Do You Enable or Ensure ADULT Learning?

"Using recognized assessment measures and a support system that ensures positive outcomes, we will provide a student-focused learning environment." - excerpt from the SKSS Mission Statement

When I attended professional development sessions as a teacher of biology and PE, I used to have a highly student-centered focus on how I would apply what I was learning to my classroom.  Yet since I have been in administration, more often than not I find myself thinking about how I can apply the principles to my staff through the lens of adult learning, even if the session could be entirely focused on changing pedagogy for kids.  Since becoming a Principal, I have held firm to the belief that a focus on engaging educators (teachers AND administrators) in their learning is as important as (and arguably MORE important than) a focus on engaging students in their learning.  Without considering and expending notable amounts of time on the former, any efforts to the latter become much less effective.

Thanks to my colleague and friend Leeann Bartee (follow her, one of the most well-read and researched administrators that I have ever met) who introduced me to it, I have begun yet another educational read for the summer called "Instructional Rounds in Action", the sequel to "Instructional Rounds in Education" that I have written so much about over the last few months.  Even though I am only a couple of dozen pages into the book, it already has me hooked because of the emphasis on the importance of the learning of the adults in education.  From the Prologue, by Dr. Richard Elmore:

“The deepest irony of American education is that the institutions that are responsible for learning in our society do the worst job of enabling the learning of the people who work in them” 

He also states that:
 
"School reform, if it works at all, works systematically by increasing the capacity of individuals and the organizations in which they work...students learn best when adults are working and learning at the outer edge of their own practice."

This made me think about what we do as a system to ensure that we are systematically increasing the capacity of the individuals in education.  In our school's mission statement above, we emphasize the idea of ensuring student learning...so what about educator (teachers and administrators) learning?  How about the structures that we have in place to enable the learning of the people that work in our organizations?  What about the effectiveness of these structures?  Are we ensuring that adult learning is actually occurring, and that this learning is transformed into the changes in practice and the changes in the tasks that we have students do to elicit the learning that each of us wants for our students?

#notsosureaboutthat

This uncertainty is not a condemnation of those that work within the system, it is more a question about the system itself.  Schools pride themselves on recognizing the differences in students as learners, differentiating instruction and assessment for them, and providing multiple and varied opportunities for their success within a blanket of wraparound support.  Yet if educator learning is so critical to student learning, perhaps it's time for us to take a really good look at how we ensure that WE are the lead learners.

So how do we change this?  Professional development days?  Send people to conferences?  Bring in guest speakers?  Put time for collaboration within the timetable?  Create peer coaches?  Skyped-in mentorship?  Adopt Google's 20% model?  Have educators get connected and develop PLNs?  Make faculty meetings about staff development rather than the technical managerial pieces of school operations?   

Yes.  Absolutely.  Do some of these things.  Do all of these things.  In fact, most of us do some or all of these activities for and with our faculties already.  More and more, however, I am starting to consider whether the things that we do to increase the capacity of ourselves as educators actually ensure learning rather than just enable the possibility of learning.  My thinking right now is leaning far more towards the latter rather than the former.  And I know that were we speaking about enabling rather than ensuring student learning, most educators would agree that such a premise would be less than acceptable.

Over the next few weeks, I want to design a model that ensures the learning of the educators in our school system.  If you have any ideas about this, I would love to hear them!

Do You SEE or JUDGE?

"What a great lesson!"

"The teacher seemed unprepared."

"The kids were really working hard."

"I wouldn't have taught the concept that way."

"I'm not sure how kids could be excited about that topic when even I was bored."

"Boy, they just nailed that one--that was great pedagogy!"

Have you ever gone into a classroom to observe a lesson had any of these thoughts after you left the class?  I'm sure that any number of people who watched me teach biology or PE could have said one or all of these things on a given day.  Over the last thirteen years, I have been in numerous classrooms and I know that at varying times I have had these types of phrases run through my head as I did walk-throughs around my schools.

How meaningless for me, and even more importantly, how meaningless for anyone to whom I was going to describe what I saw in the class.  Whether I was speaking to that teacher, another educator or administrator, these normative-based bits of feedback were almost entirely useless in describing the learning environment that I had observed.

In each of these instances, I was unclear as to what I was actually looking for, and moreover I was quickly jumping to conclusions that were based on my own biases and experiences as both a learner and a teacher.

Imagine that you were taking a piano lesson and the teacher said "Good one!  You really nailed it!".  Or you swung your golf club and your golf pro said "Well, clearly you didn't prepare for today.".  Or perhaps in your evening art class, your professor says "I wouldn't have done it that way.".  Would any of this be meaningful?

#notlikely

One of the pieces that truly challenged my thinking when studying the concepts of Instructional Rounds was learning and practicing the discipline of description.   More specifically, I found it difficult to begin by determining an area of focus for feedback, and then to describe the EVIDENCE of what I saw in classrooms from the students, the teachers, and the tasks they were doing as opposed to stating my OPINION of what I saw.  City, Elmore, Fiarman and Teitel (2009) call this "learning to see" and "unlearning to judge".  I imagine being in the middle of teaching a science lesson and my Principal coming to my class, doing an observation, and giving me this feedback:

• "the pace was too fast"
• "you assigned a highly complex lab to the students"
• "the students were actively engaged with their groups during the lesson"

or....a different scenario, such as me asking the Principal to come to my class to look at something that my department and I had collectively determined as an area of focus, such as "when doing labs with our students, we find that they struggle with following instructions and using higher level thinking skills to connect the lab to the concept we are doing in class."  If he then gave the following feedback:

• "when you moved from the first task to the second task, eight of the students had not completed the first task"
• "you assigned the students a task that required them to collect, plot, and analyze and draw conclusions from data"  
• "the students used a rubric to provide feedback to their peers on the structure of the conclusions they had drawn and the strength of the evidence to find those conclusions."  

The first set of feedback has limited use for me, as the terms "too fast", "highly complex" and"actively engaged" are judgement statements.  As the teacher, I might respond to this feedback..."What do you mean too fast? I thought it was fine."  Or maybe "The lab actually wasn't complex, the students just didn't get it.". Or "Glad to hear they were engaged, I worked hard to put this lab together."  And PS, "Why were you here in the first place?"

The second set of feedback lets me slow down and do some thinking.  Hmmm...if eight students had not completed the first step, should I have circled back?  Was my instruction not clear enough?  The assignment did involve some higher order thinking skills, as did the peer evaluation tool at the end--this is what the department and I wanted to examine in more detail.  Cool.

At some point in the process of examining our practice, there will be judgement.  Make no doubt, if we collectively are looking at an area of focus in what we are doing in the classroom, given enough descriptive feedback, we will start to note patterns and draw some conclusions.  But by giving descriptive feedback without judgement, or learning to SEE rather than jumping to OPINION, we can slow the process down and approach classrooms in a more meaningful and productive manner that can truly impact teaching practice.

Now THAT would be cool.  Wait a sec, that's a judgement...


City, Elizabeth A et al. Instructional rounds in education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2009.

Self-Organized Learning

It has been nearly three years since I decided to become a "connected Principal" -- an educator using social media for the purpose of improving my own practice as a school-based administrator.  I wrote a post a couple of years ago called "The Evolution of a Twitter User", and since that time, I feel like I have continued to evolve in my use of social media to learn.  I used to evaluate new applications on a nightly basis and see which ones I might be able to recommend or pass along to others.  However, over the last 18 months or so, I have streamlined my approach to new programs and apps:  I find myself gravitating to tools that allow for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration on projects large and small with people that have similar interests to me.

Recently, I watched the latest Sugata Mitra TED Talk called "Build a School in the Cloud".  I had seen his "Hole in the Wall Project" TED Talk back in 2010, and enjoyed it tremendously. This was an extension of his project which also included a piece on Self Organized Learning Environments, a concept that seems to capture where I am going with my own professional learning, and where I think we could be moving with both student learning and professional development.  Sugata Mitra uses a graphic to illustrate three elements he feels are key to creating these Self-Organized Learning Environments:

The first two pieces of this equation are relatively self-explanatory--connectivity to the internet and some sort of mechanism than enables individuals to assemble in collaborative groups are things that we can understand.  However, the piece that struck me as unique was around what Sugata Mitra calls "encouragement and admiration".  If you have seen the TED talks, you will recall Mitra's reference to what he affectionately calls "the Granny Cloud":  he enlisted 200 volunteer grandmothers to act as 'tutors' to assist students on whatever topic they were working on.  But there was one important feature about the grannies in "granny cloud":

They didn't know anything about the topics that the kids were studying.

Hmm.

All they did was sincerely encourage the students, and continuously ask the students to tell them more about what it was they were learning about.

And the kids learned. And learned. And learned some more.

Cool.

After watching "Build a School in The Cloud" I began reflecting on my approach to my own professional learning through the lens of a Self-Organized Learning Environment.  Twitter allows me to connect to people with common interests.  Facebook lets me learn a little bit more about them (I am starting to look at LinkedIn, but am not completely immersed in this technology yet).  Diigo allows me to bookmark and catalog their ideas.  I use different Google applications and Drive to share and to work on things collaboratively with them. I am starting to use Google Hangouts to set up synchronous meetings, and will look forward to making a YouTube channel as a repository for some of these meetings. Jing and Screenr help me to capture authentic artifacts that I can share with those that are and are not connected.  Dipity lets me to keep a running timeline of the project that we work on (albeit Dipity seems to be degrading a bit).  Blogger allows me to share my reflections, get feedback and grow personally and professionally with different projects that I may be working on with them.   And while I know that many people use more, different and better applications for to accomplish these and other tasks (and I am always eager to find out what might be more functional for me, so please share your ideas if you wish), these are the tools that I am currently using.

Yet these are sort of the "hows" for me, and I starting thinking about the motivation behind the "whys"--why do I even bother doing this self-organized learning?  I would suspect that I'm as busy as the next person---my school fills my day, my family fills my evenings (a three and a five year old can certainly keep you on the move), my hobbies and interests fill my early mornings, and all of the above fill my weekends in various amounts. But what gets me back to my laptop at night, after the kids go to bed and before I slump over into my keyboard?

It's a bit of a shout-out from my peers:
 

It's a kick in the pants to be a part of a group:

It's a comment on a post from an expert like Bill Ferriter (@plugusin) that makes me stretch my thinking and links me to other resources:

Each of these falls under that 'encouragement' piece that is suggested in Mitra's model for Self-Organized Learning.  It's my 'granny cloud'.  And like the kids from the "School in the Cloud", I keep learning, and I keep going back to find out more.  Even when I don't have time.

This is the type of learning that I want for my own children.  I want them to self-organize and connect to others who have similar interests (not necessarily similar points of view) and to provide them with as much encouragement as I possibly can to keep learning and to tell me what they have learned.

And extrapolating from that, I am going to spend some time seeing how I can work with our staff and other educators integrate ideas around this concept of Self Organized Learning to parts of our own Professional Learning Communities model.  George Couros (@gcouros) wrote a post on Blended PLCs, and I think this could dovetail nicely into the SOLE idea.

Broadband.  Collaboration.  Encouragement.  It seems too simple.

Yet it seems to have worked for me, and I wonder if it can work for others.

So either I am simple (highly probable) or we may be on to something here....

Stay tuned.

Technology and the Bowflex Collide

Right now, many schools and school districts are under a great deal of pressure to have their students learn (and their teachers teach) '21st Century Skills'.  We can all sing along here...collaboration, communication, critical thinking, you know...give me the 7 "C"s and all that.  For the record, I agree, and endorse these skills wholeheartedly.  I'm not sure these skills are so different from that which we have wanted for our students in the 20th century, but nonetheless, it is hard to deny that these skills are vitally important for the success of our students now and in the future.  Unfortunately, this pressure comes at a time when many would say budgets for education have never been tighter.  And yet it is not uncommon for us to hear things like:

"We need a 1:1 program"

"We need to have a smartboard in each classroom in our school"

"Everyone of our teachers and administrators needs a laptop"

"Should we be getting iPads or android tablets for all of our kids?"

"What kinds of pro-d do we need to get for our staff and administration to use technology more in their classes?"

But I can't help but think that, in some instances, we may be looking at technology use and implementation in a manner that is at best somewhat backwards, and at worst a potentially frightful use of precious educational budgets.

I need to qualify something: I am a huge believer in the importance of implementing technology in education. We have made it a priority in our building.  We have free and open wifi at our school.  By the end of this year, we will have projectors in every classroom.  Some teachers have smartboards, others have tablets and laptops, and we have pods of tablets floating around the building.  We have completely re-tasked our library to become a learning commons that is tech-rich and conducive to collaborative learning.  Most of our students have some permutation of a smartphone, and we have policies that support the use of technology for learning.  We welcome the use of social media.

However, my concern about tech budgets and tech spending are most aptly summarized with a question:

"Why are you buying that?"

I say this because there seems to be a prevailing "Field of Dreams"-themed logic out there with technology:  this is the "if you build it they will come" logic, or more specifically the "if you buy it, they will use it" approach with the promise that an infusion of technology will lead our students promised land of 21st century skills.

This thought pattern seems odd to me.  And according to this logic, every person who buys a Bowflex should be in good shape.  Yet if one spends about 30 seconds on Kijiji, there are more than a few fitness items for sale.  And I'm just taking a flyer that most people aren't selling their fitness equipment because they are now "too fit".

#howsthatworkingforyou

Making widespread tech purchases to ensure that each classroom in a school or district is kitted out with a bright and shiny technological suite is (to my way of thinking) quite analogous to the Field of Dreams concept, or buying every student or educator a Bowflex.

Maybe they don't want a Bowflex.  Perhaps they need a stairclimber.  Or maybe they need just want a pair of runners.  Or a yoga mat.

Perhaps a different tact that we might take towards our tech purchases could be based in the tenets of  Instructional Rounds.

• tasks predict performance
• the real accountability system is in the tasks that the students are asked to do

If we look at our technology purchases through the lens of the TASKS that we want students or teachers to accomplish, then suddenly the rationale for a technology purchase becomes infinitely more evident.

"I need my students to be able to have instant access to the internet so they can compare and contrast the validity of different websites."  Maybe a set of tablets for that classroom to enhance "side of the desk" technology could help you out.

"I want to be able to upload problems to my website from my math lessons that I have solved with students in class".  Hmmm, maybe a tablet PC or Smartboard could work.

"My students need quick access to a repository of literary terms that they can use to analyze pieces of prose".  Have them pop their smartphones out.

"I want my students to be able to brainstorm and display their ideas when they work in collaborative groups."  Well, maybe you don't need technology.  Maybe you just need some chart paper.

Of course these are just raw and rudimentary examples.  And of course, I support the idea of spending money (and sometimes a great deal of money) on technology.  However, before we spend our modest budgets that serve many important causes in our schools, it seems prudent that we can base a significant portion of our rationale for technological purchases on the TASKS we want our students and teachers to accomplish.

Because I can't afford another Bowflex.   

I learned that the hard way.