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.

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.

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.

The following are my notes, reflections, and slidedeck from my ASCD literacy presentation.

I presented this session with Angela Maiers, a true guru in the land of literacy.

Angela and I began our presentation by asking the participants to answer the question, “What is literacy?”  Certainly there has been much written and discussed on this topic, and we explained that our approach to the subject is rooted in communication; specifically, how we input and output through various mediums and modes.

We briefly discussed the work of Luke and Freebody and their Four Resource Model.  We discussed how these four resources work both as we input and output in communication.

We then discussed how important the medium is and how much it has changed.  This change is significant, and that significance is evidenced in videos like this.

We asked the participants to then consider the medium and the mode of communication and which one we most often use as adults.  We typically favor speaking, but what do we require our students to use the vast majority of the time they are working to communicate their learning?  What if we started changing our expectations and removing some of the barriers that trip kids up when they are trying to communicate?  What if we let them tell their stories and demonstrate their learning like this?

We discussed a practical example of the way we traditionally teach literacy by using an example of the book Number the Stars.  We explained how we could be doing so much more with our students and expecting them to dig so much deeper in their exploration of reading.  We showed two videos, and explained how the second led to an incredible learning experience for the entire school based on a comment someone left on the students’ YouTube post.

We wrapped up the session discussing how dramatically the web has changed in recent history, and we discussed the implications for literacy based on this change.  We ended the session with this video and explained how important passion and audience are for our students.

The following are my notes, reflections, and slidedeck from my ASCD podcasting presentation.

I presented this session with Jeff Arnett, the Chief Communications Officer for Barrington Community Unit School District 220.

Jeff and I began the session asking the question, “What can you accomplish when you merge communication strategy and innovative instruction?”  As Jeff is the Chief Communications Officer for our district, he is constantly working to ensure our district is communicating effectively with our community.  Often times a role like this in a district ends up being more of a public relations role wherein the individual works to shape and control the stream of communications coming from a district.  Jeff, however, works very hard to maintain open dialog with the community about what is happening throughout our district, and in particular, what is happening with our students as they are learning.  This is evidenced in his use of Facebook and Twitter as a strong component to our district’s communication plan.

My focus as Instructional Technology Coordinator for the district is on engaging students in learning experiences through technology.  I work to help teachers establish and identify their learning goals, and then we move to extend the learning experiences students are engaging in a way that moves them beyond the point that was possible with traditional learning tools.

A year and a half ago, Jeff and I began discussing the potential of establishing a district podcast where we can both accomplish goals for our respective areas of work.  What we came up with is the content for our presentation.

We spent the first portion of the presentation talking about the why of this project.  Why did we do it, and why do we believe in it?  We framed the discussion around three main points; purpose, power, and product.  We each answered how our goals worked in these three points.  We then talked about the process that got us to a district podcast.

The questions we posed for each point were:

Purpose-

Jeff- How are your current communication strategies engaging your stakeholders?

Ben- What are you doing to create engaging learning experiences for students?

Power-

Jeff- What you are doing to create ownership of your message and brand?

Ben- What are you doing to release ownership of learning to your students?

Product-

Jeff- Is your product adaptable to emerging technologies?

Ben- Are your learning experiences adaptable to emerging technologies?

We presently have three different shows in the network.  Elementary Insights, where our Superintendent of schools has a discussion with elementary students about issues and topics of interest happening in our district.  The Midpoint, where members of our Board of Education have discussions with middle school students about what is taking place in the district.  The Barrington 2:20, where high school students report on stories from the community.  To hear a short sample of each show, click here.

We started the network a year ago, and if you look at our blog, you will notice a serious lapse in new content.  We spent the fall and early winter in a targeted effort to transition to a new content management system for our district, and once that transition is complete, we will move all our podcasts to our new platform.  This work is nearly at the point where the podcast network can begin again, and in fact, we recently recorded new content for Elementary Insights and The Midpoint.  Both should be released within the next week or two.

I believe a partnership with communications and instruction can yield powerful results for students, teachers, and the community.  I could talk a whole lot on this subject, but I’ll leave it at this.  If you have any questions on this project, please feel free to let me know.

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.

Thanks to Drewski2112 for the use of the Flickr image.

This week I had the distinct privilege of presenting two sessions on Communication and Collaboration at District 30 in Illinois with Andy Kohl. Although we had enough material to last us through the day, we tried to cram it all in a 90 minute time slot. Needless to say, we didn’t get to everything.

I think the conversation was outstanding, and I believe we should all take the time to wrestle with these ideas together with other staff members. I’ll share the session notes and presentation here, and please feel free to use anything that will be useful for you. And really, I mean it, go have these conversations with other members of your institution. I think you’ll find it an excellent opportunity for growth and learning for everyone.

Introduce Moodle and backchannel to attendees. Invite them to join in the process, building collaborative notes.

9:30 – 9:50 = Introduce ourselves. Introduce Moodle and Backchannel. Ask teachers to define collaboration. Use Etherpad to have them build this definition together.

9:50 – 10:00 = Review the definition and reflect on the process with them.

- What was different about this experience?
- How could this look different for the classroom?

- Discuss portions of the Panitz article.

Review questions asked in the article.

Students must learn to routinely ask questions such as: “Are we thinking clearly enough? Are we being accurate in what we say? Do we need to be more precise? Are we sticking to the question at issue? Are we dealing with the complexities of the question? Do we need to consider another perspective or point of view? Are our assumptions accurate or are they faulty? Is our purpose fair-minded, or are we only concerned about advancing our own desires? Does our argument seem logical, or is disjointed, lacking cohesion?

In other words, these important standards of thought must be applied to all of the important structures of thought: to its guiding goal or purpose, to the central question, to the information used with respect to the question, to the judgments that are made with the information, to the concepts inherent in the judgments, to the assumptions that underlie the judgments, and to the implications that follow from it.”

10:00 – 10:20 = Roundup of tools which can help provide these learning experiences for kids.

- Moodle
- Wikis + Google Sites
- Google Docs
- Blogging

- Look at the bowdrill video from YouTube. Talk about this as a collaborative experience for this student. Use this as a transition to the topic of communication.

10:20-10:40 = Discuss how communication has both changed and stayed the same.  Show “Can This be His Home.”  Discuss the result of new mediums and the “four resources model”.

10:40 – 11:00 = Time for teachers to work on a lesson example or retool an existing assignment.

—————————————————–

We only got to the point where we showed “Can This be His Home.”  Lots of good stuff in the Four Resource Model.  Maybe we’ll get to it next time.

Thanks to American Backroom for the use of the Flickr image.

Notes from the session “Understanding by Design and Technology Integration” by Mark Fijor. Presented at the ICE 2010 conference on Friday, February 26.

Wiki link: http://sd25tech.pbworks.com/Understanding-by-Design-and-Tech

Start off with an essential question.  Something that is debatable.

For example, “Can technology really enhance and support standards-based curriculum or is it just a passing fad?”

Determine whether or not technology can enhance and support a standards based curriculum.
Collaborate and identify research tools to complete project.
Determine end product to demonstrate learning.

Use blogs or wikis or online discussion boards to demonstrate learning and wrestle with essential questions.

Fijor’s district uses the Big 6 research method. http://www.big6.com/

Establish the question, identify key search terms, use a resource like Google Scholar to conduct research, and then select end project to demonstrate transfer.

Used Turning Point Anywhere to decide as a group which project format we would use.  Options were Power Point, iMovie, podcast, Prezi, web page.

After the project is complete, students go back and evaluate the presentation against the question and determine if they have to go back and revise their project to answer the essential question entirely.

*My reflection*  It’s obvious that technology can play a big role in the implementation of Understanding by Design.  The most difficult part that I’m not sure we addressed in this session is the process of transfer.  Creating a PPT, iMovie, podcast, Prezi, or web page are not necessarily the best opportunities to create transfer.  Transfer is supposed to happen when you take a skill you are learning and demonstrate the ability to use and apply the skill in an unfamiliar situation.  I believe the beginning of the presentation was strong as we discussed essential questions and research, but the most crucial part of the process, transfer, was lacking a bit.

Justin and Sandra,

First of all, let me applaud you and your efforts to engage and inform through the use of Twitter.  There are many government entities who are not willing to do so.

Let me also encourage you to actually engage and not just inform.  You will certainly find a host of passionate, candid individuals in this space, as you’ve no doubt already encountered.  They may well offer you more than you bargained for when you created your account.  Understand these are people who believe passionately in students, their possibilities, their potential, their ability, and their education.  And many of them are frustrated with the present state of education.  As frustrated as you likely are based on your recent tweets.  You’ve now provided them an outlet to unload their frustration.

I hope you will stay around.  I hope you will respond to the questions, the challenges, and even some of the pointed criticisms.  We don’t get enough of that from our government officials.  You have an opportunity to help remedy that.  I hope you actualize this opportunity.

I would also offer this one last piece of unsolicited advice.  Be careful of your words.  I know that is your profession, and that is why you work where you do, but I still offer the advice all the same.  When you make statements like, “we need to stop lying to students” you step upon very uneven and potentially damaging ground.  Because the statement immediately begets the question, “who are the we that are doing the lying?”  Are you insinuating that you are lying to students?  Are teachers lying to students?  Are administrators lying to students?  Are parents lying to students?  Are we all lying to students?  That’s a tough way to begin a constructive dialog.  Especially given the history of honesty from our politicians.  So please, weigh your words and expect them to elicit a very real, genuine reaction from the community.  If you want that reaction to be constructive, I’d encourage you to frame the questions and statements in a more measured manner.

I honestly appreciate your presence here.  I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

Ben

You can find the official twitter page for the Department of Education Press Secretaries at http://twitter.com/EDPressSec

Thanks to Star Dust for the use of the Flickr image.

*This is a reflection post required for my JHU-ISTE Leadership program.

This reflection is to focus on answering the following questions:
How has your definition of curriculum been shaped by the course readings and discussions? How and why has your definition of curriculum changed?

For reference, our texts for this course were:

Burrello, L. C., Lashley, C., & Beatty, E. E. (2001). Educating all students together: How school leaders create unified systems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Glatthorn, A. A. (2004). Developing a quality curriculum. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Glatthorn

Tomlinson, C. A. (1999 or 2004). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Tomlinson

As posted in my first reflection for this course I was certainly pushed on my definition of curriculum over the past eight weeks.  When I first started the course, I wasn’t sure that I had an established definition at all.  It seemed to me that many different people used many different definitions for the term.  Still does.  And while I believe I have more clarity on the issue, I’m not sure I’m ready to declare I have a definitive answer.  I’m not sure I want to.

The theme of the “written, taught, and tested” curriculum came up time and again in our work.  It still seems to me that is too narrow a focus for true curriculum.  I’m still of the mind that curriculum remains everything that students end up learning in our institution.  The written, taught, and tested is a big part of that to be sure, but it isn’t all of it.  Because again, kids learn as much about themselves, us, and learning from the things we chose to omit as from the things we choose to include.

There are many curriculums that are “test prep” focused.  That speaks volumes to students about the value of creativity and innovation.  Especially when they aren’t allowed such because it would interfere with the test prep scope and sequence.  When programs start cutting the arts, that teaches a student more than what they learn in an entire unit of grammar.  They learn between the lines.  I’m afraid we forget that.  We mislead ourselves to think they learn what we direct them to.  If you believe that, I’m afraid you’re sorely mistaken.

And if you aren’t considering the needs of all your students, again, you’re missing an incredibly large part of the point.  We’re not in this business to make things.  To manufacture items.  To manage.  We’re here to serve students and help them figure out how they can most effectively learn.  And we do that for all our students.  Tomlinson’s book certainly provided a great deal of thought on this topic.  And I think we’d do well to all remember that not all students  run a six minute mile, nor do they learn at the same rate.

In considering how my definition of curriculum has changed over the course of this class, I also recognize Glatthorn’s influence on my thinking.  His work provides an excellent framework for considering when working on implementing a new curriculum.  Although I can’t say that he directly changed any part of my definition of the term itself, he certainly provided great guidance in setting up a sound system that will help navigate curriculum change.

As this course draws to a close, and I’m considering my final definition of curriculum, I’d probably have to return to a variant of my original definition.

Curriculum is everything we want our students to learn; including the explicit and implicit of what our system fosters for learning.

I’m sure that will continue to evolve, and I’m happy with that.  I’m not ready to stop wrestling with the concept quite yet.