By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

When such an education luminary as Robert J. Marzano starts singing the praises of interactive whiteboards (IWB), people listen. And sales go up. In an ASCD article, Dr. Marzano writes about huge gains, 16 points, in student achievement when the magic boards are used in classrooms.

Are these boards really the magic fix for our classrooms that we’ve all been so desparate to find? Or, are they just another classroom fad? If the latter, then they’re certainly an expensive one that costs thousands of dollars per classroom.

We should ask two penetrating questions. Is there another less expensive way to match interactive whiteboards?  Do they, uniquely, really produce the gains Dr. Marzano reports?

Answering the first question poses no real challenge. Nearly every classroom already has a projector screen. Many have VGA (or better) projectors installed or available. These projectors that display a computer’s screen are readily available at much lower costs than the IWBs. The IWBs, after all, just display a computer screen. The computer is required in both cases.

For a modest cost, classrooms can have the display capabilities of IWBs. What about the interactive part? IWBs allow teachers to work directly with the projector screen. They can use a special stylus or their fingers to perform the same actions that a mouse does right on the board. In so doing, they must turn, at least partly, away from the students. A computer properly set up allows the same teachers to face the class while manipulating the information on the screen. It could even be a touch screen but wouldn’t have to be. The IWB has no advantage here.

Readily available software will allow teachers to perform the same actions of drawing colored lines that the IWB does along with all of its other capabilities. Generally speaking, the IWB holds no advantage over a much less expensive projector and screen.

What about the advantages of having the teacher standing at the board gesticulating and interacting directly with the board? I can imagine that some teachers with really good showmanship skills could glean some benefits from this technique. They themselves might enjoy preforming in this manner. However, I believe that the students will benefit very little and, in the cases of less capable performers, not at all.

The second question requires looking at what Dr. Marzano reports. He claims that three features “inherent in interactive whiteboards” improve student achievement.

1. The learner-response device, a handheld voting device or “clicker.”
2. Use of graphics and other visuals to represent information.
3. Interactive whiteboard reinforcers such as visual applause for the correct answer.

Of these three “inherent” features, the second two can readily be added to the simple projector and screen system that costs a small fraction of what an IWB costs. They are inherent only in computer-based projection systems, not in expensive IWBs. They require the same amount of teacher preparation in either case and should have the same pedagogical results.

Voting devices in the hands of each student cost extra no matter which system you use. They can be purchased without buying an IWB. So far, results strongly suggest that the appropriate use of voting devices in classrooms truly does improve average student achievement. The student responses are anonymous, and the aggregated responses appear as a bar graph for all to see and discuss. Every student participates.

In my opinion, all the benefits that Dr. Marzano presents can be achieved without using an interactive whiteboard.

Dr. Marzano goes on to explain the common errors made with IWB technology and also to explain that teachers must organize their content carefully if they wish to make the best use of the technology. He makes the important point that technology will not fix anything by itself but requires training and work. Otherwise, results can be worse with the technology than without.

The popularity of IWBs has forced educators to rethink the way courses are taught, and for that, we can be appreciative of their invention. New ideas that have come from classrooms using the technology have been trumpeted across the education marketplace by the manufacturers of IWBs because of the profits that they will gain from increased sales.

In my opinion, all the benefits that Dr. Marzano presents can be achieved without using an interactive whiteboard. Less expensive alternatives exist. The boards use up valuable classroom space and have a very high cost. If you gave each of the teachers in a school the money that might be spent buying (and maintaining) an IWB, would they spend it on one, or would they find better uses for the money? More to the point, if you gave them the alternatives of an IWB system or a projector along with the difference in cost to spend on other classroom material, which would they be most likely to choose?

In these days of declining school budgets, let’s spend our education dollars wisely.

Differentiation, as defined by the ASCD (with the help of Carol Tomlinson) is,

“At its most basic level, differentiating instruction means “shaking up” what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn”.

However, Tomlinson makes the point that instruction (aka “process”) is only one area that can be differentiated.  Content and Product can also be differentiated.

We all have different leadership styles, just as we all have varied learning styles.  What “Content” can we differentiate to help meet our respective institutional goals?  How about the “Process” (or processes) we employ to meet those goals?  Can we allow for differentiated “Products” from our faculty?

So… how does that apply, in education, beyond Teachers and Curriculum Directors?  I posit that we, as leaders in education, must walk the talk and differentiate the manner in which we lead.

http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/donmillsci/dept/social_global/gifted/diff.htm

Examples of ‘administrative’ Content:  Let’s say one of our schoolwide initiatives is using UbD to develop curricular units.  One of the Big Ideas is ‘Begin with the end in mind’.  We can give various examples of how that is done in order to help our faculty gain a complete understanding.  Let’s say another schoolwide initiative is promoting a unified discipline approach.  Some teachers may benefit from reading articles on the philosophy of Unified Discipline.  Some may benefit more from reading about the nuts and bolts procedures.  The point is, we can tailor some of the Content to reach the understandings we need.

If you have better examples PLEASE comment below.

Examples of  ‘administrative’ Processes: Just as we use various instructional strategies in the classroom, so do we use various management and interpersonal strategies to help our faculty and our school meet our goals.  Collaborative decision-making may work well with some of our faculty but not all.  The same goes for Cooperative Grouping.  Varying the WAY we run meetings can help us get our messages across more effectively to a wider range of individuals.

Again, your observations, suggestions and comments are most welcome!

Examples of differentiated Product (in an admin context): HOW teachers show us they are helping us meet our goals can be manifest in various ways.  What is acceptable evidence?  Isn’t this what reflective goal-setting is all about?

What do you think?

The good news is educators commonly epitomize the concept of Lifelong Learners AND there are a multitude of resources for differentiation out there…

LINKS:

• A web page focused on the gifted and differentiation, entitled “Tomlinson”

http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/epsy373/Tomlinson.htm

• Carol Tomlinson’s webpage

http://www.caroltomlinson.com/

Equal but not fair...

• 4MAT Leadership Behavior Inventory

http://www.aboutlearning.com/assessment-tools/132-leadership-behavior-inventory.html

• Bill Powell’s webpage with the Center for Cognitive Coaching

http://www.cognitivecoaching.com/wpowell.htm

This list is from an ASCD article in November 2008.  I think it still works for this year:

What students want from teachers:

Take me seriously

Challenge me to think

Nurture by self-respect; teach me self-discipline

Show me I can make a difference

Let me do it my way

Point me toward my goals

I do a pretty good job with these.

What types of media, access, and support do cutting-edge media centers and school libraries offer students? How are teacher librarians and library media specialists leading the charge to help students master 21st century literacies?

Issue 22 Volume 4 of ASCD Express “The Transformational Media Centre” looks at ways teacher librarians and library media specialists can collaborate with teachers and other staff to enhance student learning.

A good read overall – and I’m excited to say also includes a piece by me -  Content Used to be King – as the New Voices feature.

What’s to think about? Give it!

Someone’s sending me a message. Or playing a joke. Rethinking Homework is the ASCD book that was waiting for me in my mailbox at school. (FYI, the $89 membership is totally worth the five books you get every year; the newsletters and magazine are just a bonus.) I always get razzed about homework – by kids, parents, coworkers, and even principals. The last two years my grade partners were giving more than me, but who got all the complaints? That’s right, moi. The first year I sent home a survey where the kids had to keep track of how much time they spent on each assignment every night. Those who turned it in (and of course the parents complaining did not) were way under their 50 minutes of allowable time. So last year I didn’t say anything about the complaints (that were from kids anyway, not parents).

I look at homework as independent practice of what we learned in class today. I tell kids, “I will never give you homework on something I haven’t taught you.” I also announce this at Back to School night so (all seven) parents know their kid is pulling their leg if they say they have no idea what to do because I didn’t teach it. Some kids don’t get that, though, and never make the connection between less-than-stellar test grades and lack of homework completion. (Despite my attempts to point it out in both subtle and more direct ways.)

Today Fashionista and I met at our former grade partner’s house to work on our new school webpages. (We were goofy even before we started drinking – we better check them later! ) Guess what we spent most of our time on? Yep, our homework pages!

I’ll read this book, but it is highly unlikely to change my mind about homework!

While I’m on the reading mode I should also mention Robyn Jackson’s book from ASCD:  Never Work Harder Than Your Students (and other principles of great teaching). Coming from an environment where we’re trying to take the language from ‘work’ to ‘learning’ I wasn’t super-keen on the title but it came free with the subscription to Educational Leadership, and it does contain some great principles. In essence, they are:

• Start where your students are
• Know where your students are going
• Expect your students to get there
• Support your students
• Use effective feedback
• Focus on quality, not quantity
• Never work harder than your students

And, truthfully, haven’t we all come out of a lesson at some stage thinking that we (the teacher) are doing all the work?  Exhausted? Jackson would argue that often these lessons haven’t worked that well, for the learners.

I just got back from the ASCD Convention as well as NECC 2009, and I am filled with ideas and inspiration. They truly were two very different conventions.

The ASCD Convention was phenomenal because I was able to listen to and work with some of the greatest educators of our time. I began with Carol Tomlinson and Jay McTighe.   Each course was 3 hours in length; thus I was able to get a deeper understanding of Differentiation and UbD. My next day was similar, but began with Robert Marzano and ended with Grant Wiggins. Both speakers challenged educators to do a better job – the status quo is simply not acceptable. I will blog more about these ideas and concerns in future blogs.

NECC was amazing — 15,000 people bustling in our nation’s capital, the convention center filled with talking, blogging, gaming and sharing. I have never been to such an event. While ASCD was serious and subdued in many ways, NECC was filled with the sharing of ideas, links, blogs and products. The expertise exhibited by the teachers presenting was amazing. I often think that I am a good teacher and devote hours of my time to become a more effective educator, yet these teachers have inspired me to be even better than I am. I will also comment on this in the next few blogs as I begin my journey to become a master educator.

As I finish this post I do so with the hope that the ASCD and NECC/ISTE begin to forge a bond to help educators raise the academic rigor that our students must experience as they enter this 2.0 world.

I saw this exchange between Gary Stager and Miguel Guhlin late this evening after returning home from the senior awards dinner:

Last year at this time, I was doing a lot of writing about the creation of a class called Connections, a writing class aimed at critical thinking, analytic reading, and centered around the idea of transfer.  We had been working with teachers for a few months on the ideas behind it, but had no model for what it would look like.  During the last few weeks of school here, I am going to be meeting with those teachers to do some exploratory surgery on the class after one year of implementation.

One element that all of the nine teachers who taught the class this year seemed to center on, and something they all indicated generated the most interest from the students, was that of service learning.  What gave me pause was that most of the service learning projects we did all had to do with raising money or buying materials for the causes we employed (one group did raise money to make a series of Kiva loans, which was an interesting process).  Is that what our students are viewing as service learning?

Gary and Miguel’s brief conversation brought this out again for me, and in conversations with my boss lately we have been wondering if there is reason to shift any service-type project away from raising money, and more towards raising awareness.  Timely enough, ASCD released a brief meta-analysis of research on service learning projects.  According to the studies examined, projects with

the strongest effects have generally been found for service learning programs that have the explicit aim of developing active citizenship, in contrast with those that emphasize community service and character building.

So the question as I go into helping the teachers redesign their process is how can we capture the motivation that the students showed this past year for raising money, and harness it in some project that is civic-minded and has little or no connection to raising money and sending it elsewhere.  It jives very well with Gary’s line above.  Let’s see if we can take care of our own house in the hopes that it will make those around us better for it.

It’s coming to that time of the year for school districts around the world where we begin assigning our summer reading to our students.  In the next few weeks, PTO’s and other fund-raising groups will be competing with one another to raise money through the sale of every district’s summer book lists.

Concurrently, students and teachers are pondering the merits of the titles on the lists.  Students are wondering if there are Spark Notes or a movie for the books in question, and teachers are wondering which of the titles they have chosen, if any,  will resonate with students.

I am wondering about the reasons behind summer reading.

My office receives more calls about summer reading than we do about just about any other topic within curriculum, including honors placements.  Surprisingly, half of the calls are complaints about the fact we actually assign summer reading (students need a break), and the other half of the calls are just the opposite: that we don’t assign enough (sharpen the saw).  How do you win?

For some reason, summer reading has become the bane of my existence in that I can’t determine its role in our curriculum.  In looking at it, I see it as playing one of two roles:

• Addendum to the curriculum, meaning that these are books within your curriculum that you cannot get to during the year, but are necessary to the successful completion of the course.  This is truly only applicable in courses where the curriculum is external to the school district, as in AP or IB.
• Demonstrating to students that reading is not solely an academic endeavor, but a lifelong skill.  This model is not to prevalent in our schools today, but exists in communities that show the value of reading through their actions.

I’ve been looking at various models of summer reading, and I’ve asked the question several places, and what I’ve come up with is that in order for summer reading not to fall back on the drudgery associated with it, both from the students standpoint of reading (or Spark-Noting) the books, or the teachers who spend time assessing the work of the students in the first weeks of September.  I don’t know which is worse: having to write a paper about a book that meant nothing to you, or having to read a paper from a student about a book that obviously meant nothing to them.   What’s the solution?  I’ll present two that I liked from the many responses I got out there.  The first is employs the use of social media, the second, not so much.

As I said above, I asked this question of several people, both on Twitter and on the English Companion Ning, and the responses I got were insightful.  Kristin Hokanson gave me this bit of transition, which matched my thinking very closely:

Her first post, which is the bottom image, shows how I view the traditional summer reading process, but the second one shows how her district is toying with the idea that there has to be something more to what the students do with the text; we have to allow them to read together.  In his Wall Street Journal piece from a few weeks ago, writer Steven Johnson describes that the future of reading will involve us reading together and having discussion write on the pages of the texts that are on our e-book readers, so that at any given moment I can discuss with colleagues, or look for discussions that others have had right on the very page I am reading.  Distracting, perhaps, but as an alternate assignment for some sub-groups of students it may work.  Seriously, if I had the ability to take time out and get some clarification while slogging through Jane Eyre as a sophomore, I would have jumped all over it.  That book nearly destroyed my desire to read.  Thank goodness for Holden Caulfield, who arrived swiftly in September.

Others, too, are turning to social media to help them facilitate discussion around summer reading as it’s happening, and leveraging the technology to make the assignments richer.  The English faculty at Fredericksburg Academy have all spoken up about their use of social media with their summer reading as a means to increase engagement.

Late last night, I received this from Candace Follis in response to some prompting:

and it changed some things.  Should summer reading include summer writing, and should that writing be in such a form that it builds communications skills around the text?  Can you have informed dialogue around why a novel is not in your top five?  Simply, can we tell a student that if they don’t like the book, they need to illuminate for us in some capacity why they didn’t love the book?  I am sure several hundred thousand English teachers have done this, but I like how Candace phrased it; it changes the way I see what we ask students to do in the summer.

Lastly, Dana Huff is really the impetus behind this thought stream, and her description of their program is below.  If you look back at some of the posts I wrote during the ASCD Conference this year, you’ll see that I hovered around one idea specifically: modeling expert thinking.  Dana’s school, The Weber School, includes an element in their September evaluation of summer reading that I feel does just that:

Students in grades 10-12 have the opportunity to read books selected for study by faculty members. Students will select which novel they will study prior to the end of second semester the previous year. During the first week of school, students will participate in seminar discussions led by faculty based on these selections. Students will be evaluated by faculty, and these evaluations will be part of the students’ grades for English during the first semester. Faculty members may request that students complete pre-discussion activities. Our goals are to encourage students to become life-long readers who read critically, insightfully, and enjoyably, to give our faculty and staff an opportunity to model the behavior of life-long readers, to familiarize our students with authors and literary works that include a range of genres and universal themes transcending time and place, and to challenge our students to grow, to reach, to stretch, and to broaden their experience of what it means to be human.

In the next few days, I’ll be posting about what we plan on doing here in our district, and appealing to all anyone who has ideas about making it work well.  Whatever we decide to do on the assessment side of summer reading, if we decide to do anything at all, I am going to use Brian Smith’s post as my guiding principle:

“summer-reading-533.jpg.” Online Image. New York Times. August 7, 2008. May 13, 2009 <http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/recommended-reading/>.

In the interest of educating myself, further, I have enrolled in an International School Leadership program offered by Washington State University and the University of San Francisco, through EARCOS. It’s a fascinating exercise in balancing an International Schools perspective (that all of the cohort come with and 1 of the instructors comes with) with a Public School perspective. Good ideas are good ideas, right?

Unfortunately (for international school educators), when it comes to best practices and research-based informed decision-making, most of our data comes from studies done in the US public school environment. Why is that unfortunate? Only because there are some conditions that are far more prevalent in public schools that are minor or non-existent in international schools and that international schools cater to a generally higher socio-economic group than public schools usually have.

That said, allow me to share some potentially useful resources. The Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning has some free resources that are useful for those in educational leadership positions. Another website to mine with a wealth of information on topics that range from UbD, Differentiation and English Language Learning to Educational Leadership, 21st Century Skills development, School Culture/Climate and more is the ASCD . Both offer online courses and other professional development opportunities. Another great resource for useful articles is the National Staff Development Council… check out their articles on building a collaborative culture!

So, what is particulary true for international schools but not so true for public schools? I’m interested to hear YOUR perspective. For example, parent involvement… it seems to me that in public schools we work real hard trying to GET parents involved at different levels and in international schools, the challenge is not GETTING the parents involved it’s making sure there are strong, healthy structures in place to ensure all stakeholders are on the same page and moving forward with a shared vision (also important for public schools but there seem to be more public schools that are at step 1 whereas most international schools appear to further along… agree?).

Feedback is most welcome!

This comment appeared in my email inbox the other day, submitted by a teacher I work with in regards to my Attention, Engagement, Learning post from ASCD :

I really liked your “transfer of responsibility” model. But to a degree I disagree with the idea that students speaking/ interacting is a panacea for learning. I remember in my teaching classes we were drilled with the mantra “leanring is social”. But I think that’s just a new myth. I think instruction has to be differentiated. SOME kids are social learners and some are not. I frequently do partner assignments in Russian at the high school, and one of the consistent comments I got back on my survey was “less partner work”. My other class there ( I have two sections) seems to love it. I’ve also seen partner/ group work devolve into BS sessions or one person giving the answers to the other and the other kid not learning a thing.

So: not a panacea, just another tool to use appropriately.

Thanks for checking it out; it was a great weekend where I was able to really get into excellent discussions about things that matter.  Here’s my take on your reaction.

Yes, some kids are social learners, some are not.  Some kids draw pictures, some are like me and cannot even begin to attempt that.  What the GRR model advocates is not “all social all the time,” but rather a mix of various types of collaborative and cooperative work.  Some of that will involve talking, some may not.

Plus, when you take a close look at what Kagan believes about the brain and what he believes about how we learn, the structures make a ton of sense.  In the model you gave me for your classes, how do you hold each student responsible for what goes on in the discussion?  If, as you say, it devolves into a BS session, what can be done to deter that?  The structures Kagan created all are built with a combination of group and individual accountability whereby, if done right, there is equal responsibility on the part of all cooperative partners.

From my perspective, we as teachers work very hard.  Can we begin to look at what we do not from the standpoint of teachers, but from the standpoint of learners?  If we did, I think we would agree that there is a lot of responsibility that can be transferred to the learner.  This is not just a tweak here or there I am talking about, but a whole paradigm shift in practice.

I’ve posted this before at some point, but in reference to my conversation with Greg Mortenson on Saturday at ASCD, it popped out in my mind as something I should revisit.  Mortenson points out that there are 110 million children in the world that are illiterate.  When you view this video, it begins to take shape mentally.  Much like Chris Jordan does with his work on visualizing waste, this truly pulls the illiteracy problem worldwide into focus.

When you get into school either today or tomorrow, whether it’s on your prep period, or during a walk through the halls, take note of who is doing the talking in your schools.  Is it the students?  The teachers?  Take this one into consideration as well:

Brains are more engaged when people are interacting with one another.

Are students interacting in your school?  Are they placed within situations that promote safe conversations and high-yield accountability?  What happens when these answers are “no?”

Kagan shared with us this image that clearly shows the activity within the brain when various learning tasks are going on.  What do you see?

Here’s what I see.

The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.

Yes, I understand that I just wrote that on Saturday in reference to another session, but it is so much more telling when looking at these PET scans.

Try taking your next lesson plan, your next department meeting or faculty meeting (please do this there) and incorporate some cooperative learning structures into the process.  In looking back at this weekend, I am noticing a connection between two specific ideas: the Kagan structures and the Gradual Release of Responsibility model espoused by Fisher and Frey.  Here is that image once again:

Notice this: your direct instruction is not lost; you can hang onto your chalk and talk.  It just lives in a smaller space within your overall lesson or meeting structure.  That area where Fisher and Frey delineate at Guided Instruction and Collaborative Instruction is where the learning structures of Kagan reside.  So the flow goes “I-We-You(plural)-You(singular).”

Image Credits:

PET Scans: “Kagan Structures Enhance Brain Engagement!” images adapted from Rita Carter’s Mapping the Mind.

Gradual Release of Responsibility.  Image taken from this slidedeck.

Just a heads up: these next few posts are going to all deal with my time spent with Dr. Spencer Kagan.  His generosity in sitting down to answer my questions led to a bunch of information that would be irresponsible of me to put into one post.

For the second time in two days, I’ve been fortunate to sit down and have a truly transformative conversation.  Dr. Spencer Kagan, a psychologist and author of hundreds of books about using cooperative learning structures in schools, sat down with me after his session and we talked about the primitive needs of our brain and how they wreak havoc on modern learning, embedded curriculum and the lack of a separate curriculum for “21st Century Skills.”

Kagan’s session was based on this idea:

“unstructured interaction does not lead to equity in the classroom.”

and it forces you to think for a minute about what equity is, and what it means to decrease the gap in achievement in your classroom.  For me, when I begin thinking of that, or when I listen to a teacher talk about a class with children of widely varying abilities, I think of how difficult it becomes to make sure that beyond helping a child reach a year’s growth in a year’s time, but also making sure that the gap between the high-achievers and low-achievers is minimized.  In his session, Kagan showed us some examples of data he’s collected in which classrooms that had a huge achievement gap and were given direct instruction aimed at raising everyone’s test scores actually did work, only the gap between the high achievers and low achievers remained constant.  He then showed the same situation with an experimental group of a classroom that implemented true cooperative learning structures, and that gap nearly disappeared within a year’s time.

Cooperative Learning is based on four principles, according to Kagan and others, that fit into the nice pneumonic PIES:

• Positive Interdependence – occurs when gains of individuals or teams are positively correlated.
• Individual Accountability – occurs when all students in a group are held accountable for doing a share of the work and for mastery of the material to be learned.
• Equal Participation – occurs when each member of the group is afforded equal shares of responsibility and input.
• Simultaneous Interaction – occurs when class time is designed to allow many student interactions during the period.

Again, and I apologize if this is becoming a trend in my writing, this session focused on a lot of doing, coupled with some amazing information on how the brain worked.  Doing, rather than just sitting hearing about the theory, makes all of the difference in learning.  This was Kagan’s message overall.  Throughout the hour and half, we interacted in several ways with both those we did not know and those we did.  We used touch, interview, and most of laughter, to get ourselves in a ready state for learning to occur.

Whether you are an advocate of this theory, which I am, or not, it was hard to deny that the activities we engaged in: Sage and Scribe, Celebrity Interview, Hagoo, Take-Off/Touchdown, and a quiet signal, did not focus our attention and put us in a position to be receptive to learning not only from Kagan, but from our new colleagues as well.

Kagan, S (2007, February, 8). Simple Structures to Reduce the Achievement Gap. NCCREST, Retrieved March 16, 2009.

Some procedural items from Day 1 at ASCD.

Firstly, wifi.  What a shift from last year in New Orleans.  In much the same light that I’ve been talking about the shift in what type of student I am, attendance at this conference is no different.  Being able to broadcast out and pull in others to this conference is a huge upgrade.

Secondly, the conference center here in Orlando is enormous, almost too big for the amount of people that are here.  Coming from much smaller conferences this year to this one is a little daunting.  I’ve never been to NECC, but what I have read of those who did, it’s similar in scope.  This year’s attendance at ASCD is (including exhibitors): 8,132 and total registration (minus exhibitors): 6,955, and it’s very roomy.

Thirdly, there is a Poland Spring Water cooler in every room, so you don’t have to fork out the $3.25 for a bottle of water or lug around a bottle from outside.  I am big fan of being properly hydrated.

Lastly, the staff from ASCD are fantastic.  Whether it was opening up media credentials to bloggers, giving access to presenters, the quality of presenters, or the scheduling of the presenters so that each session time slot has something to offer for nearly every interest, they have done an outstanding job.

Looking forward to what Day 2 will bring.

This came across my reading/viewing list a while back, but it means more today after having listened and spoken with Greg Mortenson.

Mortenson, recently nominated by the U.S. Congress to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, was an one of those figures you just jump at the chance to meet and talk to. What strikes you immediately about him is his supreme lack of urgency about his time. Here he was, scheduled to catch a flight to take him to a flight to Afghanistan, yet he sat and gave pictures and autographs, a 30 minute interview with three educational bloggers, and then signed over 50 books for people at the conference. He joked to us that he is notorious for missing flights, and I can see why.

His chronicle of his life since 1992, the New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, continues to change the mindsets of those who read it. It details his experiences after a failed attempt to summit Mt. Godwin-Austin, known more commonly as K2. Upon his descent and exodus from the region, he happened upon a village name Korphe. After resting and taking in the hospitality of the villagers, he discovered the schoolchildren there both lacked a school and a teacher. He described the moment in which an elder of the village had passed away and he was visiting his grave site. That elder had given him one piece of advice before dying: “Listen to the wind.” And so he did.

What he heard were the voices of the children in the village of Korphe, and that changed everything. He promised those villagers and those children that he would return and build them a school.

That same wind carried him back to build that school, and several others since then.

Individuals like Mortenson astound me. Meeting him and finding him so relaxed, calm, and giving was a revelation. I had fully expected him to be full of energy and movement–I would expect that from someone who affects as much change in the world as he has. Yet, he was placid and warm, truly concerned about what his message was.

He spoke of girls. He spoke about why education and empowerment were crucial to creating change in the world of our children. He spoke of the real importance of schools, and not once did he mention any of the words we often use when we talk about how we want school to change here in the United States. His message involved community empowerment and the need to be patient enough to wait for change in education, or anything for that matter, because the affect may not be visible for a generation or two. That is why, he says, education is a hard sell to politicians and community leaders.

If you haven’t heard of his program, the one that ultimately worked to raise the money needed to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s called Pennies for Peace. Please visit the site, or if you have already heard of it, donate your little Abraham Lincoln’s to help change the world.

It’s not lost on me that for the longest time I did not think deeply about geo-political issues in the Middle East and the effects of terrorism on the world at large. Now, twice within the last week, two very influential thinkers and doers have pointed at very similar solutions to combating terrorism in the world.

And they both begin and end with two words: Education and Empowerment.

Doug Fisher had a profound affect on my outlook today, and I’ll likely spend the next few days putting together some more of my thoughts that came from his shared session.  At this moment, I’ve got this one stuck in my craw:

We need to model expert thinking for our students.

All too often, he states, we see too much “explaining and interrogating,” and not enough of modeling how we think through a text, how we go about finding information when we really need it.  My standard line when it comes to this has to do a lot with Penny Kittle’s book Write Beside Them and our work with the National Writing Project in that if we are teachers of writing, we must be writers ourselves.  We need to show that there are processes and skills that even we as educators, who have already done this thing called school, still work hard to figure things out.

He works in a high school with his colleague Nancy Frey, called Health Sciences High & Middle College and the shift to the Gradual Release of Responsibility has helped that school make incredible gains in learning and literacy.  What it took was a huge shift from investing in the “magic bullet” programs to an equal or greater investment in teacher ability.  For those of us who are in charge of providing professional development or making sure it is available to our teachers, that’s a huge shift. Amy Sandvold asked “why is it that teachers feel that the Professional Development expert have to be 50 miles away from your district in order for teachers to believe what they say?”

I’d like to see what we could do in our schools if we did invest in our own abilities rather than rely on some external force or program.

Last year, I used a book on assessment from Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in a study group with teachers.  When I saw their name attached to this morning’s panel discussion on Literacy in the 21st Century, I was intrigued.  My thinking was that they would have some great foundational elements to add to the what I’ve been thinking lately.

What happened was much more than what I thought.  Amy Sandvold, a colleague of Angela Maiers, was also on the panel as well.  Here is what I pulled out.

Fisher, Frey and Sandvold advocated a Gradual Release of Responsibility in the relationship between teachers and students.

A few years back, when I really began this journey, I saw Alan November present about the need for teachers to outsource what they do to the students to prevent them from being the only voice in the classroom.  What they advocated and described here is exactly that.  Focused instruction, according to Fisher, is pointed modeling of expert thinking and behavior. It’s in this mode of instruction where we help students build the requisite background knowledge and vocabulary they need for success in higher level tasks.  This argument, which is raging throughout the educational world right now, about content v. skills, then becomes moot.  Is there direct instruction in this model?  Absolutely, but it is followed by gradually removing the emphasis on what you as a teacher do in front of your students.  Once you model and instruct, move into more collaborative and shared modes of teaching and learning, until the end result is full on student responsibility.

And this from Frey:

Students and teachers must know stuff in order to do stuff.
Teachers now stuff.
Students know stuff too
Teachers and students learn from one another by interacting and collaborating.

I truly believe that learning takes place in many forms and through many processes.  One that I will recommend to anyone is that of conversation and communal learning among students and teachers.  Even today, sitting there discussing our greatest learning experience we ever had (my partner had a great one where she remembers finally being able to move from snow-plow skiing to parallel skiing), I didn’t realize my own until we began talking to others in the room and listening to the stories of people learning.  Collaboration is a powerful tool for learning.

There is so much more to come out of this session, but I am finding that it’s hard to process, especially in light of what occurred directly after this session.  That’s coming too.

Thoughts on Workshops

In my 25 years is this biz, I have been to scores of workshops of varying quality. Some have made a tremendous impact such as the first time I saw Wiggins and McTigue on their early “tour” describing the marvelous simplicity of Understanding By Design or Heidi Hayes Jacobs espousing the tenets of curriculum mapping. I have also walked out on a few as well, especially workshops sponsored by companies with a pecuniary interest. Fortunately, ASCD now segregates this variety within the Annual Conference Program Book.

Over the course of the last 13 years, I have attended the annual ASCD Conference regularly. No single professional development opportunity has made more of a difference in developing my educational philosophy and sifting for me what is truly important as an educational leader. Yesterday I attended the pre-conference session on The Art of Leadership with Principal and ASCD author Thomas Hoerr. Based on his book of the same title, Tom shared many thoughts on life as a Principal, how it has changed from his early years, and what leadership will look like as we travel through the millennium.

It was a worthwhile day and reminded me that workshops are primarily beneficial not just for new learning but for time to reflect on what we already know. There is so much noise in the Principalship and in fact, most jobs, that the time to reflect on one’s impact on a school is so valuable. Not everything Tom shared was new information, but my interaction among fellow colleagues added to my “toolbox” and allowed me to reflect.

I just stopped into the Convention Center here to pick up my media kit, and I immediately noticed a big shift from last year’s conference in New Orleans: tech.  Flat screens, laptops, live streaming of sessions, and a dedicated Technology Corridor (that’s going to be a separate post).  All things that had they been here last year, I wouldn’t have stuck out so much sitting all by myself in session rooms because the only viable electrical outlets for people with laptops were on the fringes of sessions.

Seriously, there is a decided effort on the part of ASCD to be visible, to pull in “21st Century Skills,” a word that the world has claimed as its buzzword du jour, and if you look through the session descriptions, there is a huge focus on these topics:

• Visual Literacy and infusion of Visual Art into the classroom
• Using assessment wisely to allow students to show they understand
• Web 2.0 and its use in the classroom
• 21st Century Skills and their broad definition

Over the last few days, I’ve spent some time looking at the sessions that immediately call out to me as valuable in what I do on a daily basis.  If you’ve been following some of the thoughts here lately, especially the dialogue between Scott McLeod and on a recent links post, you’ll understand that there has to be a marriage between teaching “soft skills,” and making sure content knowledge is sufficiently understood.  There is a balance we need to strive for in our work over the next few years in curriculum writing.  Scott really hit it here in this reference:

In Built to Last, Collins & Porras describe how visionary organizations do not “oppress themselves with … the ‘Tyranny of the OR’” (i.e., citizenship preparation v. employment preparation) but instead “liberate themselves with the ‘Genius of the AND.’” As they note, yin and yang are “both at the same time, all of the time.” Why is this so hard for educators to do?

I’d like to find some examples here at ASCD that show me this is happening, or at least show ways in which I can move forward to help teachers create learning environments that are innovative for students and teachers alike, yet provide a solid academic foundation for the future.  As I have said before, it never was an Either/Or.

The second major focus I have this weekend is to leave here with more actionable content which I am taking to mean both teaching strategy and assessment strategy.  When I work with teachers, especially in light of all the buzz about the influx of creativity and innovation ideas into the NJCCCS, they often ask me how they are supposed to teach these skills.  The sessions I have chosen center around giving teachers strategies for stretching student minds within their content areas.  In my own personal practice, I always fall back on the Kagan Structures and other forms of cooperative learning (and it just so happens, Kagan is presenting on Sunday).  With that creativity in how we approach teaching, I’d like to explore some innovation in how we assess our students.

Be sure to pick up the twitter feed also, which you can find here and here.

Later on this week, I will be leaving for the ASCD Conference in Orlando, and thanks to Scott McLeod and the generous group over at ASCD, I will be covering the conference through this medium.  With that responsibility comes some pretty cool benefits, one being that I can pop into ticketed sessions that I otherwise would not have been able to get into.

In that light, I thought I might throw it out there to the readership here (whatever that number might be) and ask if there were any topics that might be of specific interest to you.  I am sitting down to plan my conference over the next two days, so here are the main headings that ASCD gives out:

• Creativity and 21st Century Skills
• From Research to Practice
• Networking Opportunities
• Urban Education

Navigating the ASCD website is proving to be a little tricky, but the sessions are all available for browsing if you are so inclined.  On a personal level, my focus is going to be on visual literacy, critical thinking, assessment, and reading strategies.  Yes, I know, rather narrow. If there is a session you see that might fit that bill, or something you would like some firsthand knowledge of, drop a comment and I’ll do my best to gather some firsthand info for you.

Starting in elementary school, my sister and I got a dollar a week in allowance. It may not seem like much now but back then it was enough for two Spider-man comics or four Hershey’s bars or a large handful of Bazooka Joe bubble gum. I know because between us, my sister was the saver. There was always something that I “needed.” My allowance was spent as soon as it was in hand.

Outside of being told to save it or hearing my father complain about how quickly we run through it, money wasn’t spoken about in our house. It wasn’t until college when it actually became something seriously discussed. But by then it was too late for me. I had already developed a habit of “need.” And that habit would go unchecked even after college when I feeling the weight of my student loans and credit card bills.

I had been living well above my means and it was my sister, the saver, who bailed me out. I don’t want to think about what would have happened if things turned out differently. What if my sister had “needs” too? What if she couldn’t bail me out? There were alternatives but none that wouldn’t have left a lasting scar on my credit report (impacting my ability to make certain positive decisions about the direction my life would take). Given a second chance to get things right, I decided then that I needed to reevaluate my “needs.”

My eldest is only starting to learn about money. He is learning to identify the values of different coins and how one coin can be broken down into other coins (e.g. a quarter can be two dimes and a nickel). As a teacher, the act of breaking one value down into smaller values is a “real” hands on way of teaching number sense. As a parent, it is a nice start to frank ongoing conversations about money and its role in life. While you don’t want to teach greed or miserly behavior, you also don’t want to ignore lessons on budgeting and financial responsibility. Lessons that should not be left until times of fiscal hardship to be taught.

The lead article in the February issue of the ASCD’s Education Update (Volume 51 Number 2) stated financial literacy as an “imperative in economic hard times.” It described the initiatives some states are taking to provide their students with “strategies to help their students deal with with the real economic world so that it doesn’t overwhelm them after they graduate.”

While I am disheartened that the program I am associated with was not mentioned in the article, I am happy that personal finance education has hit the mainstream. Perhaps I am being overly optimistic but dedicating the lead story in its Education Update signifies that the ASCD and like organizations are ready to bring the current niche subject of financial education into the mainstream classroom (potentially, as a regular part of the school day).

Kiplinger editor, Janet Bodnar also writes its money advice column for parents, “Raising Money Smart Kids.” While I have not agreed with all of her advice, I do agree with her top six suggestions: “Start early. Start small. Keep it simple. Make it fun. Set a goal. And reward your children’s efforts.”

As teachers, the challenge of “starting early” is integrating essential life skills in saving  into the growing regimen of high stakes tests. Any program in financial literacy that is adopted would need to provide opportunities for students to practice and hone those academic skills which are rigorously tested.

As parents, the challenge of “starting early” is one of routine. How do we insure our children remember the importance of saving without seeming like we are nagging (potentially causing the opposite effect)?  We also have to readily identify opportunities for our children to practice the money skills we teach them.

My wife and I have taken tiny steps to look for opportunities for our eldest to practice “money skills.” Simple things like estimating the change he should get back when he purchases something at the store. We have been trying to implement allowance based on chores and homework. The challenge remains instilling it as habit. It is easy enough when the waters are calm but given a particularly hectic day or two, it can take weeks before we get ourselves back on track. However, we keep trying.

There are a lot of financial literacy materials out there for us to use. In addition to most banks and financial institutions having educational materials, there are also a number of not-for-profit organizations and foundations providing teaching resources. Among them, the non-profit organization, Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy. They provide a “clearinghouse” of educational resources and reports on the state of financial literacy in the US.

I strongly believe that the overwhelming number of choices we have in financial literacy materials is a good thing. However, I also believe that the most effective resources at our disposal is good old common sense, establishing effective money habits, and a cliche here and there; “If it sounds too good to be true,” “You don’t get something for nothing,” “Neither a borrower or a lender be,” and so on.