Every One Learns - Pedagogy, Technology, Motivation

Is PBL Supported by Research?

2007-10-31T09:14:00.000-05:00

I often get asked if the Project Approach is supported by research.

Thankfully, The George Lucas Educational Foundation (Edutopia) has answered that question.

I just came across this page on their site:

Research Validates Project-Based Learning
A growing body of academic research supports the use of project-based learning in schools as a way to engage students, cut absenteeism, boost cooperative learning skills, and improve test scores.

Misperceptions about Internet Safety and Filtering

2007-10-23T08:52:00.000-05:00

(Warning: possible rant to follow...)

Here's another article with information about filtering. Here's a quote:

The dangers from predators on social networking sites has been overblown, resulting in adult hysteria and Internet overblocking.

The article goes on to offer more data to support the notion that we've gone overboard.

And here's one on why filters will never be enough.

And here is another post about why one blogger doesn't like filters.

And an Edutopia article about blocking, filtering, and lockdowns.

And a tongue-in-cheek post on how we're really blocking engagement:

Tired of your students learning rather than paying attention to you, the teacher? Then get your school to install the Engagement Filter, guaranteed to take enough enjoyment out of online activities that students will no longer be tempted to use the school's computers or network.

And here's one on the Educational benefits of Social Networking.

And here are my bookmarks on "fear."

Censorship vs. Selection, and Fear vs. Care

2007-10-23T08:25:00.000-05:00

I've always been impressed with the power of Digital Storytelling when working with students (especially when Digital Stories are the products of student learning)!

Recently, I saw this on Wes Fryer's blog:

I will note, however, that Alan Levine’s previously posted “50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story” project is just amazing. That’s right, 50 different web 2.0 tools for digital storytelling, and 50 different versions of the same story Alan has created using those tools. Hopefully at least some of these storytelling options are not blocked in your school district!

It had so many great resources, I sent the link to our Pedagogical Coach. She quickly wrote back:

Really cool - unfortunately, as I am browsing through, a lot of the tools are blocked!

This is the same district that is pretty good about unblocking sites we request, but when we wanted 3 specific videos on YouTube unblocked for our students, the response was, "We will not unblock any YouTube sites." Apparently, that includes the ones with educational value...

I understand the strategic importance of filtering in "encouraging" students toward appropriate use. But I don't understand when there are policies that prevent accessing sites vetted by and of value to teachers.

And I'm not sure that policy is working. Our students still manage to reach inappropriate sites by finding new proxy sites faster than we can block them. My favorite Dr. Phil quote is becoming, "How's that working for you?" Clearly the filter isn't working for us. Except in keeping us from great resources that might engage students. I don't understand the decision-maker's holding so firmly to such policies.

In Maine's laptop program, teachers are much more successful with a 3 pronged approach:

light to moderate filtering to keep students from the most obvious inappropriate sites
teaching students appropriate use with teacher supervision (even just walking around the room while teaching or having students work)
designing lessons and activities that engage students (kids engaged in their work don't really find time to go to inappropriate sites)

Of all of those, engagement is the most important, yet we tend to find mechanical solutions to people problems...

In a recent keynote, Will Richardson makes the argument that for educational & economic reasons, we need these sites unblocked and for kids to use them vigorously! Our students need to learn expression, communication, innovation, collaboration, and creativity. Technology (and the Internet) is a critical tool to doing this work and can't be done as easily when great resources are blocked. Clearly teaching students about appropriate use is an important part of this. But clearly these are the tools to engage students, as well!

Why then do we block?

I think part of the answer is fear.

Doug Johnson at Blue Skunk Blog writes some good stuff about filtering and fear mongering in relation to misperceptions and overreactions to the internet:

A colleague just connected me with a great article about the difference between censorship and selection.

The article points out

Selection seeks to protect the right of the reader to read; censorship seeks to protect—not the right—but the reader himself from the fancied effects of his reading. The selector has faith in the intelligence of the reader; the censor has faith only in his own.

I have friends in Texas who I think take a great approach. They start by blocking most things. But all it takes is a teacher saying they need access to a site and about 4 minutes and boom! they have access.

When will we focus on due diligence and not fear and censorship?

When will we understand that the new tools that are part of our students' culture will be powerful tools for teachers to teach academics?

When will we work to leverage them, instead of blocking them and both alienate students and set them up to break our rules?

When will be use more psychology and less logic?

Standards-Based Academic Progression - Chugach School District

2007-10-22T18:18:00.000-05:00

Recently, I wrote about the our need to move away from a course credit based system toward one based on "hours logged" and "standards met." Part of that work is trying to find other schools that have similar policies. And you usually find those leads through other, unrelated conversations.

One of those instances led me to the Chugach School District. Their standards-based program has replaced grade levels and their report cards are now 3-ring binders showing how students are progressing with meeting standards.

This from their website:

The Chugach School District Office is based in Anchorage, Alaska. Chugach's 214 students are scattered throughout 22,000 square miles of mostly isolated and remote areas of South Central Alaska. With 30 faculty and staff, CSD is the smallest organization to ever win a Baldrige Award. CSD delivers instruction in education from preschool up to age 21 in a comprehensive, standards-based system. Education occurs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Instruction is delivered in the work place, in the community, in the home and in school. Half (50%) of the students in the Chugach School District are minorities (Alaska Natives).

There is a nice Edutopia article about the district's program.

But they are also great because they have lots of information and resources on their web site. This includes information about the following

Thanks to Joe Makley for the tip!

What are schools to kids? And what should they be?

2007-10-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

Following yesterday’s school shooting in Cleveland (a school that isn’t a lot different than ours in Buffalo!), Gary Stager has written about his worries about children and schools. Below is an excerpt from that article:

Allow me to ask an unpleasant question. Why is it that kids are shooting up schools? They don’t seem to attack video arcades, bookstores or houses of worship. Perhaps they don’t feel as “connected” to school as we might like to believe. I in no way excuse such violent behavior, but do believe that urban schools need to be an oasis in a sea of poverty, deprivation, violence and depression. Schools have an obligation to be the best part of a young person’s day; a place so wondrous, beautiful and engaging that a child feels wanted, respected and part of something bigger than themselves.

Such an environment would be inviting, personal and filled with books, art, music, sports and most importantly, adults who know each child and can maintain a meaningful relationship with them. Urban educators know all too well that No Child Left Behind and the culture of name-calling that accompanies it have pushed schools past the tipping point from which they can no longer make schools hospitable to the intentions of children.

It speaks loud and clear to the importance of school climate and teachers connecting with students...

When will we learn that we need to use more psychology about our business and less logic?

When will we learn that kids are not our raw material to be pushed through our fabrication plant? They are people.

When will we learn?

The complete article is here.

An Alternative Policy of Academic Progression

2007-10-09T08:30:00.000-05:00

When you've got students who haven't done well in a traditional school program, and you're trying to reengage them in learning through a nontraditional program, it's hard to give credits the usual way (seat time and course credits). So we're working on an alternative approach for awarding credits and for allowing students to progress from grade to grade.

We really need this alternative policy for academic progression for the following reasons:

The majority of our students are over-age and have not been successful in a traditional school program;
Our educational program is delivered through real world learning (including multidisciplinary, high interest, community-based projects, learning by doing, internships, and community partnerships), instead of through conventional courses
We are committed to reviving hope in their students and providing an option that will result in higher graduation rates and more students continuing with advanced training or higher education; and
We are committed to our students meeting the state learning standards and other state requirements;

Since the vision is for students at our school to be learning content primarily through working on real world projects and problems, the products of their work provide the evidence of their learning. But any given project might involve standards from several different disciplines, and even from within the same discipline, content might represent standards from several different courses. We also have an online learning system to support the learning of content. There are diagnostic tests that show what content students already know, and the system can be used when students take their laptops home, not just in school.

All these factors suggest that we need a flexible system for awarding credit and promoting students. But we're looking for “flexibility of when; not flexibility of what” (ie, students will meet state requirements, but perhaps not along traditional sequences or timelines).

We're working on a proposal for a policy of academic progression that would be based on awarding credit for “hours logged” and “standards met.” Students would earn Project Credits for a certain number of hours that they log (approved by their teachers). Using an assessment rubric, teachers may add or subtract hours based on the quality of the student work (great project, a little more credit; lax project, a little less credit).

Content area grades would be awarded based on the number and quality of Learning Targets (standards) mastered for that discipline during that grading period. Students would then need to accumulate a certain number of Project Credits and have mastered a certain number of Learning Targets in order to be promoted to the next grade level. Additionally, students would have to master all required Learning Targets in order to graduate.

This draft policy is based on the Policy for Academic Progress at the Minnesota New Country School, a very successful, and nationally recognized, project-based learning school.

Documentation will be the backbone of this proposal. Project Foundry, a web-based project and learning management tool, has already been implemented at the school. Project Foundry allows both teachers and students to design projects, including correlating the work to Learning Targets. Teachers then use the system to communicate with students; assign projects, reflective prompts, and assessments; review work; and rate the students’ level of proficiency in the relevant Learning Targets. Students can post their work (providing the evidence of learning), and log their hours worked.

As mentioned earlier, an online learning system provides support in the learning of content. Its time logged feature, diagnostic tools, online lessons, and assessments provide additional concrete documentation of student learning, even when students are working beyond typical school hours and/or at locations other than school.

This system can help students who have to retake classes because of course failures. By taking diagnostic tests, they can receive credit for course content (standards) they have already mastered, and then focus only on the content not yet mastered. This compares favorably with the conventional system of having to repeat the entire course, whether they know the material or not. (I'll never forget the poor girl I had in Algebra I years ago. She had already failed the course twice, but was very smart, and at this point was just too bored to sit through a third complete year of the course, just to learn the couple of pieces she hadn't mastered yet. Of course, it ended up as failing for the third time.)

By defining traditional courses by the standards they represent, transfer students can easily be awarded credit for meeting standards from courses they have already passed.

Life experiences, such as internships, are also easily integrated into this system. Students log their hours and supervisors or teachers rate their acquisition of knowledge and skill relative to the Learning Targets using rubrics that clearly identify quality of work.

Paradigm Shifting is Still Hard Work - But Maybe It's a Semantics Problem...

2007-10-07T20:20:00.000-05:00

Last year I wrote about how paradigm shifting is hard work. We've made progress, but seeing some teachers still struggle has me thinking much more about this issue. Why are they having a hard time? What information or experiences could I share with them that would help them understand or to teach in ways more in keeping with the vision for our program? Why are we struggling and how can I help?

Could it be be that part of the struggle is that even though we use the same words, we have different pictures in our heads of what we mean by those words?

One of the things that really bothered me last year is that some of the teachers seemed to reduce our complex PBL units to a couple of activities.

Last year, our Theme Park Design unit had in-depth, scaffolded activities leading up to (hopefully) a deep understanding of marketing, business plans, and the story telling and engineering that goes into designing rides and attractions.

Some of the teachers threw out most of the scaffolding activities and jumped right to writing a business plan. Others, instead of doing the carefully crafted string of marketing activities, simply had students create a newspaper ad for their theme park.

As we're work on our first new project unit for the year, I worry that teachers will again dismiss activities they don't value, instead of at least asking why they are there. (ok - I wrote large parts of several of our PBL units and put every activity there for a reason - a really good reason... And maybe I'm a little bit of a control freak - or at least like the units I crafted... And maybe my feelings are a little hurt when they dismiss my activities...)

Of course, I don't mind if teachers modify the unit, skipping activities or adding their own - as long as it enhances the intent of the unit, or finds an alternate route to achieving the same goals.

But the other day, I was reading Start with the Pyramid: Real-World Problems Motivate Students, and it reminded me that an important part of our organizing the curriculum around PBL was promoting rigorous, in-depth inquiry.

Could it be that the teachers who dismissed the projects last year simply have a different mental model of projects than I do? What if part of why some of our teachers (especially the ones who so actively blocked our work last year) think of projects simply as fun activities? Making a print ad. Building a theme park model out of pipe cleaners. Writing a short paragraph describing a new ride.

Well, if that were the case, no wonder they thought conventional teaching was so much more effective, and believed blocking our program was the right thing to do for kids. I would, too!

But my vision includes rigorous, in-depth inquiry. I was frustrated with ads and pipe cleaner models because they lacked the depth and the rigor. But maybe the fault was mine for not better communicating what we meant by "projects."

This year, I'm trying to be more clear. Now, I'm including in each activity of the units I'm writing a section headed "desired outcomes." I'm including both process outcomes (like "Students are aware of what constitutes quality work within the context of PSAs," and "Students understand how their PSAs and their work on the PSAs will be evaluated") and product outcomes (like "the PSA Rubric" or "Health Topic Research Journal").

It might not help, but I'm hoping that it might add clarity to why an activity is included. I'm hoping, too, that when teachers drop activities, it will allow me to ask "Help me understand how, if you aren't doing these activities, you are going to achieve the following desired outcomes?" And it will allow me to ask, "Is the way you're doing the unit rigorous? Does it include in depth inquiry?"

Will it help? We'll see.

And I'll let you know.

It's Like Jogging Through Molasses

2007-10-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

Looking at how school opened this year, it's clear we've made a lot of progress in the last year. Recall that we're trying to reengage overage underachievers with a curriculum based on high-interest, community based projects, a teaching style that is new to most of our teachers, and uncomfortable to some of them.

In the last year, our teachers successfully completed one unit on theme park design and organized a public exhibition of student products, including a private viewing for VIPs that included executives from two local theme parks. We've had some good press coverage. Some of the most reluctant teachers have moved on to other contexts and we've hired some new teachers that I think are going to be fantastic. And the opening week of school was pretty quiet.

But we still have teachers that are struggling with teaching through projects. A couple who have stayed on with us are still questioning if kids can learn through projects. And some of our teachers feel like they are slaves to two masters: the state requirements (organized by course credits and high stakes exams), and our educational program.

But they are working at it and giving it an honest try. Teachers are working to customize and teach project-based units we're supplying to them. And some of our teachers are working to design new units.

We're working hard on making this year Phase 2 with more tools and units and moving closer to the vision for our program. We've added a project & curriculum management system. There's software on the laptops to restore them to the original setup, helping to avoid inappropriate downloads. Our schedule has both project time and time for more conventional teaching. We're working to develop four new long term PBL units. And we're working to establish a policy of academic progression based on "hours logged" and "standards met" (with the state DOE's encouragement) instead of the traditional state approach.

It is incredibly slow going. Everything we do seems to take twice as long as anticipated. And there are always unexpected set backs or surprises that keep us from moving any faster.

Both our project management system and our restore software are having problems that we're trying to iron out. The administrators are still tweaking our schedule and have recently made significant changes to student placements on clusters and in homerooms, even though we've just been through most of a community building unit. Even though everyone likes the idea of the new policy for academic progression (including our contacts at the state DOE), they are reluctant to move away from traditional courses and their fears of the state high-stakes test until the new policy is approved by the state. I'm having a hard time getting in touch with one of the authors of one of our new PBL units to find out what progress her writing team is making. And when I check out classrooms to see how teachers are doing with our current project unit, it seems like some teachers are skipping activities and jumping over sections of the unit, or substituting their project time for their conventional teaching.

I used to get really frustrated by this slow progress. I used to worry that we would never move forward. But then I realized that we WERE making progress - it was slow and full of detours and surprises and delays, but it was progress.

But I've come to the conclusion that this kind of complex school reform work is a lot like jogging through molasses.

It might be slow, and progress might require a lot of energy, just like jogging through molasses, but I also realized that as long as we were moving forward, we were doing all right.

And since then, the set backs and surprises haven't seemed so bad, and don't frustrate me too much (ok - they still surprise me sometimes!). And I can keep working on making sure we're moving forward.

Evaluations from the Year 1

2007-10-04T11:40:00.000-05:00

We've just finished our first month of our second year of school. It's a good time to reflect on where we've been and where we're going.

One source of that reflection should certainly be our end of year evaluations. We received two external evaluation reports: one from University of Buffalo and the other from the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network. Both were realistic about the challenges we've had and how much more work we have to do. But they were also both every optimistic. UB said, “Given the problems of suspension and delinquency apparent in the students admitted to the school, the ResulTech blended curriculum at Academy School@44 has been largely successful in the school’s first academic year, even though the blended curriculum has not yet been fully implemented."

One of the things some teachers kept saying over and over was that our projects and online curriculum were not aligned with NY State standards. (Now, I think some of that is concern about helping students meet state requirements, but I also think some of that is some teachers looking for excuses not to change...) But both studies came back saying that both our projects and our online curriculum are strongly aligned to standards. "The curriculum at the school has been carefully indexed with the NY State standards, and appears to meet the state requirements.” – University of Buffalo Evaluation

Additionally, we clearly made the needle move with our students:

Improved Grades: Large proportions of students had improved their grades in English (50.6%), math (48.4%), and science (45.9%). Nearly 50% of the students improved their overall average grade across all subjects, indicating largely positive results given the problems associated with these students in the previous school year, and given the fact that the curriculum was at an early stage of implementation.” – University of Buffalo Evaluation

Improved Attendance: “It was found that 68.5% of those who were involved with the Autoskills program decreased their number of absences, as compared to 31.5% of those who had not yet received the program: those who had received the Autoskills reading program were 2 times more likely to decrease their number of absence.” – University of Buffalo Evaluation

Improved Suspension Rate: Overall, out-of-school suspensions and re-suspensions were reduced by 80% – University of Buffalo Evaluation

Both studies made clear that teachers who more closely followed our program had students make more gains and do better. Further, The National Dropout Prevention Center/Network evaluates school district dropout prevention programs and specifically alternative education programs all over the country. The model on which Academy School is based was found to be among the strongest they had studied in the way it employs proven strategies for students at risk of not graduating. (see what the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network had to say about the ResulTech School Model.)

Researchers from both studies shared with us that the evidence pretty much indicates that it is time for everyone to support the continued implementation of the program, and with fidelity to the model. “The essence of the ResulTech model is the systemic integration of many proven strategies in the program. Because the strategies are fully integrated into the model, the model should be implemented as it was designed.” - National Dropout Prevention Network Evaluation

This is People Work

2007-09-21T17:04:00.000-05:00

Our school has opened again this year. We're still working on getting the project-based curriculum in place, but it is still a challenge.

We have some new tools in place: TakingItGlobal.org helps us make global connections with our work, and Project Foundry is helping us manage projects, and we have several new project units, including one on community building and another on solving a health issue in our community.

But even with the new tools in place and hiring some new staff and some leaving who didn't believe in the program, we're having challenges (and why not!? It's only our second year):

Some of our teachers aren't completely convinced that they should teach through projects, instead of traditional methods.
And there is still the perception that we are serving two masters - the traditional course system (giving students the courses they need to graduate) and our program based on real world learning *** and of system of awarding credit based on "hours logged" and "standards met" (more on this later) - at least until we get State approval.
And there seems to be conflicting views of how to run a nontraditional school for students who don't do well in traditional school programs: do we "keep our thumb" on them and "show them who's boss" or should we try to have teachers connect with students and engage them in learning...
There were delays in deciding where (which clusters and homerooms) to place students meaning both that laptops were delayed being deployed to students and that three weeks into school, we're going to make some major shifts in student placement (long after we've done some community building activities...)

But we have deployed the laptops. And Monday, the last (?) changes in student placement will be made. And teachers have a schedule that supports both the new project-based units and more conventional teaching.

And I walked the building this morning, visiting classrooms, observing teaching, talking with students and teachers, listening to their concerns and thinking of solutions, telling everyone to work hard but also to have a nice weekend, and complementing them on their work. And I realized that this work isn't really about laptops, and units, and standards, and schedules, and class lists.

This work is about people: both the adults and the children. People who need to feel like they belong and are valued. People who don't want to be pulled in too many directions. People who want to know they are doing a good job. People who don't want to be told to do contradictory things. People who want clarity. People who want guidance and direction. People who want to do a good job (and will if you let them). People who want to be listened to and validated.

This is people work.

Systems Thinking: Logic vs Psychology

2007-07-03T08:56:00.000-05:00

My step-son says that I don't have a simple answer for anything. I can never seem to give him a simple yes or no answer. The world doesn't seem that simple to me and there are always nuances, contexts, and situations to be considered...

I'm a big fan of Robert B. Parker (also a Colby grad!) and his Spenser novels, as well as his books about other characters, including Jesse Stone. In fact, I've been watching the Jesse Stone movies with Tom Selleck this weekend. Part of what I admire about Parker's characters is how grounded and centered they are. They see things with a clarity. And they can give simple answers.

Much as I admire that, I have decided that I don't have simple answers because I am a systems thinker. I see my world by the systems that operate within it, especially the complex systems. (and I guess I should say that I think the world needs both the folks who can cut through the complexities and see simple answers, as well as the ones to understand the complexities...)

Few systems are as complex as education.

I've been thinking a lot about education lately, especially as it relates to creating schools that work for all children. Over the last year, my work has focused on schools for hard to teach students and on 1to1 learning with laptop initiatives (the two usually overlap considerably when each is done well). And I especially wonder how it is that competent educators (good people) make decisions and policies that seem to not work very well.

From my perspective, a decision or policy works if it supports the working of the system. You can tell if it doesn't work if the system is still upset or in some level of tourmoil.

I'm not sure I can explain this like I want to, but I guess I should say here that when I say "system," I don't mean the "education system" or "school system" (the policies that govern a district, school, classroom or other jurisdiction), but rather the system of learning. If generally kids do their work, follow the rules, learn and are engaged then the system "works." If kids are breaking rules, not learning, refusing to do their work, then the system doesn't work. If a school has a high breakage rate on laptops or they go missing, the the system isn't working. When breakage and missing rates are negligible, then the system works.

So why do seemingly good policies not work?

I've come to the conclusion that problem lies with logic. Good people use logic to make decisions. But education is a complex system based on people, not things. Therefore, we need to use psychology, not logic. By definition, logic makes sense in systems that focus on things or stuff. But it is psychology that makes sense in people systems.

So, when I do Motivating Underachiever workshops, or Doing 1to1 Right workshops, here are some of the "Logic vs. Psychology" ideas I've been emphasizing lately:

Logic says 1to1 is a technology initiative. Psychology says it is a learning initiative.

Logic says students should learn (it is for their own good). Psychology says we must ask ourselves why students would want to learn.

Logic says do workshops on how to use the various software on the laptops. Psychology says do workshops on how the software can be used to help students learn academic content.

Logic says that a teacher must cover content. Psychology says that a teacher must connect with students personally.

Logic says schools should ban disruptive technology (cell phones, mp3 players, blogs, chat, social networks, etc.). Psychology says if a tool is part of the child's culture, then we should find academic uses for it.

Logic says filter the Internet heavily. Psychology says filter some, but mostly educate students.

Logic says use technology to do what teachers have always done, but more effectively. Psychology says use technology in new ways to engage students and help them learn.

Logic says supplying the tools is enough. Psychology says apply some positive pressure and support to get teachers to use the technology effectively for academic purposes.

Logic says breakage and theft is about the technology and the kids. Psychology says breakage and theft is about how the technology is being used for academics and the leadership around the technology initiative.

Logic says tech folks need to protect the stuff. Psychology says tech folks need to enable engagement and the learning.

Logic says a school is doing well if the easy to teach students are doing well. Psychology says that a school is doing well if the hard to teach students are doing well.

Logic says give students information. Psychology says help students make meaning of information.

Logic asks, did the teacher cover the material? Psychology asks, did the students learn it?

Logic says that technology is a separate line item. Psychology says that all the expenses related to technology are integrated throughout the budget (infrastructure, instruction, staff, etc.).

Logic asks, how smart are you? Psychology asks, how are you smart?

Logic says teachers should speak to students with authority. Psychology says teachers should speak to students as people.

Logic says a teacher can select which teaching styles they choose to employ. Psychology says that there are high-impact and low-impact pedagogies, and teachers should choose wisely.

Logic says pass out laptops to teachers as soon as the school gets them. Psychology says pass out the laptops at an inservice where school leaders can set the tone on how they will be used in the classroom.

Let's try to use a little less logic and a little more psychology.

Doing 1to1 Right Question - Effectiveness

2007-06-29T13:31:00.000-05:00

At NECC07 this week, I did a workshop titled "Doing 1to1 Right!" When I got home, I had an email from a participant asking for any research I could share on the impact of 1to1 learning with laptop initiatives on student achievement and the relative impact of 1to1 vs. carts. I thought others might have similar questions and so am posting part of my response to him:

I have some resources here that might help. Some time ago, I did a web site focused on advocating for 1to1.

Some of the articles might help you:

One of the issues with 1to1, when it is implemented well, is that it tends to effect higher order thinking skills much more than it effects the acquisition of facts. In other words, it might not effect standardized tests much. That is the major reason the lead researchers looking at Maine’s project have moved away from looking at testing for measuring the impact of the initiative.

Also, it isn’t the access to technology that impacts the learning, it is the quality of teaching that follows from the access to tools. That speaks to the quality (and importance) of professional development and leadership to an initiative.

Policy, Filtering, Blocking: Disruptive Technology and Student Culture

2007-06-29T12:58:00.000-05:00

Cell phones, blogs, social networks, YouTube, IM, email. Lots of schools block them. They find student use of them distracting and disruptive.

But how successful are they in blocking them? Most educators from such schools I've talked with say they aren't very successful. That it is an ongoing battle to get kids to keep their technologies and gadgets out of school.

This doesn't surprise me. These tools are part of our students' culture and to try to keep students from using them simply reinforces the notion that schools have nothing to do with their world.

I've been saying in workshops for some time that if a tool is part of the students' culture, that we should find ways to use them for academic purposes. I learned that from Gary Brown some time ago. It was reinforced this week when I met with him again at NECC07 (see here). Gary says, "Blocking is paranoia," and about his school system, "We don't block - we educate."

Now Doug Johnson has captured the essence of this generation gap with is recent post about the Engagement Filter. "Tired of your students learning rather than paying attention to you, the teacher?" he writes, going on, "Then get your school to install the Engagement Filter, guaranteed to take enough enjoyment out of online activities that students will no longer be tempted to use the school's computers or network." He's got a screen shot of the interface, too!

These are simply the tools students use to communicate, discuss, think, and learn. Blocking them is a mistake.

Do we need to help keep students safe (and teach them do the same for themselves)? - You bet!

Do we need to reduce the level of inappropriate use of these tools? - you bet!

But we need to do it through a combination of figuring out how to use them for academic purposes and by educating our students.

On Blogging...

2007-06-27T20:34:00.000-05:00

Wow! I love what I've been doing this year. I'm working with a group that does schools designed to motivate kids.

We're a diverse partnership with expertise on business, community & business partnerships, school leadership, school organization, PR & marketing, curriculum design, educational programs, instruction & pedagogy, project-based learning, and professional development.

I've never worked with such a group with such a diverse skill set, and it has me convinced that the success we're slowly seeing is because of this comprehensive approach - not just addressing one or two of these areas.

But it has been hard work! Work that I love, but work that starts early in the morning and gets me back to the hotel late in the evening, and home for a couple days at a time before returning to the airport.

It's great work that needs (and deserves) to be blogged (and I have a little bit here), but mostly I'm too tired to write by the end of the day. You can tell. I've averaged only about 2 or 3 posts a month for first half of the year. At least, I was glad to see, when I checked this morning, that I had made at least one post each month!

I admire the folks I read regularly, like Wes Fryer and Chris Lehmann (who runs a school with some similar features to our own) who somehow manage to post regularly - often several times a day.

Maybe part of the problem is that I'm an academic! :-)

I generally want to write long reflective and synthesizing posts. I think maybe I need to do shorter posts.

One post I've been dying to do is on how we ended the year on a strong note. But I haven't written it yet, because it is another one of those long posts. I think what I'll do, instead is write a series of shorter posts reflecting on those special events at the end of the year...

I don't know how successful I'll be - look at the length of this post...

Another Cool School

2007-06-27T20:01:00.000-05:00

Just spent an hour with Gary Brown, formerly Professional Officer (Learning Technologies), Catholic Education Office Wollongong, Australia. We had dinner together about a year ago and had some interesting conversations that I wrote about here.

But we're now both at NECC in Atlanta and we had a chance to reconnect.

He's moving on to a new jurisdiction this year, but we were talking about an awesome school he has in his old district: Corpus Christi Catholic High School (learn more here or here).

Many of it's features remind me of what we're trying to accomplish with our Buffalo school project:

They have learning circles and CLEA’s – their units – Connected Learning Exepriences
Sessions on just learning to learn
They don’t have teachers – they have "learning advisors" with learning circles and lots of reflection.
Every Friday is a community open house – Learning showcase
Strong on parent and community connections

One of the most interesting things Gary said was in relation to making use to Web 2.0 tools in our classrooms.

“We don’t block – we educate. These kids will be doing this outside of school, so we have to make them understand how to do it responsibly. Blocking is paranoia. Teach them self-protection rules. Have them be the regulators. They live in a global world and need to be able to do that effectively and safely."

The interesting thing is that have have effectively reduced their inappropriate use issues to zero with this approach!

Good News from Illinois

2007-05-09T10:09:00.000-05:00

In light of hubbub around the recent NY Times article, it was terrific to get good news this morning about the continuation of the Illinois laptop project. Kathleen Barnhart, of the Illinois State Board of Education, sent an email this morning to a collection of folks involved in 1to1 initiatives, spreading the good news. With her permission, I publish the email here:

Good Morning,

Yesterday the Education committee of the Illinois Senate voted unanimously to continue the 1:1 initiative entitled, Technology Immersion Pilot Project. Now the hope is that the $10 million allocated will make it through the final FY 08 budget. On our side, Lt. Governor Pat Quinn is very instrumental and active in moving forward continued funding. Our fingers are crossed.

“What brought down the house” were the statements from seven 6th graders sitting in front of the Education committee giving classroom testimonies on interactive lessons, communicating with classmates using Gaggle, and taking their laptops home to finish their projects, because the hour of class time is not enough.

The only question that I was asked during the committee meeting was a sidebar on the cost of the devices. I explained that currently through negotiation with Gateway and Apple, these devices have bumper-to-bumper insurance, Absolute tracking software and 24/7 technical support for three years. After the three years, the district will be picking up the tab. However, some of the district technology coordinators are becoming certified for On-Site Repair Service through Gateway. This will keep the cost of repair down.

Kathy

Kathleen Barnhart
Principal Education Consultant
Curriculum and Instruction
Illinois State Board of Education
100 North First Street
Springfield, Illinois 62777-0001
217.557.7323
217.782-7937

NY Times Article Pounds 1to1

2007-05-04T10:43:00.000-05:00

The NY Times published today "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" by Winnie Hu. It outlines how school leaders at Liverpool HS (NY) are going to get rid of their laptop initiaitve because of misuse and mistreatment of the machines. This follows on the heels of a report that reviels the ineffectiveness of reading and math software.

It's not hard to start to think that schools pursuing laptop initiatives are barking up the wrong tree (or worse - wasting millions of dollars!).

But if laptops are such a failure, why are so many initiatives being successful? A friend who is the technology director for a district with a 1to1 program in their middle school and high school recently asked for the research on the success of 1to1 learning with laptop initiatives. He was attempting to get the DOE to allow him to use textbook funds for laptops. They replied "no," since there "was no quantitative evidence that laptops help learning." (As if there is the same evidence that textbooks do!!!)

Here are the resources that I sent him:

The One-to-One Information Resources page has tons of stuff, especially click on ResearchReports.

The Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation has a terrific list of research.

Research on Maine’s project his available here.

Wes Fryer has this list of research on 1to1.

InTASC has some of the best (experimental model) research on 1to1. Here’s one study.

The Penn State Center for One-to-One Computing in Education has more research on their site.

These successful initiatives focus on creating new learning experiences for students, not just automating presentations and text books. They provide engaging work for students that entices them to play with academic content, not inappropriate sites, and to see the laptops as invaluable personal tools, not a device to pound on.

This isn't necessarily easy work. It comes from strong leadership, courageous teachers, and lots of professional development and support. No easy fixes here. (Of course, where are there any?)

Wouldn't it be great if each of us who has had positive experiences within 1to1 learning with laptop initiatives would send a letter to the editor of the NY Times in response to this story! Letters can be addressed to letters@nytimes.com. You are limited to 150 words, but accepted letters will have the opportunity to be shortened. Be sure to include your name, address, and phone number (for confirmation purposes only, not for publication). You can also copy your response to the author: winnhu@nytimes.com.

If you send in a letter and it doesn't get published within a week, would you consider posting it here as a comment to this posting? (but wait until you know if they are going to publish it or not...)

Here's what I sent:

Dear Editor,

I’m writing to express my frustration with Winnie Hu’s article “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops.” I can understand why the district might have chosen to do away with laptops. But I’ve been actively involved with Maine’s laptop project for 7 years and wonder “Was it the laptops or was it what they were doing with them?” We know from our experience that the laptops need to be used for creating new kinds of learning experiences (not simply supporting more memorization or test prep), and that there needs to be strong leadership both around how educators are expected to use the laptops with students and the policies and procedures around how students use them. We found when there is little focus on learning and few procedures and policies, there is lots of misuse and damage. Leadership and teacher practice are everything. Why not report on the successful initiatives?

Marketing and Arm & Hammer Baking Soda

2007-04-02T09:25:00.000-05:00

Our teachers are working hard to teach reluctant learners. They're laboring to master teaching through projects and making real world connections. One of our teachers just dropped in to tell me a success story she had had.

We've provided teachers with a set of activities for a Theme Park Unit as one model of teaching thematically, using learning by doing, higher order thinking, and making real world connections. One of the early activities, once students have brainstormed a theme for their park and have started brainstorming attractions and rides, is to work on the first draft of the marketing plan.

One teacher was trying to think of a way to make the importance and power of marketing understandable to students. She settled on Arm & Hammer Baking Soda.

She started by telling stories about people during the 50s and 60s and doing most of their cooking at home, mostly from scratch - providing the natural market for baking soda. But through the 70s and 80s people cooked less and less at home, eating out more, or using more prepared foods.

What was Arm & Hammer going to do with their product? They could just let sales slip away. Or they could think about other uses for their product and develop other markets. Through their marketing strategy, Arm & Hammer could encourage people to buy or use their product in ways that people had not thought of before.

They started with direct uses for the product. Some of you will remember the marketing of baking soda as tooth paste: add a little water to make a paste, put it on the toothbrush and brush away. It tasted awful, but I remember doing it just to be independent! Most everyone remembers the commercials for using baking soda as a refrigerator deodorizer.

Later, they marked baking soda as an additive to other products - toothpaste (tastes better as an additive than the product!), detergent, etc. Go to their web site today, they hardly mention cooking at all, but rather "Solutions for My Home, My Family, and My Body."

But the great part of this story is that, for some of our hard to teach students, it made sense, made the learning real, and engaged them in drafting a marketing plan for their theme park a little more than a straight lesson on creating marking plans. The real world connections and the use of stories made the learning a little more meaningful and engaging.

Generating Curriculum with Students - The Soundings Visit

2007-03-15T22:08:00.000-05:00

This is the next in a series of posts about my visit to Mark Springer's Soundings program, a middle grades program designed to engage and motivate students.

In the last post, about building community, I made the point that one of Mark's strategies to create a high energy learning environment was to involve students in both generating ideas and making decisions about those things that need to get done.

This strategy extends to designing most of the curriculum that the students study. Using a process of asking students their questions and concerns about themselves and about their world, then finding themes by looking for overlapping questions of self and world, students settle on several themes for the year. When I visited, the students were studying economics.

The unit itself is planned collaboratively between students and teachers. Teachers guide the unit design so that it is built around goals and questions that the students want to answer (in this case about economics). Teachers scaffold the work by asking students to think about what makes for an effective goal and for effective unit questions. Here are the lists that this year's students generated:

What Makes an Effective Goal?

Must be yours: personalized
Must be relevant and important
must be positive
must be a stretch but "reachable"
must be specific and "measurable"
Must be directed toward improving or accomplishing

Unit Questions

Broad to cover many sub-questions - but not too general
Prompts you to dig deeper into its roots
Everyone finds somewhat interesting
Doesn't have a simply, single answer (yes/no)
Lots of information available
Provokes thinking
Lots of connections

Students then go on to generate the questions they want to answer. Here is their list for this unit:

Economics Questions

how have past economies affected the present (future?)?
how do budgets work?
how do we reguate the stock market?
how does the stock market affect the economy and vice versa?
what gives money value?
What is a stock and how does it work?
How do companies change and how does that relate to stock?
How do natural resources related ot the stock market?
how does inflaction work and why does it happen?
How does bakning work? Why is banking the richest industry?
How does our local economy compare to other economies?
How do wars affect t our economy?
How do world events affect our economy?
How does money circulate?
What are some economic scandals?
How did the great Depression occur and how did we reocver from it?
How does our economy affect other economies?
How does tread affect our economy?
What is the World Trade Organization?
How does an economy affect profit and nonprofit organizations?
What are different kinds of stock marktes?
How does the ceonomy relate to technology?
What major events have shaped the economy?
How does economy affect life styles and cultures?
How does shopping patterns affect the stock market?
How do meical costs affect the dconomy?
Hod does the aconomy affect job choices?
What are the most profitable industries and why?
How was the Stocik Market created?
How does the justice system affect economy?
Who runs the stock market?
Do other countries have stocik markets? which?
What makes a company fail/succeed?
Supplies and Demand?
Are there relationships between demographics affect spending patterns?
How does space technology affect economy?
What is a Black Market? How does it corelatew with legitimate markets?
How does theft affect an economy?
How does advertising affect the economy?
How does government spending affect our economy?
What is capitolism?

In a future post, I'll describe some of the activities that students chose to do in order to learn about and answer these questions.

Building Community & the Door

2007-03-15T22:05:00.000-05:00

I think Mark Springer and I have worked together for about 12 or 13 years. Based on what I saw of Watershed and Soundings and the level of student engagement (and ownership of their own learning!), I'm sorry it took me that long to finally get into his classroom.

I know Mark would say that one of the ways he and his colleagues achieve that level of learning is how they work very deliberately to build a strong community within each class, to build strong relationships both with and between students, and finding ways to get to know and connect with each student.

I was surprised by my own dissertation research (PDF - 640 KB) when my data showed that relationship and connecting with students was the single most important motivator for hard to teach students (and sure doesn't interfere with the learning of easy to teach students!).

It was evident of Watershed teachers, as well as Mark and his Soundings team teacher that each of these teachers genuinely likes middle school students and talks with them as people, not from the authority perspective of a teacher - or as a policeman! (I have referred to these as People Voice, Teacher Voice, and Disappointed Voice in an earlier post.)

But achieving the level of community - and of student sense of self responsibility and motivation - I witnessed in both programs takes more deliberate work than simply the tone of voice used when talking with students or how you work to build relationships and mutual respect through every day interactions.

Strategies these teachers used often involve asking students for their ideas and to think reflectively about good learning. Early in the year, Mark asks his students to think about what makes for a good student. This year's students came up with this list:

What Makes a good student?

Willing to learn
creative respect
pays attention
can work with others as well as alone
open minded
tenacious
synergetic
motivated
organized
does homework
participates
unique
involved
doesn't procrastinate
sets goals
attentive
super!
confident
studies
responsible
optimistic
has opinions
doesn't cream
never interrupts finishes on time
cooperates
caring
inquisitive learns form mistakes works hard
animated
willing to try new things
willing to try
not bossy
having a life outside school
prepared
teamwork

Mark and the other teachers then asked the students what makes for a good teacher. They came up with this list:

What makes a good teacher?

Answers all questions
privileges
open-minded
fun lessons
humorous when appropriate
doesn't give tons of homework
positive
patient
calm
skils
organized
articulate
useful learning
activities
helpful
lets student find an opinion
friendly
headstrong
Sober (serious)
Believes in student approaches
know what you are teaching
not crazy
no temper
attractive?
confident
creative
no coffee on student work
doesn't look down on students
flexible
good listener
balanced
considerate (aware)
Respectful
no favorites
faith in oneself
plans ahead

As their community building progressed, Mark also asked students how they could show that they were a community!

Using the nautical theme of "Soundings," the students decided to put a construction paper ship on the double doors that led into their room. On the ship, the students added small photographs of themselves, posed purposefully to look like they were part of the crew. What they ended up with was a design that both highlighted the students' individual personalities and the cohesiveness of the group.

That leads to another strategy Mark uses frequently: he presents the things that need to be done, then tasks the students with coming up with the ideas of what they will do and making the decisions about how they will do it. Mark structures and scaffolds those conversations so that they are productive and do achieve the necessary results, but the ideas and choices are the students'.

This extends to designing most of the curriculum that the students study (more on this in a future post).

For me, as a pedagog and learning theorist, I'm not just fascinated by these strategies and how powerful they are, but also by the notion that "connecting with kids" and "student voice & choice" seem to be inextricably linked when fully implemented! But it is also clear that high quality learning takes place, not just when high quality content is present, but when high quality relationships and high quality input and choice are present.

Watershed

2007-03-15T20:49:00.000-05:00

(Recently I had the chance to visit Watershed, the integrated learning program created by Mark Springer. These are my notes and reflections on this visit.)

Wow! This room looks so different! There are 2 teachers and about 36 students in a large room on the ground floor of the school. In the center of the room, desks are pushed together in groups of 4 or 5 to create small groups. All around the room are computers and comfortable places to sit. Students are moving around the room, working independently or in small groups. Everywhere there are student created products - bird models, mini ecosystems, a model water mill. And about 20 large, poster-sized photos of the previous years' Watershed students.

In fact, when I came in the room, there was only one teacher, because the other had taken nine students to do a stream study (in this sunny, 45 degree, February weather!). The other teacher reported that he would take a different 9 to the stream later in the day.

It's hard to see if there are any off task or disengaged students. In fact, I'd say every kid was engaged. They were writing, looking things up on the computer, working on models and diagrams, reading.

Now, off task is a different matter. Jon reported that today was a catch up day. Students had planned one of their quarterly parent nights. One of the chalk boards had the agenda that the students had come up with. They were trying to finish up the work that would be shared with parents during the event. Jon pointed out one student who was was busily reading a book with interesting pictures of aquatic creatures. The student was certainly engaged. But it turns out that right under the book with pictures, was another book with biographical information about the poet the student was researching. That was the work he should be doing to get ready for the parent night.

But Jon was also quick to remind me that these kids were 7th graders with all the energy that that age group is known for. He also pointed out that when they let students do some of what they want (like reading the book about aquatic life), it wasn't too hard to get them back onto the teacher's task.

Jon said, too, that some of the kids seem to play a little more in Watershed than they do elsewhere, but that he believed that that was because they had built a community from the group and that students felt safe and accepted and more comfortable in Watershed than they do in a conventional classroom.

When I think about my model for Meaningful Engaged Learning, several components jump out at me:

Connecting with kids - clearly the teachers have put significant time into building a real community here.
Learning by doing - It seems that all the students' projects involve hands on work. And not just models in the classroom, but also going out to the nearby creek to study the ecosystem and to contextualize the learning they do.
Voice & choice - Although teachers design the skeleton of the curriculum and work with the students to maintain academic integrity, students play a very active role in in putting the meat on that skeleton; deciding how they should meet the objectives and show what they have learned.
Real audience - While I was there, students were preparing for a parent night where they would present their learnings
Real world connection - They use the local watershed to help put all their learning into context.
Higher order thinking - almost everything the students did involved applying knowledge, making decisions, analyzing and evaluating information, and creating various products and models.

If you want to know more about how they do this, check out this book or this one, both written by Mark Springer, Watershed's founder.

I Had to Throw Out My Observation Form - a Visit to Soundings

2007-03-15T10:42:00.000-05:00

On my visit to Soundings (I briefly describe Soundings here), I actually had to throw out my class observation form! It was unbelievable!

I'm on sabbatical this semester exploring how to motivate students and to see how engaging teachers implement the 9 components of my Meaningful Engaged Learning Model. Part of that is visiting teachers' classrooms, and I've developed a classroom observation form to help me. One of those visits was to Mark Springer and his Soundings program.

But I walked through the door and pretty much had to throw out the observation form.

The observation form is designed to help me capture what teachers do to help motivate students. It looks for strategies like learning by doing, focusing on higher order thinking, teachers connecting with students, soliciting student voice & choice, attention to different learning styles, real world connections for learning, etc. There are places for me to record what the teacher is doing and what the students are doing, and how those different engaging components are implemented.

What I saw was 36 students working independently and in groups. The teachers were there to help, but the students didn't ask them for any. Everyone seemed to be engaged in working productively on something (although knowing if they were on task is a little harder discern!). But there was productive chatter. There was some moving around the room. But it was just 36 students working at their clusters of desks.

As an observer you couldn't tell for sure if there was learning by doing, or higher order thinking, or what learning styles were being used. I could see a few laptops being used... In fact, about all you could see were groups of students hunched over their desks, discussing something in a huddle with their peers.

But there was a buzz that said students were being productive.

So if observing wasn't going to work, I turned to the table near where I was sitting, excused myself and asked the students what they were doing.

They went on to articulately tell me all about the economy unit they were working on, the (simulated) businesses that they had taken on, the projects and activities they needed to complete, where they were in the process of completing each, the objectives for the unit and how they had been involved in deciding what those objectives, projects, and activities would be. They told me about their business and what they had learned about the economy so far. They showed me what they were working on and about what they were thinking about.

Rarely, had I worked with students who were so articulate, involved with their learning, and so clear about what they were learning! It was amazing.

But what was really amazing is that it didn't look anything like direct instruction (in fact, while talking with the students, I had lost complete track of what the teachers were doing...).

I'm going to devote several future posts to how I think Mark and his teaching partner made this happen. But if you want to read more about how Mark does Soundings, check out his book.

Using Data to Help Shift Paradigms

2007-03-05T22:49:00.001-05:00

I've written recently about the hard work of changing
paradigms. Shifting paradigms takes clear communication and expectations, good models and modeling, supportive coaching, and the good use of data. It takes positive pressure and support.

We've been working on creating tools to help us with this work.

We started by trying to define what our model was. What was the vision of the school we were working to create? What were our critical pieces? Our model has 9 components: 4 Teacher Practice components and 5 School Program components. Many of the elements of the Teacher Practice components come from my (McMEL's) motivating underachiever work and work with learning with laptop initiatives. Many of the elements of the School Program components come from ResulTech's roots with CART, the progressive high school in Fresno, CA.

The Teacher Practice components include Environment & Culture, Meaningful Learning, Technology Integration, and Engaged Learning. The School Program components include Facilities & Infrastructure, an Engaging Program, Data Driven Decision Making, Professional Development, and Leadership. A PDF of the model is available here.

Part of Data Driven Decision Making (and positive pressure and support) is knowing where your teachers are in terms of implementing the teacher practices. We figured that if we had a teacher observation form we could use it to collect objective data on to what degree teachers were implementing the desired practices. Having a collection of observations from throughout the school over the course of a day or so would give a snap shot of where the school was. Having a series of observations for single teacher over time will help track a teacher's strengths and challenges.

But we never intended the observation form to be used for evaluation purposes. We are using it to help us know how we need to support teachers, and to track our progress as we strive to fully implement the school model.

The observation form has three sections. The first allows the observer to record the teacher's name and the date, etc. It also has a space to script a brief overview of the lesson or activities observed.

The second section is a timed observation checklist. It is structured so that the observer merely needs to mark off observables every five minutes. These include class organization; teacher role; level of student engagement; learning by doing; level of Blooms Taxonomy; learning styles used; and level of technology integration.

The third section are items that are better suited to be rated once at the end of the observation. These include the quality of the teacher's interactions; the level of real world application used; the level of student choice and voice; and the level of orderliness.

A PDF of the classroom observation form is available here.

Who'd'a Thought Content Would Interfere with Teaching?!

2007-03-05T20:16:00.000-05:00

(Ok, this is probably part 2 of my Trying to Change Paradigms is Hard Work post)

A couple of our students wrote to me recently and asked me what the goal of doing this Theme Park Unit was. Our model unit involves students designing their own Theme Park. They'll have to create a layout to scale, do a business plan, a marketing plan, and models of some of their attractions. Many of our materials come from real attraction and theme park designers and design companies, the small business administration, and other real world sources. This is really our first project-based unit and teachers are just getting started.

I wrote back to the students that the goal of our school is to engage and motivate students to learn skills and knowledge through a project-based curriculum that will help them get jobs and/or attend college; that we were working to create a curriculum that will teach traditional knowledge and skills through high-interest, real-world based activities and this was our first unit. (Keep in mind that our students come to our school because they haven't done well in the conventional setting. They are bright, but they are hard to teach kids. Frankly many of them don't care about the traditional curriculum or what other people say they should learn.)

I went on to write to the students that we wanted the students to learn about running creative businesses, about an important part of the entertainment industry, about attaining funding through business plans, attracting customers through marketing, planning and design work, how local government impacts business and vice versa, becoming a clear communicator, working collaboratively, creative problem solving, how to search out and analyze needed information, etc.

Doesn't this sound like a great way to learn? Don't you wish that you could go to a school like this? Or that one of your kids could? Certainly the people I tell about my work with this school get all excited! And certainly all the teachers chose to teach in this school, to be part of a project based curriculum.

But who would have thought that the traditional curriculum would be one of our biggest road blocks to really getting good at doing projects!

Well, the reality of this school is that haven't had as much time for training as it would seem. We didn't get the go ahead until mid to late August, just a few short weeks before we were to open our doors. While we were hiring, we were able to do a series of half day informational workshops and we hit the road running. It became clear that our teachers weren't ready to just jump into project-based learning (and why should they without proper training and support?). It took us until January to get back and do some modeling with the teachers. They still weren't ready to take on project planning (because they needed more modeling and support - how much training can you do in a couple of afternoon planning periods!?).

So here we are starting to get our Theme Park activities out to the teachers. And we're still running into challenges...

Who would have thought that the curriculum would get in the way of teaching?

One teacher politely informed us that she wouldn't have time to do the project because of the social studies unit she was working on. It turned out that her supervisor had stopped in recently and asked her where she was in the pacing guide. With that kind of pressure, who could blame her baulking.

(In all fairness, when the supervisor learned more about our program, he sat down with a different teacher, asked lots of great questions about the Theme Park unit, and together they brainstormed ways the social studies curriculum integrated with the unit.)

Who'd'a thought that the curriculum would get in the way of teaching?

One of teams was introducing the Business Plan portion of the project, and contacted us for any ideas on incorporating science in this portion, aside from Earth Science (soil samples for example) and Biology (ecology)... I wrote back that I wanted to share an idea.

Keep in mind that Project-based learning is a different way to organize the curriculum.

It organizes learning around the project and its components, not around the disciplines of knowledge (even though you can’t do projects without rich content from the disciplines of knowledge). So the question we want to eventually get good at asking isn’t “how does science (or some other subject) contribute to the business plan (or some other project component)?” but rather, “What skills and knowledge do my students need in order to successfully complete the business plan?” Secondary to that is tracking the standards based content students are learning and over time helping to guide students to fill in the gaps (left from the projects) in their education.

In other words, the content flows from the project. We don’t force fit content to the project. (Remember that our overarching goal is to reengage disenfranchised learners who already believe that school is contrived and irrelevant to their lives!) The project is the curriculum.

Science teachers (certainly teachers of any subject area) then are not so much responsible to “the science curriculum” as they are to the education of the students. They teach what needs to be taught, not necessarily just science. But they are then also the science expert on the team and responsible for both evaluating students’ progress toward learning scientific concepts and for being the steward of scientific knowledge within the projects. The question we want teachers to start asking (related to their content specialty) isn’t so much “where’s the science in the business plan?” but rather, as the projects develop and those requisite skills and knowledge are identified, “Where are the opportunities within that list of skills and knowledge to bring in high quality scientific concepts? Where can I turn a kernel of a scientific idea into a rich scientific lesson?”

Ok – so it’s a game of semantics. It’s a subtle difference. But it is an important difference.

I'm thinking that maybe we should tell all the teachers they aren't Math teachers and English teachers any more. They are all project teachers with content expertise in one of the disciplines.

The funny thing is that during one of the inservices we looked at the idea of the theme park layout. When we asked the question, "How does math (or science, or English, or social studies) contribute to the layout?" we ended up with a pretty shallow list of content. But when instead we asked the question, “What knowledge and skills do we need in order to successfully do the layout?” we ended up with a (almost overwhelmingly) rich list of concepts and content. It wasn't hard to look at this list and see how the disciplines of knowledge would contribute to this aspect of the project.

But even so, our conventional content organization still gets in the way...

But that's why we're doing this unit. That's why we're giving the teachers activities that will make a rich learning experience for our students.

When I wrote to the students about the goal of the project, I didn't just write about the goal for the students, but also for the teachers. I wrote that the teachers will learn how to teach knowledge and skills through project-based learning, how to connect traditional curriculum to project-based units, how to contextualize learning by connecting it to the real world, how to scaffold learning (building a sequence of activities to make new ideas more understandable), how to generate interest and engagement in learning, how projects reflect real world problems and issues.

Boy, changing paradigms is hard work! And who'd'a thought that content would get in the way of teaching!

Connecting with Students, Especially Challenging Students

2007-02-27T22:02:00.000-05:00

I recently did a series of teacher observations in one of the schools I'm working with. We're working hard to implement an engaging, project-based curriculum with hard-to-teach students.

These weren't evaluation observations, but observations to help us track the level of implementation of our programmatic elements (especially the teacher practice elements), to aid us in knowing how to support the teachers, and to collect information about strategies which seem to be working.

As expected, we were at a low level of implementation on most of our factors. This isn't the teachers' fault, but rather simply an indication of how little time we've had for training. We collected this simply as baseline data. We expect that everyone will be excited when we see those measures start to move and improve!

One area that we did expect to learn something was in the area of connecting with students. As with many hard-to-teach students, our students can be challenging. We know that relationship is everything when it comes to reaching these students and many won't learn unless they feel that the teacher respects, if not likes, them.

Some of the teachers find our students quite challenging and others seem to have little problem with them. What could we learn about how different ways of interacting with students impacts student behavior?

It was interesting to see (and perhaps no surprise) that the teachers who seemed to have the best rapport with students talked with them as people - they used the "people voice" (as if they were just talking with another person - I think some teacher educators call it the adult voice). There was no positional authority in their voice. The teachers who used the people voice still drew the line with behavior, set expectations, and intervened when students weren't doing what they were supposed to. In other words, even though their authority didn't come through in their voice in general, these teachers still used their authority when appropriate and necessary.

Students reacted to teachers who used the people voice better than to the teachers who had positive interactions with the students, but had a bit of a "teacher voice" (you know, that voice that says I'm the teacher and you're the student).

Further, teachers who used the "disappointed voice" (the tone indicated that the teacher was disappointed, upset, or angry with the student) had the most difficulty with students. The disappointed voice did not necessarily happen only when students were off task or misbehaving. Ironically, teachers were not aware that they were using the disappointed voice, and in at least one case, it had more to do with the teacher's natural tone of voice than it did with how the teacher was feeling.

(Ironically, in the past, I was a middle school teacher and had really good luck connecting with my students. But later I was moved to the high school and had a really horrible year before moving to the university to work with preservice teachers. I realize now that I had used the people voice with my middle school students and the teacher voice with my high school students. I can't help but wonder if that had something to do with the quality of my year...)

Clearly our challenging students are very sensitive to the teacher's tone of voice and teachers should avoid both the disappointed voice and the teacher voice in favor of the people voice.

Teachers who had better luck with the students also made extensive use of behavioral expectations. They made comments about what individuals, groups, or the class would be working on and what was expected of them during that time (in their people voice) and constantly updated students about what the teacher would be doing and what the students should be doing at that time. Further, when students were off task, the teacher didn't shift to an authoritarian or angry voice, but rather remained in people voice, but used a strategy I call "broken record," simply repeating the expected behavior until the student follows through.

When students needed to be redirected or corrected, students became confrontational or ignored shifts to the authoritarian voice and were certainly confrontational to a shift to the disappointed voice. Both approaches were non productive or counter productive.

Threats of punishment, removal from the room, or extra work only exasperated student behavior and had the opposite effect from the one desired. Using humor or broken record to get the desired behavior was much more effective, especially when it came to having students put away cell phones, mp3 players, or other objects teachers needed to have put away. (It was also observed that grabbing the object or getting into a tug-o-war are counter-productive strategies.)

Certainly, many hard-to-teach students are not particularly interested in learning what we have to teach. Motivating the students to learn can be challenging.

But teachers who attempted to use grades (tests or quizzes), the future (the next grade or course, or the next school, whether it be high school, or college, etc.) or the high stakes test to motivate students, only succeeded in agitating the students or exasperating undesirable behavior.

Teachers who were more successful motivating the students used strategies such as making the material interesting, using real world examples, or leveraging their positive relationship with the students.

Interestingly, feeling angry (and perhaps showing it in your voice) when students act rudely or are persistently off task or disruptive is human nature. Wanting to subtly assert your authority is perfectly understandable. Grabbing an object a student won't put away seems a normal reaction. It is the teacher's job to help students be successful in the next grade, course or school, or to do well on accountability measures.

These differences in teacher behavior can even be explained as stylistic differences. For example, some teachers relate more informally with students while others are more formal, and some teachers are more straight forward about their content, while other teachers work to make it more fun.

But although various behaviors, approaches, or reactions are natural, logical, understandable, or one's personal style, they can be non productive or counter productive.

This is about teachers being strategic and intentional in using productive behaviors, approaches, and reactions.

It would appear that using the people voice, broken record, and humor are much more effective ways of dealing with challenging students, and that making learning interesting or meaningful are more effective motivators for learning.

Three Student-Centered Educational Programs

2007-02-20T09:11:00.000-05:00

Today and tomorrow, I'm visiting Mark Springer at Radnor Middle School (PA). Mark is best known for his Watershed project (see here and here and here) which is now in its 20th year.

Watershed is an integrated 7th grade curriculum. Students are involved with learning the usual middle school content, but all within the context of studying the watershed surrounding the school. Students are involved in canoe trips, stream studies, model building, etc. Students have an enormous amount of input into how they learn. And the program has generated lots of interest among students, receiving many more applications each year than the number of students they can take (about 36 students a year, selected randomly from all the students who apply).

Gordon Vars would call this "structured core" (see here) Learning is organized thematically. Although rich in the content from the disciplines of knowledge, learning is not separated into the separate subjects. This is "structured" core because the choice of themes and the major units, projects, and activities were designed by the teachers.

But there are still strong elements of what Vars calls "unstructured core," in that students have a lot of choice and input into how the class masters the unit, designs the projects, and completes the activities. (Personally, I find the term "unstructured" horribly misleading - and it certainly has negative implications - since planning curriculum with students requires a much more sophisticated set of structures than when teachers design the learning by themselves.) If you were to look at a bar graph of the planning, you might see that about half of all the planning is done by the teachers and about half is done by the students (facilitated and structured by the teachers).

But Watershed isn't Radnor MS's only student-centered program. For the last nine years, Mark has turned over the Watershed program to other teachers and developed and run an 8th grade program called Soundings. This is a highly democratic program with students involved actively in planning and designing most aspects of the educational program, Vars' unstructured core.

Mark, and his teaching partner, Mary, are using what is often affectionately known as "The Beane Model" of planning curriculum with students. Jim Beane wrote about a democratic, student-centered curriculum in The Middle School Curriculum: From Rhetoric to Reality, but his wife, Barbara Brodhagen, worked with him put his ideas into action in her classroom. Together they developed a process of asking students for their questions and concerns about themselves and their questions and concerns about the world (what could be more appropriate, developmentally, for middle grades students?!!!), and then find themes from the intersection of these concerns of self and concerns of world. Jim and Barbara readily recognize that there are many ways to create an integrative, democratic curriculum (not just the one that they used) and that many educators have contributed to the development of strategies to plan curriculum with students - they blanch when teachers call it "The Beane Approach."

So Soundings curriculum is designed, negotiated really, between the students and the teachers, but grows from their questions and concerns about themselves and the world. If you were to look at a bar graph of who designed the educational program, 10-20% would be designed by the teachers, and 80-90% is designed by the students (with teacher guidance, of course!).

Now, Radnor MS has a third student-centered program. Crossroads is the relatively new (3 years old) 6th grade student-centered program. Instruction is still thematic and students learn by working on projects, but although students are often give choices, it is the teachers who design most of the learning experiences. On the proverbial bar chart, it is 80-90% teacher designed and 10-20% student directed. But throughout the year, the teachers give students more and more voice and choice, helping them learn how to make decisions and be more involved in their own learning.

Although the thought of a progressively more student-centered program is intriguing, Crossroads students aren't required to become Watershed students, although many apply to do so. Likewise many Watershed students apply to be Soundings students. Mark reports that this year about a quarter of the Soundings students are former Watershed students.

Radnor Middle School has approximately 850 students in grades 6 through 8. Each year approximately 200-450 students apply, but only 105-120 can participate in their three student-centered programs annually.

Trying to Change Paradigms is Hard Work!

2007-02-12T18:22:00.000-05:00

We're trying to implement project-based curriculum in the school I'm working with. All the teachers chose to work there and be part of our program. Many of them said, "All I know is that what I've been doing doesn't work with a lot of kids." They are simply acknowledging what I pointed out a while ago: some kids need more than direct instruction.

But project-based learning is new to most of the teachers and we're getting some push-back.

Not because they are difficult, but because paradigms are hard to change.

They had 16 years of training (K-12 plus college as students) in what school is "supposed to" look like, and were well trained in how to teach. But really they were well trained in direct instruction.

And we're working with a population that needs a whole lot more than direct instruction. These kids want to know the why before the what. They want to learn by doing. Our teachers largely haven't experienced learning that way and weren't really trained to teach that way.

The teachers are enthusiastic and really trying, but this is new to them.

Sometimes the new approach is just too unfamiliar and they push hard to return to what they are familiar and comfortable with - traditional teaching. Sometimes they think about the high stakes state test and they feel that they need to return to coverage and direct instruction. Sometimes their content director comes over from the central office and tells them that they should be using the text book or the pacing guide.

Who could blame our wonderful teachers for pushing back under these conditions? It's only human nature.

It just means that we need to work smarter to help them through paradigm change and to fully implementing our school program.

We didn't have much lead time before school started to fully train teachers or to develop curriculum. We started with really good informational workshops (well, of course! I led some of them!). But good information doesn't change practice (at least none changed just because we shared good information with them.

So now we have a model project-based unit for them to work on. We've given them the skeleton of the plan and are modeling with them how to develop the unit and how they might work with students. And their enthusiasm (and their students') is slowly raising! They clearly need models. (and now I'm planning on tracking down some good videos of teachers teaching using projects so they can see it in action.)

We also have applied to the state to use portfolio assessment, instead of the high stakes test.

And we got the Area Superintendent to say (in person) that our program was a project-based program and that the teachers' job right now was to get good at teaching through projects.

And we developed teacher practice rubrics and classroom observation forms that will let us focus on the key teacher practices we want to make sure teachers are using: connecting with kids, learning by doing, using higher-order thinking skills, applying learning to real-world situations, etc..

And we're in the process of setting up a meeting with the curriculum directors so that they know more about our program and how we can work together (and not end up giving mixed messages to our teachers!).

Changing paradigms is hard work, but we believe that with clear expectations, lots of training and support, some positive pressure, a lot of clear communication, working to remove barriers, and good models and modeling, we're going to make good headway.

Besides. We have a great staff who are willing to try!

Mapping the Curriculum When Doing Projects

2007-02-08T21:47:00.000-05:00

Our schools organize the curriculum around high interest, community-based projects.

One of the challenges of doing project-based curriculum is keeping track of what students are learning. We're exploring how we might keep track of standards introduced and mastered while working on the projects.

Today I came across a resource that might help. Either one of the Edutopia newsletters I get or one of the listservs or RSS feeds I subscribe to had a video called "My Kind of High School." It shows two students in a school where they learn through projects.

They're using a system called Project Foundry to manage their work. It looks like it is designed to help facilitate independently (student) designed projects, but might be adapted to our program of projects designed for the class by students and teachers . It looks like Project Foundry has a couple important features that would help us with project design: connecting standards to projects, keeping track of which standards students have met over time, and
a portfolio system.

We're going to have to explore this product and see if it will help us meet our needs.

Research on technology and learning

2007-02-08T20:49:00.000-05:00

One of my jobs is writing research briefs for the Principal's Partnership.

Recently, I was asked to find the research on what is known about technology's impact on learning. Lot's of folks want to know if their investment is really paying off.

It won't surprise you to know that the answer boils down to "it depends on how you use it."

The brief is available here (pdf).

Why we need the schools we need

2007-01-27T22:04:00.000-05:00

An old friend provided me with a wonderful opportunity recently. Well, really, I did some consulting for her, but I learned something from it. She's the Middle Level Director for a mid-sized city in the South. I've been doing workshops for her schools and teachers for about 10 years.

Last summer, I worked with the teachers at two schools that have high populations of at-risk and hard-to-teach students. I introduced them to several strategies for reaching these students. A little more than a week ago, I returned to the district and got to spend a day at each of the schools. I was able to conduct 8 classroom observations at one school. At the other school I did 4 classroom observations and conducted focus groups with four of the cluster teams.

It's great getting back into classrooms. It's helping be put things into perspective and learn more about this work of creating schools that motivate students. Surprisingly (at least it was an aha for me!), I didn't see out of control classrooms or bad teaching.

What I did see was order in the classrooms and a lot of competent (and in some cases outstanding) direct instruction. Even so, I often only saw about half the class “engaged” (showing signs of being on task) and, in conversations and focus groups, teachers indicated that many students don’t care, won’t do the work or study, and there isn’t much support from home. One teacher called this “lazy disease.” Teachers relate that they feel that they are tired of trying ways to motivate the students and, according to at least one teacher, it is “time to get the students and parents to do their part.”

This makes me think that some students need more than direct instruction. And I realized, too, that this was a much more appropriate tag line to the Schools We Need Project. The old tag line was "because the schools we have don't work for every student." Now, while school reformers nodded knowingly, others were offended by it. But "Because some students need more than direct instruction," is less threatening and less offensive.

And it reinforces that teachers aren't to blame. This is about some students needing more than what teachers have generally been trained to do.

The teachers also provided me with the answer to the question, when do you know that you need to do more than direct instruction? When the students don’t care, won’t do the work or study, and there isn’t much support from home.

The teachers I observed have the right instincts and try to motivate students, but most of the motivators teachers say they use or were observed tend to be “low payoff” motivators such as showing enthusiasm, being nice to students, or using manipulatives. They also used “no payoff” motivators such as grades, “you’re going to high school and will need this,” or “it’s going to be on the state test." These may be motivators for easy-to-teach students, or important to teachers, but they tend not to be motivators for hard-to-teach students. It’s no wonder that if teachers are putting a lot of energy into these kinds of motivators that they are frustrated with the results and the students.

But, teaching these students are extraordinary circumstances requiring extraordinary efforts. Teachers need to not just try or work hard; they need to try the right things and work hard at effective practices. Teachers need to be using “high payoff” motivators, such as

project-based learning,
connecting with students,
connecting learning to the community and the students’ lives,
focusing on higher order thinking activities,
learning by doing,
making learning interesting, and
involving students in designing their learning.

But moving teachers in this direction is a big effort. Teachers need more than informational workshops. They need good models, both the kind they can observe (videos or classroom observations), and the kind they can try out (model units/lessons). They need coaching and support. They need access to the right resources. And they need strong leadership that clearly expects this work and backs it up with how they supervise and evaluate teachers.

Schools We Need Project

2007-01-27T22:03:00.000-05:00

Wow. It's been a long time.

I was really busy this past semester.

I was teaching full time and still doing a lot of work for ResulTech, the group that created the Academy School @ 44 (see the two posts from last fall). We're working on setting up schools in other cities to.

It's no wonder that I haven't posted to this blog in so long when you realize that I had weeks like this: Teach all day Monday. Fly to Philly & have a dinner meeting. Work with the Philly school district all day Tuesday. Fly home. Teach all day Wednesday. Fly to Buffalo. Work with the Buffalo teachers Thursday. Fly home. Teach all day Friday. Not sure what happened Saturday! (probably slept all day!)

But this semester I'm on sabbatical. I'm returning to my "motivating underachievers" roots. I had just finished my dissertation on the topic (you can find it here) when the state laptop initiative started up, and I've been doing learning with technology initiatives ever since! The plan was originally for me to visit classrooms where the teachers do an especially good job of reaching hard to teach students. But after working with ResulTech all Fall, they want me to work with them more!

This is a great opportunity. They're serious about creating schools that motivate kids. And they're approaching it systemically. With a strong vision and the resources and support to make it happen! Now, I can not only visit classrooms where teachers are motivating students, but have the opportunity to help create some.

I'll be spending half the time during my sabbatical continuing to work with ResulTech, and the other half I'll spend visiting schools and classrooms and doing some writing (inclduing, hopefully, back on the blog!). And when the sabbatical is over, I'll continue to work (as UMF faculty!) with ResulTech full time for the next several years. Part of my charge will be to bring back what we learn to the University and explore how it might impact our teacher training programs and the services we offer Maine's schools.

I'm calling my involvement in this project The Schools We Need Project.

I'll try to be better about writing here about what I learn from this work. Goodness knows I miss the writing and the interactions with some of you who might read it!

Buffalo Academy School: Mission and Goals

2006-09-18T22:09:00.000-05:00

The Academy School @ 44 has a simple mission:

To provide its students the best educational experience they have ever had!

Students are selected to attend Academy School @ 44 because they will benefit from teaching and learning methods that are based on their individual needs, rather than those in place at traditional schools.

Academy School @ 44 has been designed to become the student’s “new school.” It is our hope that students will enter this new environment and become more successful than they have been in the more traditional school. It is our hope that every student who enters in September will proudly graduate from this school.

Toward this end, Academy School @ 44 is designed to be different from traditional schools:

Positive relationships, and classroom climate and environment
High interest projects
Actively engaging students
Instruction supporting projects, not projects supporting instruction
More learning by doing than learning by reading & listening to the teacher
Community connections, and work connected to the students interests and lives
More higher order thinking activities (apply, analyze, evaluate, create) than recall and understanding activities

How Will We Know We Are Succeeding?

We certainly expect that with our student-centered approach test scores for our students will improve.

However, that is neither our express purpose nor priority.

We will know we are succeeding when we can observe the following:

increased student engagement
improved attendance
reduced behavior referrals

Over the long term, we also expect the following to be indicators of our success:

increased rate of credit accrual
increased graduation rates
increased rates of enrollment in higher education

An Awesome Opportunity

2006-09-17T05:23:00.000-05:00

Buffalo is a lot like other urban school districts. They have over 1700 overage students in their secondary schools (including some 17 year old 7th graders). Across the city, they have large numbers of students who have been suspended multiple times in the previous year. And they wonder, as many other large districts do, what they're going to do all these disenfranchised students.

They started where a lot of districts do. Creating a suspension school where they can send these students when they are disruptive. It helped the students who remained behind and were no longer disturbed by the offenders, but did little for the students sent there. The purpose seemed to mostly be to warehouse disruptive students, and the adults were encouraged to put the students in their place; to show them who was in charge.

But Buffalo did something that some other urban districts have not yet done. They recognized that what they were doing was not working and that they needed to do something different.

Now, imagine a school designed to give students a second chance.

Imagine a school that is designed to give students the best educational experience they've ever had.

Imagine a curriculum taught through community-based, high-interest projects.

That's Buffalo's Academy School @ 44.

This is an exciting year at the Academy School @ 44. We are beginning to create that rare school, one designed to provide students with the best learning experiences they have ever had. It is designed with the fact in mind that the conventional approach to school has not worked for our clientele, our type of students. What we’ve been doing hasn’t worked for our students, so we will be doing something different.

Opening a new "conventional" school is easy, since it is well-established territory – much like taking a train from Buffalo to Seattle. The tracks are laid. The route is well traveled and well known. There are few surprises.

But opening a school designed to meet the needs of students who have not traditionally done well in a conventional school is more complex and involved. It’s not completely new territory. Schools such as Central Park East Secondary School, The MET, and CART have gone before us. This work may be more like Lewis and Clarke exploring the West. Traders, hunters and settlers had gone before them. They had some good guides. Even so, they knew their goal, but weren’t completely sure where they were going or how they were going to get there. Their plans needed to adapt to the territory. They needed to be flexible and adaptive. And they needed to learn from each new experience.

We will be the same way – especially through our first year. We will be learning how to structure learning around community-based, high-interest projects. We will be learning how to keep our clientele interested and engaged. We will be learning how to leverage wireless laptops for the students’ learning. We will be learning how to insure that students learn standards-based content through this approach. We will be learning not only how to implement all this, but how to support each other doing it.

I'll try to let you know how we're doing, along the way.

It's Nice to Be Back...

2006-09-14T21:22:00.000-05:00

Well. It's been a long time since I've posted. I had an unusually busy summer, being on the road nearly every week: Columbus, New Bedford (MA), Boston, Orono (ME), Austin, Phoenix, Houston, Mont Belvieu (TX), Lake Charles, Stillwater (OK), Buffalo.

I'm tired (and I miss writing), but they were mostly all terrific projects. Working with schools on motivating underachievers, or working in 1to1 learning environments.

But the best project of them all was working with folks on a new alternative school in Buffalo. It is probably the single most exciting educational project I've been involved in in a long time! Imagine a school designed to give students a second chance. Imagine a school that is designed to give students the best educational experience they've ever had. Imagine a curriculum taught through community-based, high-interest projects.

We're just getting started, and it will be a long haul - it's a lot like building an airplane while you're flying it!

But you can count on my writing more about it here.

The Problems with Pilot Programs

2006-07-24T10:23:00.000-05:00

A friend recently sent me this evaluation report of the Texas school laptop pilot program (TIP). The study concludes:

We found that after one academic year of implementation, there were no positive effects of immersion on either reading or mathematics scores. After controlling for prior achievement and other important student characteristics, there were no significant differences in the spring 2005 reading or mathematics TAKS scores of students in immersed and control schools. In fact, students in immersed schools had slightly lower scores than comparison students.

I've got friends involved with TIP (just got back from working one of them outside of Houston), so I was excited to see this study.

I think this study illustrates some of the problems with pilot programs.

Some of those challenges revolve around at least three problems with pilot studies of large-scale educational change initiatives, like laptop programs, where test scores are the primary or exclusive measures of success.

One is that this type of research, for all intents and purposes, implies that the only reason to do a 1to1 initiative is to raise test scores. There are at least four compelling reasons to institute a learning with laptop initiative: the economy, equity, engagement, and digital emigration. Test scores can be useful indicator of some success, especially when it is only one of several indicators. But raising test scores should never be the purpose of education.

Another is that researchers recognize that it usually takes 3-5 years for this type of innovation to impact test scores. You don't have that much time (nor should you take that much time) in a pilot program.

The third problem is what we found in Maine - this kind of initiative most directly impacts higher order thinking, which is not tested on standardized tests. Maine has moved to other measures to examine the success of our initiative.

But the larger problem may be with how pilots are conceptualized in the first place. 1to1 learning is an idea whose time has come. Computers are simply the modern tool for intellectual work and schools are where (ideally) we prepare students to do intellectual work. This has led more and more leaders, such as Maine's former governor, Angus King, to point out that jurisdictions should not do pilot programs (at least as we have traditionally). The track record is that places that do, just study the pilots to death and never move on to the large-scale implementation. If a jurisdiction does do a pilot, it's purpose should not be "proof of concept" or "to be studied." It should instead be a limited timeframe to test and trouble-shoot the technological solution that will soon be implemented everywhere and to help prepare teachers for the coming innovation. The ultimate purpose of a pilot is to help inform the jurisdiction how to best implement the initiative.

So let's redirect our pilots and studies from "should we do this?" to "how do we do this well?"

Of course, if you don't mind competing with Maine's students in the emerging economy, you can just ignore this advice and continue to study your pilots and remain ambivalent about investing in a 1to1 learning with laptop initiative.

We won't mind.

Successful Schools: From Research to Action Plans

2006-07-11T22:24:00.000-05:00

Session notes from Dr. Willard R. Daggett's (International Center for Leadership in Education) keynote.

A general session at the Principals' Partnership Summer Institute, 7/11/06

Worked on a study examining high performing schools given their SES. Today will share the findings from that study. Resources available on his website.

Single most important component of success in schools is the principal.

Lessons learned:

We aren't failing
more diverse population than before, spending less per student than ever before, fewer dropouts than before. The problem isn't that schools are changing, but that the world is changing faster than schools are. We're seeing a skill gap. They aren't failing, they just need help to adapt.

Every school has it's own way
What works for one school may not work in any ohter school. But there are successful practices. You have to more pressure for change than resistance to change. Used the "Good to Great" model.

Almost everyone agrees raising academic standards for all children is a good thing. But almost no one believes they are part of the problem. But in fact we are all part of the problem. The first half of his presentation will focus on making us "feel bad about what we do." - to challenge our assumptions.

Would spend half his time in a school on "Why" and half on "What" and "How."

The world has changed. Our kids are different. Do you not have a PDA? Then you are preparing students to live in a world you do not live in!

New technology: SPOT - Smart Personal Object Technology.
Integrated projection, projection keyboard.
The Magic Pen - one button projects the keyboard and another projects the screen.

Who will be the early adoptors? The young or the old? Ban cell phones? or SPOT tech from assessments? But if every kids has these tools, how valid are the tests that don't recognize these tools

Language Translation - you speak in English and you hear it in Chinese. What does that do mean to our Foreign Language courses? Nothing - nothing else has impacted schools! (said tongue in cheek)

China and India have a one or two year BioChem requirement in their high schools.

Why do we do what we do? Because it is the right thing to do or because it has always been done that way?

Are you Institutional Managers or Instructional Leaders.

Technology is one factor. Globalization is another.

If the India preschoolers were a nation, they would be the 4th largest nation.

Demographics is another change factor impacting schools. We are an aging nation with fewer and fewer younger people.

Retirement benefits grow into "monster"
If all retirement systems were to stop today, the nation would owe $500,000 PER FAMILY to pay for these.

No nation since the Roman Empire has remained the predominate economic world leader for more than 100 years. No nation has responded to the writing on the world.

Is reading important? Yes. A little or a lot? A lot. Reading should be taught were? In the content areas. Do we do it?

Is foreign language important? Yes. What language should we be teaching? Arabic? Chinese? What languages do we teach?

We teach the slowest keyboard in the world. What keyboard does the rest of the world use?

Why do we have summer vacations? So kids can use the summer to work in the fields?

Why do we do what we do? Do we do it because it is what we need to do to prepare our students? Or do we do it because we always have?

Application Taxonomy

Knowledge about the application
Apply to your discipline
Apply across disciplines
Apply to predictable real world problems.
Apply to unpredicted real world problems.

Teach Rigor/Relevance

The framework:

Put Blooms up one side and the Application Taxonomy across the other. Four quadrants. A is low Blooms/low Application. B is low Blooms/high Application. C is high Blooms/low application and D is high Blooms/high Applications.

Finding that almost every high performing high school teaches math across the disciplines using real world problems (just like reading). High performing high schools eliminated department heads (they are the keepers of the past), and have instituted interdisciplinary team heads.

State "A" 10th Grade reading Test Questions
Quadrant:
A - 76%
B - 17%
C - 7%
D - 0%

you can't test for D using a pencil and paper test. We test for A - which kids can get off personal technology.

Essential skills are in the B and D realm.

Technology is changing so quickly that everyone needs to be a life-long learner. Technology itself is driving the reading levels higher.

High performing schools are not using Grade Equivalent, but rather the Lexile Framework. Measures "Semantic Difficulty" and "Syntactic Complexity." Grade Equivalent is norm referenced and Lexiles are criterion referenced system. Our HS students perform at a much lower Lexile than that that is needed for the military, personal use, and entry-level occupations.

But we are the only country that refuses to follow the research on teaching reading, because our math teachers teach math.

The lowest literacy rate in our curriculums is in our literature programs.

The target is 1200 Text Lexile Measure. Every HS teacher will have to teach reading.

Teachers won't be ready to do it until there is more passion for change than there is resistance to change.

The Quantile Framework is for Math what Lexiles are for reading. The issue in mathematics is the oppocite of what it is in reading. What we are teaching and testing is much higher than the real world. They found that in the real world we don't use Algebra II. But higher ed requires it. The higher ed math requirements are consistently way higher than the requirements of the real world.

The "real world" and "personal use" math areas fell into quadrant B & D, but the math taught in school is mostly in the A quadrant. The 8th grade test is on a higher Quantile level than actually needed outside in the real world.

You have to take something off the plate for classroom teachers. We have a far more overcrowded curriculum than any other country. We need to dump at least a 3rd of our standards in each discipline area. Must be based on Data, not lesson plans.

What we take away needs to be based on 1) what kids really need, and 2) what is on the test. We need to work with states on what to test to make sure it aligns with what is needed. Only about a third of the state standards in TX are actually on the test. But teachers try to teach everything because they think it all might be on the test. But the info is public domain and schools can use it. But if this is the only data you use, then you are only teaching to the test.

You need to also look at data on what knowledge people need. The only groups that rank priorities in the disciplines differently than anyone else are the people who teach that discipline. That is partly because those teachers know more about their discipline than others (an asset) but also because they probably liked the discipline in HS and went on to college to study it and then returned to HS "to do to others what had been done to them!"

When you dump 30-40% of your standards, then your tests will go through the roof - based on the experiences of high performing schools.

Can teach English, Math and Sci through Career and Tech Ed. and also Arts education. In high and performing schools, teachers are teaching it in the discipline then in the career and tech ed and then in the arts - they are getting it 3 times, instead of the traditional approach which is to pull out kids and put them into classes they don't like and haven't been successful with. No data that that approach has been successful anywhere.

Mess with Instruction before you mess structure. Give teachers the Gold Seal lessons and professional development and you will have success. Messing with structure allows schools to dodge change. After 3-5 years the most reluctant teachers will come along, if you start with instruction.

Start with Special Ed - the hardest to sever students. The practices that work in SpEd help all kids achieve.

You need a comprehensive plan. You need to do something different with 9th grade - the year we loose the kids. Have identified about 20 key strategies. High performing schools are looping 8th to 9th grade. Even though they are different buildings. They have also moved all the electives from 12th to 9th. Use 9th to get the kids connected and 12th as the most academically rigorous curriculum.

Each school has it own unique DNA.

How do you change schools? By focusing on each and every child - not each and every adult. Word of advice - love the kids more than the adults you work with.

To get more info from Dr. Daggett, subscribe to the occational emails using this form. Or visit the International Center for Leadership in Education.

Summary of Curriculum for Hard to Reach Students

2006-07-11T22:12:00.000-05:00

What is a proven curriculum for alternative school students and students who have had a hard time learning in a traditional school setting? This is the text from the Principals' Partnership research brief (soon to be posted):

Summary of Findings:

Exemplary curriculum for reaching alternative school students and other hard to teach students can be understood by examining the curricula of successful alternative schools. Four highly successful schools that successfully reach hard to teach students are highlighted here: The Met (Providence, RI), Central Park East (NY, NY), CART (Fresno, CA) and the Educational Video Center (NY, NY).

The Met & The Big Picture, Co.
The Big Picture Company was founded by educators Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, both formerly of the renowned Thayer High School in New Hampshire and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. In 1995, they began collaborating with Rhode Island policymakers to design a student-centered high school, and created The Big Picture Company as the launching pad for what has now become a national education reform movement. The result of their work in Provedince was the Metropolitan Regional and Technical Center (commonly called simply The Met). Opened in Providence in 1996, The Met is a unique state-funded public school, open to all Rhode Island students in grades 9-12. The Big Picture Company believes that schools must be personalized, educating every student equally, ONE STUDENT AT A TIME. Each student’s learning plan should grow out of his or her unique needs, interests, and passions.

CPESS (Central Park East Secondary School)
Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) is part of the Coalition for Essential Schools and therefore is guided by its principles. The school was founded in 1985. A key element of the school's program is the Community Service/Learning Program. The philosophy behind this program is that students are part of a larger community, and they should participate in and benefit from regular community service. The CPESS curriculum allows highly individualized design in order to promote innovation in education. CPESS offers a common core curriculum for all students in grades seven through ten that is organized around two major fields: mathematics/science for half of the school day and humanities (art, history, social studies, and literature) for the other half. Interrelationships between different subjects of study are integrated and communications skills are taught in all subjects by all staff. At the end of tenth grade, students enter the Senior Institute. Each student has a Graduation Committee. The committee prepares a personal program of study designed to prepare the student for graduation and the world of work.

CART - The Center for Advanced Research and Technology
The Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) is the most comprehensive, state-of-the-art education reform effort at the secondary level to date. The CART combines rigorous academics with technical, design, process, entrepreneurial, and critical thinking skills. The 75,000 square foot CART facility, designed as a high performance business atmosphere, is organized around four career clusters: Professional Sciences, Engineering, Advanced Communications, and Global Economics. Within each cluster are several career-specific laboratories in which students complete industry-based projects and receive academic credit for advanced English, science, math, and technology. CART provides a state-of-the-art research and technology facility where students design and complete projects in collaboration with partners from the local, national, and international business community. Through learning plans, individualized attention, and a coordinated sequence of projects, CART students explore the variety of ways they can achieve their career goals.

EVC (The Educational Video Center)
The Educational Video Center is an alternative high school in New York City, whose curriculum revolves around documentary making. Through the process of documentary video production, EVC students learn valuable research, writing and reporting skills, enhancing their capacities for critical analysis and creative self-expression. EVC's unique methodology of media education brings together the powerful traditions of student-centered progressive education and independent community documentary making. This approach uses media and technology to engage all students in creative and rigorous inquiry-based projects on current issues of importance to them. Documentaries produced range in topic from domestic violence, to race relations, drug abuse and teen pregnancy, bearing witness to the problems and possibilities of life for today's urban teenagers. Using this multidisciplinary approach, teachers can integrate English, social studies, art, and technology into video projects as students develop their literacy, research, critical thinking, and civic engagement skills.

What are the curriculum characteristics shared by these successful programs?

Personalization & individualized attention
Active engagement in authentic, real-world tasks about issues that are of interest to them;
Hands-on, project-based learning
Integrated curriculum
Student reflection and self assessment throughout all work
Work connected to the students’ lives, communities, and local businesses or industries
Authentic assessment
Advisory
College & career preparation
Technology use integrated throughout

Each of these schools have been successful because of the hard work of educators who believe that these hard to reach children can learn and are capable of high quality work. “Canned” curriculum programs, such as computer learning systems, are largely ineffective with these students since the focus is largely on content delivery and not on relationships with the students and the other characteristics listed above.

There was much more information on each school than could be presented in this brief brief. Additional information and links to resources related to each school has been posted to this blog:

The Met & The Big Picture, Co.

Central Park East Secondary School

CART (The Center for Advanced Research and Technology)

The Educational Video Center

EVC (The Educational Video Center, NY, NY)

2006-07-09T09:35:00.000-05:00

The Educational Video Center is an alternative high school in New York City, whose curriculum revolves around documentary making. Through the process of documentary video production, EVC students learn valuable research, writing and reporting skills, enhancing their capacities for critical analysis and creative self-expression. Documentaries produced range in topic from domestic violence, to race relations, drug abuse and teen pregnancy, bearing witness to the problems and possibilities of life for today's urban teenagers.This information comes from their website

EVC has come a long way since it held its first video class for teenagers in a Lower East Side alternative high school in 1984. History >> EVC has come a long way since it held its first video class for teenagers in a Lower East Side alternative high school in 1984. From that single workshop, EVC has developed into an award-winning organization with three major programs:
High School Documentary Workshop
YO-TV (Youth Organizers TV)
Teacher Development Program

EVC has become a nationally recognized model of a media arts education program that makes an important difference in the lives of some of the most hard-to-reach youth. EVC is dedicated to the creative and community-based use of video and multi-media as a means to develop the literacy, critical thinking, and work preparation skills of inner city youth.

EVC's unique methodology of media education brings together the powerful traditions of student-centered progressive education and independent community documentary making. As described in the New York Times article, "Video Verite", as the EVC students learn to create their own video projects they also "learn to analyze the language of image and sound, just as they read and analyze books in English classes".

Following the key principles of this methodology, EVC media educators:
actively engage students in authentic, real-world tasks about issues that are of interest to them;
facilitate small group, collaborative work so that each student can serve as a resource and amplifier for their peers' learning;
organically link the processes of student creative media work and critical analysis;
teach students abstract concepts through the habitual joining of observation, experience and discussion;
routinely use visual, print and aural literacies for learning and expression;
share student-produced media work with school and community audiences for learning and discussion;
incorporate student reflection and self assessment throughout all work.

EVC has recently released their curriculum. Based on EVC's two decades of experience, this comprehensive curriculum package helps middle and high school teachers and out-of-school program instructorsguide youth in producing a documen-tary video. This practical toolkit of instructional strategies uses media and technology to engage all students in creative and rigorous inquiry-based projects on current issues of importance to them. Using this multidisciplinary approach, teachers can integrate English, social studies, art, and technology into video projects as students develop their literacy, research, critical thinking, and civic engagement skills.

Also check out their Youth Voice project (Similar to Taking It Global):

EVC: http://www.evc.org/

Youth Media Comes of Age
Resourses on Youth and Media

Teaching Youth Media
A Critical Guide to Literacy, Video Production, and Social Change
by Steven Goodman
Released in January 2003, Teaching Youth Media explores the power of using media education to help urban teenagers develop their critical thinking and literacy skills. Drawing on his twenty years of experience working with inner-city youth at the Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City, Goodman looks closely at both the problems and possibilities of this model of media education.
Click herefor excerpts from Teaching Youth Media in PDF format.

The book at Amazon.com
EVC's page on the book
A review of the book

CPESS (Central Park East Secondary School, New York, New York)

2006-07-09T09:06:00.000-05:00

This is the high school made famous by Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas. She has transformed several elementary and high schools through what she calls "democratic education," involving the students and families in making these the kind of schools they want. The following comes from NCREL:

This city school gives both teachers and students high amounts of personal freedom for development and sets the limit for class size at 20.

Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) is part of the Coalition for Essential Schools and therefore is guided by its principles. The school was founded in 1985 as a public school in Community School District 4 in New York City. It operates in partnership with District 4, the Alternative High School Division of the Board of Education, and the Coalition for Essential Schools. It began with seventh graders, and a grade was added each year so that it comprises grades 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11/12. Application to the school is open to all students in New York City, particularly those entering seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. The enrollment at its full size is 450 students.

A key element of the school's program is the Community Service/Learning Program directed by Community Service Coordinator Ann Purdy. The philosophy behind this program is that students are part of a larger community, and they should participate in and benefit from regular community service. Students spend a minimum of three hours each week in a wide range of community service activities. The time that students spend in service activities also helps provide time for teachers' collaborative planning. Community service activities occur between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., Monday through Thursday. With students out in the community during these hours, teachers are allowed one morning per week, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., for collaborative planning. Four groups of teachers divide up the four mornings available. No one is out on Friday mornings - all teachers have class in the morning and students go home at 1 p.m. Teachers then have time to eat lunch and to meet from 1:45 p.m. to 3 p.m. for staff development. Therefore, teachers have this time each week for professional development, along with 2.5 hours on Monday for professional planning.

The CPESS curriculum allows highly individualized design in order to promote innovation in education. Therefore, a brief description of that design is necessary for clarity. CPESS offers a common core curriculum for all students in grades seven through ten that is organized around two major fields: mathematics/science for half of the school day and humanities (art, history, social studies, and literature) for the other half. Interrelationships between different subjects of study are integrated and communications skills are taught in all subjects by all staff. At the end of tenth grade, students enter the Senior Institute. Each student has a Graduation Committee, which comprises the student, a family member, a staff member, an adult chosen by the student, another student, and an advisor. The committee prepares a personal program of study designed to prepare the student for graduation and the world of work.

Articles and Information about Central Park East and Deborah Meier's work

Deborah Meier Homepage

A brief biography of Deborah Meier.

IN SCHOOLS WE TRUST Interviews.
An Interview with Deborah Meier
From the PBS Learning Matters Series

The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem
Through journal entries and narrative, the author tells stories from Central Park East, a small elementary school in Harlem that is often held up as a model for reforming inner city schools. The author was a chief architect of the innovative elementary school and its offshoot, Central Park East Secondary School.
Edutopia's Overview
The Publisher's Overview
The book at Amazon.com

All Aboard: Pioneering educator Deborah Meier has a new plan for softening up tough schools.
By Jo Cavallo
Stage Door: Playacting replaces acting out aggression, providing a release valve for kids from rough urban neighborhoods. Credit: Gregory Cherin
For more than three decades, Deborah Meier has worked to improve the physical space that frames intellectual learning. As a teacher, principal, and writer, Meier has long been one of the most vocal proponents of the small-schools movement. In 1974, she founded Central Park Elementary School in New York City. Later she opened two more elementary schools, along with Central Park East Secondary School in New York City and the Mission Hill School in Boston, all of which have been praised as models of urban education reform for giving teachers and parents greater power in running their schools and encouraging a family-friendly environment.

Central Park East: An Alternative Story
By Deborah Meier
Central Park East Secondary School is ocated in East Harlem in the midst of New York City's District a that many observers believe is as good as any school in the public or the private sector. A progressive school in the tradition of so many of New York's independent private schools, Central Park East is finnly fixed within New York's school bureaucracy. As its founding principal, I remain both ecstatic and amazed.

A Hundred Times More Rewarding
By Alexis Carrero
Alexis Carrero describes how project-based learning, original research, respect for student ideas and opinions, and portfolio assessment made high school so rewarding for her as a student at Central Park East Secondary School in New York City.

The Met & The Big Picture, Co.

2006-07-08T21:54:00.000-05:00

Metropolitan Regional and Technical Center (commonly called simply The Met) is the brainchild of Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor. Littky formed the Big Picture Company to help promote schools that work for all students. The following comes from the Met's and the Big Picture's web sites:

Opened in Providence in 1996, “The Met” (Metropolitan Regional and Technical Center) is a unique state-funded public school, open to all Rhode Island students in grades 9-12. Three-quarters of The Met’s students come from Providence, with the remaining quarter from more than a dozen towns and cities across the state.

The school’s student body mirrors that of the Providence public schools: 39 percent Hispanic, 37 percent white, 22 percent African-American, and 2 percent Asian. More than half qualify for free lunch, and 42 percent come from homes where English is a second language.

The Met now houses 336 students in six separate school buildings on three Providence campuses. Although it plans to expand to approximately 700 students, it will limit enrollment to 110 students per school, divided into eight advisories, with two from each grade.

The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, “The Met,” is celebrating its tenth year anniversary. It has expanded from a single school in the Shepard Building to a network of six small schools across three campuses in Providence, Rhode Island. The Met personalizes each student’s education and prepares all 700 students for collegiate and professional success.

The Big Picture Company was founded by educators Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, both formerly of the renowned Thayer High School in New Hampshire and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. In 1995, they began collaborating with Rhode Island policymakers to design a student-centered high school, and created The Big Picture Company as the launching pad for what has now become a national education reform movement.

The Big Picture Company believes that schools must be personalized, educating every student equally, ONE STUDENT AT A TIME. Each student’s learning plan should grow out of his or her unique needs, interests, and passions. We believe that the education system must ensure that students and families are active participants in the design and authentic assessment of each child’s learning. Schools must be small enough to encourage the development of a community of learners, and to allow for each child to be known well by at least one adult. School staff and leaders must be visionaries and life-long learners. Schools must connect students, and the school, to the community - both by sending students out to learn from mentors in the real world, and by allowing the school itself to serve as an asset to the local community and its needs. Finally, schools must allow for admission to, and success in, college to be a reality for every student, and work closely with students, families, and colleges throughout – and beyond - the application process.

Big Picture Schools are distinguished by the use of the same language and practice. All Big Picture High Schools share common characteristics which we call ‘distinguishers.’ The distinguishers, listed to the right, exist as a comprehensive whole. They are interrelated and inform one another, consequently, no distinguisher is more important than another and none work in isolation. It is the combination of the distinguishers, the degree to which Big Picture Schools employ them, and intensive conversations of reflection and action, that results in the powerful success of the design.

The 10 Distinguishers
One Student at a Time - Personalization
Learning in the Real World
Authentic Assessment
School Organization
Advisory Structure
School Culture
Leadership
Parent/Family Engagement - Adult Support
School-College Partnership - College Preparation
Professional Development

There are currently 34 Big Picture Schools with four more to be opened in 2006-2007.

Various data show the success of the Met:

The Met is an “improving” school and scored just shy of being named a “high performing” school (3 points in English/Language Arts and 6 points in Math).

On average, The Met had 18% more students proficient in math and 14% more students proficient in English/Language Arts than the three largest Providence high schools.

Graduation Rate
94.6% Graduation Rate (one of the highest in the state)
The state average is 81.3% and the Providence average is 54% for the city’s three largest high schools.

Attendance Rate
92.1% Attendance Rate
The state average is 89.8% and the Providence average is 80% for the city’s three largest high schools.

According to Rhode Island’s School Accountability for Learning and Teaching (SALT) Surveys 2005:
#1 in the state Parent Involvement
#1 in the state School Climate
#1 in the state Instruction
#1 in the state Teacher Availability (academic)
#1 in the state Teacher Availability (personal)

College Data
»» 98% College Acceptance, 80% College Enrollment (in college or post-secondary education)
»» 75% are the first in their families to go to college

The MET & The Big Picture links:
http://www.bigpicture.org/
http://www.metcenter.org/
http://www.whatkidscando.org/portfoliosmallschools/met/metintro.html

Articles related to the Met and their approach to reaching students

Creating New Steps: Innovating from the Edge to the Middle
by Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski
Phi Delta Kappan; June 2006

Chapter 1 - "When Learning Matters - Using Learning Plans To Educate One Student At A Time"
by Elliot Washor

Welcome to the New World: Met school rekindles learning by doing
by Elliot Washor and Dennis Littky
Rhode Island Citizen; September 2001

Motivation, Mentoring, Miracles: A Rhode Island high school, The Met, helps students who mostly have failed at conventional schools fulfill their academic potential
Business Week; June 16, 2006

CART - The Center for Advanced Research and Technology

2006-07-08T21:21:00.000-05:00

CART is a high tech school serving students from the Fresno and Clovis school districts. It's curriculum is organized around career labs. Here is more about CART from their website.

The Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) is the most comprehensive, state-of-the-art education reform effort at the secondary level to date. The CART combines rigorous academics with technical, design, process, entrepreneurial, and critical thinking skills.

The 75,000 square foot CART facility, designed as a high performance business atmosphere, is organized around four career clusters. They are Professional Sciences, Engineering, Advanced Communications, and Global Economics. Within each cluster are several career-specific laboratories in which students complete industry-based projects and receive academic credit for advanced English, science, math, and technology.

Eleventh and twelfth grade students from the Clovis and Fresno Unified School Districts are bused to CART where they attend half-day classes in one of the laboratories taught by teams of instructors from both education and business. The partnership between the school districts is a unique opportunity to make systemic change in education and positively influence the future of all students in the San Joaquin Valley, a rapidly expanding economic area for high-tech business and agricultural firms.

CART provides a state-of-the-art research and technology facility where students design and complete projects in collaboration with partners from the local, national, and international business community. Through learning plans, individualized attention, and a coordinated sequence of projects, CART students explore the variety of ways they can achieve their career goals. Working with business partners, teachers, and parents, students design a program of study that qualifies them to pursue the post-secondary path of their choice from entry-level positions to industry certification to university admission. With the knowledge, skills, and support they receive, students leave CART ready to launch their careers.

Lab Organization Overview:
CART labs are organized within "Career Clusters". Each Career Cluster will contain two or more labs related to that career focus. The students can choose one lab depending on their interest. The labs are either a morning or afternoon session and last two semesters.

Professional Sciences
Forensics
Biomedicine
Environmental Science

Advanced Communications
Multimedia
Network Management
Computer Science
Interactive Game Design

Global Dynamics
Economics & Finance
Marketing & Advertising
Law & Policy

Engineering Architectural Design
Biomedical Engineering
Product Development
Robotics

The School:
http://www.cart.org

Articles or further information:

School Profile of CART

The Education Innovator:
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY PUTS STUDENTS ON FAST TO ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL TRACK

PROJECT-BASED LEARNING

Learning from the Margins

2006-07-08T21:12:00.000-05:00

The entire Summer 1998 issue of Northwest Education Magazine focuses on Alternative Schools: Alternative Schools: Caring for Kids on the Edge.

One of the articles synthesizes lessons learned from alternative schools:

Learning from the Margins
By Suzie Boss
NW Education, Summer 1998

Students attending the nation's estimated 15,000 alternative schools come in all sorts of colorful packages. More than a few adopt hairstyles, wardrobes, street language, and attitudes that would make them stand out—or be kicked out—of mainstream classrooms. But what's most remarkable about this diverse student body isn't outward appearances. It's that these students, many of whom face obstacles ranging from poverty to teen pregnancy to long-term academic failure to chronic delinquency, are making an appearance in school at all.

A growing body of research and years of anecdotal evidence show that students who have been labeled failures, troublemakers, or dropouts in traditional schools can thrive in smaller, more individualized settings. That may sound like plain common sense to any teacher who has worked to pull a struggling student back from the brink. It's especially timely news, however, as communities across the country wrestle with the staggering social and economic costs associated with undereducated youth. After years of operating on the margins of public education, alternative schools are getting a serious look from many different interest groups: proponents of school reform, corrections workers overwhelmed by juvenile caseloads, and employers concerned about finding enough educated young people to fill tomorrow's workplaces.

Strategies for Teacher Success

Meet students at the door of your room every single day.
Call each student by his or her first name.
Engage all students in each class each day.
Set high standards for behavior and work.
Clearly communicate your expectations for student behavior and work.
Use varied methods of teaching (hands-on and student-centered activities).
Be consistent in rewarding behavior and disciplining misbehavior.
Call parents with good news and concerns. Use the "sandwich" approach (put the concerns between slices of good news).
Understand the impact of homework on many students.
Let your students know that you are truly interested in their welfare.

Curriculum to Reach the Hard to Teach

2006-07-08T21:07:00.000-05:00

More and more high schools are wondering about what to do with their hard to teach students. They are exploring engaging instruction and alternative education.

What models of curriculum are proven with these students?

That is the question that I was asked by one high school principal. While researching the information for a Principal's Partnership Research Brief, I found much more information than would fit in the brief brief. So I've decided to share the information that I've found here in Every One Learns.

The series of posts will include schools that have successfully reached hard to teach students, including:

The Met
CART (The Center for Advanced Research and Technology)
EVC (Educational Video Center), and
Central Park East Secondary School.

Digital Kids are Changing the World!

2006-06-23T09:30:00.000-05:00

—Michael Furdyk

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 23, 2006.

Session description:
With his own story as a powerful example, Michael will provide us with an in-depth look at the "Net Generation", born between 1980-2000, and how their use of technology is influencing many aspects of society. Michael will also discuss his work with TakingITGlobal, the world's largest online network of youth leaders, and their efforts to develop engaging, effective curriculum activities for schools around the world, to get students more engaged in global issues.

Session notes:
Born in 1982 - Commodore 64, the best selling computer ever (Guinness), was released. Now, most young people report starting using computers between ages 5 & 8 (Pew).

Young people learn differently

multiprocessing
multimedia literacy
discover-based learning
bias towards action

One marketing teacher spent about a week on the textbook and then challenged the students to create and market a product and were graded by the success of the product.

They have new expectations:

Staying connected
zero tolerance for delays
consumer/creator blurring

Young people are taking action. One boy in Ontario learned that kids in Africa can't go to school because their towns don't have a well, so he has raised more than a million dollars for building wells in Africa.

What is learning was as interactive and "addictive" as social networking and gaming?

Why is TakingItGlobal needed? Globally, only 14% believe that the world is becoming a better place.

TakingItGlobal gives young people the opportunity to make friends. Discover people that share the same interest, speak the same language, etc. There is a whole section on taking action. A whole expression section where young people can share their artwork and get feedback from others. A whole section on Browse Resources. Trying to democratize opportunities. Panorama - expression through writing - a place to share & discuss writing. Also individual blogs. They can become a live news network about what's going on in their community and their lives. Have country sites, and state/province sites, and city sites and learn more about that location.

Today's education system faces irrelevance, unless we bridge the gap between how schools teach and how kids learn outside of school

Almost half of the students say they dropped out because classes were not interesting and they were bored. - Gates Foundation Dropout Study

Leonardo's Laptop: Educational Tools for Collaboration and Creativity

2006-06-23T08:48:00.000-05:00

Ben Shneiderman

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 23, 2006.

Session description:
The old computing is about what computers can do; the new computing is about what people can do ...and therefore the new education is about collaboration and creativity. If our children learn those skills, they will be more capable of contributing in their families, communities, and jobs, and they may have more satisfying and meaningful lives. Effective educational tools are those that support creativity. The goal is to have students working in teams to create something of value to someone outside the classroom, and something that endures beyond the semester.

Session notes:
Working to move beyond "user friendly." Scientific Approach.

American Memory - Library of Congress digital library

International Children's Digital Library - We are a library that provides free access to children's books from around the world. By ensuring access to books from many cultures and in diverse languages, we foster a love of reading, a readiness to learn, and a response to the challenges of world illiteracy.

Visual Understanding - the eye is the best way to understand the world. Trying to create rapid exploration software that allows for easy, visual searching of large pools of data.

Leonardo's Laptop: The old computing is about what computers can do, the new computing is about what people can do. "You become what you measure." But you have to measure what matters. How many web pages did kids create today? How many emails did they send in a foreign language? The usual measures don't measure productivity, creativity, or understanding.

E-Learning: The new education.
What is the purpose, the goal of education?
The sound of education isn't the sound of my voice being broadcast across the room, but rather the buzz of discussion and conversation of the learners/students.
"The large part of the answer may well be what men and woment of this civilization have longest feaerd and most desired: the achievement of moments of ecstasy." George leonard - Education and Ecstasy, 1968.

Sopholces - One should learn by doing.
Learning is something that students do, not something that is done to the.

Basic skills are learned not in isolation, but in the context of collaborative undertaking.

Collect-Relate-Create-Donate as a model for learning. Thinking how students might work in teams to produce ambitious projects meaningful to someone outside the classroom and to survive the semester. The 5th grade class that created a CD about African animals for the 3rd grade class. What kids want: a challenge, to collaborate, to do something.

In class: think-pair-share, roundtable. Short-term projects: lab exercise, show homework problem solutions

Service Oriented Team Projects:

Engaging in the World
elping where needed
Caring for others
Communicating ideas
Organizing events

Making kids into activists. Joining them together, such as a newspaper.

Have them leave something behind, such as "the encyclopedia of..." what ever topic. There is a due date by which it is posted. Students give feedback to each other and the projects are revised.

Crisis: Innovation & Creativity Skills

the workforce of the future requires people who have
strong communication skills
ability to work collaboratively
ability to manage ambiguity
strohng problmen solving skills
ability to rapidly learn new skills

innovateamerica.org
compete.org

The Berkshires to Boston - One-to-One Planning and Implementation Tools

2006-06-22T10:41:00.000-05:00

—Matt Mervis, North Adams Public Schools

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 22, 2006.

Session notes:
Matt is Director of Technology for North Adams (MA) schools and part of their Berkshires Wireless Learning Initiative. Planned for a little more than 2 years and have been implementing for a little more than 9 months. Is taking what they have learned and is trying to share it in a practical form for others to learn from (still in draft).

Also involved with the Boston Pilot Middle School laptop initiative.

Why 1:1? The Friedman thing! The world is flat. Also teens and tech. Teens have shifted from being passive consumers to active content creators. Also equity. We're a world of have's and have-not's. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." Growing acceptance of online learning. States now allowing textbook adoption moneys for digital content providers. Texas, for example, is merging their textbook and technology departments at the state level.

Results from laptops: Learning environment transformed; assessment changed; diversified professional development; engaged students; productivity increases. "We spent big bucks on capacity building professional development efforts before the deployment, but the best professional development has been Teacher A turning to Teacher B and their helping each other." But not a lot of evidence of change of test scores (but some starting to come out and there are other indicators of positive effects on student learning).

There are four schools involved in the Berkshires project - two from Pittsfield, one in North Adams, and a Catholic school. Looking for changes in motivation & engagement, teacher practice, attendance & behavior, etc.

The toolkit (a project of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative) - in draft mode. Includes several sections: getting started; getting organized; building the foundation; selecting providers; charting the final plan; Implement, Review, Reengineer. Working to break them out to discreet pieces and provide support for others working to start a project.

Working to build an RFP where it is clear that the bids will be scored on price, success in other initiatives, and match to project outcomes. If a vendor submits a bid that is just a bunch of technology and not aligned with the project outcomes, they will not score very highly. No more RFPs based on tech specs but on pedagogical and use specs.

They are working on building a series of wireless classroom rubrics to help inform the work.

Reflections on Katrina ....

2006-06-22T10:25:00.000-05:00

—Carolyn Thompson

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 22, 2006.

Session notes:
Louise S. McGehee School, New Orleans. From the school web site:

At Louise S. McGehee School, we prepare each student for her individual journey amidst a climate of innovation rooted in tradition. McGehee is a school of girls for girls. Our students understand that they can do anything because here girls fill every role—student body president, math whiz, sports star and valedictorian.

For close to a century, our school has graduated young women who know what it means to be leaders and are ready to take charge of their futures.

Hit hard by Katrina. They were lucky - their school sustained very little damage. It was the students that were blogging and emailing that they wanted to return. They would have boys for the first time (people brought their daughters back to this girls school, but the boy's schools hadn't opened yet. There was the "tradition" think. These girls wanted to graduate in their pink dresses!

Involved the kids in service learning upon return. They contributed to cleaning up the city.

This is really a story about how technology brought the students back together through the power of communication - emails, blogs, etc.

They had a very strong sense of connection to their school and a strong sense of community. There are no lectures at McGehee - it is all discussion based and hands on. So going to other schools was very different and uncomfortable for them. Electronic tools allowed them to reconnect with their community and then work to bring everyone back. These tools provided support in a way that the government and other institutions could.

Set up a school blog and invited students to participate. First posts are I'm save and here, where are you? Then it shifted to reaching out and supporting students as they adjusted to new schools. Then shifted to talking about coming back and encouraging every kid to return.

Teachers informed on Oct. 10 that they needed to report back on the 17th. Teachers were concerned. Some had lost houses or had children whose schools hadn't opened yet. But the technology helped them support each other, too. The school reopened on Oct. 24 - a big celebration.

They know now, as we enter another hurricane season, that if they are hit by another hurricane, they will continue to hold school, but electronically using their blogs, school wiki, and school website.

Wanted students to have a way to process what they had been through, so created the Hawk's Eye View site so that they could tell their own story of Katrina. They also thought that they should tell the story of the city. That turned into two oral history projects. One in the Women's Study class, largely because it was women who got out and got the work of the city clean-up and recovery. (Still need to get all the video up to the web site, since January hit and they realized they had to help get kids ready for SATs and college content.) Will eventually get all that media up.

Also believed that they needed to create context. So students worked on research projects. Posed questions they wanted to answer (e.g. Does political perspective shape views and perspectives on Hurricane Katrina? and How did historical settlement patterns and architecture help explain the flooding pattern after Hurricane Katrina?), and then did some research and produced web pages.

Then wanted them to feel empowered and think about envisioning a new city. "If we won't do it who will?" Poems. How would you design a house to be hurricane proof. Held a town meeting where the kids represented various community members. Then put the kids in the position of doing a "Bring Back New Orleans" session, like the mayor was doing. And wrote position papers.

Was greatly influenced by Shneiderman's book Leonardo's Laptop.

Leadership & Sustainability

2006-06-22T07:15:00.000-05:00

—Bette Manchester, Maine Learning Technologies Initiative

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 21, 2006.

Session description:
This session will focus on lessons learned, research results during four years of implementation. Specific, key components such as professional learning community, focus on instruction, professional development for leadership, teachers, techs, content development must be in place prior to implementation and throughout the life of the work. Coherence with state, district and school goals must be apparent throughout the project if there is an expectation to increase student and educator learning. Strategies and evidence of results will be presented throughout this presentation.

Session Notes:
Maine's laptop initiative was about Public Service with a Moral Purpose:

Equity of resources for students and staff
Increase student and educator learning
Increase collaboration among students and educators
Project based learning

An overview of MLTI. Watch the video.

How do we make this more than a $2000 pencil?

Commitment to Changing Context at All Levels:

Systemic change - we needed to involve everyone,
Purpose setting,
Learner Centered,
Content development (we didn't have money, so we partnered with nearly every organization in Maine that produces content. Example - Windows on Maine, partnership between university and Public Broadcasting to bring video content into the classrooms online.,
Charette - Strength-based model - whenever we met, we asked first "what is working?" It is critical to have a foundation of strength and then work with our challenges around this.,
Culture of risk-taking - we really had to work with schools to take on a huge project like this to make changes

Lateral Capacity Building Through Networks

Communication
Learning communities - within building, district, region state
virtual networks
Principal, teacher leaders, librarians, tech coordinators
student tech teams - brings the student voice, brings support to the teachers and tech coordinators, career awareness.

Intelligent Accountability and Vertical Relationships

Assessment of Learning - schools said they mostly needed help with assessment.
Assessment for learning - We also recognized the importance of feedback and formative assessment - Maine hired Dr. Anne Davies to help develop assessment tools and resources for teachers.
Evidence of Learning
Content-Digital Media group.

Deep Learning at All Levels

Create feedback loops at all levels
De-privatize classroom/school practice
ZPS - Zone of proximal development (Vgotsky) - if you are really trying to move teachers ahead, you have to be aware of where your teachers are and pace the work with teachers. It may need to move slower than you think - but it should be based on what the teachers are ready for and requires that you are tuned in to what they need and their readiness.
Critical Friends Group-Examining Student work
Inquiry-based Learning

Dual Commitment to Short and Long Term Results

Clarify goals for students, educators, and support staff
3 lenses - CCT (curriculum, school culture, technology) - we had some schools being made only from the technical point of view. We're moving schools to teachers making the educatoional decisions and the technologists then find ways to support that decision.
Feedback loops & action steps
Monday and Someday- Papert - Bette considers herself the "Monday" person - what will happen right now. But Seymour is the "Someday" person who helps us think about where we are headed in the future

Cyclical Energizing

Work should be hard fun - Papert
Pay attention to energy levels
Implementation Dip - know they are coming and prepare for them.
Celebrate accomplishments

The Long Lever of Leadership

Expectations for all - you wouldn't go to a hospital where some of the staff says, "well, we don't do technology." It is the role of the principal to set the expectation that every teacher will be using the technology.
1to1 maximizes student learning
Teacher Leadership - "green-eyed monster" - there are innovators in each building whose colleagues are their own worst enemy. But your school can look at the research (Google "green-eyed monster") on the topic
Professional development- sustained and imbedded - the day of the 2-day workshop is over. It must me ongoing and support the work of the teachers and schools. We noticed the math teachers were using the technology the least, so we retooled the professional development to target Math teachers.
Leadership is Everything

Some schools want to leave the computers on carts. The state said that we would pull the laptops from the school if they were used as a cart initiative. That was all about control. Leaving them in carts says that the teacher controls learning and when it happens - they pass out the "books." Giving the machines to the students means that kids control their learning. This has been a focus of our work to have teachers give up unnecessary control (while keeping appropriate control) so that students can flourish by having more voice and control of their own learning.

Making the Laptop Disappear: Moving to Seamless Integration

2006-06-21T11:37:00.000-05:00

—Howard Levin, Urban School of San Francisco

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 21, 2006.

Session Notes:
A version of the presentation is available online. This link will also connect you to articles by Howard.

Howard is Tech Director of the Urban School of San Francisco - a small independent high school. Some argue that they have accomplished more because they are a small, independent school, but howard argues that it is all doable and scalable for public schools. Urban School has about 325 student and 36 teachers (full time equivalent). Grades 9-12. Educational innovator. For example, narrative feedback and no such thing as a grade until they graduate. One of the first schools to implement a full fledged Block schedule. 28% students of color and students receiving financial aid, but also a strong base of wealthy students.

1to1 since 2002. The only CA independent laptop high schools. 7th year of wireless. Completed cross platform system. Primarily Mac, but server is PC based. Head of School as key catalyst.

Laptops for all: Why? Urban's guiding technology principles: Mission based- to ignite a passion for learning; active student learning; seamless integration; equity access; increase access to resources; prepare for college and careers; provides options for divers learners.

Why "natural integration?" No tech-specific courses. Not directly teaching skills- lessons integrated into the content learning. Entering 9th graders have a "technology boot camp" with the beginning on policy pieces (what they can and cannot do) but then turned loose to make web pages to get to know each others. "Teach no skill before its application." Culture of collaboration. Strive to push aside the notion of competition in academics.

What does making the laptop disappear mean to you? Making it like paper or pencil that you just bring to use for your learning. If you are conscious of the laptop, then you aren't thinking about the learning.

Vision - has nothing to do with pen & paper - it is a completely new phenomenon. But it is about being a natural tool for learning and kids having the most modern/powerful tools for learning. It is all about learning: organization; communication; information; production. We don't measure the effect of laptops on test scores. We have evidence, but we won't keep a "control group" of students away from the laptops just to see "if it works." We believe it works and have seen it work.

The means of communication, organization, information & production have changed. Used to be paper and pencil and listening. But technology has changed that (look for the Paradigm Shifts slides in the online presentation). New Paradigm: everyone captures. For example, every student with a MacBook has a built in iSight camera and microphone and can capture a lesson or event. Today, kids are capturing a piece of poetry or a scene for a history activity.

Students are allowed to do anything they want to their computers as long as it is legal and safe. The school doesn't filter or block. Kids can set their own background and can organize the desktop as they would like.

Power of laptop as communication tool. In beginning, English Dept. & Language Dept. were most resistant, but now are the biggest users. Audio files for language study. Teacher sends audio assignment. Student send audio response. Teacher can correct it (textually) and send back for student to revise. This kind of assessment and feedback is done quickly and does not need to be used during class time. Email conferences as communication tool. Often done as groups (not whole class) - creates a record that can be reviewed. This approach also facilitates peer editing - get and give feedback on their writing.

Seeing teachers use SnapZ Pro to create movies of directions for activities/projects. Then it is there permanently.

Audio files as an alternative to or extension to writing - especially for students who are really challenged by writing and aren't really being evaluated adequately on their learning.

Enhance and Augment: Cultivate 'latent opportunities." What is now possible that previously was difficult or impossible? What are desires of teachers - often utopian - that they would want to accomplish with students.

Authentic Doing: Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project. Students collect the stories of Holocaust survivors & refugees and WWII Camp Liberators. Each story represents about 4 hours of interviews. Students record the interview and transcribe the interviews. This project could have never been accomplished without laptops. Directions are all online - teachers don't provide directions directly. Students can figure out all the different tech steps by working together and using the online help resources.

Making Education Relevant: A System-Wide One-to-One Laptop

2006-06-21T09:52:00.000-05:00

—Ron Canuel, Eastern Townships School Board, Quebec

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 21, 2006.

Session description:
As educators we are given the honor and privilege of preparing today’s youth for tomorrow’s realities. This challenge is made increasingly more difficult with society’s ever changing expectations on education and the fact that we must prepare the students of today for their world and not ours. This includes taking a close look at teaching methodologies and practices and aligning them to meet the skills and expectations demanded by the next generation of employers and society at large. To do so, we must re-evaluate the old paradigms in education and look to how we can engage our students in the learning journey and further empower our teachers.

The greatest challenge facing educators is Relevancy. The walls of our classrooms are becoming increasingly permeable, with students moving between and amongst a variety of “learning interfaces”. At the Eastern Townships School Board, a one-to-one wireless laptop deployment, now completing three years of a system-wide implementation has generated positive transformational teaching and learning environments. Ron will share with participants the many facets of how technology can play an integral role in literacy, numeracy and reducing dropout rates.

Session Notes:
Ron is "superintendent" of the Eastern Townships School Board in Magog, Quebec. The Dennis McCullough Initiative - Enhancing Learning Strategy. Chose not to do a pilot, but to make it systemic and do it with everyone. 65% English education students and 35% French mother tongue population. 28 Schools in small towns/cities 7000 students total (about 35% special needs). Cell phone service still not available in many areas. 21 Elected School Trustees: Unanimous Vote in 2002 - even though no money to do so, nor proof it would work. Funding: foundation for fundraising, loans, lease agreement. Put the laptop budget on a separate ledger, because they were balanced in the rest of their budget, and were in a deficit only for the laptops and that is the piece they are funding. If they had integrated the the budget, they were afraid they might be criticized for mismanagement because of the deficit, but wanted to be clear it was only the laptops that gave them a deficit.

They "work with the living" - they no longer pay any attention to the 10% of the teachers that don't want to work with the laptops. Put them aside and work with the 90% of the staff who will make a difference with their kids.

Forget about trying to focus on the folks who are against the idea, work with sustaining, supporting, and building capacity of those that are ready to move forward. We also need to shift from learning about the technology to learning about who our students are and how they learn. Our system is designed for the 19th century and we need to redesign schools to match the kids we have today. How many practices have we done for a long time because they "feel good"? But when will we focus on what "really works." If we look at the feel-good strategies and they aren't making a difference, why are we continuing with them.

There is urgency. We would never tolerate a doctor that said there is a new procedure that would have such a better impact, but I'm not going to do it for a couple years, because I'm not quite ready. No other industry would accept a 30% failure rate.

Our value system is misplaced. Our kids are multitaskers - we make a mistake when we try to medicate them or to force them to do one thing at a time, because they don't do one thing at a time when they are outside of school. Also, do we finally understand that learning is not restricted to the classroom context and takes place all over, all the time.

Focus on Literacy & Numeracy and engagement and student empowerment. In Quebec, Project learning is the approach - by law.

Papert - Laptops vs. no laptops is a silly debate. Technology is fully integrated into our current society and economies. Education cannot be exempted.

Don't be fooled by poorly researched media stories of "Technology in Education studies."

We need to support educators adjust the old and current standards of instruction to incorporate the new realities of learning in children. Change IS the now natural environment of the classroom. You can't just "stop."

Educators are losing the monopoly on the issue of where learning can occur. The shift from the control of knowledge to facilitating, conducting and orchestrating multiple approaches to the teaching and learning is needed. Laptops are an unprecedented resource in the classroom.

The Plan: Factors of Success

Professional development
Driven by pedagogy, not technology.
Focus on student learning.
Reliable and stable access
Reliable laptop operation and servicing
Rapid response to issues.
Solid legal and financial input

All seven factors of success are intertwined and one should never precede the other in planning and in application.

Focused on being based on research into effective learning and how rapidly evolving and changing our world has become. Engagement of these students in the learning contexts of a classroom is critical. Starting to shift/expand the focus of professional development from the adults to the students. By PD'ing the kids, the teachers can then help build the the work collaboratively with the students.

Developed the Blueprint for successful integration that involves 208 different activities.

Elementary School Results: Increased performance in reading and writing; reduced absenteeism of students; reduced behavior referrals.

Stories from the Central Valley California: Using Technology to Achieve

2006-06-21T07:47:00.000-05:00

—Walt Buster & Karen Ward, Central Valley Leadership Institute

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 21, 2006.

Session description:
All of our communities struggle with ensuring equity and academic success for students. Whether we teach and learn in private settings, urban districts, or rural communities, we are attempting to increase student achievement. AAL offers the vision of what could be for students in today’s technological environment. This is the story of one community starting the journey and believing that all students and teachers deserve the best in technology if they are truly going to “leave no child behind”.

Session notes:
Working to eliminate the achievement gap with technology, classroom practices must change (not just distribute technology).

Clovis (near Fresno, CA) School District's partners: AALF, Springboard Schools, Fresno State University and Central Valley Educational Leadership Institute. Karen Ward, Director of , works with 9 schools that are primarily English Language Learners. If we put this technology in the hands of some of the poorest students in the country and change to more constructivist practice, can we close the achievement gap?

Karen Ward asks, "what kind of education do our students deserve?" and "What do we need to do to achieve this?" Most of the schools she works with have a very high percentage of "Free and Reduced Lunch" students - students who do not generally have access to technology.

A couple of beliefs: Laptops are one of the most effective learning tools available today. Laptops are powerful literacy tools (most high school students are reading below grade level). Laptops and technology must be used equitably.

"Laptop programs require visionary leaders who understand what needs to done and who have the courage to stay the course." - Jenny Little

The largest farms in the Central Valley have GPS systems on the tractors. The prisons have enormous amounts of technology. Why don't our schools have as much technology?

Does it impact learning? The Beauford District found that the laptop students scored 16% higher than the non-laptop students.

One student asked a laptop student why he was writing so much. He responded, "There is no bottom to the page." If we don't put limits on student's talents and abilities, perhaps we will get more from them and for them.

We need to not make this a competitive process between laptop schools, but join together collaboratively as a Community of Learners.

The Central Valley has great needs: economic, cultural, and environmental. We have to have an educational system that works toward every child succeeding and technology is a critical tool for that work.

A poem that Walt finds helpful with this work:

To be of use by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

AALF 4i Conference Welcome: Welcome Comments for all Conference Delegates

2006-06-21T07:30:00.000-05:00

—Bruce Dixon, President AALF

Session from the AALF 4i Conference. June 21, 2006.

24 states represented. 8 countries represented, including Germany, India, Ireland, France, Australia, and the US. Marseilles, France, has three representatives of their laptop program with 60,000 students.

Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation Mission and Vision:

Picture the happy, effective and contributing global citizens of tomorrow. Being lifelong learners and digitally fluent, they participate fully in every aspect of social and economic life.

To make this picture a reality, today's students must learn differently. They must be granted an education that fosters their innate motivation to learn, that encourages academic rigor through relevant application, and that connects them with the world they will enter. This approach is often called 'anytime anywhere learning.'

To take part in anytime, anywhere learning, students must be provided with:
A constructivist, international education where meaningful tasks subsume curriculum objectives
A personal, portable computer with which to think about, construct and share ideas

An International 1to1 Conference

2006-06-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

I'm at the AALF 4i Annual Conference. The conference is sponsored by the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation. It will be three days (June 21-23, 2006) of awesome presentations by folks involved in 1to1 initiatives all around the world. We're at Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts.

I plan on blogging the sessions I attend.

Fires in the Bathroom

2006-05-31T21:38:00.000-05:00

A couple of projects I'm involved in lately have gotten me really interested in what our high schools might be like. What if they were as successful with our hard to teach students as they are with our easy to teach students? What if they really were places where every child would graduate ready for college, work, and citizenship? What if drop out rates dropped toward zero and higher education acceptance rates climbed toward 100%?

It makes me think about Dennis Littky's saying: If we love kids more than we love schools, then we have to change schools. And it makes me think about Al Gore's saying: Change is inconvenient (his context is the environment, but mine is education).

We know it is working some places and it has led me to read about them: Dennis Littky's Met in Rhode Island, Central Park East and Deborah Meier's high school in Boston, and CART in Fresno. And to wish desperately to be able to spend some time at each of these schools and learn more about what makes them work.

And it has me looking for anything (books, articles, TV stories, movies) that might tell me more about how we might make high schools better.

How about student voices? What if a bunch of high school students had advice for their teachers?

That's what's in Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students by Kathleen Cushman and the students of What Kids Can Do, Inc. (whose own Web site has tons of info that could help inform high schools).

The author started by interviewing teacher candidates about their concerns and questions about becoming high school teachers. She used that information to form questions she posed to high school students. The book is the culmination of that work. There are 10 chapters:

Knowing Students Well
Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness
Classroom Behavior
Creating a Culture of Success
Teaching to the Individual, Working with the Group
Motivation and Boredom
Teaching Difficult Academic Material
Teaching Teenagers Who are Still Learning English
When Things Go Wrong
Going Beyond the Classroom

The book is filled with wonderful quotes, great advice, and useful forms, charts, and calendars.

Now, if we'd only listen to what the students have to tell us...

What Makes a Good School: Students Speak Up At Leadership Forum

2006-05-26T12:13:00.000-05:00

Here's an Edutopia article on what student leaders believe makes for a good school:

What Makes a Good School: Students Speak Up At Leadership Forum

What happens when 24 high school students are brought together to articulate their ideas for what makes a good school? What if the students have never met or worked together before? What if there's a high-stakes culmination to their work -- like presenting their ideas to education leaders from across the country?

Here are some of their ideas:

The learning environment should be safe.
Learning spaces should be open and airy.
The curriculum should be comprehensive but student-driven.
Activities should be hands-on and related to real-world work.
An array of technology tools and access should be available at all times, from home and school.
Varied learning styles should be honored.
Emotional and intellectual support should be offered to students.

5 Paths to High School Success

2006-05-26T12:00:00.000-05:00

Just found this NWREL web site on several high schools that are making some progress toward reform:

Five Paths to Success
Throughout the region, high schools try different strategies to make learning more personal, relevant, and challenging.

The five paths are:

When Big Seems Small
Serious Goals, Playful Environment
Wired World
Building on the Past
Classroom Without Walls

The web site expands on each of these ideas.

A Great Story About What High School Can Be

2006-05-19T09:56:00.000-05:00

Here is a new article from Edutopia about one young lady's experience in two different schools. Perhaps we can learn something from her experience that will help us think long and hard about the way high school should be.

A Hundred Times More Rewarding

CART - What high schools could be like!

2006-05-18T22:08:00.000-05:00

I met this week with Pat Wright, the former CEO of an impressive school in California, the Center for Advanced Research and Technology. Here are some snippets from their web site:

The Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) is is the most comprehensive, state-of-the-art education reform effort at the secondary level to date. The CART combines rigorous academics with technical, design, process, entrepreneurial, and critical thinking skills.

CART provides a state-of-the-art research and technology facility where students design and complete projects in collaboration with partners from the local, national, and international business community. Through learning plans, individualized attention, and a coordinated sequence of projects, CART students explore the variety of ways they can achieve their career goals.

Eleventh and twelfth grade students from the Clovis and Fresno Unified School Districts are bused to CART where they attend half-day classes in one of the laboratories taught by teams of instructors from both education and business.

Instead of teaching their curriculum as separate subjects, they cut up the curriculum and teach it through projects that integrate the curriculum. Each of these "labs" have a different high-interest focus. Their labs include:

Interactive Game Design
Multimedia
Network Management
Computer Science
Forensic Research
Biomedicine
Environmental Science
Economics & Finance
Marketing & Advertising
Law & Policy
Architectural Design
Bioengineering
Product Development
Robotics

For example, “Students in the McCormick Barstow Law & Policy Lab examine the American legal system and its impact on every American’s life. They explore the current state of the law and forecast the changes that will occur in their lifetime. America’s influence on global legal issues is also considered.” Students earn credits in English 11 or 12, American Government/Economics, Law and Order and Public Policy, and CART Technology Applications. Here are some of things that students get to do during this lab:

Argue a case before the CART Supreme Court
Participate in a Town Hall Meeting
Work with professionals and mentors in the community
Take part in a mock criminal trial
Advocate for change in the law

This school has been terrifically successful, even with hard to teach students and is a model that deserve greater investigation.

What's the Message for Middle Grades Reform?

2006-05-15T08:59:00.000-05:00

I was recently part of a small group asked their thoughts on an upcoming meeting to explore creating a cohesive and linguistically simply message regarding middle level reform. Below is my response:

I think that instead of having middle grades students who are "hormones with feet," we have "minds with wings."

There is an important developmental shift early in this age group where students stop being so concerned with pleasing adults and start being more concerned with themselves and their peers - not in an egocentric way (well, maybe a little), but more growing into newfound independence and a discovered (and discovering) self.

I really think this is why we start to loose learners in our public school system at about this age (and certainly by the time they are in high school). These young people live in a school-world that largely behaves as if it believes that students' interests, needs, and curiosities are irrelevant. It works in elementary school because these children are still concerned about pleasing adults and see themselves as an extension of the adults in their lives. When they start seeing themselves as individuals, they realize that they don't have to go along for the ride - they can choose their own ride.

Why do some kids still hang on and do well in school? Probably less because "school do it right" and more because they came from families that really value school and where "academic" work and values (e.g. Books and reading, visiting museums, experiencing culture(s), expecting kids to go to college) are implicitly present in their homes.

But there are a lot of kids for whom this isn't the case (or their books and reading, their cultural experiences, the places where they learn their life and career lessons are different from those described above). It is too easy to start to think that those kids need to change to fit school, or that their independence is defiance, or that kids who don't fit in school (which has been an institution for so long, it certainly MUST be right just as the kids for whom it doesn't work MUST be wrong) need to change. Student learning needs to be the non-negotiable, not the Institution of School.

I think we need to remember that kids are not in school by choice. They are in school by law. Further, our charge is not only to teach the kids who want to be there, but rather to educate all the children of all the people. And young adolescents' independence isn't defiance, it is how they are hardwired and a critical developmental component to becoming an independent and contributing adult.

So these middle school students are starting to sprout intellectual wings. Wings that cry for movement, flying, exploration, experimentation, and challenge. What happens to these young people's wings (and what happens to them as high school students, college students, workers, and adults) depends on how we as middle grades educators treat those wings. If we in effect say, "Your wings don't matter; sit quietly here and do what I tell you to and what I tell you is important to know," we help their wings wither, atrophy, and die - or they rebel and find their own ways to exercise their wings.

We can't refuse to allow students to pursue their curiosities and passions and then complain that they aren't curious and passionate. We can't squash their self-directed interests and then complain that they aren't motivated. We can't tell them what to think and then complain that they can't think independently. We can't tell them constantly what to do and then complain that they can't work independently. We can't refuse to give them responsibility and then complain that they won't take it. We can't demand their respect if we don't respect who they are.

How do we support young people as they spread and exercise their wings? We pay attention to who they are BY NATURE at this age group. How do we do that? Pay attention to tools such as Turning Points 2000, NMSA's Success in the Middle: A Policymaker's Guide to Achieving Quality Middle Level Education, and the free resource, Fundamentals for Student Success in the Middle Grades" that describe what research says helps these young people.

But it isn't just about reaching middle grades students. It is also about preparing them for high school. In our Secondary Education Policy Task Force work, we are getting ready to explore what high school instruction should be like if we want to graduate every student College Ready. But it isn't enough to take a 12th grader (or an overage high school student trying to recover credits and graduate) and give them engaging instruction in 12th grade material. Being successful with 12th grade material DOES depend, in part, on how well previous knowledge and skills were learned. They need engaging, developmentally responsive schools at every level.

Middle school is the foundation for being college ready. Even if we do our reform work in high schools, only when we create the middle schools that work for young adolescents will we really be able to graduate students who are ready for the world of higher education, work and citizenship. Middle schools should be all about preparing students for Promising Futures high schools.

If middle grades students are "minds with wings," then we need to create schools where they can learn to fly.

Educators as Technology Leaders - Chris Toy

2006-04-29T13:18:00.000-05:00

Keynote notes from Leading and Learning with Technology Conference.

Chris works with schools working on transforming teaching and learning. Finding it is all about leadership. Not just the administration, but teachers as leaders, too. you can decide everyday if you will be the guide on the side or the sage on the stage. Are you going to fill vessels or inspire learning.

Yes, the principal is also key. The principal is the lynch pin making or breaking if the school culture will support the change. It is said that it takes between three and five years to make a change, but inevitable, the school's culture will take on the values of the principal.

Leadership is really the key piece. It is very important that there is a vision, a philosophy. And the leaders need to communicate that. Have folks heard the vision once? Twice? Lots? Can the repeat it back? Do they understand it? Great leaders are teachers and great teachers are leaders.

There is also the nuts and bolts points: budget, parents, transportation, etc. The leader needs to be able to have the vision, but also make decisions to move that vision forward.

Four goals today

Relfecting about the meaning of leadership for ourselves
Examining our beliefs about effective leadership
Analyzing our own choices regarding leadership practices
Sharing some effective practices and strategies for supporting 1to1 learning

Leadership & Change
There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutes, and merely lukewarm defenders in those to should gain by the new one. - Machiavelli

Zen & Leadership
A student completed the leadership training. The teacher asked what he would do next. The new leaders replied, "I will listen to the needs of each villager in order to make the wisest decision." His teacher replied, "In that case every single person in your village will suffer and be miserable."

There are almost always two choices - the easy one and the hard one. And 9 times out of 10, the easy one isn't the right one.

Thinking prompt: Leading 1to1 learning is like this because.... (Image of old sailing boat in stormy waters). *there are storms and calms *There is a storm, but the ship is still continuing. *teachers are the wind to the students' sails *a strong wind blowing us into new worlds of learning *lots of ships (students) traveling in their own directions with the teachers as the star chart. *like navigating the open sea in uncharted waters - you don't know what adventures you're going to have!

It is this checking in while we are going through a process that helps us feel that we are working together - maybe using different metaphors. Often we are so busy doing what we need to do, that we forget that we share these metaphors and these meanings of what we do together. It informs everything else that we do. It is our soul.

Thoughts on Leadership

Max DePree- Leaderships is the art of liberating people to do what is required of them in the most effective and humane way possible.
A leader's first responsibility is to define reality
Leadership is about support, service, and stewardship (notice it is not about telling people what they have to do - it is about how can I be of assistance. You are the keeper of the flame. When it is windy, you shelter it. When it is rainy, you cover it. When it goes out, you re-light it.)
A leader's last responsibility is to say thank you.

A mini Case Study

Defining Reality

The leader is the Keeper of the Vision
The leaders sets the direction of the school
The leader sets expectations for everyone (the challenge is convincing them that it is their idea!)
The leader makes decisions and supports activities that reflect the vision and direction

Keeper of the Vision

MLTI - Provide the tools and training necessary to ensure that Maine's students become the most technologically savvy students in the World.
Teachers and students will have full time 1to1 access making the compute a ubiquitous tool for the educator and the learning
Actively and publicly support the people, and activities and structures to achieve that vision

Setting Direction

School Mission Statement and Beliefs - "Meeting the unique needs of early adolescents..."
Integrating School Mission with the MLTI Vision
Key Decisions support direction
Leading by Example - "Walk the talk!"

Don't be concerned if the children are listening. Be more concerned that they are watching.

Setting Direction

All students will have full time access to laptops (does that include that students should be able to take them home? but if it really is 24/7, then the issue becomes how do we make it possible to take it home and solve the challenges instead of debating if the challenges are a reason for them not to.)
Laptops will be used as teaching and learning tools. (Ok, the school is doing this but do I need to? Yes, because this is our reality. A teacher that this happened with eventually resigned and went to do something different. REcently called Chris to thank him for being clear about the expectations, because if he had waffled, the teacher knew he would have ended up being resentful that he was teaching in a tech rich environment and the false reality that it would be ok for him not to do this...)
Technology will be integrated by teachers. (his tech teacher doesn't have a separate class, he is a support person to the classroom teacher, planing seeds, modeling things, co-teaching, helping out.)
Integrating technology effectively will be the focus of professional development.

Decision Making - Be Clear!
Be clear about

what is being decided
Who will make the decisions
what role staff will have
how the decision will be made
when the decision will be made

Supporting Decisions

Be clear and consistent about expectations
Be reasonable with expectations (for example - some of Chris's staff asked what's the expectation about the extent to which teachers need to integrate technology - perhaps when just starting telling staff that during the first marking period, I want you to just use the laptops for one unit. The staff sighed with relief because that sounded reasonable.)
Linking professional activities to MLTI (for years, Chris has now had teachers bring their laptops to staff meetings to use in ways to support their work as a staff - e.g. talk about Differentiation and put terms up on the board then asking them to search online for info about those terms and then discussing with their teams what they found.)
Linking evaluation and supervision to MLTI (especially since, in theory, you have linked it to the mission and vision of the school)
Focus PD resources on MLTI.

Saying Thank You

Supporting and appreciating all staff
Providing resources for needed work
Include and support computer coordinators
Include and support school librarians
Include and support students and families

Multiple Intelligences and Instructional Technology - Walter McKenzie

2006-04-29T10:37:00.000-05:00

Session notes. Leading and Learning with Technology Conference in North Adams, MA.

Walter McKenzie is Vice President of MassCUE (Massachusetts Computer Using Educators) and is Tech Director at the Public Schools of Northborough/Southborough (MA).

Long history of trying to explain the mysteries of the mind and brain. Phrenology - measurement of skull and bumps on head explained intelligence!

Bottom line - not everyone thinks alike. Do great minds think alike? And should they?

We know that learning is experiential. To support learning, technology has to be an extension of human experience.

Human intelligence vs artificial intelligence. What is intelligence? Is it using skills? Is it the application of knowledge? Is it wisdom? Not everyone will get to that understanding the same way? Gardner's definition - The ability to solve problems and create products that are value in one's own culture. Isn't this a good definition for artificial intelligence, too? Doesn't this define how we want to use technology?

Is technology just another tool for instruction? Is it like the TV/VCR? Is it like the overhead? How is like and different from other instructional tools.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail." Technology opens up a whole new tool kit and it now allows us to think more broadly than before. [Reminds me of Papert - "The math we teach is the the math that can easily be done with pencil and paper."]

If the human mind has an operating system, Gardner's model is the manual that attempts to explain how it runs. Was able to take a virtual tour of Colonial Williamsburg and then when they actually took the students, the tour guides really earned their money! His students had already thought about and experienced so much of the place that they asked deep questions.

The Multiple Intelligences: Mathematical/Logical (problem solving, not just numbers); Naturalistic (Categories & heirarchies, not just nature); Interpersonal; Intrapersonal; Musical (patterns in and out of music); Verbal/Linguistic; Bodily/Kinesthetic; Visual/Spacial; Existential (Intelligence of the big picture)

A great activity to do with students, especially at the beginning of the year is to do an MI inventory. It sets the tone for doing things in different ways throughout the year, and says, "I respect how you learn."

Think Differently! The Power of Design - Business Week, May 17, 2004. IDEO is making lots of money by thinking differently. Helped a Health Care organization restructure by having the executives experience the hospital as patients. They then used those experiences to

How does IDEO do it?

body storming
behavior mapping
quick and dirty prototyping
deep diving
unfocus groups
be your own customer

Stanford contracted with IDEO to create a new "D-school."

Thinking differently - it is what we're being challenged to do in the 21st Century? What if we thought about schools as if we were our own customers? What assumptions have we made about schools and technology? What would we discover about our own end-users and their experiences? Do we get in the way of students and technology? What happens if we let go and allow technology to empower students?

In our schools, time is the constant. We would make huge improvements if we simply changed to learning being the constant. Does the culture of the school reflect the culture of America or have the kids gone beyond schools and schools are becoming more and more irrelevant to kids?

This is about culture. We are shifting to an information [and collaborative] culture and schools haven't figured out how to bring this into schools, yet.

Thinking Technologically

Verbal - Word processing, desktop publishing, email
Logical - Spreadsheets, search tools, WebQuests
Kinesthetic - video game, digital probe, assistive technology
Naturalistic - Database, digital scrapbook, semantic mapping tool
Existential - Simulations, virtual communities, blogs, wikis, virtual field trips (ongoing morphing understanding)

Ubiquitous Computing is forcing the issue:
personal, portable, seamless, integrated, task driven
Once you say I have the tools, now I have to think about the pedagogy behind those tools.

New Paradigm (partial list from slides)

All children are learners
earners are unique individuals
student centered classroom
collaborative problem-solving
authentic tasks and assessments
creativity and diversity are celebrated.

Is keyboarding kinesthetic? If we go back to the definition of intelligence of solving problems and creating products of use to your culture, does keyboarding meet that definition? Is keyboarding an end unto itself.

Looking at these in three domains:
Analytic: logical, musical, naturalistic
Introspective: Intrapersonal, Existential, visual
Interactive: Verbal, interpersonal, kinesthetic

Can now think about maybe pulling on activity from each domain of intelligence and having 3 different intelligences represented in a lesson seems much more doable than 9 intelligences.

Working on a book for ISTE on the iQuest which shows teachers how to apply these domains to teaching with technology.

These materials are available on Walter's Website - select the Multiple Intelligences link.

Sequence for Integrating technology?
1) Learner
2) objective
3) intelligence
4) technology

This is not about the technology. It is about the learning for specific learners.

Bolts teaches animation to his students - Gaby Harrington

2006-04-29T09:38:00.000-05:00

Session notes:
Tech integration specialist at a middle school. But students there didn't have much technology experience, so it was like trying to start from square one with students.

Her charge is to teach content from the Mass Frameworks using technology. Since she knows kids like video games, she thought using animation and storyboarding would be helpful and engaging. Animate something they were learning in another class. They had to write a proposal of what they were going to do and had to have the other teacher sign off on the proposal. Teachers got excited about what she was doing because of this interconnectedness.

Simple animations using just PowerPoint and its shapes and clip art.

Put all her Frameworks standards in PowerPoint, printed and cut into cards. Now, when she does a project she uses these cards like "Deal-a-Meal" to highlight which standards she is meeting.

Start with images that just move across the screen. Then animate something like a bean growing or a frog growing from a tadpole. Start with the simple image. Save it. Make slight changes. Save it as a new file. And keep going. Then you have a whole series of images to animate. This is "Flip book" animation.

Or can take one image and make several variations and you can then alternate them in a loop and you get a moving image (for example a fish swimming).

Third kind of animation is layered animation. Has to be done in something like Photoshop that supports the use of layers. For example, a bird would have separate layers for feet, tail, eye, and beak and then there are a series of position images (like the second type of animation, but for different elements). The layers then allow you to assemble the pieces to create a character that move in multiple ways.

Uses a lot of books from arts, such as studies of human movement or books for drawing that show steps for creating illustrations (so kids can then adapt the ideas to computer graphics and animation).

What's the level of collaboration between her and the other classroom teachers? Very little. Mostly she asks students what they are learning in other classes and help them see what might make for good animations of content.

She has to adapt the activities to the type of computer and software that is available. For example, only has one scanner, so isn't able to really let kids draw things by hand and

Her main task is to teach them how to keyboard. Is a nightmare, because kids are already very successful with their own method, not "Touch Typing." Tries to use the standard, can you use your method pretty well without looking at the keyboard?

She believes students are into the animation because it matches their interest in anime at home on TV.

The real power piece for her is the storyboard. This is the planning and critical thinking piece. She has them do it on paper - thinks it's easier than doing the storyboard online. Kids are hesitant at first (why use pencil and paper in the computer lab!?), but they tend to see the benefit after they have done it.

If students are having a hard time coming up with a curriculum connection, there is always "creative writing" to fall back on. If they choose this, they have to write the story out first before they can start working on the animation.

We saw several examples of student work. A story about a student and a bus. A Japanese girl flying a kite. The life cycle of butterfly.

The key is partly that if they are working on an animation about a piece of the content, they end up watching it about a thousand times! Not only are they working to teach others, but they are experiencing the content over and over and over again. [My thoughts - reminds me of Papert's view that kids learn best by creating products to teach others.]

In rubrics, someone had suggested that she move the column for the highest grade to the first column, suggesting that some kids won't read beyond the first column, so why not focus on the highest standard, rather than the lowest.

Kids would bring their work home and work and work on it and bring back 5000 slide animations that would crash the school's old machines. Kids would want to burn their animations onto a CD, but the machines don't have CD burners.

She often leaves her laptop hooked up to the projector while students are working and she's working on the same kind of project. Kids then can see how she works. [Reminds me of writing teachers also doing writing so kids can see the process.]

Gaby's Website (eventually including her PPT from this session - click on Workshops) is Strategy2design.

The Quest For the 21st Century - Chris Toy

2006-04-29T08:36:00.000-05:00

Chris Toy gave a brief presentation at the breakfast session of the Leading and Learning with Technology conference in the Berkshires. These are my session notes. Chris is the former Principal of Freeport Middle School. One of Maine's top implementing schools under Chris's leadership.

As a principal, he sees his "classroom" as his school. He noticed that we were all doing the same thing and he wondered what that thing was. He decided that it was a "quest" an archetypical journey, and adventure.

He things of classic quests. Don Quixote - people said it couldn't be done, but we believed that it couldn't. The moon launch. there was a time we hadn't set foot on the moon but Pres. Kennedy had a vision.

Questing is Risky - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Chris is from Hong Kong and there was a time he didn't English. His earlier dreams have no sound track because he has lost the ability to speak Chinese. Have you had the dream of falling and startled awake. Someone had told him that if you can keep yourself asleep and trust the dream, you won't hit bottom, but will fly. The Legend of The Young Man - "A faithful heart makes wishes come true."

Companions, Fellowships, Alliances
We aren't doing this alone. One of the great things about this technology is that it connects people. This is a way we can transcend time and space. We're so busy with our day to day jobs that it becomes hard to be together, but this technology allows us to stay connected and part of a community at any time and any where we can.

In Maine, Gov. King was a visionary. This work takes a leader and he was the leader of the state. With a large surplus, he knew that he needed to do something visionary. In meeting with other governors, he realized that they all were trying to do the same thing and no one was really trying to get ahead. Talking with educators he realized that a learning with laptop initiative could be a revolutionary way to get ahead. We've just finished our first 4 year cycle and just last month, after taking stock of where we've been, the legislature has approved another 4 years.

Schools can buy the old units for about $48. They are still serviceable and some will be used for parts, but schools are looking to expand that vision (down grades or up grades).

As principal at Freeport, Apple often brought visitors from all over the US and the world. Chris pulled aside one of the visitors who wasn't an educator but an economist from Australia who said he was here because he didn't want his students to be behind Maine's when they have to compete for jobs.

Vision: Maine's students will become the most technologically savvy students in the world.

From Vision to Action to Results

Teachers report positive impact on instruction
Teachers report positive impact on student learning
students report positive impact on learning
Students report positive impact on 21st Century Skills
Principals report positive impact on student learning

Provided hard data from one of his teachers on the improvement of class test scored (same test, different kids) at the end of the 1st year of the initiative. (student performance before and after the laptops)

The adventure continues!

The Tale of Two Networks - Jim Moulton

2006-04-28T21:49:00.000-05:00

Notes on Jim Moulton's keynote on the two networks (the technical and the human) in a 1to1 learning with laptops initiative. From the Leading and Learning with Technology Conference.

One network is the technical network. The machines have to work. The network has to work.

the other network is the human network.

When Apple put in 241 wireless networks, they would sweep the area with a signal meter to try to find the wholes; the blank spaces. But we need to sweep the human network as well. The machine doesn't teach kids; teachers teach kids.

Google Earth. Don't know where somewhere is, just type it in and the globe spins and then zooms to that spot on the earth.

National Geographic has PDF maps of every space on earth, copyright released for school use.

CIA Factbook - can't buy a paper copy. $35 for digital form. Free online. If we aren't going to use these tools, we might as well take the money we spend on the network and just throw it all away.

If all we do is use the laptops for English writing and grammar and Math computation, we aren't doing enough. We have to do more. We have to get out into the community. [My comments: What are the things that we should insist that we do with the laptops that goes beyond simply doing what we've done before.]

When working with schools in Tennessee, Jim carried a digital recorder and asked who had taught the longest. He interviewed Miss Eunice and interviewed her. She talked about teaching since the 40's. Similar to the Traditions of Turpentine in South Georgia: "Faces" of the Piney Woods: List of the Project Interviews.

You have to look at projects like this and try to pull the kernel. Some people will say, "But Jim, you don't understand, we don't work in Georgia." But that's not the important part. It's the connecting with fading resources, such as the people who have lived there for a long time.

Routers: a distribution point. We reset it when it doesn't work and we replace it when it is busted. Who are the "Routers" in our schools? Who are the hubs for information distribution. Department Heads, secretaries, etc. If you put the high access network over a dysfunctional human network, you have a school where no one talks to each other, but you can get on the Internet real fast.

Fear is the great human motivator. It is not always a bad thing. The question is, "Is the Technology a brick or a life preserver?" It has to be seen as a life preserver. The way to make it feel like a life preserver. The people who are eager to know more. So an administrator can say, "because we will need to prepare everyone of our students for the future, we will use technology. I want a personal goal from each of you, but I don't want a technology goal. I want a goal of how you're going to have students learn your content area using technology. and part of what you need to add is about what support you will need." Technology goals don't work - they end up having nothing to do with teaching and your students' learning.

Change or Die in Fast Company Magazine, May 2005

Angioplasty will not make you healthy, if all we do is root out your arteries and then send you home. We have to surround the person with all sorts of supports.

Professional development - we don't take all the responsibility for the success of the sessions. If you don't come to the table hungry, you can't complain that we didn't sate you.

If the Principal isn't fully engaged, you won't succeed. Teachers leadership is critical, but not sufficient.

Involve 1to1 with other initiatives

Use current technology to study local history. You have an active Arts community. What are you doing to connect these machines to the Arts community?

We are Talking About Significant Change
- schools as biological beings - self replication - they tend to hire back into them folks for whom school was a good experience.
- Innovators as boat-rockers
-Innovation as infection

What if we found a high achiever that thought school was hell and ask them how did you achieve in spite of school? Why didn't school work for you? What could we do differently?

If you are a boat-rocker, the body treats you like a splinter. You are attached by white blood cells that try to excise you. When the splinter goes in too far that it will never come out, the body calcifies around it so that it is separated from the body. When teachers are too good, schools calcify around them, by moving them way from the rest of the body. 1to1 breeds innovation.

Purposeful Design for Results
Create a shared vision. Why are you guys doing this?
Everyone is involved
School community - not just school
Putting a purpose to the technology
Putting the "WHY before the HOW."
What is written above your schoolhouse door?

Building a shared vision by thinking about a child you care about as if they were your own about 10 years out (7th grader through a 4 year degree and one year out) and ask three questions: What work will they be doing? Where will they be living? How will they be living? When someone says, "We'll be lucky if they're working at WalMart!" We have to respond that they didn't listen to our directions. "Is this really what you want for a student you care about as if they were your own?"

What do we have written above our door? Does our filter interfere with our being able to do the activities with students we want to do? No one has it written over their door - We aspire to have the toughest filter of any school.

Fear is a strong motivator. You cannot ignore them. If they go underground, they are hard to work on. You have to raise people's hopes and fears so you cand deal with them.

Leverage local genius - we're all in this together and you have to take advantage of every person (if they are a teacher or not!) to help us all learn. Who knows this stuff? If you know something, I don't know - Puff! You're a teacher.

We are all in this together.
No abdication of responsibility
The end of intellectual vandalism & Fascism
the viral spread of appropriate information

the kids are now engaged so there is less policing

Having a kid tech team. There is never technical support. Train the kids in both tech skills and people skills. The world is full of people who can fix a printer, but there aren't as many people who can fix a printer and not leave the others feeling stupid. The tech team has to be self sufficient.

Change pedagogy to leverage potential
Don't just automate
Project based learning for engagement & achievement
Projects build human networks
Edutopia
BIE.org
MaineMemory.net
MLCI.org

When you look at a topic in our curriculum or standards, ask the question, "Who cares about that?" And then who in your community cares about it? Then you have a compelling reason to learn something. But you can't do that by yourself. You need other people to help you out.

Who you know and what you know...

Let A = what one knows
let B = what one does with what one knows
Let C = who knows and cares what one knows and what one has done with it.

(A x B)^C (ie, C is the exponent - couldn't track down the HTML code for superscripts)

In schools we knock down the human network - we call it sucking up and brown nosing. The real power of what you know and what you can do with it comes from the human network and how you are networked with people.

Your vendor working with the local technical staff will insure that the equipment functions. But the human network will really determine the success of the project.

The major handicapping factor for most special needs students is that they don't do school. But when giving other ways to learn.

Jim's list of online resources for teachers

Make work for a real audience and a real purpose

Panel - 10 Questions We Wished We Had Asked

2006-04-28T21:34:00.000-05:00

This panel brought together educators involved in the Berkshires Wireless Laptop Initiative and facilitated by Matt Mervis. Each panelist shared a little about what they are currently doing with the laptops in the classroom and then conference attendees could ask questions of the panel. These are my notes from the session. The best part is at the end of this post with the questions that were asked and answers of the various respondents.

Our purpose - get a picture of 1to1 classrooms
Share the questions we wished we had asked
share the questions we have now
Build an Image of what BWLI can look like in Pittsfield, North Adams and beyond.

Idea came from the Woody Allen movie, "Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask."

10 questions you should ask before giving birth:

who will be there with me during labor and birth?
what happens during a normal labor and birth in your setting?
How do you allow for differences in culture and beliefs?
Can I walk and move around during labor? What position do you suggest for birth?
How do you make sure everything goes smoothly when my nurse, doctor, midwife, or agency need to work with each other?
What if my baby is born early or has special problems?
How do you keep everybody comfortable besides drugs

Explored the possible analogies between these birth questions and 1to1 questions. Others seemed too inappropriate to this analogy.

Matt Collins -critiquing student multimedia projects on Lewis & Clark. Some of the technical issues become a road block for a new teacher. "Ask 2 before me" (ask two students before asking teacher) has helped. Students now turn in most of their work electronically.

Conte English/Lang Arts Teacher - Ancient Greece unit. Using web resources to track down answers to questions on a Word document.

Grade 6 ELA teacher - not currently using technology, but is part of the Tech Leadership Team. Has started an iTeam at Conte - students who become the tech helpers. There is an application process.

7th Math teacher - uses the laptops every day, some days more than others. Using applets to work with mathematical objects. what they do depends on what the content of the lesson is. Takes a lot of time to to search for web sites that help teach the content. Doesn't know how someone could do this without a class web site to make linking the resources easy.

What are the infrastructure tools that help: StudyWiz, Moodle, etc.

Matt Mervis - thinking about the "spectrum." There is a range of uses. How do we document these and then share them to help people see the range.

6th Math Teacher - using the ClassDrive Website to access practice questions to prep for the state test.

Exploratory Technology - Pittsfield- teacher - interested in seeing difference betweeen the 7th graders with the laptops and the other grades who still use his desktop machines. It takes kids a while to make shift from using them for entertainment to using them for academic uses.

6th Eng & Science Pittsfield Teacher - great having own web site to have kids go where you need them too. Use own computer and overhead for demonstrations. Today visited 7th grade classres. Kids using Dashboard to go to calculators or using StickyNotes. Math text is online.

Questions:

What were 3 successful techniques for getting successful teachers involved? *Peer pressure does tremendous things. When you have a group that is doing well and they see things can happen, then they start doing more. *Modeling lessons but sending an email to the entire staff saying that he was going to model this in this room at this time, so others can drop in and see how it is going. *Recognize that it is fear that is making people resistant. *Recognizing that helped make working with them and encouraging them easier and more productive. *Understanding the "real" question the reluctant person is asking you. Sometimes it is a machine question and sometimes a planning. Had to change own attitude - as not to scare the teacher. *Had half day workshops (with a real range of sessions) and teachers could sign up for what they wanted. And it was teachers teaching teachers. *What the principal defines as this is what we are doing is sometimes different than what the tech people come to help us. Principal sets expectation. When they say next year we aren't going to send out notices on paper, get comfortable with email now, they get familiar with email. *Spotlights folks who have done a good job with links to resources so other teachers can do it to. *Parent nights to share student projects so that parents' attitudes toward the technology. And having parents focused on 1to1 helps move teachers forward. *simply having EVERY child with a laptop moves some people that would never have happened in a 2to1 or a 4to1 environment. *fear and peer pressure can also be used to keep things the same.

Did you have electronic note passing? - at first, but software let us know where it was happening and we took away laptops to make message. Had shut down iChat, but kids found the sites with a chat feature (imagine 7th grade boys at a paper doll making website!). But now looking at possible academic uses of iChat. Strategies: move around the room (if you never move from the front of the room, you can't be mad that kids in the back of their room aren't doing what they aren't supposed to - they don't have to do this, but the principal could say then don't get mad at kids not ). Log into iChat yourself and when a kid sees 15 teachers logged in, they aren't likely to misuse. academic use: teacher poses a question and then the kids change their away message to their answer and then the teacher can see all the answers on their iChat window. We won't take tools away that kids misuse - we show teachers the academic uses. They have the view that we will not every be able to anticipate all the inappropriate uses. Teachers: "We won't tell them about it!" But they already know. Why not show the kids what it is and how to use it - letting them know that you know about it. Don't want to take away laptops for one infraction, because it can disrupt what the other teachers on the team are doing. Not letting them take it home overnight seems worse for the student than taking it away at school.

What does it look like to a principal in terms of engagement, attendance, and behaviors? - very few 7th graders coming to the office for discipline issues. Biggest problem might be occasionally leaving it in the cafeteria. One Pittsfield MS last year 89.8 and this year 94% so up about 5 points this year. Kids discipline themselves in terms of the class. Kids are asked to multitask more - kids have commented that they don't have time to get in trouble, and don't want to be out of the classroom because they don't want to have to do all the work to get caught up.

Any difference in Parental Involvement? - When kids work on engaging projects with powerful tools, they want to come to school, even early, and parents are wondering what we've done to our kids!

Mass Technology Collaborative is working an a 1:1 Wireless Learning Toolkit

When High-Access Computing Works - Brian Page

2006-04-28T21:06:00.000-05:00

These are my session notes from Brian Page's presentation at the Leading and Learning with Technology Conference.

Brian Page is a consultant with Apple Computer working with the educational research projects Apple is involved in and sharing the results and visions.

Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT - 1985-1998) - the first 1to1. Put one computer at school and one at home for every child. At the time, the Apple IIe. High Access 1985. Multimedia and collaboration 1986. Networking and video 1990. Pen-based and wireless 1993. A lot of those early innovations are now built into our computers. Subsequent Reports all had one thing in common - a reference to ACOT. Because previous innovations were in the lab, but ACOT was in the classrooms - where all the gains were seen.

About 8 or 9 years ago, curriculum people disengaged from technology. Technology used in schools (even that used for learning) are under the purview of the technology department, not the curriculum folks. Largely because tech was implemented in ways that were not supported by the research. Tech became a subject.

Millennials Rising - the Next Great Generation. How kids are different - think differently, play differently, work differently. It got people thinking about how kids are working and thinking today and thinking that maybe we should give kids the tools of their world to do school work.

Condition of Education 2002, National Center for Education Statistics - 12th Graders View of school. Shows 12th graders view school as less interesting, engaging, and having to do with the real world than 20 years ago. Not an indication that schools are getting worse, but rather that there is a larger and larger gap between what schools are and do and their students' lives outside of school.

Over 700 schools giving students laptop computers. We don't have to go it alone. There are others who are doing it and we can learn from those who went before us and from each other.

There are factors about how technology has impacted the world: how we live and work. Profound changes in technology. Economic resurgence of China, India. Advances in science. Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. The top 20% of the kids in China are like the top 20% of the kids in the US, but there are 20 times as many kids in China, so their top 20% far outnumbers ours. Therefore we need to help more of our kids perform to the level of our top 20%.

Research based best practice. Robert Marzano at McREL labs. He did a metastudy of studies about teaching and learning and has identified 9 categories of things teachers can do that we know will improve achievement. So having students do the kinds of projects Jim Moulton described is among the types of things that help more children learn more.

The enGauge (NCREL) Range of Use chart. The more constructivist, authentic and complex the thinking and learning, the better the effect of integrating the technology.

Sound theory leads to sound practice. And practitioners should understand the ideas and research on which the theory is based.

Changing learning: It is no longer about integrating technology; it is about integrating students into the learning via the technology.

Research on 1to1 schools: attendance up, behavior down, achievement up, engagement up, property values up, people moving into the area.

Given a discussion about what kind a car one of the boys could buy. His dad wouldn't allow him to get a sports car or a car that was red because of the increase in insurance. So students set up a camera to record cars going by their school and then used two markers they set across the road and the frame rate of the video to gather speed data (and type of car and color) and then used scatter plots and discovered that of the cars going more than 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, all of them were sports cars and all but one were red.

The Apple Learning Interchange is a resource with lots of lesson plans annotated with video on how to teach effectively with technology.

Project Based Learning - Jim Moulton

2006-04-28T20:48:00.000-05:00

What follows are my notes from this session on project based learning at the Leading and Learning with Technology 1to1 conference in North Adams, MA.

When we make technology something separate, then we give a bulwark behind which reluctant teachers can hide. We don't have pencil labs,

Fan of the failure based curriculum, rather than a success based curriculum. Thinking of those 3rd grade students for whom he never found the edge of their knowledge. Unless we stumble we don't really learn. Some of our best learning comes from when we stumble.

Assessment: Assessment for learning & Assessment of learning. Assessment of learnign is the test - do you know it or not? But where the learning takes place is assessment for learning. The course corrections we make along the way.

All teaching and learning is relationship-based. The relationship is absolutely critical. It is the gentle coaching... You always begin with, "Next time..." When this happens gain, what do we have to remember so we do it better next time?

Characteristics indicative of success

Entrepreneurship
Perseverance - Effort trumps intelligence
Projects come from a passion
They have to be truly worthwhile
Productive in a tangible way
Efforts that develop and utilize complex thinking skills
Collaborative efforts that naturally build social skills along with academic skills
Fun

Why do we read Shakespeare? - is it because it is more like Cod Liver Oil - it's hard to take , but you'll be a better person because of it? Or is it because of the universal truths it highlights?

Projects are not dioramas

Projects come from a passion. Something you care about. It can be the passion of the teacher that the teacher uses to move along. Or it can be the students' passions. The students catch the negative passion ("boy, I know I really have to teach this, but I can't wait til it's over...")

Heifer project - because sending $120 to the Tsunami relief is a drop in the bucket, but when you send a water buffalo, a chicken, a cow, a goat is an investment that is sustainable. Now you have a real purpose for doing things. It's easy - this is about a water buffalo!

English/LA: Write a persuasive letter to help raise money. Remember the old simulated persuasive letter: We're going to have uniforms. Choose one side of the issue and argue it. The kids who have learned how to play school will do this, but the others eventually stop being willing to go along for the ride.

Math: doing a budget

Social studies - where will it go? Who will it help? What is their life like? What will a water buffalo mean to them?

Problem solving- we don't start with me saying how we'll raise money. We start with the moral imperative - we will send a water buffalo. Then we get ideas from the kids on how to raise funds. then you ask each kids to write a one-pager prospectus: how would it work? How much could we raise? How many people are needed? How long would it take? Would we be allowed to do it? Do you have a couple adults who would help supervise for this?

This will never happen! Too many people focused on the end standards and dealing with them piece by piece. They no longer see the forest for the trees.

It is easy to get the moral authority to help starving children. It's harder to get the moral imperative for a star lab. You have to ask what would inspire children to this?

Project Based Learning Handbook from the Buck Institute for Education

How do you create projects that are experiences that inspire but based on doing real work.

They have to be truly worthwhile

Productive in a tangible way - No more just a pat on the head! Blooms Taxonomy has been revised. Now to be at the top of understanding of a concept you need to create something. Some HS students at North Adams made a film for the North Adams police department on where are the places that an intruder could hide. Pics4learning.com (a free resource from the folks at Tech4Learning.com) Lots of pictures available for ed use. What if you were to ask your kids, "What's beautiful in our town? Where is the symmetry and geometry?" Then they can be contributed to Pics4learning. They have to be the best - high res, in focus, framed. And I want our names on them, so we can be proud of what we post. United Streaming is a massive collection of video clips that can be searched by standard (makes Jim nervous because who gets to say each clip meets a standard. Clips don't meet standards. The teacher working with the clip in and engaging and inspiring manner that meet a standard.) But there are folks that will come to work with you to help you answer the question, "Ok, we have United Streaming. So what

Efforts that develop and utilize complex thinking skills.

Collaborative efforts that naturally build social skills along with academic skills.

Fun - because students and teachers care about the goal, teaching and learning are more enjoyable for all.

Grammar. Who cares about grammar? We say that we have a country that cares about grammar - but that's not true. But we hold schools highly accountable for how well we teach grammar. who does care about grammar? Newspapers. Web presences. When we create real work, then students have a reason to learn it.4teachers.org Project Poster allows you to sign up your class and have students post stuff on the web. We can say you each will write, but you have to get the grammar right before we can post it. Project Poster keeps the link live for 30 days and then releases it.

If we are really going to leave no child behind, then we have to meet them where they are. We are teaching "screenagers." But the teacher needs to moderate the technology use. In Lord of the Flies, the kids turned the idyllic island into a hell because people are people. and when we send kids out in the technosphere WITHOUT ADULTS, we are sending them to the island.

Examples of great projects:

The Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education working with real time data. For example, Square of Life - studies in local and global environments. They are interdisciplinary. They are based on the students' own communities. Or Bucket Buddies - students collect data about local pond water and then share it in an international database.

Look at Globe.gov - An exciting, worldwide, hands-on education and science program.

Frogweb.gov - Amphibian declines and malformations. It is work that matters.

Need a document camera? Hook up your camcorder - even an older one - because most video projectors have a video in RCA connector

Conte Middle School

2006-04-28T08:39:00.000-05:00

This morning I got the opportunity to visit Conte Middle School in North Adams, MA. They are one of four middle schools participating in the Berkshires Wireless Laptop Initiative

At Conte, all the 7th grade students have had laptops since January. Students are allowed to take the laptops home, once their parents have participated in an informational meeting. The 6th grade teachers have access to a laptop cart for planned and scheduled activities with laptops. Students report that all teachers have their own class web page and that the teachers post assignments, lessons, demonstrations, online activities and resources. They can, of course, access these resources from home.

I started by visiting two Math classrooms.

In Ms. Gillooly's 7th Grade Math class, students are determining the interior angle sums of polygons by 1) using a polygon angle applet to find the angle sum, 2) build a table of the data collected, and 3) use the data to determine a rule for finding the interior angle sum of any polygon.

The polygon angle applet comes from the resources at MSTE. The Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education. MSTE is a division of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The goal of MSTE is to serve as a model-builder for innovative, standards-based, technology-intensive mathematics and science instruction at the K-16 levels.

In this lesson, students could create any polygon as long as it had the right number of sides. The applet identifies the angles and the students can drag them to a circle that then measures the angles. Once they have the total of the interior angles, they enter it in a chart. The teacher let them to discover the patterns from the chart, including that no matter what polygon they created, as long as it had the same number of sides, it had the same total sum of the interior angle sums.

It strikes me that this is a case of having the right tools makes guided discovery a lot easier! Students would not have done nearly as well if they had to measure each angle by hand. The applet makes the measurement easy, and makes it easy to see that different polygons with the same number of sides have the same interior angle sum.

The teacher switched back and forth between using the computer and doing paper and pencil work. When she wanted the students to discover the relationship between the number of imbedded triangles and the number of sides in a polygon, she used a paper with various polygons on it and the students used their pencils to draw extra lines between vertices to see how many triangles are created. She moved easily between the laptop and the paper, depending on which tool was best for the task at hand.

In Ms. Holmes' 6th Grade Math class, students use the cart laptops to electronically access some MCAS (state test) sample questions from the the teacher's home page. The students then do the problems on paper. When done, the teacher had the question projected on a white board and used a marker to work with the class to highlight the important parts of the word problem and to write the equation on the board then led them through the solution. The students then put away the laptops and participated in an engaging review game.

It was intriguing that in the span of an hour I saw both disruptive and supportive uses of the laptops. Accessing the test questions was simply using the laptops to access what would have been delivered on paper in the past. There was the incremental improvement that comes with supportive strategies - the teacher didn't have to run papers and the review questions were instantly distributed to all the class. But there was no real change to teaching. The polygon applet was disruptive technology. It provided tools to allow students to do things easily that were difficult before. The applet took the focus off the tedious measuring and onto the pattern between the interior angle sums.

Now in all fairness, the 6th grade teachers only got the cart last Monday (less than a week ago!) and the teacher should be applauded for diving right in to using them.

Off To The Berkshires' 1to1 Conference

2006-04-26T18:13:00.000-05:00

I'm off to the Leading and Learning with Technology Conference in North Adams, Massachusetts. It's meant to bring together educators from throughout the Bershires to explore teaching and learning in a 1to1 learning with laptop environment.

The Berkshire Wireless Learning Initiative (BWLI) is a 1to1 pilot program being implemented in Berkshire County (western Massachusetts). Their goal is using laptop computers and wireless communication to transform teaching and learning. Their efforts spearheaded Massachusetts' statewide 1to1 learning with laptop initiative, now with pilots all over the state.

Conference program highlights include:

Visits to 1 to 1 laptop classrooms involved in the Berkshire Wireless Learning Network.
Roundtable sessions featuring technology in the content fields (math, science, English Language Arts, Social Studies)
Session on technology for Early Childhood and Elementary Education.
Opportunities to network with colleagues in your educational role at a "Birds of a Feather" session (during which teachers, technology coordinators, or principals and curriculum leaders can get together to share ideas or plan for future collaboration)
Invitation to be founding members of a new Berkshire's SIG (Special Interest Group). Our goal is create a Berkshire organization that can continue to work together after the conference.

I plan on blogging the sessions I attend and will work with others to see which sessions we might be able to podcast.

The Answer To Curriculum Might Not Be Content Part 3

2006-04-24T19:17:00.000-05:00

Previously, I've argued that hard to teach students can learn a high status curriculum.

In The Answer To Curriculum Might Not Be Content Part I, I raised the following questions:

What if instead we designed those high status courses in such a way that the hard to tech kids could be successful with them? What would a Physics class look like where every student could leave the course understanding important Physics principles as outlined in national standards? What would an Algebra II or Calculus class look like that every student could leave having met the standards outlined by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics? What would a course look like where even the hard to teach kids could master the themes of Shakespeare or Whitman?

It is a fallacy to think that because an instructional strategy works for easy to teach kids that it should work for hard to teach kids, or that hard to teach kids are at fault for not learning like easy to teach kids are. Our standard of success with a curriculum must be the effectiveness of instruction for the hard to teach students.

We have to back up the desire to have our hard to teach students learn the high status curriculum with paying close attention to how these particular students learn. For so many years, the Standards movement ignored the instructional piece, seemingly simply insisting that they learn (and in NCLB - learn, or else!). But this isn't much better than giving a construction worker a pocket knife to cut a sheet of steel or an acetylene torch to cut boards to length (What's your problem?! They're cutting tools aren't they?! Just cut the stuff!).

Construction is construction, but you still use the right tool for the job. And education is education, but the teacher has to select the right instructional tool to reach the right kid.

So what are the right (instructional) tools for reaching the hard to teach kids?

Probably the place to start is with the people who are already having success reaching hard to teach kids, like the educators I described in Part 2 of this series of posts.

But what is it that they are doing that is reaching hard to teach students? My own research into motivating underachieving students suggests that there are 9 Essential Elements:

student/teacher relationship;
helping students succeed, especially through frequent feedback;
hands-on, active work;
variety and attention to learning styles;
making learning interesting or tying into student interests;
giving students choices and involve them in planning;
avoiding "bribery" rewards;
making connections by working at the higher end of Bloom's Taxonomy;
and putting learning into context and making real world connections to the curriculum.

Where are some other sources of info on ideas/approaches/strategies that meet the criteria described above?

Making learning real by connecting to the community - read about one example here.
Inquiry-Based Learning like that supported by Calgary's Galileo Project.
Jeff Wilhelm (formerly of Maine) knows about as much as anyone on boys and reading.
Algebra readiness - the Delta Algebra Project was created by Bob Moses when he decided that if Algebra was the gate keeper course, he was going to make sure that poor students and students of color made it through the gate. Students in the program develop pre-algebra and algebra skills by solving real problems in the community.

So there are a lot of resources here and in the Part 2 post as places to start.

Coming in Part 4: We certainly can't blame teachers for not teaching this way, so how are we going to support them?

Model One-to-One Project Sites

2006-04-24T12:32:00.000-05:00

Matt Mervis, Project Coordinator for the 1to1 Pilot at New Boston Middle School in Dorchester, MA, had generated a very nice list of Model One-to-One Project Sites.

It's a great list and if you're looking for info about the various 1to1 projects that are going on out there, this list is right place to start.

Fear and Disruptive Technologies

2006-04-22T19:59:00.000-05:00

Wes Fryer writes about another district banning new technologies in Reactionary, statist school leaders ban iPods. I responded with a comment, but had been meaning to write about fear myself for a while, so I'm reprinting the comment here to share with you folks (be sure to read Wes' post first):

Wes - I'm not surprised. I think fear is a common reaction to new things that people don't really understand. I wrote about fear as a reaction to innovation near the end of Do Something Disruptive, and earlier in Policy Choices and New Tools: to Block or not to Block in the 1to1 Stories Project. Based on the blogs I follow, here are my bookmarks on fear of disruptive technologies (as you could guess, a lot of articles about MySpace).

On the other hand, about a month ago, I had dinner with Gary Brown, IT Director for the Woolongong Diocese of Australia (that's about 125k kids - we get folks from all over to see Maine's laptop initiative). He has a different approach. At a meeting with students and faculty at one of his schools, he asked the teachers how many of them had or knew someone who had a MySpace account (a few hands) then asked the kids the same question (all the hands). His reaction? He turned to the faculty and said that they did not understand their students!

At his schools, about 95% of the students had cell phones. Did they ban their use? No. They purchased a system to push school announcements out to the phones. Some of the teachers use them for quizzes (kind of like the "clicker" student response systems). Now 100% of their students have cell phones. Their cell phone abuse rate? According to Gary, 0%.

Why? I suspect because instead of fearing a new technology he did not understand, he noticed that it was a tool used by his students, found out how it might be used for academic, or at least school, uses, and implemented them.

In Maine, we find that there is more breakage and off-task computer use when the teachers don't use them for academic purposes. Ironically, when we use them regularly for academic purposes, the machines stay in good working order and kids actually do homework during homework time, instead of whipping through their homework as fast as they can so they can surf the web.

The Answer To Curriculum Might Not Be Content Part 2

2006-04-22T09:36:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, in The Answer To Curriculum Might Not Be Content Part I, I argued that our previous approach of providing different courses for hard to teach students wasn't any more effective than providing the high status curriculum to hard to teach kids. I went on to argue that different content wasn't the answer to reaching hard to teach kids, but rather different instruction.

But in that post I didn't address the concern I've heard some of my colleagues and fellow educators express: the belief that hard to teach kids are not able to learn the high status curriculum.

In some ways, it is completely understandable that they may feel that way. If they have not had experience reaching hard to teach students, or if they see few hard to teach students do well in their school, how could they believe anything except that hard to teach kids can't learn that curriculum?

In 1to1: She Said She Hated Them, I had a similar discussion about 1to1 learning with laptop initiatives. If you don't see the laptops being successful in your school, how can you believe anything except that laptop initiatives don't work? But that argument is only valid if they don't work everywhere. So, if hard to teach kids don't learn anywhere, then we can say they can't learn.

But what if they learn some places? What if they are successful some places?

For example, I wrote this about Maine's learning with laptop initiative:

If there are a lot of schools where 1-to-1 is working, doesn't that prove that it is at least possible that 1-to-1 works. In fact, if we know that it is possible that it can work, then we have to look at why it isn't working in some places. If it didn't work in most places, then we could say that it didn't work in the girl's school simply because "it just doesn't work." But if it works a lot of places, then you have to ask the question, if it isn't working in this school, is it because they didn't make it work? The fault may not be with the laptops. It may not be the new element; the disruptive element. It might be what the school did or didn't do.

Likewise, if there are places having success with hard to teach students, doesn't that suggest that there are ways to reach hard to teach kids?

And there are places it works:

King Middle School, Portland Maine. The Wikipedia says that it is cited as one of the most racially diverse in the state of Maine: the student body represents seventeen countries and 28 languages. They are having success through expeditionary learning - learning by doing!
At Madison HS, Technology Education teacher, Doug Malloy, teaches a physics class to his "vocational track" students where they learn "College Physics" concepts by making them concrete through engaging, hands-on experiments and demonstrations.
Maine had a large federal grant to train math teachers to use the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. Research on that initiative showed that not only did the students' achievement improve more than students learning the concepts in traditional ways, but the teachers' understanding of the mathematical concepts improved, as well.
Remember Stand and Deliver? It's the story of a dedicated teacher, Jaime Escalante, and his success getting his at risk students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles to learn calculus. His story shows that success comes from hard work (systemically) over time. There are no magical quick fixes.
Maine's own JMG (Jobs for Maine's Graduates), a program adopted by many high schools in Maine, has had a long track record of more success (according to grades, test scores, graduation rates, and dropout rates) with their students than similar students who don't go though the program. There are many components that make JMG successful, but I believe their focus on adult mentor/student relationships may be the most critical. Their program is so successful, it is being exported to their parent organization, Jobs for America's Graduates and other programs around the country.
Erin Gruwel, currently a "Distinguished Teacher in Residence" at California State University at Long Beach, was a high school teacher in Long Beach, CA, teaching the "unteachables." She had enormous success teaching these kids to write, by having students keep diaries of their lives and then connecting their lives to the lives of people in historical literature. Her students became known as the Freedom Writers and ended up having a much higher gradation rate and rate of going on to higher education than classmates who didn't participate in the program. She has gone on to form The Erin Gruwell Education Project and works with schools all over the country. (The Freedom Writers' story is about to be turned into a movie.)
Maine's Seymour Papert and Jim Moulton have worked for years with students at the Maine Youth Center in Portland, students who literally have three-inch thick folders purporting that they cannot learn. But the folders are wrong. Seymour and Jim have had success with these ultimate hard to teach students (see my bookmarks on this topic). It was not the case that these hard to teach students could not learn, but rather that they would not participate in "school-type" learning. This is an excellent example of how changing instruction reaches hard to teach students.

Well, if these folks have had success with hard to teach students, doesn't it follow that there are ways to reach hard to teach students?

In fact, this is why I use the terminology "easy to teach" and "hard to teach" instead of other descriptors, such as quick learners and slow learners, bright kids and dumb kids. There is absolutely no doubt that hard to teach kids are challenging, taxing, and difficult to reach - that's why I call them "hard to teach." But it is also clear that with the right instruction and learning environment they can learn.

Software for Mathematics Education

2006-04-20T22:22:00.000-05:00

A colleague recently asked if I could recommend some Math software to be used in a summer program and after-school tutoring program. Here are some of the thoughts I shared:

There is some general drill & kill math software available, but I’m not sure I’d really recommend any. It’s not much better than giving worksheets (once the initial novelty of working on the computer wears off) and some are pretty bad. They might be entertaining for a short period, but there is little research to support their use and they don’t tend to focus on anything other than basic calculations or fact recall. Some stuff is available for free at FunBrain.

The good math software works best if the teachers/instructors have some training in how to best use them. But here are several:

Fast ForWord – This software is actually a series of exercises that rewire the brain, not a curriculum or mathematics application. It is marketed as language software, but has a profound impact on mathematical ability, too. It is one of the two most strongly research-supported software packages available. Students have to go through an extended series of exercises to realize the benefit (you wouldn’t choose this option if you were looking to just have students use the software now and then...).

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives - These are a collection of applets (available free online) that allow students to explore mathematical concepts – they do a fabulous job of making abstract concepts concrete. The site has recently been expanded to include tutorials and other teacher resources, as well as, the interactive activities. Maine had a huge federal grant to train middle school math teachers to use these tools. The scientific study that was a requirement of the grant showed that not only did student achievement increase, but the teachers’ understanding of the mathematical concepts improved, as well.

Measurement in Motion - This is an interesting package that allows students to collect visual data points and then plot them on a graph (imagine graphing the acceleration of a car from a stop sign, or the height of a candle as it burns). It makes graphing and mathematical modeling real. What do those different functions really mean anyway!? See! Math does have a use in the real world!

What are your best examples of online materials or software packages that help students understand mathematics?

NoteShare - More New Tools for Education

2006-04-20T22:15:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, Aquaminds brought us NoteTaker, a wonderful tool that not only allows the user to write, but to insert documents and media, include voice annotations (think podcast), has full web browser capability (in the notebook!), and the ability to use a notebook viewer (if you don't have NoteTaker) or to export notebooks as a web site (including all imbedded documents and media).

Think student portfolios! Think teacher created texts (with imbedded web resources)! Think an organizational tool for course materials! Imagine student notebooks where the pages are interactive! Maybe this is the beginning of books like we see in the Harry Potter movies! (and here I'm only half joking)

And anyone familiar with the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives knows how powerful the interactive activities are. But folks also know that there are limitations to using them online - the teacher can't set up activities with specific parameters for the students and the students' work isn't preserved when they leave the page or work on a new activity. But in NoteTaker, when the NLVM plug-ins are installed, teachers can create notebooks of lessons for students and students can submit their work with their results preserved!

And NLVM's developers recognize other advantages to using NLVM applets in NoteTaker:

We have found that convenience and adaptability are big issues for teachers. Many teachers find that internet access at their schools is unreliable, slow, or even unavailable. In contrast to paper and other traditional mediums that teachers are used to adapting, most web-based resources, especially interactive ones, cannot be easily adapted or contextualized. NoteTaker, makes it possible for teachers to easily adapt NLVM applets and materials and to create new contexts for our applets.

What if a NoteTaker notebook allowed collaboration, like a wiki, but only for who you wanted to allow access? Aquaminds is getting ready to release NoteShare - imagine the same kinds of notebooks as in NoteTaker, but shared online for your students or work group to view, contribute to, or to collaboratively develop.

And Aquaminds really gets it. As an early user, I was invited to look at a NoteShare notebook from Scott Love, Aquaminds' founder, where he discusses how teachers might use this powerful tool to address real educational needs. I've heard a lot of vendors talk about their products, and frankly, I'm tired of vendors who only understand their product. They can talk about features and what the product can do, and maybe they'll even let you know how they think educators should use it. But they don't understand teachers and teaching well enough to recognize the real challenges educators face in trying to help all students learn.

Ralph Granger, one of my colleagues, once pointed out that when you go to the hardware store to buy a drill bit, you don't do it because you want to own a drill bit. You do it because you need a hole!

Aquaminds understands some of the "holes" teachers need and they talk about how NoteTaker and NoteShare can help - they don't just talk "drill bits," like many other vendors.

NoteShare is one of those new tools that is in a new paradigm. It's surface features are quick to grasp and similar to what we are used to (writing, organization, voice annotations, document management, web browsing), but as more and more teachers explore the subtleties of how this tool is different from others, I suspect that it will help us create new and powerful learning and working environments.

Teachers Aren't To Blame

2006-04-20T08:55:00.000-05:00

Most of what I write about in this blog is educational change, usually focused on instruction and/or technology integration (which, of course, is just a subset of "instruction"). But when you talk a lot about changing expectations for teaching and learning, and how teachers teach, and paradigms, and getting them to focus on the right thing instead of the wrong thing, it's easy to start to think that I believe that teachers are the reason that schools aren't changing or that more students aren't learning.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. I was watching Dr. Phil this morning (I am on break this week!) and during the show he repeated one of his Dr. Philisms, "People do the best they can with what they know at the time."

I believe that the rules for education have changed. First, the world of work has changed and we now need every child to learn in school what we used to only need the college prep kids to learn (well, actually what has changed is that we now need every kid to be college prep!). Second, new tools (laptops, cell phones, iPods, information access, personal broadcasting, the read/write web, multimedia, etc.) have changed how kids work, necessitating how schools have students learn (or risk becoming irrelevant to students).

So teachers are now working in an environment they didn't really experience as students themselves, and probably weren't trained for professionally. Even if teachers need to be the ones making most of the changes, the reason is that the rules have changed, not because they weren't doing a good job.

And if they have to make changes for a new environment they haven't experienced or been trained for, then we have to be very, very clear that we don't blame teachers. Nothing could be more inappropriate, or unproductive for achieving our new goals.

Instead, what we need to do is provide teachers support to a level like we never have before. Side by side with an expectation to teach in ways so all students can learn a high status curriculum and that makes use of new tools, we have to be making a promise to support them in this work, making clear we believe in our teachers and know that they can do this hard work. We have to provide training, resources, and time. We have to let teachers try and make mistakes and get better - and hold them harmless in this work.

If we don't, we guarantee failure: for our schools, for our teachers, and for our students.

Challenges to Integration - Paradigm Shifts

2006-04-19T22:08:00.000-05:00

I think one of the biggest challenges facing educators when it comes to taking advantage of new technologies for learning isn't money, or training, it is paradigm shifts. Technology integration isn't just an issue of knowing how to use the tools, but of understanding how the new tools let you do things differently.

Case in point, the other weekend, we took my folks to Boston to see our girls' college and to spend the day with one of the girls. We stayed outside the city (cheaper rooms & no parking fees!) and took the Metro in. We called April when we got Faneuil Hall, where we would meet. She was just getting on the Metro at her end, and would be another 20 minutes. I hung up and suggested to my folks that we look around Quincy Market while we wait.

"Well, how will she know where to meet us?" my mom asked. Frankly, I had made the same assumption, because when I was on the phone with April, I had started to set up a place to meet. But she had said, "Why don't I just call you when I get there?"

My mom and I were thinking like people who grew up with land lines. You had to be more deliberate making plans, because there was no way to communicated away from the phone. But that day, we all had cell phones. We could call any time, from any where. April was thinking like someone who grew up with the new tool and my mom and I were thinking like people who didn't. For April, it was natural to just check in when we were closer to each other, but Mom and I didn't think that way naturally - we had to work at it.

It's this doing things differently that gets in the way of integrating new tools into teaching and learning. In "Do Something Disruptive," I described a fellow Math teacher who exclaimed, "Cool! I hope none of my students have one!" when I showed her one of the first graphing calculators. She knew that she wouldn't be able to teach Algebra the way she had for fifteen years. At best, the graphing calculator represented having to teach Algebra differently, but at worst it represented "cheating" because it wouldn't allow learning Algebra the way she was used to.

And yet, this natural resistance to new paradigms may be preventing us from doing a better job than we have been. Willard Dagget has said for a long time that although almost everyone says they use Algebra regularly, it isn't the Algebra we teach in school. And Seymour Papert is fond of pointing out that we teach only the math that is easy to do with pencil and paper. New tools could address both of these challenges, better preparing students for using real world mathematics.

And what about the other subjects?

So some of the powerful questions we need to answer in order to harvest the potential of new tools to education include:

How are young people using these tools and how might that new way of working be used by teachers?
How can we help teachers see these new uses as potential ways to improve learning, instead of distractions from how we've always learned?
How do we help teachers better understand and think like our students who are growing up with the new tools?

I'm reminded of Darwin. When he described "survival of the fittest," it wasn't the strongest creatures that he was describing, but rather the most flexible and adaptive.

Of Course Computers Don't Improve Achievement!

2006-04-13T21:54:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, USA Today published Computers May Not Boost Student Achievement. The article shares several research studies presented at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting in San Francisco. The article begins:

Give a kid a laptop and it might not make any difference.

That's the message from research presented here Monday, which suggests that spending millions of dollars to bring technology into kids' homes and schools has decidedly mixed results.

This is disheartening news for an advocate of 1to1 programs. I don't mean the part about how laptops might not make a difference, but the fact that they are asking the wrong question. You don't need research to know that laptops don't improve achievement.

We don't ask if textbooks improve achievement. We don't ask if pencils improve achievement. Likewise, we don't ask if stethoscopes improve health, or if hammers improve buildings.

I guarantee (even as a 1to1 advocate) that if all we do is hand kids laptops we won't improve grades or test scores. The issue is more complex than that.

One of the major issues is the fact that laptops as a tool are themselves complex. They aren't a single purpose tool. A laptop is more like a swiss army knife. It has lots of tools and possible uses. But it can also be misused as easily as it can be used productively.

We start to head in the right direction when we ask the question "How can laptops be used to improve achievement?" In fact, I believe teacher practice is one of the most important factors that impact the impact of laptops in schools. (See, for example, my recent posts Do Something Disruptive and More on Type I and Type II Uses of Technology.) I like to say, laptops don't improve learning; teacher do.

But teachers alone don't carry the weight of the success of laptops. They haven't grown up with technology. Understandably, many teachers don't know how to use more than routine uses, let alone how to teach with them. But even when teachers are expert at teaching with technology, they don't have the positional authority to set direction for the school, nor the expertise to keep equipment running or to do networking. Yet these are all factors that will impact if student achievement is impacted by the introduction of laptops into learning environments.

The question has to be, "What are the conditions and factors that contribute to laptops helping to improve learning and achievement?"

Based on our work in Maine, I believe that there are 6 components for success. I've already mentioned that teacher practice is one of the critical components. Leadership is the second - especially setting expectations for use and building a shared vision for the school. There are also four supportive, but necessary, components: professional development, technology access and support, partnerships, and funding.

Only when researchers (and educators) recognize the complexities of introducing laptops into schools will we get the information, data, and research that will really help us improve achievement.

1to1: She Said She Hated Them

2006-04-11T22:36:00.000-05:00

We're finishing up advising for pre-registration on my campus this week. Pete, one of my advisees, is currently doing his Practicum - teacher candidates' first field experience, spending a couple days a week out in a school working with students and getting a chance to do some teaching. Teacher candidates in our program take my technology integration course at the same time, so Pete isn't just my advisee, he's my student.

When we were done meeting about what courses he would take next semester, he wanted to talk a little about something that he had experienced out in the field. He asked one of his 9th graders if she had liked having the laptops and didn't she miss having one.

She had had one for 7th and 8th grade as part of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, but, although still a goal, high schools are not currently part of the learning with laptop initiative.

To Pete's surprise, she said that she didn't miss them at all.

"Well, didn't you like having them in middle school?" Pete probed.

The girl replied that she hated them. They didn't use them much and they never seemed to work right.

This story makes me think so many things about doing 1-to-1.

Not the least of which is how easy it is for people to believe that one story like this proves that the laptop initiative doesn't work. Perhaps that's the disruptive part of 1-to-1. It doesn't remind them of what they are used to, so it must be wrong. And this girl's story proves it so. It reaffirms that the schooling they experienced is the right one and something new and different just doesn't work.

On the other hand, no one believes that a single story of a kid, who loved the laptops and for whom the laptop made a difference, proves that the initiative works. In this case people respond, "Well, it worked for him, but does it work for everyone?"

Actually, this is the right question to ask about any single story. Any of you out there who are researchers will recognize the phrase "qualitative study; n of one." The significance is that it is someone's story, but without more stories we can't know if it generalizes to others - we don't know if it is a lot of people's story.

It could be that most of the kids in this girl's school enjoyed learning with the laptops! She could be the outlier. She could be the unusual case.

But what if this girl's story is the story of her school. Does it prove that the laptop initiative doesn't work? It certainly doesn't work (hypothetically) in this school. Certainly the teachers and parents believe it doesn't work. That is, in fact, their reality. How could they believe 1-to-1 works?

But once again, we have only a single story, just on a larger scale. We still have to ask, "Well, it didn't work for them, but does that mean it doesn't work for everyone?" There are 241 middle schools in Maine involved in the laptop initiative. There are schools where it isn't working, but there are a lot of schools where it is.

Now this leads me to the second point. If there are a lot of schools where 1-to-1 is working, doesn't that prove that it is at least possible that 1-to-1 works. In fact, if we know that it is possible that it can work, then we have to look at why it isn't working in some places. If it didn't work in most places, then we could say that it didn't work in the girl's school simply because "it just doesn't work." But if it works a lot of places, then you have to ask the question, if it isn't working in this school, is it because they didn't make it work? The fault may not be with the laptops. It may not be the new element; the disruptive element. It might be what the school did or didn't do.

That doesn't mean that it is the school's fault it didn't work - there could be other reasons it didn't work. For example, in the 1to1 Stories Project, Principal John Keane reflected on the many possible reasons why his school had a higher breakage rate in the 8th grade than they did in the 7th grade. He recognizes that it could be that the students are bored with them or the school's lack of tech support contributed, or their 8th grade staff isn't as committed or don't use them as often.

But it could be that the school didn't make it work. And this leads me to my third point. Bette Manchester, the person in charge of MLTI, and her team from the Maine Department of Education, have visited nearly all the schools in the project. Early on, they noticed that the successful schools tended to use the same strategies. They also noticed the the struggling schools weren't using those strategies.

It makes me sad, because when I think about Pete's student, I think maybe her teachers didn't use the laptops for academic reasons very often. Or maybe there was no system at the school to report difficulties with the computers so they could be taken care of in a timely manner. Or maybe the teachers talked openly with the students about how they thought the laptops were stupid, or maybe just about how they think it was dumb that the state went with Apple as a vendor. (Unfortunately, all these things do happen in some schools.)

And I'm sad because there are schools where the teachers use the machines almost every day for academic reasons. And the students insist the the laptops get repaired quickly because they want to be able to use them. And the school and technology leadership have put an efficient system in place. But most importantly, we're reaching kids we weren't reaching before. We were making a difference. (Fortunately, all of these things do happen in some schools.)

I'm not sad because schools do these things, but because Pete's student didn't go to one of those schools - she missed out.

PS: In a recent interview, I asked Bette Manchester what the biggest challenge facing Maine's learning with laptop initiative was. She said, "Schools not doing what we told them to." We know what works. We know 1-to-1 can and does work.

More on Type I and Type II Uses of Technology

2006-04-06T08:27:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I blogged about two approaches to technology: one that just makes things more efficient and the other that does things differently. This morning, I am reading my students' articles and came across a quote in one of the papers that I think, again, illustrates this principle.

Teacher Peter Halfpenny has used and evaluated the classroom use of Geometer's Sketchpad. Geometer's Sketchpad is a computer construction and exploration tool, that allows students to construct geometric shapes and figures and then explore their properties.

In the quote below, Halfpenny gives two examples of its use: one is Type I and the other is Type II.

I found that when Geometer's Sketchpad is used in conjunction with an interactive whiteboard it becomes an extremely powerful demonstration tool. However, when the software is used by pupils with individual computers then the software is even more powerful, since the program allows the teacher to create guided discovery lessons in which the students produce mathematical relationships and generalisations.

He even notes the differences in impact between the two approaches.

What other examples of Type I and Type II uses can you contribute to the conversation?

Do Something Disruptive

2006-04-05T22:57:00.000-05:00

There are really two ways to use technology for teaching and learning. Johnson and Maddux refer to it as "Type I" and "Type II" (see here, for example). Alan November refers to it as "automation" and "infomation" (see here). Others refer to them as "sustaining" and "disruptive" (see here).

The bottom line is that Type I approaches simply automate conventional practice - they support the ways teachers currently teach. Type II uses are those that allow students and teachers to do things that they couldn't easily do before, or perhaps couldn't do at all. Business recognizes that although Type I uses of technology make work more efficient, there is only incremental improvement and benefits. It is with Type II uses of technology that real gains are to be made.

For example, the typewriter is Type I since it makes writing more efficient (it's neater, and with practice you can type faster than you can write). The word processor, however, is Type II because of the ease of revision. If you need to revise or edit a paper, there is little advantage to having a typewriter over having a pen and paper. In both cases, you have to start over with a new copy. With a word processor, you simply make your changes to the existing copy and print a new one. In fact, writing teachers have noticed that young writers no longer do separate, distinct drafts of a paper (1st draft, 2nd draft, etc.). Young writers now simply do a single rolling, evolving draft. They may print a new version at certain points of their work, but each of these is not an end product of work on a specific draft, but rather a snapshot in time of the single evolving paper.

Other Type I examples include drill and practice software, student response systems ("clickers"), and SMARTboards. Each of these are more efficient ways of doing what teachers have done for a long time. But, since we aren't really changing what teachers have done - we aren't changing eduction - they won't mean that we will reach more students than we have in the past or that our schools will achieve anything they haven't done in the past. There's an old saying that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten - even if you're doing it more efficiently.

Keep in mind that what matters most is how the technology is used, not which technology is used. For example, PowerPoint to create slides for a presentation is a Type I application, but students using PowerPoint to create multimedia documents to teach others about a topic they have been studying could be a Type II application. Using a graphing calculator in a math class with the traditional Algebra text is a Type I use, but using a graphing calculator for modeling real (messy) data and studying functions is a Type II use.

Other Type II examples of using technology in education include digital storytelling, or WebQuests, or using blogs, wikis, and podcasts to build community and literacy. These uses have been shown to get students excited about learning, to learn basic skills, to use and develop higher order thinking skills, and to motivate hard to teach students. These tools have the ability to change education.

David Thornburg puts it this way:

All too often, we see teachers who are using technologies today trying to do the same kinds of things they did in the past, only more efficiently. I'm not going to go back to using a typewriter now that I use a word processor. But those are examples of what I'd call doing things differently--and the real power comes when you do different things.

But there is more to Type I and Type II uses of educational technology than the opportunity to improve education and to reach more students. There are risks involved. But this isn't from embracing Type II uses, but rather from not embracing them. David Thornburg again:

When kids who are that fluent with these tools encounter an educational system that is predominantly driven by the awesome power of a sheet of slate and a stick of chalk, then they're in trouble. Or the teacher is in trouble, more appropriately, because the student will just tune [the teacher] out and do this project at home. [He'll say,] "It's not worth my time to try it here, I don't have access to the resources. I'll just get through the day."

In fact, the whole sustaining/disrupting idea comes from the world of business and the writings of Clayton Christensen, who "focuses on the critical distinction between sustaining technologies that enhance current trends in an industry and disruptive technologies - innovations that herald the wave of the future." He argues that even well managed companies fail if they don't respond to innovation in a timely manner. It is adaptive organizations that survive and thrive in the presence of disruptive technologies. (See a summary here.)

That doesn't mean that it's easy. In fact it can generate a lot of fear. That's because Type II uses can fundamentally threaten well established practices. When graphing calculators first came out in the late 1980's, I bought one because I knew they represented great potential for teaching math. I showed it to a close friend, who was also a math teacher. Her first words were, "Wow! This is great!" But, without missing a beat, she went on to say, "I hope none of my students have one!"

David Thornburg had this to say about 1-to-1 computing, perhaps the biggest disruptive innovation facing schools in along time:

There's a realization that when you go below 4 to 1, as an educator, your world changes. I think that the teachers and administrators who are resistant to one-to-one computing definitely do understand the implications. These are very bright people. They know that the world of education as they know it will end. ...

How can we help schools adapt to disruptive technologies? And more importantly, how can we take advantage of the "wave of the future" to improve schools and reach more students?

The Answer To Curriculum Might Not Be Content Part I

2006-04-05T15:08:00.000-05:00

In my post Rethinking Secondary Education in Maine I discussed some of the exciting work that is going on around the secondary education curriculum in Maine.

The curriculum that we finally recommend to the Commissioner will likely be based largely on a report from the colleges in the University of Maine System that suggests that in order to be ready for college, students should have 4 years of English, 4 years of Math, 3 years of lab science, 3 years of Social Studies, and 2 years of a foreign language.

This is a "high status" curriculum. It is the curriculum that has gotten students into four year colleges for decades. But it was also clear, talking Task Force members from the world of business and industry, that this is also the curriculum they feel they need for graduates to be able go to work, let alone a 2-year technical school/community college. (We heard stories, for example, of recent hires not being able to read electrical meters because they couldn't do the math.) This isn't just about 4-year colleges. Maine's slogan "Every Child College Ready" really does mean being academically ready for work or military service right after graduation, not just being ready for higher education.

This is very exciting to me! Who wouldn't want all their kids to be "smarter"?! To get a better education?! I'm a critical theorist (a fancy way of saying schools should be for ALL students) and see this curriculum opening all kinds of doors and possibilities for every single one of our students, not just the ones who are lucky enough to already have lots of doors open.

But this high status curriculum is a little scary, too. We already know it works for the easiest of our easy to teach kids. How will we make it work for our hard to teach kids?

Our answer in the past was that we made DIFFERENT courses for our hard to teach kids. If they can't do Algebra II (especially since they probably had a hard time with Algebra I and Geometry), why don't we offer a Shop Math or a Life Skills Math. If our hard to teach students can't do American Literature (especially since they probably had a hard time with freshman comp and lit), why don't we offer "Sports Literature."

But I don't think this approach has been very successful. I think we didn't address the root problem; all we did was remove our hard to teach kids from the high status curriculum they were struggling with.

What if instead we designed those high status courses in such a way that the hard to tech kids could be successful with them? What would a Physics class look like where every student could leave the course understanding important Physics principles as outlined in national standards? What would an Algebra II or Calculus class look like that every student could leave having met the standards outlined by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics? What would a course look like where even the hard to teach kids could master the themes of Shakespeare or Whitman?

Clearly part of the answer is also answering the questions, how do we design an Algebra or Pre-algebra class that every student could be successful? Or how do we design a freshman comp class where all the students can become effective written communicators?

The answer isn't with the content (we changed the content and still had a problem with the hard to teach kids being academically ready for work and school).

If we want every child, including and especially the hard to teach students, to be successful with a high status curriculum, then we need to focus on instruction.

The definition of insanity is doing the same old thing and expecting different results. We know that a high status curriculum (taught the way it has always been taught) doesn't work for the hard to teach kids. We have to teach the content differently.

What might that look like? Please add your comments below, but I'll add my thoughts in an upcoming post.

Tech Savvy Students in Text-Dominated Schools

2006-04-01T22:55:00.000-05:00

Schools everywhere are working to better meet the educational needs of today. Many of them check in with colleges and employers to find out their needs. But if we're really serious about improving schools, then we need check in with students, as well, and add their voices to our work.

Minnesota based Education/Evolving is doing exactly that with their Real Impact: Student Opinions for a Change Project.

One of their recent reports summarizes available literature reporting student attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors when it comes to using digital technology, particularly for learning. Tech-Savvy Students Stuck in Text-Dominated Schools explores both how our students are using technology, particularly for learning, and how they are becoming more and more frustrated with schools that are not embracing technology. The report includes students’ ideas for how adult education policy and school designers could better meet their needs.

The report includes 15 major findings:

Computer and Internet use is growing
Students are sophisticated users
Technology is important to students' education
Technology is not an "extra"
In-school access to technology is limited
Home use dominates
In-school use is not integrated
Computers and the Internet are communication tools, first
Metaphors describe how students use the Internet for school
Technology has caused students to approach life differently; but adults act as though nothing has changed
Students desire increased in-school access
Students want to use technology to learn, and in a variety of ways
Students want challenging, technologically-oriented instructional activities
Students want adults to move beyond using the 'Internet for Internet's sake'
Students want to learn the basics, too.

How can we use this information to change how we use technology in schools? What else should we be asking students that could inform us about designing schools that work with today's learners?

Happy Birthday, Apple!

2006-04-01T10:52:00.000-05:00

Today is Apple's 30th Birthday. The two Steves are getting a lot of attention in the blogoshere. Although their first computer was the Apple (and I remember working in schools with the Apple IIe and my first computer was the "portable" Apple IIc - I even had an LCD screen for it!!), I really admire the Macintosh because of its user-friendly human interface, focus on creative/expressive software (e.g. iLife), and stylish design (weren't they also one of the first laptops to move the keyboard back and provide a wrist rest?).

Anyway, I am also a strong believer in the power of stories. My own 1to1 Stories Project (gathering the stories of folks involved in 1to1 learning with technology initiatives, so we can learn from each other and inform those thinking about doing a 1to1 initiative) is based on one designed to gather stories about the creation of the Mac.

Andy Hertzfeld was on the design team for the original Macintosh. His The Original Macintosh Project at folklore.org captures "Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it."

There are nearly 120 stories that provide insight into that revolutionary event. Reading the stories leaves you feeling like you were there. The stories have been brought together into the book, Revolution in the Valley

Today (or when you read this) take some time to explore the stories about the development of the Mac. What do you think of their stories? What do you think about projects like folklore.org or the 1to1 Stories Project that try to gather everyday snapshots of amazing events?

Rethinking Secondary Education in Maine

2006-03-31T22:19:00.000-05:00

I'm on the Maine Secondary Education Policy Task Force, a diverse group of teachers, administrators, higher educators, business, education, and community leaders and others with a stake in the education of our young people. We were convened by the Commissioner of Education and over the next couple months, we are being led through an intriguing process to advise the Commissioner on what the middle school and high school curriculum, assessments, and supports should be to insure that every student graduates from high school "College Ready." The Commissioner will use this information when advising the legislature on updating Secondary Education policy and law.

The task force met for the first time last Monday (3/27/06). The first meeting concentrated on what the curriculum should be (future meetings would focus on assessment and on necessary supports). It was interesting that it started with a presentation by the Maine Learning Technology Initiative's Bette Manchester sharing GLEF video clips of high schools that have redesigned themselves to work for at-risk students. She continued, describing the skills and knowledge needed by college and work, and the newly released findings of the 2006 Horizon Report, describing the innovative new technology-based tools that are working their way into the mainstream. Then, Bette went over all the tools our middle school students have on their laptops, highlighting how our young people work and learn differently. This was followed by the Commissioner describing her trip to China to visit their schools - schools, very different from the ones we have now, designed to insure that their students can compete in a global job market.

The message was clear - This won't be your parents' education!

This first meeting focused on the curriculum. Future meetings will focus on assessment and the supports that will need to be in place for this curriculum (including Instruction).

It's exciting to be part of a Department of Education initiative that honestly hasn't made up it's mind before approaching stake holders for input. It's also exciting to be part of an initiative that is seriously looking forward into future and seems to be interested in succeeding, not just putting forth political rhetoric!

We Learn From Each Other

2006-03-31T21:23:00.000-05:00

Last night, I met with Ron Sweet. He's the principal at the Calgary Science School in Calgary, Alberta. We get a lot of visitors from all over the world that come to Maine to visit our laptop initiative. They visit some of our schools and meet various project leaders, administrators, teachers, and other folks involved in the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. Most of them are thinking about starting their own 1-to-1 learning with laptop initiatives, but some are already doing their own.

Occasionally, I get invited, with others, to have dinner with the visitors to discuss what we have learned about doing 1-to-1 initiatives successfully. I love the meetings, because I often learn something about education from the people I'm meeting with. That was certainly the case with Ron.

His school is a grade 6-9 charter school with a focus on math and science. They have always been technology rich and teach on integrated teams of 50 students and one Math/Science teacher and one Humanities teacher. Their work with inquiry insures that much of their teaching focuses on hands-on learning and making learning real and meaningful to students. This past year, they received a grant from the government to do 1to1 with their 6th grade and things are going so well that they are thinking about extending the project to the other grades.

Ron shared how he enjoyed reading Brent Davis'
Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy. I loved looking at it online as it seems to be a book about the philosophy of education (a subject I have taught at UMF before), but instead of dealing with the philosophies simply as discrete views of education, deals with them within their interrelated historical and evolutionary contexts as a series of "inventions."

But most of all, I enjoyed hearing about the projects that they are doing with students. One teacher, on maternity leave, but volunteering at the immigrant center, worked with her replacement to bring students to spend a morning visiting with, getting to know, and interviewing the immigrants. They then returned to school and spent several weeks on the "Your Stories Are Our Stories" project. Students scripted videos, created music and burned DVDs the project culminated with inviting the immigrants to the school for an evening of sharing their DVD productions. Ron reports that some of the immigrants shared that they thought all North American children were spoiled and self-absorbed, but through the project, saw only love and caring.

We spent time contrasting this approach to learning with other more focused and prescriptive approaches. This approach not only helped the students learn about other places and cultures and developed communication and literacy skills, it attended to the education of the entire child, teaching compasion and understanding, working with creative tools to tell someone else's story. Somehow standards just don't seem to address what's possible with this sort of teaching.

What are your thoughts? Add your comments.

Welcome

2006-03-31T16:42:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my blog: a place where I can reflect on what it takes to transform schools into places where everyone can learn. I have special interests in technology integration, 1-to-1 learning with technology initiatives, and making learning meaningful and engaging to all students. I'm looking forward to your comments, too.