Category Archives: Professional Development

Unconference: A New Model for Professional Development

January 8, 2014 Dana Huff 5 Comments

You have probably heard the joke about professional development: “Dear Lord, please let me die at a staff development workshop. The difference between being alive and being dead is so indiscernible that I probably won’t even notice I’ve died.” In fact, my dear former colleague Barbara Rosenblit at the Weber School in Atlanta recently quoted the joke as well in her article for Ravsak, “Inverting the Triangle: Reimagining this So-Called Profession.” Barbara says in her article that “we regularly infantilize teachers with what we offer as educational opportunities.” She doesn’t explicitly say so in her article, but having worked with Barbara for eight years, I feel confident in saying that one of the big problems she has with professional development is that teachers have no choice about what kind of professional development is on offer. They are not supported to go to conferences of their own choosing. They are not offered opportunities to design their own learning experiences. Professional development days are dreaded as long, boring days in which we are talked at and perhaps made to watch excruciatingly bad PowerPoints.

When my Dean of Faculty offered us the opportunity to be on a Vision Steering Committee tasked with working with the administration and the faculty to help articulate and build a shared vision for the school as well as help guide our school culture toward that vision, I jumped at the chance. The way I see it, it is important for teachers to step up when they are given opportunities to have their voices heard in this way. Teachers have a stake in the vision for their school, but they’re not always asked to share their ideas for that vision.

One of the first tasks of the Vision Steering Committee was to brainstorm a plan for our professional development day following the winter break. One member of our committee suggested we try an unconference model. She described her experiences at the Boston Edcamp. I was enthusiastic about the idea after participating in SocialEdCon (previously EduBloggerCon) prior to ISTE on three occasions. To me, it’s often the best part of that conference. Another colleague shared her own experiences of visiting High Tech High for an unconference and finding herself volunteering a topic of interest and facilitating the topic. In her words, one of the problems we often encounter with PD days is that we don’t get what we need out of the day, but an unconference model allows us to “get exactly what [we need] out of the day.”

The trouble as I see it with widespread adoption of the unconference model is that it involves a great deal of trust in the faculty. It takes a courageous administration to trust the faculty to pull off an unconference. However, I think the time has come for administrators to trust their faculties. There is a lot of angst in the air among educators right now, and the core of the problem lies in feeling we are not to be trusted. Planning professional development is only a small part of it, and Barbara articulates more of the problems in the article I linked above.

We used a Google Doc to plan and talk about how the day would take shape. In the end, we settled on two one-hour unconference sessions, and because this is new to our faculty, we invited them to propose ideas for sessions in a Google Doc before the PD day itself. First, a few of us shared our experiences with unconferences as a means of explaining what they are to our colleagues. Next, a few of us discussed norms for participation in an unconference. Then it was time for the planning to begin.

We divided into tables with about eight people at each table, and we had a three-minute idea dump. We wrote ideas on sticky notes. After the idea dump, we voted on the ideas and selected two from each table to present to the faculty as a whole. I know my table decided to put checkmarks on the ideas we liked, and we tallied the checks and chose the top two. These ideas were added to large pieces of chart paper along with the ideas already shared on the Google Doc and placed in a large room where we could further narrow down the topics after lunch. We elected to supply sticky notes, and teachers attached sticky notes to the topics that interested them most.

Those topics that received the most votes made it to the final round and became sessions. In the end, we offered six sessions during each time period, and a total of eleven topics were explored (one session idea on scheduling was so popular, we ran it twice). Among our faculty, these ideas were selected for sessions:

Specific Strategies to Build Morale (School/Division) and Managing Conflict Among Colleagues
Finding the “Right Balance” Between Old Practices and New Practices
Project-Based Learning
Combatting Grade Obsession
How can the schedule best facilitate learning?
Independent Research Electives
Homework: How Much? Assessment?
Activity Requirements (Students and Faculty)
Students’ Fear of Failure
Portfolios as Authentic Assessment
Fostering Student Independence and Agency

I attended the sessions on Project-Based Learning and Portfolios as Authentic Assessment. I thought it was the best professional development day I ever had. I had an opportunity to talk about issues I care about with peers who care about the same things. We talked about what was happening in our classrooms and how we envisioned carrying the ideas further. For instance, one of our science teachers described a project he designed with a colleague for physics in which students spent just about the entire trimester building their own cars. They learned the principles of physics in the process, but the learning became more relevant and important when it moved from the theoretical to the practical. He described a point at which he realized all the student groups were having the same problem with acceleration and gave direct instruction about the issue. They didn’t have to memorize information about acceleration. They had to understand it and apply it to their car design. He also shared candidly that there was a point when he thought it would be a disaster and that the students wouldn’t pull it off, and he wouldn’t pull it off—the students were frustrated, and he was frustrated. They pushed past it, and in the end, he said most of the students felt it had a great deal of value. The learning all branched out the project. The issues that arose over the course of the project became the focus of lessons and quizzes. He mentioned that some topics he covered might not have been explored until much later in the year, but because they became important to learn because of the project, the students explored these topics earlier. I loved hearing about what was happening in his classroom.

The feedback I have heard so far is that faculty enjoyed the opportunity to choose what they wanted to learn more about and to cross departments and divisions (we have a middle school and upper school) to talk about what they wanted to learn. I can’t remember ever leaving at the end of a PD day feeling energized and wanting to get in my classroom as soon as possible. That is a really sad statement, if you think about it. Conferences? Sure. I almost always leave conferences excited to go back to my classroom with what I’ve learned. However, I left this particular PD day excited about going into my classroom the next day and thinking about the discussions I had with my colleagues.

Some things we might do differently? I think in our haste to honor topics that received the most votes, we let some really good and important topics slide. Some of the topics we explored wound up not really being about professional development so much as discussion of policy. Perhaps that is fine, but not everyone walked away feeling like I did after my two excellent sessions as a result. It is easy to let such sessions devolve into venting frustration. While it is validating to hear others voice your own concerns, it isn’t very energizing.

Teachers need to be trusted to care about and design their own learning experiences. The unconference model offers schools a great opportunity to put professional development in the hands of their teachers.

Thanks to Cindy Sabik, our Dean of Faculty, for permission to use her photos in this post. You can follow her on Twitter @sabikci

Professional Development, Recommended Reading, Reflection

An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger, Chapter 4 and Afterword

July 20, 2013 Dana Huff 1 Comment

In the final chapter of An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger addresses the need to support teachers. This chapter in particular is one I think administrators should read. I wish those in business and educational bureaucracy would read it and let it sink it and really reflect on it as well.

Berger points out that teachers do not go into teaching because it’s lucrative. All the bonuses, merit pay, and monetary incentives in the world will not really attract quality teachers in the same way that supporting teachers will. Berger cites the oft-quoted statistic that “[a]lmost half of all America’s teachers leave the profession within five years” (121). I was almost among their number. After my fourth year, I was overwhelmed. There was no support for me. I was burnt out. I had no time to plan or grade, not the time I needed anyway. I was isolated in my own building despite the fact that I was teaching in my former high school and counted among my colleagues some of my own former teachers. I decided maybe I just wasn’t any good at this teaching thing, and perhaps I ought to just pack it in and go into public relations or something. I had some writing skills.

I was out of the teaching profession for about five months before I came back. I taught preschool because it was what I could find in November. The one thing you don’t hear about going into teaching is that jobs are not just going to fall into your lap. People figure everyone needs teachers, so finding a teaching job is easy. Another lie I was told in undergrad was that so many teachers would be retiring in the early 2000’s that they would leave huge gaps, and there would not be enough teachers to fill them all, so we’d have our pick.

At any rate, the entire time I was in public education, I was not given the respect, resources, time, or support needed to do my job effectively, and I would venture to guess that is the case in many (if not most) public school situations. Many people naively assume that private schools have tons of resources. My own experience is that time, resources, respect, and support vary in private schools as well.

I think it starts with what Berger calls “visionary administrators” (121). If you do not have a school with a strong, visionary administration that advocates for and supports its teachers, that doesn’t give its teachers the time, respect, and resources needed to teach well, then it is going to be an uphill battle to stay enthusiastic about your teaching job or even to stay in the profession.

This support needs to go deeper than lip service, too. I have had an administrator that I will call John who swore up and down that he supported his teachers, but in reality, he micromanaged them, didn’t trust them, and was rather quick to throw them under the bus. He was responsible for a toxic work environment. There was no recourse for teachers who worked with him. He was a bully. He did not have what Berger calls the “courage” to trust his teachers, and his teachers didn’t have the tools they needed to innovate, both in terms of actual resources and professional development. Teachers were not involved in “decision making in genuine and significant ways” (150). They were consulted, and if their thoughts did not align with his, he discarded them. If a teacher did have an innovative idea, often John’s way of discouraging it was to send the teacher on a fruitless research and report assignment to prove it would be effective, and no matter what the results of the report were, John would discard the idea if it didn’t align with what John wanted to do. After I while, I stopped bothering to offer my opinion. It was easier to agree with John and do things his way because my opinions would not be seriously considered anyway.

I have learned recently that it’s important to assume people have good intentions. I wish John had assumed that I had good intentions with my students and that I was a teacher because I felt called to teach. I wish he had trusted in my professional expertise. I think that John had good intentions. He wanted a quality education for the students at his school, and he felt very strongly that it had to look a certain way, and his micromanaging of classrooms was intended to ensure teachers were doing what he felt was best.

I think the education bureaucrats and business people involved in making major changes to our educational system have good intentions. They see students who fall through the cracks. They see teachers who aren’t good teachers. They want opportunities for all students. But the way they are going about it is not going to reap the results they are after any more than the way John went about administrating his school achieved the results he was after.

And just like Ron Berger, I don’t have an answer. There is not a magic bullet that would fix all the ills in education. If there were, I wouldn’t be blabbing here on my blog. I’d be writing up the discovery and ensuring I could make a mint on it. But I think it does start with a mindset, as Berger has said in this book:

Consideration of the school culture and creation of a positive school culture.
Consideration of student learning.
Consideration of the craft of teaching and respect, time, resources, and support for teachers.

Berger will give you a lot to think about if you are a teacher, particularly with regards to authentic assessment and project-based learning. But I would highly recommend his book also to administrators, education bureaucrats, and everyone else involved in shaping education policy.

Assessment, Professional Development, Recommended Reading, Reflection

An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger, Chapter 3

July 19, 2013 Dana Huff

The third chapter of An Ethic of Excellence is a meaty one. After you’ve tackled school culture (chapter 2), this chapter asks you to think about the work.

Don’t focus on students’ self-esteem before expecting them to do good work. The praise is not genuine, and students know it. Instead, encourage them to produce quality work, and the self-esteem will follow.

So, how do you inspire students to do excellent work?

The chapter is long, and I’ll do my best to digest.

Powerful Projects

Assignments should be authentic. “There’s only so much care and creativity that a student can put into filling in the blanks on a commercially produced worksheet” (65). In addition, assignments have to be connected to the learning. You are probably thinking that’s obvious, but there are a fair amount of projects assigned—and I’ve been guilty of it, too—that have nothing to do with what the students are studying. Berger gives the example of the science fair. After seeing my daughter through that particular drudge this year, I think he has a point: she picked a random science-related topic, went home and learned about it, and produced a project based on it. It didn’t have any connection to the science she was learning in school. He also describes making a diorama based on Pecos Bill and receiving an A for the project, despite not having read the book. There is a big difference between projects and project-based learning. He describes the classroom as “the hub of creation, the project workshop” (70). Projects are not something done outside of school. They are important work, done in class, with rubrics (often written in collaboration with students) and models. It strikes me that the flipped classroom model is a gift of more time to be able to spend on workshop in the classroom. Project components are broken down, with checklists and deadlines. The process might look the same for each project, but the projects themselves are not the same.

Building Literacy Through the Work

Use these projects to teach all the critical skills. Projects are not “an extra activity after the real curriculum and instruction is done” (72). Teach reading comprehension, analysis, understanding, writing skills, etc. through the process of creating the project.

Genuine Research

I love the example Berger gives of science experiments in school: “We called them experiments, but we didn’t really experiment. These were scientific procedures, prescribed by a book, that we were instructed to follow so that we could achieve a prescribed result, a result that our teacher knew ahead of time” (75). It seems like every experiment I ever did in school was just like the ones Berger describes. I often wondered what the point was. People already knew this information, so why were we wasting our time marching through a process? What did I really learn from doing these experiments? Well, one thing I learned is not to like science. And then I started making my own soap recently, and all of a sudden, chemistry was interesting to me. Not just interesting—fascinating. Even if you’ve made lots of soap, it can still surprise you and do things you didn’t expect it to do. That’s fun science. I can follow a procedure, but the results are not a given. I am actually learning a lot, and I only wish science had been this interesting to me in school. I never really had a chance to be a scientist in school. But Berger makes a good point when he says that “[t]eaching how to do original research doesn’t come easily to many teachers” (78). The key? Teachers need to “let go of their expectation that they need to be the expert in everything, the person who knows all the answers” (78).

The Power of the Arts

The arts are often cut in schools, but the arts are a powerful tool to enrich student work. Berger says, “The question for me is not whether we can afford to keep arts in our schools but how we can ensure that students put artistic care into everything that they do” (80).

Models

Berger is emphatic that the best way to help students understand what quality work looks like is to show them quality work. Rubrics and descriptions are not enough. While I agree wholeheartedly, the problem is that I don’t always have a student-created model. I can and have created models myself, but my work is not as powerful as a student’s work. Berger suggests borrowing one, but this isn’t always feasible either. I know there have been many times I’ve done a project that is different enough that I can’t find a model. Providing models is ideal, but it’s not always possible. However, Berger is right that the pride students take in being models for others is profound. I have seen it myself: students will ask years later if I still have x project. Berger doesn’t come right out and say so explicitly, but what I infer from this chapter is that you just cannot teach in a vacuum. You don’t have models? Someone else might. You need help figuring out something about an assessment? Someone else can help. This type of connection was the vision I had for the UbD Educators wiki.

Multiple Drafts

Berger describes the ways in which school is one of the last places where rough draft work is still acceptable. Teachers will chalk it up to not having enough time, etc., but ultimately, if you want polished work, that means students need to do multiple drafts. We have some work to do in school to establish multiple drafts as the norm instead of the signal that you failed to do it correctly the first time.

Critique

Berger describes a really interesting model for peer critiques in his classroom, and I think this part of the chapter offers really sound advice for how to move students towards more thoughtful critique. Critiques are boiled down to three rules: 1) Be Kind, 2) Be Specific, and 3) Be Helpful. Within these rules, students are protected from being hurt and are able to get real, helpful feedback. In addition to these three rules, Berger suggests the following guidelines (rules are never abandoned, but guidelines might be):

“[B]egin with the author/designer explaining her ideas and goals, and explaining what particular aspects of the work she is seeking help with” (94). I think at first, you might need to put some sort of metacognitive reflection in place until students become acclimated to asking themselves these types of questions about their work.
“[C]ritique the work, not the person.”
Begin the critique with “something positive about the work, and then move on to constructive criticism” (94). This part can be hard, and it is easy to move into the danger zone of offering empty compliments. But it does help not to feel attacked right at the start. Teachers often call this the “sandwich.”
“[U]se I statements when possible: ‘I’m confused by this,’ rather than ‘This makes no sense'” (94).
“[U]se a question format when possible: ‘I’m curious why you chose to begin with this…?’ or ‘Have you considered including…?'” (94).

This advice strikes me as something that will be easy to implement in a classroom with a few small changes and some scaffolding upfront, but that will reap large dividends in terms of students’ thinking and understanding. Berger goes on to describe two main kinds of formal critique: 1) gallery critique, in which each student’s work is displayed and students “look at all the work silently before giving comments” (94), after which students discuss examples from the gallery that particularly impress them; 2) in-depth critique, which involves spending a substantial period of time critiquing a single student or group’s work as a class. Berger also adds that when you are talking about written work, it’s important to “differentiate between critiquing for specific content qualities and critiquing for mechanics (conventions); if this isn’t clear, critique can quickly become just copyediting” (95). If you’ve ever tried peer editing and had it flop (I’m raising my hand here), it may be because students have the idea that critiquing is just proofreading.

Making Work Public

A lot of teachers do not make student work public for a variety of reasons, but a public audience does make the work more authentic and meaningful. As Berger points out, if work is public, “There is a reason to do the work well, and it’s not just because the teacher wants it that way” (99). Emphasis his. We should be offering our students opportunities to publish their writing and projects. I have a colleague that has difficulty with this idea because students do make errors. So don’t we all. I am continually finding small proofreading errors in work I have published here. I even found an apostrophe error in Berger’s book. Does it detract from his ideas? No. Students should be correcting their work and polishing it as much as possible, but we have to acknowledge when we talk about publishing student work that it won’t be perfect. We should not let that paralyze us and prevent us from doing it. Learning is messy. I don’t have the answer. One suggestion is not to assess the work until the students have corrected all the errors you have pointed out in your feedback. However, there is a reason, I think, that Berger mentions multiple drafts and critique before he mentions making the work public. That work of drafting and editing comes first.

Using Assessment to Build Stronger Students

Berger makes the statement that “U.S. students are the most tested in the world.” I have a hunch that this statement is true, but I would be interested to see if that statement can be verified through statistics. He goes on to say, “Oddly, test-taking skills have little connection to real life. When a student finishes schooling, she is judged for the rest of her life on the kind of person she is and the kind of work that she does. Rarely does this include how she performs on a test” (101-102). See, this is the problem most of us teachers have with testing. I gave one test in my English class last year—the final exam. I was supported in this. I very rarely give tests. They are not the best measure of student learning in my class, for sure. The only kinds of tests I can think of that we might take in “real life,” aside from driving tests and the like, are professional entrance exams like the Bar Exam. I am sure many professions have them. But how is the professional assessed after that? By the quality of his/her work, right? That is what we do in our society, yet it is not the kind of assessment advocated by those who dictate educators’ practices (many of whom are not educators themselves). Why? Because it’s easier than doing a real, authentic assessment. It is much harder to evaluate authentic assessment. Sometimes there is not a neat little letter grade you can put on it. It reminds me of this quote from Dead Poets Society after Mr. Keating has just had the class read the introduction to their text, the subject of which is how to evaluate poetry: “Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? ‘I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!'” Berger says, “If tests are the primary measure of quality, the majority of schools feel compelled to have students spend much of their time memorizing facts and preparing for tests” (102).

Berger imagines a different model for school:

Imagine if students were judged instead on the quality of student work, thinking, and character. Imagine an expectation that an adult should be able to enter a school and expect that any child in that school older than seven or eight would be ready to greet him politely, give an articulate tour of a well-maintained, courteous school environment, and present his portfolio of academic accomplishments clearly and insightfully, and that the student’s portfolio would contain original, high-quality work and document appropriate skill levels. If schools assumed they were to [sic] going to be assessed by the quality of student behavior and work evident in the hallways and classrooms—rather than on test scores—the enormous energy poured into test preparation would be directed instead toward improving student work, understanding, and behavior. Instead of working to build clever test-takers, schools would feel compelled to spend time building thoughtful students and good citizens. (102)

Berger also brings up the fact that grades are not the best motivators:

The strategy most often employed to create pressure for high standards is assigning grades to work. Ideally the promise of good grades and the threat of bad ones will keep everyone working hard. In reality, it doesn’t always work this way. (103)

Any first-year teacher can probably tell you about students who are not motivated by grades. Berger teaches in a school that has done away with grades. Some day I plan to write a huge treatise on grades and assessment because I have a lot of thoughts, but I need to do a lot of research. Suffice it to say that I do not see any reason why grades have to be the way we assess. However, Berger does give good advice if you do have to use grades: “Make sure the grades are seen by students as something they earn, rather than as the arbitrary decision of a teacher” (105).

Berger closes the chapter with discussion of a water study his students did, which was an authentic research assignment that had real-world implications for community members. It’s a perfect example of the kind of science I wish I had had more opportunity to do in school.

Assessment, Professional Development, Recommended Reading, Reflection

An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger, Chapter 2

July 10, 2013 Dana Huff 3 Comments

The second chapter of Ron Berger’s An Ethic of Excellence discusses the importance of school culture in student learning. If you have ever worked in a school with a negative school culture, you will find yourself nodding as you read and highlighting several sentences in every paragraph. Reading this chapter, I reflected on the school cultures in several schools where I have worked or attended as a student, and Berger is absolutely right that culture is the bedrock of a successful school. If the school culture does not celebrate excellence and is not a safe place for students to learn (not just safe from physical or mental abuse or bullying but also a safe place for taking risks), then it is nearly impossible for individual teachers and students to hope they can be successful. Several movies about excellent teachers show us examples of teachers who successfully fight against a negative school culture to help their students achieve, but the fact that these teachers have movies about them should tell us how hard it is. If it were easy to fight a negative school culture, we wouldn’t have movies about the teachers who did it.

It did not take long for me to understand that administration is key to establishing a positive school culture. When I was a student teacher, I didn’t really see what, exactly, administrators did all day. It seemed to me that all the important work in schools was done by teachers and students, and administrators mattered very little. I said as much in a journal I wrote as part of an assignment in my English Education program. We had a doctoral student who graded some of our work in that program. She was a veteran English teacher. All she said in response to my journal was “I would be interested to know how you feel about this in a few years.” She didn’t tell me I was naive, but that’s exactly what I was. I kept her comment in mind, and later, when I realized what she meant, I truly felt like an idiot. Unless an administration is behind the culture and is a positive influence on the culture, it’s just not going to happen. Berger begins this chapter by describing visiting a school where the principal clearly didn’t want him there and clearly didn’t want to be there himself. He was marking time until retirement. He refused to meet Berger when Berger visited the school. There are a few teachers who want to hear what Berger has to say because they want change. But, as Berger says about the school, “Conditions are so bad that I hardly know what to say” (33). I actually want to ask Berger about this school when he visits us in preplanning precisely because I have a hunch they are still struggling, if they are still around, because their leadership was unwilling to establish a positive school culture. Their leadership didn’t even want to try. Unless the leadership is willing to make changes, nothing will happen, no matter how earnest the faculty and students are. It is too much of a losing battle to fight. If they were able to make some positive changes, then they likely did it after the principal left the school.

Let me tell you about the cultures of a few schools with which I am familiar.

The first school is a small elementary school. Funding has been slashed to the point that the school has no librarian, but parents volunteer to staff the library. Student artwork adorns the walls. Creativity is celebrated. Students are given the opportunity to engage in a variety of arts: music, visual art, drama, and dance. Sixth graders are paired with kindergarten buddies, much as Berger describes his own school doing. The buddies meet regularly, and the older children serve as mentors and friends. The principal knows students. Every student is accountable. It’s a small school, and students are not lost in the crowd.

The second school is a rural combined middle and high school. Students tend to come from backgrounds that do not celebrate academic achievement. Gangs are problem. Yes, even in this rural school. But the principal largely ignores the major behavior issues in the school and prefers to stick his head in the sand because he’s not sure how to change it, or maybe because he isn’t willing to try. Students threaten violence against teachers, and the students might be suspended, but then they are back, and the teachers and students have that issue hanging in the air. Students lock a teacher out of her classroom, and the principal thinks it’s funny. One of the administrators’ own children leaves a classroom without permission, through the window. Thankfully, the school has one level. An administrator tries to convince a teacher to change a student’s failing average from a 40% to a 70% so he can graduate. Otherwise, she says, he will wind up in jail. He had retaken three courses in that same subject that year, and he needed to pass all three of them. He passed two.

The third school has students are fairly good, for the most part, and they understand the importance of a good education, or at least good grades, but the kind of excellence celebrated at the school is not respect for the excellent work done but rather the grade or AP score achieved. Unfortunately, there is a bully at the helm of the school. Certain teachers and staff are regular targets of verbal and mental abuse. Unfortunately, there is little recourse because the bully is in a leadership position. A great deal of attention is paid to appearances, but the school has a foundation built on sand, and there is little attention paid to the most important aspects of building a positive school community.

The fourth school has collegial, hardworking, intelligent leadership with great ideas. The students are polite and hardworking. They take pride in their work. The school is not only invested in building a strong school culture, but in establishing itself as a positive member of the neighborhood and city community at large. The expectation in the school community is that people help each other out. Doors are held open. People help out with heavy loads. People greet each other warmly. Achievement is celebrated.

It is just about impossible to overstate the importance of establishing a school community that supports all of its constituents. Berger describes how positive peer pressure is a part of his school community, and I have seen positive peer pressure be a force for good in my own experience, as well. When students expect excellence out of each other and hold each other to high standards, you’d be amazed what can happen in a school; as Berger notes, it is a powerful motivator.

Berger says that “Every effective school I’ve seen has a strong sense of community,” even if their resources and settings differ wildly (41). And community only happens when all the stakeholders—faculty, staff, students, parents—have a voice and take pride in being a part of what is happening at the school. Berger describes building a foundation for community, starting with the building. His description of an inner city school he visited is compelling enough to quote in its entirety:

The building was surrounded by trash: fast-food boxes, plastic bags, food, broken bottles, wet newspapers, shopping carts, and needles from drug users. People sat on the curb in front of the school drinking from paper bags; the liquor store was across the street. The building had the architectural look of a prison—massive exterior walls of water-stained concrete with few windows. The front entrance was a battered metal door covered with graffiti; if you banged loudly enough they would buzz you in for inspection by a security guard. The boy’s [sic] bathrooms had stalls with no doors, broken toilet seats, and graffiti on the walls and metal mirrors.

This was an elementary school. (45)

I have to say I nearly jumped out of my seat when I read that last sentence. Can you imagine? As Berger says, “If politicians or business leaders were compelled to send their own children to this school, I would guess we’d see changes in the building fairly soon” (45). He says that “Architects point out that it’s easy to see what is valued in a culture by looking at which structures are built with expense and care” (46). The sad thing about the description of the inner-city school that Berger visited is that I wasn’t shocked that a school like that existed. I was only surprised it was an elementary school. As Berger says, if we are expecting students to go to dilapidated schools that look more like prisons, it is no wonder the schools are underperforming.

I enjoyed reading this chapter a great deal, and I agreed with what Berger says. Building a strong school community is not easy and takes time, but it is important work. It can be done anywhere, even in places with few resources, but it has to start with leadership that cares enough to support the work. And frankly, it isn’t the kind of work that is being supported by a society driven by test data as the only marker of success.

Professional Development, Recommended Reading, Reflection

An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger, Chapter 1

July 4, 2013 Dana Huff 5 Comments

The message of the first chapter of Ron Berger’s book An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students is the importance of student models. I think a lot of educators are afraid to use models because they want student ideas to be original, and they are afraid students will simply copy the models. It is our job as an educator to ensure that they don’t. I think most students really want to be creative and original. Sometimes, however, they don’t know how to start with project until they see how someone else did it. Models give us all something to strive for.

Berger also shares his process for collecting student work. He says, “One of my jobs as a teacher, I feel, is to be an historian of excellence, an archiver of excellence” (29). He doesn’t just use the models and portfolios of student work to show his students. He also uses them to show others what his students have learned and what they can do. Several anecdotes describe the surprise followed quickly by skepticism that others can feel upon seeing his students’ work. If the students are given time to draft, revise, refine, and really wrestle with their learning, they can produce amazing things. I have often found that giving students choices about how to present their learning really awakens them. I have also had students that were much more concerned about their grades than learning and doing excellent work they could be proud of, and that pressure was often external as much as it was internal. Sometimes I really wish we could do away with grades completely, as I think grades become the point of learning instead of learning being the point all on its own.

Another issue Berger describes with great honesty is the fact that his students are mostly white and rural. When he has presented to audiences teaching students of color in urban environments, they are skeptical that their students can do the same great work. Berger says it is about a school’s culture. Teaching is hard no matter where you do it. It’s harder when you don’t have what you need.

When Berger comes to visit our school in preplanning, I hope he brings his students’ work. I have to admit I am curious about it after reading his description of it.

Professional Development, Recommended Reading

Summer Reading for School

July 2, 2013 Dana Huff 2 Comments

What PD reading are you doing this summer?

I’m reading the following three books:

An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students, by Ron Berger. This book is an all-faculty read. Ron Berger will be visiting our school to do some professional development at the beginning of the school year. Here is the jacket blurb: “Drawing from his own remarkable experience as a veteran classroom teacher (still in the classroom), Ron Berger gives us a vision of educational reform that transcends standards, curriculum, and instructional strategies. He argues for a paradigm shift—a schoolwide embrace of an ‘ethic of excellence.’ A master carpenter as well as a gifted teacher, Berger is guided by a craftsman’s passion for quality, describing what’s possible when teachers, students, and parents commit to nothing less than the best. But Berger’s not just idealistic—he tells exactly how this can be done, from the blackboard to the blacktop to the school boardroom.”

How to Read Novels Like a Professor, by Thomas C. Foster. I have already read and enjoyed Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I have had this one on my shelf for a couple of years and just never read it. This book is an English department read. Here’s the jacket blurb: “Thomas C. Foster—the sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor—now examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors’ choices about structure—point of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuity—create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.”

Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager. This book is my own choice after attending sessions on making at ISTE this year. “There’s a technological and creative revolution underway. Amazing new tools, materials and skills turn us all into makers. Using technology to make, repair, or customize the things we need brings engineering, design, and computer science to the masses. Fortunately for educators, this maker movement overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. The active learner is at the center of the learning process, amplifying the best traditions of progressive education. This book helps educators bring the exciting opportunities of the maker movement to every classroom.” Edited to add: Check out the website for Invent to Learn for more resources.

So what do you think? Do they look good to you? If you want to read along with me, feel free to join me. As I have in the past, I will be reflecting here. On at least one occasion, it turned into a book club that became the UbD Eduators wiki.

Professional Development, Technology, Tools

QR Code Tips

May 2, 2012 Dana Huff 2 Comments

I participated in a Teq webinar on QR codes today. I thought I was fairly well versed in QR codes and their uses, but I learned a couple of interesting things today that I thought I’d share. First of all, I hadn’t played much with QR Stuff. I think I sometimes become set in my ways with regards to tools—not that I don’t like to try new ones, but if I have a tool that does what I need, I tend to stick with it unless I need to change, and sometimes, this isn’t a good thing. QR Stuff is cool because it allows you to change the color of your QR codes and also allows you to easily create codes for a variety of data types, including plain text.

One of the webinar participants said that you can point QR codes to Google Docs to share text-based content, too. I like this idea, but I need to play around with it a little more. I am a little bit embarrassed not to have thought about connecting QR codes to Google Docs before. Unfortunately, some tech issues on my end kept causing me to drop out of the webinar, and I had to reload U-Stream in order to get it working again. It seemed to happen whenever I tried to use chat.

Finally, I learned about the QR Reader iPhone app. I have been using Red Laser, which scans all kinds of bar codes, including QR codes, but I actually like the way QR Reader handles scanning QR codes better. Red Laser’s focus is mainly on price comparison, and its QR code features are limited. It’s easier to scan codes with QR Reader. Better than that, however, QR Reader has a creator feature that allows the user to create all kinds of QR codes and save them to the iPhone photo album, send them via email, print them, or share them on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or Tumblr. Cool!

I had already heard about another tool mentioned in the webinar, Class Tools’s QR Code Treasure Hunt Generator, a very quick and easy tool to generate scavenger hunts, but I don’t recall if I have mentioned it here before, and it’s something many of you might want to check out.

QR codes have a lot of potential in education; your only limitation is really your imagination (and your mobile device).

It also pays to see how other folks are using tools you think you know a lot about and try doing things their way.

Blogging, Delicious and Diigo, Issues, Professional Development, Technology, Tools, Wikis

Technology Integration for Preservice Teachers

April 10, 2012 Dana Huff 2 Comments

Bethany Smith asked a great question on Twitter this morning:

I don’t remember learning much about technology integration when I was a preservice teacher, but then that was 1996-1997. We thought we were advanced for using email to communicate with each other. I’m not sure what has changed in the intervening years, if much of anything. I have found, contrary to popular belief, that young teachers do not necessarily know as much about technology as older teachers think they do, nor do younger teachers necessarily naturally integrate technology. (For that matter, I don’t think kids know as much about technology as teachers think they do, at least not using it for school or work, but that’s a separate blog post.)

The key word in instituting technology integration as part of a preservice teaching program is integration. Technology shouldn’t be an add-on, or else preservice teachers will only come to think of it as such in their classrooms. Asking preservice teachers to create lesson plans and assignments for their college courses that integrate technology and then reflect on how that technology might be used in their classrooms might be effective. An e-portfolio would be a great start. preservice teachers could share it with prospective employers. It can be hard sometimes to find a job with no experience, and a great portfolio can encourage administrators to take a chance on first-year teachers if the portfolios show the young teacher to be thoughtful, engaging, organized, and involved in their field. That portfolio should include a blog. When I was a preservice teacher, my classmates and I had to write weekly “think pieces” about an issue we were concerned about. We passed these around in class so that our classmates could be exposed to our ideas, and of course, they were graded by our professors, too. A blog would be a natural forum for such thinking aloud.

Other artifacts that might be included in such a portfolio:

Evidence of understanding good presentation practices. I have seen some horrible PowerPoints in my day (often created by teachers and administrators), and teachers cannot be expected to teach students how to create good presentations if they themselves don’t know how. Presentation skills are a key part of any preservice teacher’s education.
Evidence of having created an online PLN through Twitter or through a group such as the English Companion Ning (or equivalent for subject matter). A link to the Twitter account or biography page should be sufficient.
Evidence of having created a wiki, perhaps as part of a group assignment for the course or perhaps as a repository for lesson plans.
As more teachers are flipping the classroom, I think an important piece of the portfolio should include a lesson delivered via audio, and a lesson delivered via video (could be a screencast). The topics should be well chosen in that they should be topics easily taught and learned via this method.
A link to the preservice teacher’s Diigo profile. I think social shared bookmarking has been one of the most fantastic tools to come along in my fourteen years as a teacher. It’s a quick, useful way to share great resources that can be integrated with both a blog and a Twitter account as well as your browser (depending on which one you use). I happen to prefer Diigo to other bookmarking systems myself, but it’s not the only game in town. Any professors teaching preservice teachers could make that call.

One of the most important things a teacher needs to learn when integrating technology is flexibility. Sometimes things go awry when you’re trying to integrate technology, and it’s important that teachers are able to change course if the technology fails. The Internet sometimes goes down. Sometimes the projector bulb burns out. Lots of things can happen, and it’s important that teachers include, as part of any lesson plan integrating technology, their backup plan for what they will do if the technology fails.

As part of their preservice teaching program, teachers should also learn how to search. Using boolean search strings will save them time and help them find resources they’re looking for quickly. Learning how to use the everyday tools of teaching, including projectors, the Internet, videos, and the like should be an essential part of a preservice teacher’s education.

To steal an idea from Melissa Scott, time to share tools, perhaps a weekly session, would be great. The way I would probably set this up is to ask preservice teachers to sign up for time if they have found a cool tool and then present and demonstrate that tool to their fellow preservice teachers. Before long, teachers would have quite a toolkit to take with them to their first job. Any tools that could more easily be shared via a Diigo group created for the preservice teachers would not necessarily need to be shared via presentation, and there should be an expectation that the preservice teachers will make use of Diigo, contributing shared links and also saving links.

It’s also key that preservice teachers understand the importance of rehearsing technology. Teachers who fiddle with tools they aren’t sure how to use in front of a group of students are wasting time and hurting their credibility. Try out the tools and figure out how they are used before asking students to use them or before using them in front of students. Don’t rely on students to be your tech support when you get stuck, which leads me to my final recommendation: learn basic troubleshooting. Most of the troubleshooting I do for other teachers, they could do themselves if they tried searching for the problem online. That’s the first thing I usually do anyway. I’m happy to help teachers. I don’t mind troubleshooting. However, they could save a lot of time if they learned how to do it themselves. It isn’t the best use of the IT department’s time to restart your computer if it freezes up when that is something teachers themselves could have done much more quickly on their own.

Professional Development

Tech without PD

March 24, 2012 Dana Huff 2 Comments

I have seen a tweet circulating among several folks on Twitter with basic text as follows:

“I have yet to have a student tell me they can’t use technology in class because they haven’t received any PD on it.”

While I understand the frustration behind the tweet, I disagree with its basic message, which is that there is something wrong with a teacher who wants to receive professional guidance on technology before using it. The subtext is that we should all be able to use technology without help, and that if we say we won’t, then we’re just whining. We’re not willing to do what we ask students to do.

First, students who are unfamiliar with tools do often balk at using them. I have found that younger students seem to be willing to play around with a tool until they figure it out, but there is a fear of failure that we tend to develop, as well as a notion that we should learn how to do things effortlessly or quickly, as we get older, and I have frequently encountered high school students who shut down in the face of using unfamiliar technology. A case in point: several years ago, I asked my students to do a poetry project on VoiceThread. The tool was unfamiliar to them, and they really fought learning how to use it. When they finished their final projects, I have to admit that only one of the groups really produced work that met the standard I had in mind. It was a technology fail on my part because I didn’t do much training in how to use the tool with the class. I expected them to be willing to dive in, explore, and figure it out. That my students didn’t produce the work I was hoping for was partly my fault. No, none of the students complained to me that I hadn’t showed them how to use VoiceThread. I don’t think it occurred to them.

One of the common refrains I hear about integrating technology is how important professional development is. While it’s fairly common for technology to be mandated with little or no professional development, I think most thoughtful educators feel professional development is a critical piece of technology adoption. I do believe that exploring a new tool, trying out new things, playing around, is the only way to really learn how to use new tools. But we also have to remember that not everyone is comfortable taking that initial step alone. A professional development session that introduces the tool and offers participants an opportunity to try out the tool when a technology “spotter” is nearby can be comforting and helpful. Also, not all tools are easy to learn without professional development. I happen to think my school’s content management system, Edline, is well nigh impossible to learn without some help, especially for teachers who have never experimented with their own websites before.

We shouldn’t criticize teachers for asking for professional development. We should celebrate it. It’s not the same thing as being resistant, which is how I think this tweet characterizes teachers. Yes, some teachers are resistant, but those teachers are resistant even after the professional development, and in those cases, it’s not really the technology that is the issue: it’s more about change. Teachers asking for professional development want to learn to use the technology in the most effective way so they don’t waste their time and their students’ time floundering around with tools before integrating them in their teaching. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Professional Development, Reflection, Technology

Reluctance and Technology Integration

March 18, 2012 Dana Huff 6 Comments

One of the questions I am often asked in interviews for technology positions is how I would approach dealing with faculty members who are reluctant to embrace or integrate technology in their lessons.

First, I think it’s an excellent question, and my answer to it says a lot about how well I would be able to work with faculty. It is a question to which any good technology integration specialist should have a good answer at the ready. Before I tell you what I think, however, it bears saying that I think a healthy skepticism of technology is not a bad thing. I have seen tools adopted simply because they will add technology to a lesson. If the only reason you’re using technology is to say you’re using technology, then you’re not truly integrating technology. Your faculty and students will see through it. I have been teaching fourteen years, which is long enough to see a few trends come and go. Technology has to be more than just flash. It needs to add something to the lesson (or whatever you are doing with it), and if it doesn’t, perhaps you don’t need to use it.

I personally feel technology has two propositions to answer before it should be adopted for integration in a lesson/class/school/activity:

Will it make it easier to do what I’m trying to do?
Will using it increase engagement?

Having said that, sometimes a learning curve is wrongly interpreted as making something more difficult to do. We need to be willing to invest the time into learning how to use the tools properly sometimes, but just because they are not immediately intuitive does not mean they are making everything more difficult and need to be chucked. One case in point is the evolution of sharing handouts with students. I actually have used one of those blue ditto machines. We still had one at one of my schools, and we had to use it if we did not turn in our photocopying with enough notice for the secretary who did our photocopying (a practice that is looking more and more attractive to me for reasons folks who work with me will understand completely). The ditto machine produced handouts that were serviceable, but damp and blurry. I only used it as a last resort. The photocopier produced nice handouts, but required me to hand in assignments early to the secretary, or, in other schools where I have worked, provide my own paper and assemble the packets and hole-punch and staple them, not to mention the time spent making the copies. Now sharing documents is as easy as creating and sharing a Google Doc or uploading a document to a content management system. The students have the freedom to print or even edit the document as needed, but they can also store it on their device using their personal file management system. Obviously, there is a learning curve involved in switching to Google Docs over a more familiar word processor (not much of one, but still), and users need to learn how to share the documents with others. Learning how to upload documents to a content management system also involves a small learning curve. Initially, learners who have a little more difficulty learning how to use new tools might balk at being asked to use Google Docs or a content management system, but once they learn how to use the tools and have been convinced that the tools are making their jobs easier, they will not be reluctant to adopt the technology and may even be your biggest evangelists.

On the other hand, sometimes using technology is not necessarily going to make our jobs easier, but will increase engagement. A good example of a project that fits this criteria is a recent lesson I did with our social studies department on how to use PowerPoint. I am told that the students were reluctant to come to my lesson because they didn’t think they would learn anything. They had, after all used PowerPoint before. I, like you, have seen many ineffective PowerPoints over the years, and I have actively sought presentation mentors who have taught me about creating more effective PowerPoints. I shared these lessons with the students. In essence, I taught the students:

You are essential to the presentation. If you make yourself inessential because you put all of your presentation text on your slides, you have no reason to be standing in front of the room.
Your slides are visual aids for your presentation and should therefore be light on text and heavy on images.
Go beyond the default fonts and prepackaged themes.
Give credit for using images and try to find images licensed under Creative Commons.
Practice your presentation in front of your mirror, your dog, your parents. If your teacher lets you, put cues on index cards, but you shouldn’t read from the cards any more than you should read from PowerPoint slides.

The lessons went very well. The students asked great questions. I was impressed by what I saw them creating in class. They shared at the beginning of the lesson when I asked how they feel when they see a PowerPoint on the screen that they associated PowerPoints with boredom.

Creating good PowerPoints definitely does not make your job easier. In fact, it is easier to create a bad PowerPoint with all your speech on the prepacked theme slides and few images (or perhaps the odd clip art image). But these PowerPoints are not engaging for your audience. In order to make your presentation more engaging, you will need to do some work. Most people who have seen a great presentation will say that it was worth the extra work to increase audience engagement.

I was thrilled when I received this feedback from one of the social studies teachers about the students’ presentations:

Just wanted to give thanks to Dana Huff for helping with a very successful technology integration project for 9th grade CP2. Dana helped to teach my students how to utilize MS Power Point to create a dynamic and interesting visual accompaniment to a presentation. My students took Dana’s lesson to heart and have come up with some compelling visual aids.

Dana spent two class periods with my students teaching them how to use the Power Point software itself and also reviewing best practices for using Power Point in the context of a 10-15 minute presentation.

Thank you to Dana for all of your help! The students greatly benefited from the time they spent with you!

Another project that required more work but definitely increased engagement was a QR Code project I helped our art teacher with. Creating and editing student videos was certainly more work for the art teacher, and uploading the videos and creating QR Codes that linked with them was also time-consuming. Hanging up the art and calling it a day would have been easier, but putting the QR Codes next to the art work so that the art displays could be more interactive made the art show more engaging for the participants.

I think the best way to approach a teacher who is reluctant to integrate technology is to share a specific idea and be willing to do some convincing that the idea will either make their jobs easier or make what they do more engaging (for them, their students, whoever). After that, you must be willing to support that teacher’s learning with professional development. The worst thing you can do is give a teacher a tool and tell them to figure out how to use it. It won’t be used because it is much easier to just keep doing things the same way. Which is essentially what Tom Whitby said on Twitter the other day that prompted me to retweet:

So in the interest of learning more about what others thought, I tweeted the question “What do you do at your school to encourage teachers who are reluctant to embrace & integrate technology?” and added the hashtag #edtech in the hopes of attracting answers from folks who don’t follow me, but keep track of that hashtag. Here are some of the responses I received:

Some definite themes emerge in the responses:

Offer extensive professional development.
Demonstrate using the technology is really going to make their teaching better.
Model technology integration (or provide models).
Provide resources and choices.

I would argue that there are simply cases when mandating is required, such as when a school-wide grade reporting system or content management system is rolled out. Inconsistency can cause a lot of headaches for a school, but the important thing is to allow faculty to be part of the decision about which tools to use so that they are more likely to buy into their use.

The worst thing a school can do is mandate use of some new form of technology without any professional development.

Leadership in technology integration comes from the top down, as I have said before, and if administrators are not prepared to support their teachers’ use of technology, their teachers will not use the technology. It’s not because teachers are not willing to change or to do the right thing for their students. It’s because teachers, like everyone else, want to see the relevance behind what they are learning, and they want to know why and how they will use it. In integrating technology, like everything else, you need to begin with the end in mind and determine where you want teachers and students to be, what you want them to learn, and what you want them to be able to do. Then you need to determine how you will get them to that place.

Some additional resources I found as I was thinking about and writing this post (via Twitter):

huffenglish.com

Category Archives: Professional Development

Unconference: A New Model for Professional Development

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An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger, Chapter 4 and Afterword

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