Learning

Another Beginning

Jul 05

Life is unexpected. Just when you think you’ve crested a hill and can look long at the path stretching before you, opportunity arises and you find yourself taking a road unanticipated. I won’t say I’ve taken the one less traveled by, but I have taken another.

Today, I officially began my job as the Director of Technology and Communications in Oak Lawn-Hometown District 123. It is a role about which I am incredibly excited. Because there’s great opportunity here. And I earnestly believe I can seize it.

I’d like to say I’m beginning this position with a long list of answers sitting at the ready for implementation. But that would be a dishonesty. Because at this point, I have more questions than answers. I’m hoping, however, that the right questions can prove more powerful than me thinking I have the right answers. I’m hoping such for what it could mean for our students, our staff, and our community. And what it could mean for learning.

It seems to me as I’ve observed the advent of modern technology increasing in utilization in education, there has grown a rift between those in the Director of Technology role and many of the others in an educational institution. Somehow the two sides seem to be at odds. Neither understands the other. As it is most often manifested, the one side is prone to thinking in terms of restricting what takes place in the technological environment, while the other side believes those running the technological environment know very little about education. I know I’m speaking in broad generalities, but it is what I have observed in many places.

I don’t want that to be my case.

I was a classroom teacher for eight years before I left one of the most incredibly rewarding professions in the hopes of making a difference on a broader scale. However, I learned quickly that there is little more rewarding than directly investing in the lives of students in a classroom each day. It is simply an amazing endeavor. I left that not to take a position where my actions matter little to the experience of students and those who are working so hard to help them learn how to learn. I left teaching with the hope that I could make a difference in a different way.

It is now, standing once again on the edge of great new change, that I begin with questions. I’m hoping these are the right ones. Or at least the ones that will lead me to the right ones. And the right ones are those that will make a difference in the lives of the students, staff members, and community where I have the privilege to serve.

As is always the case, your input and help in crafting and molding both these questions and my potential to make a difference is extremely important to me. Here is my beginning.

1. How is what we’re doing with technology making a difference for learning?

2. How can we support teachers and do everything we can to help them help their students learn?

3. How can we support teachers as they continue to learn?

3. Does the environment we create build trust?

4. How can we communicate more effectively and better meet the needs of our community?

5. Are we reliable?

6. Are we making a positive difference?

I hope these questions guide the work that I have ahead. And I hope I keep questioning the questions. And I know I will keep learning.

Assessment is a Bad Word?

Apr 01

Many teachers in many districts have the same reaction to the word assessment. Mention it, and you could very well elicit a visual cringe. That’s interesting.

The most oft cited criticism of assessment is that we don’t have time for it. I don’t really get that.

I can’t say it any better than Grant Wiggins did at ASCD when he was asked the same question. He responded;

“If you say you don’t have time for this, you assume that the teaching is more important than the learning. Feedback is the key to reaching goals. Saying there’s no time is to confuse causing learning for mentioning stuff.”

Bingo.

Thanks to Purplemattfish for the use of the Flickr image.

Can Standardized Test Data be Formative?

Mar 27

Very often we refer to state standardized testing data as summative. It is used to determine if a student, and an institution, meet AYP. We apply the data, much as the somewhat tired analogy goes, as a learning autopsy. We identify problems and areas of health, and perhaps even the cause of learning death, but we say it’s too late at that point for us to use it to change anything for that student. The problem, most people say, is that we don’t receive the results in a timely manner, and thus, can only use it to reflect back upon.

I wonder if we can change that.

Because at the beginning of a given school year, you typically have at least several years of data on each of your students. You have how they performed on the test last year, and the year before, and depending on what grade level you teach, you might even have the data for quite a few years.

What if we approached our standardized testing data this way?

Instead of basing your instructional decisions for this year on what a different group of kids did last year, what if you looked at the students you have at the beginning of the year and used their historical data?

This might shift our perspective from summative to formative.

I often see schools and districts use the performance data from the previous year to make instructional decisions for the next year. For example, students perform poorly on vocabulary one year. So, the teacher or perhaps even entire grade level, makes the determination to focus on vocabulary as a weakness for improvement for the next year. The problem is, what if the class you have this year is actually very strong in vocabulary but really need help with comprehension? Or what if only several students are very strong in vocabulary but really need help with making connections? What if we looked at what each student needs individually based on how they have done over the years?

I wonder how much this would change.

I honestly don’t know how much valuable information can be found and used in a formative capacity in state standardized testing. I’ve a feeling, though, there might be more there than we realize.

Thanks to DrWurm for the use of the Flickr image.

Airplanes and Education

Mar 06

A couple things ran through my mind today as I flew into San Antonio for the 2010 ASCD conference. Both related to education.

On the trip, I started reading 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of the name. I don’t necessarily like it, but I do get it. While these skills have absolutely been a requisite part of our society and learning for many centuries, and they aren’t unto themselves new skills by any means, there is a new context in which we should be engaging them. I agree with that. Emphatically.

It seems over the past decade, our education system has temporarily lost the use of its mind. We went from focusing on a more complete education of our youth to a finite focus on basic skills. And we ramped up the testing and the accountability for those very specific skills, and we left many important things behind as a result. Now the focus of many instructional programs is on test preparation. And the majority of those skills apply very narrowly to the experience of taking a standardized test and can then be discarded by students once they are done with that two week window. We do this at the cost of creativity, innovation, collaboration, problem solving, and other important lessons students should be learning about being a part of a democracy.

Frankly, it’s tough to watch.

And the watching led me to my second thought. Airplanes.

What is it that airplanes are designed to do? Really designed as their most core function? Fly. Take hundreds of people up thousands of feet in the air and fly them over the earth at mind numbing speed. Transport us across the country in a matter of hours rather than months. They are truly amazing, and though that word has been prone to overuse in our society, in this context I believe it is a perfect descriptor.

But what must an airplane also be able to do as a necessary utilitarian function? Drive. On the ground. I was struck with this thought as I looked out the window when taxiing at the airport. The comedy of it. Looking out and seeing these incredibly elegant flying marvels of science lumbering around the holding grounds. All that ingenious design and the power of jet propulsion being used to move along the ground at the speed you or I could match on our bicycle.

And that’s when I realized what we’ve been doing this past decade. We’ve taken the airplanes and tried to make them cars. We’ve told our students the most important part of what they learn is the utilitarian function of powering down all their potential to crawl around the ground. There’s a reason we don’t use airplanes to commute to work on our highways. The basic functioning of driving on the ground is such a minute part of what makes an airplane so powerful.

But that’s what we’re doing with our students. We’re leaving behind the best part of what they could be doing with their education. Forgive the Lifetime Original feel-good movie of the week payoff at the end here, but I have to. We aren’t letting our kids fly. We’re keeping them grounded and using metrics to measure how well they taxi as airplanes rather than how well they could be flying.

Though I still don’t care much for the name, I really do hope that we will find ways to begin moving our focus, conversations, and effort to the 21st Century Skills approach to learning. Remember that there’s a whole lot more that we could be having our students do.

This quote is listed at the beginning of 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times. Will it every come to pass? I don’t know. But I certainly can hope.

“I’m calling on our nation’s governor’s and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” -President Barack Obama

I think it’s time we start getting education off the ground.

*Cross posted at Tech & Learning Advisor blog.