let’s figure out a new narrative for education. I think starting with Godin’s piece is a good place for us to start.
8. Let’s stop letting major companies and their incredibly successful marketing teams tell us what to do. Especially with learning.
9. Let’s just sit and talk about some stuff we really love and care about.
10. Let’s make something.
11. Let’s remember what Gary Stager recently reminded me to remember. As Alan Kay so aptly stated, “The computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.”
12. Let’s be courageous enough to listen to ideas that aren’t our own.

I look forward to the talks, the thinking, and the work ahead the next five days. I hope you do as well.