Not So Distant Future

The end of the school year always feels like a mixed bag–excitement at the thought of relaxation and summertime, but wistfulness and sadness at saying farewell to the year, with students and friends leaving, and with things left undone, potential unfulfilled.   But usually it feels over.  Like things are packed up–put away, set aside, and then next year, we have a completely fresh start, almost like starting over.

But this year, a group of us are working on something that feels like it has the potential to provide a sense of continuity–and of a sense that our work is a continuing endeavor instead of something that is just ending so we can “start over” the next year.   And that’s a different feeling, to feel like we’ve somehow started some conversation that is going to keep going.

A group of us have planted the seeds for a professional learning community, and amazingly, the last two weeks of school, we’ve had over 25 teachers volunteer to participate, and they’ve even attended after school meetings talking about educational philosophy (a week before school is out!)

We’re making a commitment as a group to spend a year having conversations about improving our teaching, investigating constructivism and more student-based learning, doing readings, hosting guest speakers, and trying to grow as educators.

Even our planning meetings have evolved into philosophical discussions about teaching that have led us to share articles and books with one another, and we are just barely beginning.  This summer we’re planning monthly coffee get togethers to start our conversation and to get to know one another since our group is pretty diverse curricularly.

So although it is a wistful time saying goodbye to our current students, it also feels like we are beginning something very significant–and a conversation that will continue as we define our learning for ourselves.

It’s also exciting because it’s a grass-roots effort on the part of a group of us, and we’re determined to have a sort of “leaderless” organization (Starfish and Spider like), so that it becomes something self-sustaining at our campus.  (or so we hope).

And a lot of things have led us  to this point, which also feels like more of a sense of continuation, rather than a disconnected set of workshops or events.   So even though we are stumbling, tired, through the last two days of school there is a sense of something brewing on the horizon, and that feels truly exciting.

And another thought–whenever you wish or wonder why your school can’t change, or get frustrated about things….each of you has the power to reach out to other teachers at your school, and ask them to join you in forming a community of explorers.   We each do have the power to begin the conversation.   

Some of my twitter acquaintances have started a new blog, The Mommy Gig.   And as I was reading it, I was thinking about other “group” blogs like LeaderTalk for administrators, or like Students 2.0.

I like the idea of using a group blog for students in a class as well.   It’s a way to feature different writers, have a variety of voices, and keep students coming back to read what their peers wrote as well.

Have any of you used group blogs like this, with a class?    I’d be interested in hearing how this worked differently than students having individual blogs.  Pros and cons?

An interesting Twitter conversation the other day has had outreach on my mind.

The other morning, several of us — Kristin Hokanson, Jenny Luca, and Robin Ellis and others were debating how to reach out to librarians (or teachers) who were reluctant adopters of technology.   We concluded that there are several factors at work and some possible solutions:

–encouraging or providing funds for librarians to attend library conferences or tech conferences with library strands that have a high tech presence (like AASL, ALA, NECC, Internet Librarian Schools, Tech Forum, etc.)  and are motivating.

–engaging more reluctant librarians like we would reluctant teachers by sharing how these tools can help them personally–to keep track of their personal stocks, travel info, their child’s college news, whatever that might be helpful to them personally. 

Turning librarians onto supportive environments like Teacher Librarian Ning or Library2.0 Ning or even flickr’s 365 libs projects are ways to get them interested and to help them find supportive colleagues.

–Recognizing that librarians often don’t have any assistance, and are tasked with many roles–from being managers of a facility to teaching to purchasing.  So the tools we entice newbies with need to be ones that add efficiency, build community and support for librarians without staff, and that are easy to use.  

–Starting with one focal point–like what would matter most to their particular library program?  Does the librarian do booktalks–then maybe podcasting is the place to start.  Does the librarian do lots of lists of good websites–then wikis would be a good jumping off point.   Just as with teachers, we have to meet people where their concerns are.

As we talked on Twitter, we also felt like education schools have a part to play, both in training librarians to work with technology(which most of them do) but also, and of importance, in training teachers about 21st century research skills and collaboration with librarians.   

How many teacher training programs address research projects with students and how the library and tech departments on a campus fit into those projects, and the importance of collaboration?   (For that matter, how many administrative programs really train principals in the kinds of support a library program can bring to their curriculum?  How many are trained in using the librarian as a researcher or support person administratively?)

Sometimes it feels as a librarian that you have to convince teachers, even new ones, of how your role can complement and support what they do.   So having new teachers or new administrators come in with a better idea of how the different roles interact is important too.

I tend to think of librarians as a real curricular partner on the campus.  Many campuses have no other curriculum-type generalist–no one else who has an eye on all the curriculum in terms of supporting it at the campus level.    That ability to connect teachers to one another, connect kids to ideas and materials, and to see how curricular areas overlap is fairly unique to the librarian and technology coordinator.   It’s helpful to have some player on campus who can see the “big picture” so to speak, instead of their own individual curriculum, and many librarians play this role for their campuses.

So it is significant that they be involved with understanding the power of embedding different technologies into projects, and that they continue to learn and grow just like every other professional on campus. 

Thanks twittees for the interesting conversation!

How are our online conversations part of our own learning?

I’ve been loosely participating in the 31 Day Comment Challenge, (which is an effort to focus on improving blog comments through various activities.)  

It’s been a little bit of a learning curve for me to figure out how to use coComment, which is the tool we are using, but by joining the 31 day challenge group, and then backtracking to blog post’s other participants have been commenting on, I’ve discovered a number of bloggers I had never read before and have been gradually widening my reading circle. 

And some of the activities, like yesterday’s Five on Five,  intrigue me in terms of doing them with students.   (The challenge is to respond to five blog posts in five minutes).  I think this activity would help break through the ice for those teachers or students “shy” about responding to blog posts, somewhat like a writing “fluency” activity that English teachers use.  (Though reasonably, maybe it should be Five in Ten, to be feasible!)  And of course, the point of commenting isn’t generally to comment just to comment, but sometimes it does take some steps to get students or teachers over that hurdle to try making a comment.

A teacher at our campus, Bill Martin, pondered this idea of helping students with commenting during a recent workshop we did.   He wondered how to help students move from commenting that was somewhat “parallel” where they engaged with the blog post, but not with the other comments, and how to help them engage in more of a conversation.   I think creating a challenge like the 31 day Comment Challenge (a simplified version possibly) to help students “practice” and develop their conversational abilities in writing might be a valuable way to ease them into blogging.

Reflections

As for reflections on my own blog, I notice that sometimes my posts aren’t invitational enough to comments, or don’t seem to be.   So I’ve been pondering how the way I write posts might enter into that.  (Although I don’t think this is the entire reason–many excellent bloggers don’t have a wealth of “commenters” but have many readers, of course!)     But I think about posts that sort of challenge an idea, or throw a question out, or challenge the accepted thinking, or generate controversy, and how those posts are written.

Clearly, the point of blogging isn’t purely to “receive” comments, but there is a lot of learning in the discussions and exchange that can happen.  So that is why I’ve been reflecting about this.    And as we start our blog for our new professional learning community, I want our blog to be a place where everyone involved feels like an active part of it and comfortable either posting or commenting, so I’ve been pondering the invitational-ness (is that a word) of the writing I do there.  

So some questions…

Are there particular writing styles that invoke comments?  If you read this blog and don’t comment, is there a reason?  I’d love to hear feedback.  

Is it because you prefer just reading?  Or that you don’t tend to comment on blogs in general?  Or don’t have time, but enjoy reading?  Or is it the style of some posts that don’t seem to require comment?  Or you think that you have nothing to add(though I’m sure each of you does!)     Or other reasons?   Even if you don’t usually comment here, I’d love to have input or reflection on your commenting habits, and perhaps relating to this blog in particular if you feel so moved. 

Our campus has a Vision committee which I’ve mentioned before, made up of parents, students, administrators and teachers.   Yesterday at our meeting, we were discussing the books Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner  and Horace’s Compromise by Theodore Sizer, and in discussing the two books together some interesting alchemy came up.

One of our parents delineated the five minds outlined by Gardner:  the Respectful Mind, Ethical Mind, Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, and Creative Mind.

As we started discussing the difficulty with synthesis and creativity if the curriculum is too “content” driven, one of the parents pointed out that how can we expect anyone (including both our teachers and our students) to be creative or synthesize or worry about a discipline when they don’t have the mental room to breathe in many of our rigorous-focused environments.    One of the teachers on our committee also talked about as a newer teacher, lack of that time to breathe meant she was more in survival mode her first few years of teaching than anything.

All of which brought up some thoughts for me–

1.  How are we supporting new teachers so that they have time to breathe?  We expect a lot of them–often new teachers come in with multiple assignments, as floaters from room to room, as part time coaches on the side, etc.   Even when providing mentoring, what else could we do to support them better?

2.  How are we supporting students so that they have time to breathe, and so they aren’t always rushing from thing to thing, from homework assignment to activity?  Could we have a homework/activity free week once in awhile?   Could we focus less on “content driven” curriculum where we try to “cover” things, and spend a little more time on one particular thing, delving more deeply into it?   As Theodore Sizer comments, ‘can we expect students to learn more while being taught less?’

3.  Are we passing our stress onto our students regarding testing?   Can we instead focus on passing them confidence, which helps create room for them to breathe?
4.  How do our school schedules reinforce this lack of “space” for thought?  And what can we do about that?
I wonder what we are saying to our students as future adults about how to live their lives when we foster environments that are driven by constant stress, overwork, overcommitment, and lack of creative time?

As one of the parents on our committee asked, “What do we value?  When you walk around our campus, what do we see?”

Look around your campus or classroom today.  What do you see?

I was fortunate to catch a glimpse via a live Ustream of librarian Jenny Luca’s presentation at a conference in Australia this past weekend, and I wanted to note it for two reasons–

1.  Though I couldn’t hear well, the presentation visuals were so engaging that I wanted to watch it.

2.  She introduced me to a new tool, Sliderocket.com, for making online presentations.

As I’ve recently written about, design of presentations can be an issue for students, who want to stuff every bit of info possible onto their slides-or who when presenting, simply read from the bullet points on the screen.

Jenny’s presentation, below, is both an excellent example of the power of Sliderocket as well as a great example of how messages can be conveyed in visuals and the speaker adds value with their discussion of them.  (Unfortunately the audio for her live presentation was troublesome, so we can’t hear the actual presentation).   But you can clearly see how she uses the presentation slides as the guide and the inspiration for her presentation.   (You can also see the extensive use of wikis at her campus Toorak College.)

Check it out!

As the culture outside our schools change, are our buildings changing to reflect the “outside” world?    

   Mitchell Joel’s interesting Six Pixels of Separation blog comments on a fascinating article in the Economist, “The New Oases,” about how people now are much more nomadic in their use of spaces.  (I found Joel’s blog via Garr Reynold’s excellent Presentation Zen blog).

Wi-fi, mobility,  and portability allow people to connect wherever they go, and so people gravitate to both indoor and outdoor spaces where they can conveniently “connect” or gather.

As the architect professor William Mitchell points out:

“The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is ‘a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces’ such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously ‘a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces’. . . . The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, will ‘make spaces intentionally multifunctional.’

These seem very significant things to be thinking about as we continue to design new libraries and school buildings.   Are they flexible?  Are spaces multi-purpose?  Are there ad-hoc gathering areas?  Separate nooks for individual laptop work?   Wi-fi and open networks?   How are nearby outdoor spaces used? 

School libraries can function as these sort of information commons in schools–providing this sort of flexibility and multi-purposing.

But eventually this sort of design should filter throughout the school–with comfortable learning nooks for students to gather, as the article describes at the new Gehry designed student building at MIT whose “student street”

“ is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing.”

Sometimes it seems that school building designs are impervious to the changes in the culture outside the building.   But as Mitch Joel points out,

“We have all become Digital Nomads. Able to work wherever we’re feeling most inspired (as long as there is wi-fi). I wonder how the masses will deal with this?”

What I wonder is how schools will deal with this?

A group at our campus is starting a professional learning community.

I’m cross posting the post below from the blog we have started, which we aren’t quite ready to share “prime time” but are using for our organizing thoughts, because I thought it would have interest outside of our campus.

———— 

In our meeting this week, Jeff brought up the idea of curriculum AS relationship, and the importance of relationship as the foundation for reaching students.

In his book, The Passionate Learner, Robert L. Fried talks about the importance of that relationship and redefining curriculum.

He makes an interesting comment that he observed when struggling with the idea of “curriculum” and observing his students:

“The content of the lessons seems to pass through them, much of the time, like an indigestible substance.”

Throughout the chapter he talks about the collaboration that has to occur between teachers and students. 

“Curriculum for the passionate learner has everything to do with whether or not the relationships are right, whether teachers and learners feel that together they are shaping the learning that goes on.  This cooperation is necessary even when teachers feel pressure from external forces. . . .”

This is something we talked about in our meeting this week–how to make this happen even when feeling pressured by the demands of content driven testing systems and structures in our schools.  

Fried has an inspiring way of looking at it:

“When we view curriculum as a function of relationships, we bring it to our classrooms and lay it out, like a comfortable and useful garment.  We allow ourselves and our students to make it belong to us, to adjust it, to restyle it, to enliven it, to infuse it with meaning.  Such ownership increases the likelihood that young people will approach the knowledge and skills to be learned as active, critical, thoughtful investigators, rather than as passive recepters (or rejecters).”

He goes on to say,

“We are so accustomed to thinking of curriculum as “a body of knowledge” or a “grouping of concepts and theories” or as “the scope and sequence of instructional material,” that it is easy to forget that such definitions, absent an active partnership between teacher and students, are little more than words on a page.”

I like what he has to say because I think it goes even beyond just establishing a good relationship with students–but more something like collaborating with them on how the curriculum unfolds itself–something which makes them more involved and less of passive participants.  I’d be really interested in discussing what that would look like in practice.

This leads me to another question.   I was talking to one of my friends yesterday–a former teacher–and she asked if students were going to be part of our professional learning community itself.  It was a good question and something I hadn’t really considered.   Would that be a possibility?   Is there a way to invite some student participation in?  Would it be helpful to our group’s goals?

How can we enter into a different relationship with students regarding curriculum?  By the way, Fried’s chapter is well worth the read.

In his inimitable style, Doug Johnson posed a research question that I’m pondering this evening–

“Is requiring print resources a sacred cow that needs to be put out to pasture?”

My initial response(from his site) was that:

“I have very mixed feelings about this. It feels somewhat artificial sometimes to say “one print source” but on the other hand, I have seen students go from one print source to using ten, and being engrossed in their subject and it really enticing them in. And we also say “1 peer-reviewed journal” here, for example, or “1 periodical online or offline” so I’m not sure where we draw the line.

It’s not that I think everything on the internet is wrong, or that it’s not out there–but sometimes, I just wonder if the key is–how do we show students how to pick the right resource for the right job?

I think our guidelines have to be flexible. I think we have to consider topics like your son’s and what would work best for him.

Maybe to make this formula less simple, what we should ideally do is conference with every student about their paper(using a discussion board, chat, physical conferences) and suggest the very best resources for THEIR topic. Point their boat in the right direction and then let them steer but also have them self-evaluate their route and how successful it was for them?

I know sometimes we boil things down to formulas to make it simpler–”Don’t end a sentence with a preposition”, for example, or “Every essay has five paragraphs,” but then again I think these formulas ultimately hem in our students. . . .

I’m not going to defend books just because I’m a librarian–I’m going to just say that there is so much serendipity, comfort and wisdom in writing–no matter what the form it takes, that we should honor it in how we approach it with students.”

In considering this dilemma more, I really think it boils down to how we approach the research process in general. If any of us are doing “real” and deep research, of course we would consult all sorts of sources–we’d want to know who the experts are, whether we find them on the web, which leads us to their books, or vice versa?

Many many articles and blog posts relate ideas back to books, where an idea can be far more fully developed than in an article in a journal or on a website or blog. But are we asking students to use books because they “should?” or are we asking them to examine books because they would inform their research and expand their thinking about it? So many assignments we ask students to do in terms of research are more like reports than like research–in which case, any brief and concise and accurate source will do. But when we are asking more something more, something which engages them more deeply, then I warrant all sorts of sources are important and significant.

I also think that how we teach research has gotten pretty sloppy, to put it bluntly, in the internet age. I’m not one for notecards, or prescriptive methods, but we just sort of toss students out online too often with some sort of minimal scaffolding and minimal expectations of quality or evaluation on students’ part. (Of course sometimes quick research has its purposes, and I’m not talking about those sorts of straightforward fact gathering purposes).

In his post, Doug suggested that what is more key than the type of source is having student defend each of their sources in their bibliography, justifying the quality and purpose of it. This seems like such a pragmatic way to bring in that much needed element of evaluative thought into their research process, and models for them how we as adults examine and consider a source.

And when we ask students to construct meaning through the process of research, then it’s likely that books will very often be a significant part of the equation–not because we “made them” use them, but because the students found that they added meaning to what they were learning.

Isn’t that why we all read books? and websites? and articles?

So, Doug, I’m not sure I really answered your question, but perhaps reframed it–I just want students to be able to find the juicy wild daisies in that pasture

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joesflickr/666951546/

In a passionate post about school change, Chris Lehmann pondered a speech he gave in Oregon yesterday:

“I want to tell them that we have to question every single system we have in our schools. I want to tell them that everything should be on the table. All of it.”

A number of us watched his presentation via Ustream yesterday and in the chat room there was quite a bit of discussion about how to focus more on the process of learning and less on the bureacracy and status quo. We talked about how we teach the way we were taught, and wondered what it takes to “put everything on the table.”

I’ve been reading Innovation by Curtis Carlson and William Wilmot, which talks about some of the barriers teams face when trying to innovate. While I don’t believe all business-speak fits schools, some of the points the authors make about implementing change are important.

“When faced with significant change, many team members are gripped with FUD–fear, uncertainty, and doubt. . . .It means that people are frightened. They do not yet see their places in the innovative activity. They can’t visualize its success and they are unable to see how their contributions will be valued. People feel disconnected from their strengths and the new vision.”

In reading the book I’ve been pondering how we often don’t approach change in terms of “teams” in schools. Very often it’s top down, not grass-roots. What an incredible environment an administration has created when teachers feel empowered to bring in grass-roots change and propose ideas. But we often neglect to build supportive teams and communicate with those teams throughout the change process, and to be inclusive of all the stakeholders. Sounds simple, but of course in reality, in a large school, it’s highly difficult.

Carlson and Wilmot point out that for leaders, “It helps to view resistance, such as skepticism and FUD, as gifts. . . . Concerns usually have a kernel of truth that must be understood and addressed.”

The authors feel that champions(like Chris) have to listen carefully to the fears, and hear what is behind them in order to reframe the conversation.

Another significant area that Carlson and Wilmot discuss is not only the need to involve key players as I mentioned earlier, but to recognize that people want to achieve and contribute at what they do, and they want the freedom and empowerment to do it. So creating an atmosphere of good communication, respect for the talent in your building, and empowering individuals and teams to carry things forward is important.

As school leaders, librarians, technologists and administrators, how do we put our messages out there to the community in a positive, collaborative, invitational and empowering manner? SLA has provided an excellent model of how that sort of leadership not only helps one individual school and one individual body of students, but helps all of us “put everything on the table” and rethink what we do.

In his keynote “Reinventing School for the 21st Century“, podcast from Goodland Kansas in August (which I’m finally listening to this week during my morning commute), Wes Fryer asked the educators present,

“Why are you here? . . . If you’re here to positively transform the lives of children, if you’re here to make a difference every day, if you want when the children walk out of the room at the end of the day or the class period their brains to be different because of what they’ve done then stay. . . . You can change your mind today. You can choose to empower you and transform them to change the world. . . . You are tremendously powerful.”

We have to empower ourselves and others to “put everything on the table” because most of all–our children deserve the best we can do. Not what we used to do, or what we’re able to do, or what was done “to” us, but the very best we can do–the best we can create–the best we can envision.

So what next? Speak? Publish? Form teams on our campuses? Believe that we can create a grass-roots effort? Talk to our students? Form professional learning communities? Network? So many ways we are getting started!

Image credit–http://www.flickr.com/photos/22983550@N02/2349593475/