What were some of the attributes that got applicants hired?
- Passion
- Excitement & contagious enthusiasm
- Skillfulness
- Expertise
- Practice that matched the “golden résumé”

To cut costs, the school will have no deans, substitute teachers, assistants, and teachers will work longer hours, more days, as well as have more students. There will be no job security and teachers can be “fired at will”.

Teachers will be paid… wait for it … … $125,000/yr. – not to mention up to $25,000 in performance-based bonuses in the second year.

I love this quotation from one of the hired teachers though:

“This could be unsettling were it not for the excitement of working with a team of master teachers, all of whom are motivated to help every student succeed, with no excuses and no blame.”

So, would you want to work in such an environment where passion, enthusiasm, creativity, skillfulness, expertise, personal accountability, and a love of learning permeated everything that takes place?

It will be interesting to see what transpires here, but there are certainly some key ingredients here for a wonderful school. The salary is certainly eye-catching, but notice the money is not being spent on interactive white boards and other “high-tech” accoutrements… yet. The initial investment is in the teachers themselves.

I like that.

There have been so many challenging messages that I have been chewing on over the past months. The latest is David Perkins’ new book, Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education, has really hammered some things home for me. I am not even half way through it and I am seriously convicted. He discusses how learning is most effective and relevant when students have the opportunity to apply learning within the context of “the game” – situating learning in relevant, meaningful and authentic contexts.

Tonight in class my students were to learn about WebQuests. With a limited amount of time, I struggled with how best to approach this. A number of very good ideas came to mind, all of which would have taken a great deal more time than was available. Then I stumbled upon WebQuests about WebQuests by Bernie Dodge. After a very short overview, I decided to have my students, in groups of 4, complete a webquest of their choice listed on this page. It was almost magical to watch them engage… engage in ways not possible when I am “waxing poetic” at the front of the classroom. They managed various roles/perspectives, evaluated 5 webquests on a number of domains, compared notes and perspectives, discussed what made some webquests “better” than others, negotiated a winner and loser, and justified their positions with each other. They were deeply engaged in a high level of discourse and evaluation that I hadn’t seen before.

Then it occurred to me that they were, as David Perkins describes it, playing the game. In his book, he outlines seven principles of learning by wholes. They are:
1. Play the whole game
2. Make the game worth playing
3. Work on the hard parts
4. Play out of town.
5. Uncover the hidden game
6. Learn from the team… and other teams
7. Learn the game of learning

But there are different kinds of games. Perkins writes,

“Schools and other settings of learning ask us to do many things that aren’t all that enthralling. We feel as though we are playing the school game and not the real game.” – the whole game.

This reminded me of a sign I used to have on my office door:

I have so much more I’d like to share about Perkins’ book… and will. But we… I need to let students play the game – the whole game whenever possible. Focusing on the small components is fine and essential at times, just like getting in the batting cage. But the real excitement and passion is cultivated when the teams take to the field, the crowds are in the stands, and the pitch is thrown toward home plate. It gives practice meaning. Purpose. Relevance. Authenticity.

I don’t know about you, but I have to get my students playing the game more often… And I will.

I have been reading and re-reading some of the ideas found in the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow 2 (ACOT2) document and this idea struck me as quite relevant. In the section that discusses the concepts of authenticity and relevance, they site the work of Fred Newmann (1995) from University of Wisconsin who has defined a set of standards for Authentic Instruction, Authentic Student Performance, and Authentic Assessment Tasks which are organized into the following three areas:

-Construction of Knowledge
-Disciplined Inquiry
-Value Beyond School

To quote the section on Value Beyond School,

“The performance must have value beyond the school; that is, the work must have meaning or value that transcends the student-teacher relationship and is not simply used to rate the performance of the student for grading purposes. This value may be a result of sharing the work in a meaningful way with an audience outside the classroom. It may also have value simply because the topic and product are personally valued by the student. Or it may be that the product or task closely mirrors the kind of work done in the real world and that relationship is clearly evident to the student.”

The authors of the ACOT2 document state that of Newmann’s three areas listed above , this one has been the most difficult to realize. But with the addition of so many new publishing tools like blogs and wikis, it has become much easier to realize.

This is where I began to see things differently. The implication here is that it is the tools that bring value to student work beyond school. Granted, these new Internet-based publishing and collaborative tools make student work and thinking more accessible to a global audience, but the work of the students must still be important, relevant, and worthy of a global audience. I remember a while back when Gary Stager was criticizing (scroll down to post titled, “Mind-mapping What?”) the zeal of teachers who were putting up student-created “mind maps” generated with Inspiration. At first I reacted quite defensively, but then I began to understand what he was getting at. Students were creating “mind candy” with this potentially powerful tool. The tool’s strength lies in one’s ability to semantically map out and represent a concept or idea in detail. To produce documents that have the word apple in the middle with three adjectives stemming outward does not even come close to the potential power of this tool to make one’s thinking visible and to expose flaws or misconceptions in understanding or thinking.

The same holds true in the use of new publishing and collaborative tools like blogs and wikis. Students can share shallow thinking and contrived work or share valuable, meaningful, relevant and powerful ideas. The tools used to publish and share do not discriminate. It is up to the teacher to guide students and demand high-quality work and critical thinking.

And THAT is still just as hard to realize in a web 2.0 world. I think the authors of ACOT2 missed this critical idea in relating it to web 2.0 tools in this section. However, they more than redeem themselves a little later on in the document when they introduce the importance of “Deep Learning”:

“Deep Learning requires deep teaching. Teachers must give students challenging tasks that require them to wrestle with core concepts in the curriculum and the time to do so.”

To me, this is the linch pin upon which all else hinges. To learn well means to teach well. Effective and meaningful pedagogies have not really changed all that much over the years, but there are a great many new tools and new learning opportunities that can be harnessed and found via new technologies. Deep teaching is still required.

And, part of relevance is not just content of the concepts, but the tools used to express ideas.

To quote,

“If student work is to be truly authentic, the tools and methodologies that are used to do that work need to be authentic as well.”

Authenticity and relevance are certainly at risk in schools today…
So is deep teaching/learning. Can we have one without the other?

– “I just heard the greatest idea… have kids write haikus in PowerPoint!”

– “Did you know that we shouldn’t use serif fonts in our presentations… we should use “sans-serif” (teacher struggling with the pronunciation here)”. Colleague asks, “Why?” Response: “I think it’s harder to read?… and did you know, using Comic Sans is illegal?”

-”I went to two of the Troxell presentations yesterday trying to win a document camera.” (Troxell and other vendor-driven sessions rob attendees of potential professional knowledge they could gain from sessions that actually might make a difference).

Then, to top it off, Marc Prensky’s keynote… sigh. Here it is in a nutshell:
-YouTube rules the world.
-Let kids make “YouTubes” and the world will be a better place.
-All you need to do is use digital tools and wisdom will abound.
-Digital tools somehow make age old, good teaching pedagogy built on the shoulders of giants like Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Papert… somehow new and sexy.
-I am a digital immigrant… a 21st century retard.
-He invites up a panel of “digital natives”, of which only two are in high school and one is 38 with children of her own. Then he asks the hundred million dollar question: “How many of you have cell phones and how many of you use Facebook?” Gary Stager tweets out that his 92 year old grandmother has one and so what?

Granted, he did make some good points, but by and large, I wanted to stand up and scream. Perhaps I should have. I could have competed with his obnoxious beeps that he had strategically placed in his linear 197 slide presentation to keep the audience awake.

After that keynote, I tried to find a presentation that was not solely about cool tools or cool stuff. I tried one, then another. A third sounded hopeful, but the presentation was dreadful. If you’re going to talk about assessment, you’d better be relevant and engaging – that’s all I have to say about that. Thankfully, I ended up in Sylvia Martinez’s session on GenYes. And thankfully, she set Prensky straight on his failure to realize that good has always been good teaching – teaching engages and creates valuable and relevant learning opportunity, not the tools. The tools help… that good teaching is not easy and that it requires more than YouTube and cellphones. Gary Stager talks a great deal about using computers for powerful ideas, but I don’t hear much about powerful ideas

Anyway, I’m really not trying to complain… although I guess that I am. Oh, how I am wishing for sessions that couch new tools within teaching excellence. How I wish I could sense an atmosphere of hungering to improve one’s own teaching craft. Oh, to overhear conversations about how new ideas on more effective teaching have been gleaned rather than which font should be used or isn’t ________ (you fill in the blank) so cool. We all need help… but not help in how to create stunning. gimmicky Powerpoints, flashy podcasts, “interactive” white board lessons, fancy document camera acrobatics, cool videos, clicker quizzes, … We (myself included here) need help on teaching our students in powerful ways and learning how to relinquish some of the control in order to empower them as learners, creators, communicators, problem-solvers, collaborators, meaning-makers,… students who make a difference and who feel empowered.

What if… what if we did away altogether with technology professional development/training and focused solely on effective and meaningful pedagogies while embedding in those pedagogies the necessary tools both teachers and students can use to make learning meaningful, relevant, and powerful?

The day ended with some good conversation in a session with Peter Riley and other leaders in their own right… conversation that needs to continue as we all struggle with how to best negotiate this new digital landscape and continue (or perhaps begin?) to meet the needs of students. I’m hoping that I will find more of these little nuggets – these types of conversations that I missed when the podcasts are available.

My fear is that these conferences do as much (if not more) to preserve the status quo as they do challenge it.

Am I off base here?

“The playful synergy of science and art is novel, and makes Phun as educational as it is entertaining.”

and

“Phun is a fantastic toy for children, where they can learn and appreciate physics, science and simulations in an open ended gameplay with rich creative and artistic freedom, including colorful freehand drawing.”

But, the name is so well chosen because it is just so much fun! My son has now spent a great deal of time trying to design creations that work according to his ideas. Because he has had no formal lessons in how to use Phun, it is all trial-and-error and studying some of the predesigned scenes that come with Phun. Through his creative exploration and problem-solving, he is wrestling with concepts that drive the physical world, like gravity, surface tension of water, how water takes the shape of it’s container, how motors can drive actions that get work done, cause and effect – and I could never list them all. We have also been working at things together because I have been so engaged with it as well and want to figure out how to design things that I can conceive in my mind. The social and collaborative aspect of this has been fantastic as we learn together. He shows me as much as I show him. However, my knowledge and experience allows me to ask him the questions he need to be thinking about and considering as he builds… a perfect scaffolding opportunity and chance to make metacognition explicit.

So, how much will happen like this in school this year? How much room is there in the tightly controlled curriculum with preparation for the myriad of tests he will have to take this year for creative problem-solving and strategic opportunities for social, collaborative metacognitive problem-solving and scaffolding? I like the following quoation found on NCREL’s website:

“Recognizing what you do know in a problem, as well as what you don’t yet understand, are aspects of metacognition in problem solving that are similar to a scaffolding approach. Perkins & Solomon (1989) point out that an expert’s behavior appears to be strongly driven by prior knowledge. When faced with an unfamiliar problem, he or she may construct a similar but simpler problem. In this way, the expert learner manages his/her own gradual self-regulation and enables him/herself to grow to meet the new task successfully.”

So, watch the video below, and, if you can indulge yourself, download it and have some Phun. Challenge your students, your children, your neighbors… to have some Phun. It may be the only opportunity for this type of learning they get all year.

The answer isn’t PowerPoint, digital whiteboards, blogs, wikis, PRS systems, high-speed Internet, Web2.0, … But, they can be part of a solution. [Generalization coming...] Why are we not pushing many of these attributes presented in the video with the same passion that we are pushing (and adopting) new technologies? As a geek-at-heart, it sure is much easier to get excited about “potential” or promise of new technologies rather than focus what we already have that is not working. Much of the time, things are not “working” because of much bigger issues than old technologies or technical support (don’t get me wrong… technical support is crucial). So, if your students are not excited about your language arts (math, science, social studies…) program, ask yourself “Why?”. My guess is that it’s not mostly because they are not using the aforementioned technologies.

I would encourage you to read one of David Warlick’s recent posts titled, “If it’s not about technology, then what is it about?“. Be sure to have a look through the comments as well. Lots of food for thought. (It’s where I discovered this video, too.)

This 35 year teacher veteran coming from a prestigious prep school into a tough urban school is described in the following situation:

“Holmes had nothing unusual planned (for a lesson where a student asked to be excused for what she thought was a good reason). He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important, and, at age 66, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day’s lessons.”

No one can say that being an effective teacher is easy. No one can say that effectiveness can be routine. No one can be effective in the classroom without a great deal of dedication, passion, conviction, knowledge, and skill.

The article goes on to describe various attributes of this teacher in his last year of classroom instruction and also reports on a number of anecdotes. The article goes on to end with this statement describing his last class teaching:

“There are no fireworks, no speeches, no round of applause. Just this: As he walks out the door and heads to the parking lot, Phil Holmes knows that today he delivered a good lesson. He didn’t waste a second. He made the students think.”

Now I know some would take up issue with the word “delivered” and take the philosophical viewpoint that instruction should not be “delivered” but rather experienced and socially constructed, but those same folks would often sacrifice “effectiveness” for poorly implemented cooperative learning, differentiated learning, on-line learning, project-based learning, technology-mediated learning, social learning, problem-based learning… The list goes on. All of these pedagogical structures have merit. But, the bottom line is measurable results that validate effectiveness as a teacher. Here is a teacher that perhaps takes an unpopular approach to teaching. The article does not even mention all of the technology-based tools that he uses to reach a digital generation. I suspect that he uses few to none. But, he gets results… excellent results. Students care about him and appreciate his skillfulness in the classroom.

How do you define effectiveness? Is technology really a required prerequisite? Or, should we let effectiveness and results speak for what should be required?

• 83% of educators report having 5 or fewer computers in the classroom; > than half report no more than 2.
• > half surveyed use computers for daily administrative tasks
• about half use them to daily communicate with other educators (communicate what?)
• about 40% use technology to monitor student progress (electronic gradebook?)
• about 37% use technology for research and information gathering
• about 32%  use it to teach lessons
• < a fifth of teachers surveyed use technology daily to post student and class information online or to communicate with parents electronically.
• a majority feel that professional development that they received was most effective for noninstructional tasks (hence, the second bullet point here)
• a majority were “highly optimistic about the impact of technology on their jobs and on their students” and that technology positively impacted student motivation

Yet…

• 89% said they view technology as essential to teaching and learning.

What’s missing here?

• No mention of teacher personal learning networks to share and collaborate
• No mention of teachers using technology to further their own professional development
• No mention of students using computers for learning in powerful ways
• No mention of students using networks for collaborative learning

What I find most curious is that the survey itself is so minimalistic in terms of what technology can bring to the teacher-learner. If focuses on access and administrative tool use, research, and teachnolgy as a teaching tool. It does not see the larger picture of the need for systemic change, the need for lifelong teacher learning and growth, and the full potential of networks and computer technologies. What is sad is that it would appear that we, in general, are failing at such a basic level. Although there are certainly pockets of innovation and change, they are not sweeping in scope. Here is a quotation from the report’s executive summary:

“The findings of this study reveal that although all educators and students in public schools
have some access to computers and the Internet, we have few assurances that they are able to
use technology effectively for teaching and learning.”

Well, that’s certainly less than encouragine, isn’t it.

So, we have schools lacking in current tools, lacking in networked access, lacking in professional development, lacking in vision, lacking in systemic change, and overwhelmed with the incredibly diverse burdents placed upon them. What do we need then? Leaders. We need leaders who are willing to put their necks and reputations on the line district by district, building by building. We need leaders who have a powerful vision of what learning can and should be and who can effectively communicate it to others. We need leaders who can inspire by example. We need leaders who reward risk-taking. We need leaders who understand the learning potential afforded by new tools and learning networks. We need leaders who understand what meaningful learning is and looks like. We need leaders (at all levels, including governmental) who value all forms of assessment – not just formal standardized assessments. We need leaders to support urban schools. We need leaders who understand the value all pedagogies. We need leaders who help their teachers be all that they can be.

We need LEADERSHIP. Without it, we will continue fulfilling this report’s outlook – “The findings of this study reveal that although all educators and students in public schools have some access to computers and the Internet, we have few assurances that they are able to use technology effectively for teaching and learning.”

Here is one finding that I think merits serious thought:

Only 26 percent of teachers say that their most recent formal evaluation was useful and effective in helping them to improve their teaching. Seventy-nine percent support strengthening the formal evaluation of probationary teachers. And nearly a third of teachers (32 percent) say that tenured teachers should be evaluated on an annual basis.

I can remember some of my “formal” evaluations. They were typically done by an overburdened administrator who had the monumental task of evaluating every teacher in the building at least twice a year in addition to all of their other responsibilities. Often, those evaluation visits where rescheduled due to unexpected events that arose. And, all of those evaluations where scheduled ahead of time. The result – teachers (myself included) would plan a smashing “song and dance” lesson that included those key elements that we all knew the principal liked and was looking for. Once the evaluation was over, it was back to business as usual. In the evaluation de-briefing (which also had to be scheduled with every teacher), unless there was anything glaringly abhorrent, most constructive criticisms were insignificant at best.

So, it is no surprise to see the low statistic of only 26 percent of teachers reporting that they found their most recent formal evaluation useful and effective. Along the same lines, 32 percent of tenured teachers feel that they should be evaluated on an annual basis. That makes total sense if almost the same percentage feel that those evaluations are not all that beneficial.

So, what to do? Are K-12 administrators perhaps not the best candidates to do faculty evaluations? Are they too busy to really give useful constructive criticism? Is their own teaching craft stale and their own idea pool dry? Can we expect building administrators to really be excellent teachers as well? Perhaps you consider yourself lucky to have an administrator who is still an active practitioner and who is keeping up with teaching innovation. But, my guess is that if you did a PowerPoint, projected a web page, sang a cool song, or did a nifty craft, you would get kudos – assuming your students were well-behaved (notice I didn’t use the term “meaningfully engaged”).

Who said education reform was simple? Are new models of teacher growth and evaluation needed?