Lead by Example

Cover via Amazon

Found this great list on Edutopia featured from Nick at http://www.thenerdyteacher.com/. Which of these is your favorite? I have seen all but two, so those will have to be my next Netflix choices.

TheNerdyTeacher.com.

In honor of Edutopia’s 20th anniversary, we’re producing a series of Top 20 lists, from the practical to the sublime.

Image by tonynetone via Flickr

I had to repost part of one of my favorite blogs The PrincipalsPage.com. He always puts things in a way that makes me dink myself in the head in the old “I wish I’d had a V8″ fashion. Here goes:

Kids today no longer want to play by our rules.

They don’t understand why schools are locked up at 3:30 and on weekends.

They don’t understand why computer labs contain equipment that is inadequate compared to what they use at home (and in the car).

They don’t understand why they’re constantly told to read more, yet school libraries are inaccessible for 3 months during the summer.

They don’t understand why teachers and administrators are given the option of improving their own technology skills.

They don’t understand why so many adults in charge of their education still seem to think PowerPoint is cutting edge (and while I’ve got your attention… if you still feel the need to use PowerPoint… stop using 18,000 words per slide!).

They don’t understand tenure or salary schedules.

But they do understand learning doesn’t begin and end for them at school.

Their education isn’t tied to a bell schedule or holiday breaks.

They know their education isn’t better because of worksheets, memorization, or mandated testing.

They get it.

They know what we still seem to be confused by.

They don’t need us.

The don’t need brick buildings that are only open 7 hours a day.

They have the internet.

And curiosity.

They’re going to learn with or without our help.

And the learning process is not going to stop for them after 8th grade.  Or high school.  Or even college.

They’re smarter than us right now.

And they’re going to be a lot smarter than us in 50  years.

The future isn’t coming, it’s already arrived.

“The best entrepreneurs don’t go around with something to tell. They go around eager for something to listen for.”  from Why University site by Simon Sinek author of the book Start with Why

This site was recommended in a webinar I attended by Angela Maiers who I follow on Twitter @angelamaiers. She always has interesting and innovative ideas.  The premise of the book and the resources is that it is not as important “what” you do, it is most important “why” you do it.  Sinek also has a great Ted Talk that talks about this concept. 

I want to apply this to the Teaching 2030  book authored by my friends at the Center for Teaching Quality and specifically by one of my friends and “soul sister” Jennifer Barnett- star over in Talledega County.

One of the big ideas of the book is that of the teacherpreneur. The book defines this concept as- 

A leadership force of 600,000 “teacherpreneurs” – classroom experts who continue to teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession – will blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them.

I want to further define this term by applying the quote from Sinek: “The best entrepreneurs don’t go around with something to tell. They go around eager for something to listen for.”  Some see the term teacherpreneur as controversial because it seems to garner the idea that these folks just wanna teach for the big bucks.  I see this as a term that breaks that sterotype of someone being “just a teacher”. A drone working for other people who make decisions and dictate policy.  A teacherpreneur is recognized and treated as a professional.  As the quote above states he/she is not just someone going around spouting off ideas and telling everyone how things should be, that person listens to fellow teachers and to students and to education research to help find a solution for the problems surrounding our schools. When you think about great entrepreneurs- Henry Ford, Steve Jobs- certainly you can list what they did, but what made them great was that they listened to the consumer and made products that resonated with their audience.

Isn’t that what is missing in education? Listening? Lots of folks are talking but who is really listening? Listen to the students, to the communities, to the parents… those are your customers. The teacherpreneur knows that. He/she is already in the classroom making it student-centered and helping the kids own their knowledge. The teacherpreneur is blogging, reading, posting, listening, researching, listening, and working constantly to stay in tune with their audience and what is best for students. Now we as teachers must OWN our profession.

Listen… you might be surprised what you hear!

Have you ever felt like you had so many ideas swimming around in your head and you were unable to verbalize them?  Well, Bill Ferriter just blew me away in his blog The Tempered Radical with his insight.  I know all of this… how come I could not say it!  Thanks Bill for putting this out there for me to affirm and totally steal from (with credit to Bill, of course) to share with our folks in St. Clair County and beyond.  Preach the gospel of “technovangelism” with less emphasis on the tools being the deity and more emphasis on the skills taking the lead.  Bravo!  Here it is… I wish I could just summarize, but I am sticking it all here:

Making Good Technology Choices

Once you understand just what those skills are—and why they’re important to the kids in your classroom—you can start to find digital tools that make the work around those skills more efficient.

The good news is that choosing skills is a heck of a lot easier than choosing tools.

After all, some of the brightest minds in education reform—Bob Marzano, Rick and Becky DuFour, Rick Stiggins, Larry Ainsworth—have been writing about “essential outcomes,” “I Can Statements,” and “power standards” for years.

Their keys to identifying skills that matter involve asking questions about endurance, leverage and readiness:

Endurance: Are students expected to retain the skills or knowledge you are considering long after the test is completed?

Leverage: Is this skill or knowledge you are considering applicable to many academic disciplines?

Readiness for the next level of learning: Is this skill or knowledge you are considering going to prepare the student for success in the next grade/course?

When I think about the kinds of knowledge and skills that meet the endurance-leverage-readiness test by crossing disciplines, preparing students for success in the next grade and remaining important long after the test, I think of information management, collaborative dialogue, and persuasion.

And now that I’ve narrowed my focus down to three important skills, making instructional technology choices is easy.

Here are some examples:

Information Management

It would be pretty darn near impossible to argue that learning to manage information—to identify sources worth trusting, to organize collections of shared resources on topics of interest, to create customized streams of content—is an essential skill for everyone in today’s digitally driven world.

Not only will managing information become more important in the future (endurance), it is essential regardless of academic discipline (leverage) and it can help students to learn efficiently throughout their school careers (readiness).

As a result, I try to introduce my students to search tools like the Google Wonder Wheel.  We also discuss the anatomy of hoax websites and we begin to explore the value in social bookmarking and shared annotation of content.

Collaborative Dialogue

Anyone who has spent any time reading the Radical knows that I’m completely frustrated by the kill-em-all nature of important conversations in our country.  Competitive dialogue—the kind of “I’m smarter than you” rhetoric we hear from politicians and pundits all the time—leaves us divided.

That’s why I’m a big believer in collaborative dialogue—“Let’s think together”—as an essential skill.  Collaborative thinking is a characteristic of the best innovators (endurance) regardless of discipline (leverage).  It is also a characteristic of the most efficient learners in our schools (readiness).

As a result, I work hard to give my students opportunities to practice collaborative dialogue.  Usually that work happens with an approachable tool called VoiceThread.

Persuasion

Persuasion is perhaps the most interesting skill on my essentials list simply because it often runs contrary to my passion for collaborative dialogue.  When you’re persuading, you’re not always working from a collaborative mindset.

But understanding persuasion is incredibly important to being a literate citizen in the 21st Century (endurance) simply because EVERYONE with an opinion is using the Web to shape public thinking around the issues that they care about.

If our students don’t understand the tricks of the persuasion trade, they’re going to spend their entire adult lives being bamboozled.

And perhaps more importantly, if they don’t understand the tricks of the persuasion trade, they’ll never be able to organize significant action around the ideas that THEY care about.

That makes persuasion an important skill in many domains (leverage and readiness), doesn’t it?

As social studies classes explore the global implications of poverty, science classes study the potential solutions to our world-wide energy crisis and health classes study the role that governments should play in regulating healthy living habits, students will form content-specific positions that they’ll want to advocate for.

As a result, I try to engage my kids in projects that require them to be persuasive.  Specifically, we use the Kiva microlending website as a starting point for persuasive conversations and experiences.

We also use Animoto to create persuasive videos and talk about the role that images play in today’s persuasion landscape.

What’s interesting is that just about every time that I finish explaining the thinking about  my technology choices, someone gets flustered.

“You’re not using wikis?” they’ll argue.  “How can that be?  And for any teacher to ignore Skype as a tool in the classroom is simply ridiculous!  It’s fantastic.”

My reply—delivered as gently as possible—is always the same:
“Wikis and Skype aren’t skills.  Instead, they’re tools that can be used to make working with individual skills easier.”

And I have used wikis with students—as a part of a persuasive effort to shape thinking in North Carolina around alternative energy sources.  Skype becomes a tool for exploring positions and ideas that are outside of our own, supporting the collaborative dialogue and persuasive efforts that I believe in.

Does any of this make sense?

I guess what I’m trying to argue is that we need to start looking at the characteristics of good teaching before we ever start to think about good tools.

Technology cannot help children learn when it is divorced from the knowledge, skills and expert choices of their teachers.

Watch this amazing Ted Talk from Diana Laufenberg about how we should “do school differently”.  I am with you on this!  The students want to let their voices be heard.

Well, I love reading things that make me think or make me want to stand up and cheer (or jeer!).  I found that today as I was following up with some emails.  I read the Flipped Class Blog (emphasis is mine) responding to all of the publicity and criticism their Flipped Classroom Model  is getting. (What is the Flipped Classroom?)

Our conclusion is that the Flipped Model is NOT a magic bullet that will fix today’s schools.  We believe education’s only magic bullet is the recruiting, training and supporting of quality teachers.   Our biggest fear is that the Flipped Model will result in teachers thinking that the model will solve their classroom issues and they will become apathetic.  We fear that some will choose to use other teachers’ videos (which is fine, and we encourage this in our upcoming book), but they will not adequately engage with the students and will bore their students to death with video.  We have seen this happen over the years with many technologies in the classroom: death by filmstrip, death by PowerPoint, death by VHS, death by DVD, death by online video, death by inquiry, death by any other instructional practice!  Good instructional models are never an excuse for bad teaching, and by teaching we do not mean direct instruction.  Bad teaching while using a good instructional model comes in thinking that the model will do the work for you.  Good teaching always has been, and always will be the gathering of constant feedback of students and modifying instruction to meet their individual needs.  Technology simply makes that possible.

The same is true with the Flipped Model.  If the Flipped Model is not carried out effectively, it will not work.  We know the most important ingredient in student success is not the teaching methodology, but rather the teacher. That said, we believe the Flipped Model makes GOOD teachers BETTER and makes GREAT teachers SHINE.  But under no circumstances will it “fix” a burned-out or disinterested teacher.

I could not agree more.  I see this model of delivering content (direct instruction/facts/Googleable material) as a way to efficiently provide information in a 24/7 format.  I do not see it as a viable whole-class instruction solution.  I go into classrooms so many times where a projector is being used to show a Power Point slide filled with text (Death by Power Point), to show a WHOLE (90 minute block schedule) movie (Death by DVD), or to utilize the document camera and display the text in a book (Death by Elmo— not the red furry one).

As with any technology, strategy, methodology, or practice; teachers must start with the questions:

1. “What is it that I want my students to know and be able to do?”
   
2. “How can I make that concept relevant to their world in order to engage them in the conversations?”
   
3. “What obstacles, misconceptions, distractions, disabilities, etc. will prevent them from doing that?”

That should drive how that material is presented, not the tool or method.

We live in an exciting world of possibilities for our students.  I have a fifth grader that craves connectedness (iPod, Xbox360, online games, Club Penguin, video creation, texting…)  I hope his teachers will use that to their advantage rather than fight it to main tain classroom management and a status quo that makes th e teacher comfortable and the students miserable.

As a teacher leader I am constantly working to inspire teachers and motivate them to engage and enrich students.  I teach because I have a passion to drive students to be more than what they think they can be.  Many of my colleagues share this passion, but some do not.  They seem to be there out of habit rather than out of desire to change the world.  As I was searching for some morale boosters, I wandered upon some great quotes dealing with striving to be the best and kept coming back to Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? I want to share a passage or two:

“The problem with meeting expectations is that it’s not remarkable.  It won’t change the recipient of your work, and it’s easy to emulate (which makes you easy to replace).  As a result of the tsunami of pretty good (and the persistence of really lousy), the market for truly exceptional is better than ever.  That’s what I want if I hire someone for more than what the market will bear– someone exceptional.”

The sad thing is that currently our system is not rewarding those teachers who are exceptional.  Many systems will be laying off the last hired teacher this spring not because he/she are not exceptional, but because of traditional hiring/firing practices and outdated tenure laws.  I look forward to being and leading teacherpreneurs that are exceptional and “change the recipients of their work”—students—in spite of the unfair system we work in which allows “pretty lousy” teachers to maintain a job while “exceptional” teachers are let go.

Also, another of my favorites:

“What they should teach in school:  Only two things-

1.  Solve interesting problems

2.  Lead “

In a Googled world, our students deserve interesting problems and desire to be engaged in those problems.  Teachers are often too scared to allow for the interesting part because it implies a possibility of chaos and uncertainty.  Schools often want to teach compliance and conformity over leadership for the same reason.  What a disservice to students who will be unprepared to enter the globally competitive job market!

As I read this book and read Teaching 2030, I am more motivated to step out of my comfort zone (as I have been a TLN stalker and reader for quite some time now) and make real waves in the profession.  In my current position as Technology Integration Specialist I have opportunity to work with teachers in 19 schools.  In my position as mom, I have the opportunity to shape the lives of my three kids.  In my position as Linchpin/Teacherpreneur/Passionate Advocate, I have the opportunity to use my voice to join others in making the changes happen.

Are you indispensible?  I have been “non-renewed” twice before (the euphemism for pink-slipped) and left those districts feeling like I had invested into making myself indispensible only to be let go.  The system may be flawed, but it did not beat down my passion.  I am a Linchpin… I have just been trying to find the place, students, and teachers that needed me the most.

Image via Wikipedia

I look back over my career as a teacher and reflect on my practice.  I am not only doing this because I am renewing my National Boards certificate, but I am doing this because it is how I grow as a person and professional.  I recall starting teaching in 1996 in Jefferson County, getting my master’s degree in 1998, and changing schools after being non-renewed in 1999.  That was a rough time for me as a teacher and led me to second guess my profession.  Thanks to some supportive friends and family members, I picked up my ego and decided to work harder and stick to my passion— teaching.  At that time I would say my PLN included Juliana Coleman, Julie Talton, Roxanne Saffles, my husband, and some of the English teachers at Pinson Valley High School.  These were the teacher/friends I “talked shop” with.  I began early on using the internet to plan lessons, build my own class web page, and find new teaching ideas.  I did not think about that being a part of my network.  It was not until I decided to start the National Board process that I realized the value of a PLN.  I grew my network to include Cindy Adams from Vestavia High School and Helen Pruitt at Mountain Brook Junior High.  These ladies, along with a few others, became my sisters as we worked through the NBPTS process.  I also found Yahoo Groups of folks who were doing the same thing.  It was also around this time that I began presenting to my colleagues regarding teaching strategies and technology integration.  My PLN grew as I networked with other passionate teachers.  In 2005 I changed schools again and my PLN really grew.  I met Connie Shaw, Mary Evelyn Holloway, Jane Marie Marlin, and Denise Trimm.  These were very supportive people during my time at Mountain Brook.  I also was honored to become a part of the Alabama Best Practices Center 21st Century Fellows.  My network grew exponentially as I became a part of a tight-knit group of 10 amazing Alabama educators and then networked with leaders and teachers across the state and the world.  I met Cathy Gassenheimer, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, and John Norton who changed my world of teaching forever.  I spent two years growing in this work and was at a peak of my career.  In 2007 life knocked on the door and asked career and profession to move over.  I put my mom in a nursing home and finally became pregnant again after years of infertility.  I took a semester off to raise a baby and to build a house in Springville, AL.  Although I tried to maintain some network connections, it became more difficult while raising a 10 year old and a baby.  I jumped back into teaching at Moody High School mid year and met more great teachers and colleagues in Dale Stripling, Donna Price, Connie Ray, and Courtney Waldrop.  Super mom responsibilities, new job, new house, and other things quickly gained priority over maintaining those network connections.  Surprise again when I found out I was unexpectedly expecting in 2009. Believe me when you have a couple of babies, your PLN shrinks as you become full time mommy and part time everything else.  I was given the great opportunity to become St. Clair County School District’s first Technology Integration Specialist, and found myself overwhelmed with lots of schools and lots of passionate teachers wanting to learn.  My PLN grew again, but it was less and less focused, long-term, data driven conversations and became more band-aid, just in time, and short term sit and get’s.  I hope to change that very soon.  The babies are growing and I am more familiar with the culture of each community we serve.  I know teachers and their needs.  I know students and how they learn.  I hope to be able to help teachers see the importance of student engagement and information literacy.  So there are the steps back in time to help me focus on the goals ahead.  More to come…. let the PLN begin to grow again.

Have you ever seen a commercial that made you rewind your Tivo?  Have you ever seen a product that you knew would out last its competitors?  Well, I have seen something that is going to turn the educational industry on its end.  The MySpark Educational Platform and Interactive Tablet looks to be the way of the future.  I hope to get my hands on one soon.  This has not one but two cameras and all the bells and whistles you would expect from a full size laptop.  Check out the info yourself:  http://mysparktech.com/features.html

I am beginning the journey of National Boards Renewal.  I guess I cannot say the journey is beginning since it never ends.  I remember going through the process in 2001-2002.  I felt like I abandoned my husband and then 2 year old Trey to write and write and write some more.  Since achieving this honor I have had amazing opportunities to lead teachers, present to colleagues, and even interview for honors and jobs I might not otherwise have gotten.  I am very proud to be an NBCT.  I have also had the great priviledge of providing support for several candidates along the way.  It feels like birthing a baby and then is so hard if they don’t make the score (sort of like being told that you have to carry that baby nine more months… argh).  Well, here I am in the renewal process working on my PGE’s (professional growth experiences).  Trying to gather my thoughts and choose four experiences that have shaped me and impacted student learning is no easy task.  When searching for information regarding technology integration and its impact on student learning, I found this great post:

http://missshill.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/a-new-way-of-learning/

I especially like this part:

This relates nicely to a post made by a colleague of mine about a university adapting to its students, not the students adapting to it. Students do not learn the same way as they did 15 years ago. Uncle Phil (he will always be Uncle Phil in my eyes) expresses this quite nicely when he says:

The system has failed you. I have failed you. I have failed to help you share your talent with the world and the world needs talent more than ever and yet it is being wasted every day by an education system steeped with tradition and old ideas. So it’s time for a new tradition. It’s time to realize that talent isn’t just in schools like this one, its everywhere! It’s time to use technology to re-write the rules of education. To learn how you learn so we can teach you better. It’s time university adapted to you instead of you adapting to it. It’s time for a different kind of university. It’s your time.