Have a Good Life

A couple months ago, I commented on how great it is when learning is frustrating. Well, it is still great, but sometimes it is not that great. As you may have noticed, I took off all the posts from my internship this summer. My principal made a good point, she said that I was privy to a lot of information and that I didn't realize how much trust I was given.

I know that I make mistakes and that I am not perfect, but I sure don't like being told about it.

The feelings that I experienced when she told me were very conflicted. I was sad, hurt, offended, suddenly aware of the weight of that job, and extremely grateful that she told me how she felt. It is not fun to be called out, but it is sometimes needed.

Thank you Mrs. P. for a wonderful internship, and helping me learn something that was hard to swallow, but needed to be said.

Have a Good Life.

Darren Draper, my hero, posted a great thought about Professional Development. He runs a great program called OpenPD. He just finished his third session, and reflected about it. I suggest you read it to fully understand my comments here. Darren asks these questions:

1. How do we transform OpenPD so as to attract the kinds of teachers that aren’t the most technologically savvy?
2. How do we garner the participation of additional groups of teachers? Sure, individual participation from wherever you may be is fantastic, but a class of multiple classes would be ideal.
3. What can be done to provide OpenPD participants with local district credit - enabling additional rewards other than the intrinsic?
4. Considering question 3, are such extrinsic rewards really needed or would they only taint the enthusiasm for such an endeavor?

@Clay, How can you say RSS is dead? You just said the other day that this is too new! Perhaps RSS is dead to you, but that doesn't mean it is dead to others.

Darren and Sarah: Teachers and any other professionals hate PD because it is PD. As my professor this last semester said about a hundred times as she lectured us with the same style of PowerPoint without letting us interact, "The days of a one-stop-dog-and-pony-show Professional Development are over!" When we tried to participate in that discussion, she ignored us and lectured more about the need for collaboration in adult education. (Pardon me, I got distracted by hypocrisy.)

If we call it PD, people are going to hate it without knowing anything about it.

Also, I have mentioned numerous times that if you want OpenPD to attract normal (non techy) teachers, we need satellite groups of teachers to start inviting other teachers at their school to participate in technology sessions or experiences. My TechnoThursdays has only been successful because they are developing professionally and they don't even know it. It is not even that successful, there are only 4 or 5 people that show up each time. But if you think about all the middle schools in our district doing that, that is nearly a hundred people participating in professional development while enjoying it and not knowing that they are being duped! But it is not about duping them, it is about creating a safe environment for teachers to explore technology and learn new tricks. If they can learn about it at a safe place, they can feel more comfortable trying it out on their own.

In addition, we might have some better success if we are not focusing on the bleeding edge of technology. This goes back to Clay's idea that RSS is dead. Maybe since it is dead, some teachers will start using it. Maybe we should look at teaching them how to properly use Excel or their grading programs or some other type of software. My biggest takeaway from TechnoThursdays is that I need to teach relevant topics, and go s-l-o-w. This should be part of any PD.

TechnoThursdays went so well today because we talked about a way to specifically integrate technology into their different subject areas in a way that made their lives easier and more productive. That is what gets them coming back.

Have a Good Life.

TechnoThursdays went great. We didn't have as many people there, but I think that I got the video to work better this time. We talked about blogs and everyone was able to keep up well. One of the other teachers couldn't make it, so she watched the session today. Last week I talked about going slow and providing something useful. I didn't plan as much today, and I think that made it a lot better. I took my time and didn't feel rushed.

I enjoy seeing everyone posting to their blogs. Right now they are just posting assignments for students, but someday I hope to get them more involved in the blogosphere. We will see.

Have a Good Life.

TechnoThursdays wiki for this session.

You can watch the video at the link above, if you choose. Please fill out the survey, too.

This week's session was way better than last week's. I felt really rushed last week, and the class didn't go very well. I think Google Docs takes a mental shift. I don't think most of them were ready for it. I am frustrated with myself for not being aware that it would be difficult. I should have known.

This week we did blogs. We set up blogs so that the teachers could post updates to their blogs each day about what they did in class. I think this is a great because they can make their lives easier. Students who need assignments from the previous day can get it there.

What made tonight's TechnoThursday really successful?

1. I was very prepared.
2. I was teaching them something they could use right away.

As a teacher of adults, I need to be prepared. As a teacher of adults, I need to teach them something that they can meaningfully use right away.

Have a Good Life.

Last week my principal came into my room to ask me if I would be interested in attending a Principal's Academy conference with him where Rick and Becky DuFour would be speaking. For the uninitiated, Rick and Becky DuFour are the big names in Professional Learning Communities (PLC). A PLC is a collaborative community of school personnel that works together to ensure that not only does every child learn, but also that when they don't learn, there is a systematic process in place to help them learn. Aside from technology integration in schools, this is what education should be all about. I would even say that if I had to choose between the two, I would take PLCs without even thinking about. When I served as director of Academic Activities at BYU-Idaho, I started on this path. Though I didn't have the same words for these ideas way back then, the idea of a PLC and collaboration amongst teachers is what pushed me over the edge to become a teacher. If you would like more info about PLCs, please go to AllThingsPLC.info.

Rick DuFour has a great sense of humor, and it showed in his book, and in this presentation today. He jumped into different accents on numerous occasions and told humorous anecdotes to get his point across. I would try to reproduce one verbatim here, but I would only butcher it, and if I can find a recording or even the written anecdote, I will certainly post it.

Briefly, he talked about an eye surgeon giving his sister a painful and dangerous operation to fix her vision that would take a year to complete for both eyes. Then he wanted his eyes fixed just 7 years ago. The doctor had Lasik eye surgery by then and said he would be zapped a couple times with lasers, and then be at 20/20 vision in just 72 hours. DuFour said that if the doctor had done the same procedure that was done to his sister, he probably could have sued him for malpractice, since the technology and skills and best practices had been discovered by this time. He likened that to teaching: the research shows that collaborative teams show significant gains in student achievement--as a teacher, do not commit malpractice by not doing what research shows is the best thing to do to help kids learn.

Here are the Big ROCKS that I got from the meeting today:

• Teachers need time to stop and think. (Much of the following will come if teachers can actually stop and think about what they are doing.)
  
• What we teach is the same across our grade level team
• How we teach it is and must be individual
• Intended curriculum is what the state (or other body) wants us to teach
• Implemented curriculum is what actually gets taught. There is a difference!!!
• Teachers need to commit to being actively involved and doing what needs to be done in a PLC. (In the words of my principal, "we aren't just going to have people 'mail it in.'"
• Say NO to averages
• Extra help and tutoring for struggling students is no longer optional (build it in to the time they are at school. No more after-school tutoring! AMEN!)
• Celebrating is like voting: do them both early and often.
  
• "The one thing leaders of any organization must know to be effective is the importance of clarity--communicating clearly and consistently:
• the purpose of the organization,
• the primary clients it serves
• the future it is creating
• the indicators of progress it will track, and
• the specific actions members can take immediately to achieve its long-term purpose and short-term goals." -Marcus Buckingham
  

At the end of the conference, my principal asked, "Are you truly willing to let this impact your classroom practice and be a leader and an example to others at our school to push us the rest of the way toward a PLC?"

Yes, I will.

Have a Good Life.

Below you will find the video for session 3 of TechnoThursdays. It is about 30 minutes long. We are talking about Google Video. The first part is muted, since we were watching a video, and it would just give an echo loop if I didn't mute, it, so push play here, then go watch this video on YouTube.

During TechnoThursdays, we talk about how to make our lives easier as teachers. Sometimes, I feel like I am just confusing the heck out of everyone there. This was a really rough week for me. I had a LOT of stuff going on with school and work and work and family and church (yes, work was repeated twice on there, remember, I got a second job!). I didn't get to plan for this session as much as I would have liked to, and that frustrates me. I felt rushed the entire time. The majority of people did say that they didn't want TechnoThursdays to last more than an hour at the most, so I was trying to keep it relatively short. I had a lot to get through, and I think that it was difficult for them to keep up, because I was really going fast. I need to remember to slow down and make it useful for them. If I don't, nobody will want to come anymore.

For the first session, I took the time to put myself in their shoes and tried to figure out the questions that they would likely ask me. This week, I just didn't do that. I forgot to ask a key question, and that made it very difficult. One teacher requested that TechnoThursdays help her use technology to more effectively teach math. When I read that comment in the survey from the first session, I thought about it briefly, but didn't put the time in that I needed to. I need to take the time to adequately prepare. (Hopefully, she doesn't read this and see that I am screwing up already!!!)

Next week I am going to talk about blogs. I am going to talk about them as a way for teachers to update their students, or remind their students what they did in class. My team science teacher has a blog that she updates regularly for her students. I will use that one as an example. I am going to suggest that they include some extra credit assignments on there to help kids get in the habit of checking. Blogs also function as a great communication tool with parents. Parents could leave comments on the blog and ask questions or make a mockery of the teacher (let's hope not, right?).

I will also mention using blogs as a reflective tool, like a journal. I don't know which is harder: writing a blog as a journal, or as an informational piece. What do you think? I use this blog as a reflective journal, so I am not surprised at all if nobody reads or comments. I do believe that a blog can be a very effective way for a person to reflect. I think that putting it out there where someone could stumble upon it forces you to think about what you are writing.

Well, here is to wishing that session 4 will be better than session 3.

Have a Good Life.

First of all, thanks to Pamela, Matt, Marcia, Jeff, Kara, Angela, Linda, and Pam for coming to TechnoThursdays today. I enjoyed working with each of you and I hope that you enjoyed learning some new things.

We talked about RSS. I showed the Common Craft Show video "RSS in Plain English."



Here are my thoughts. There were seven people there: that was a great number. Not too many, not too few.

I love technology, and I spend a lot of time figuring out how to use it to help me be a better teacher. Of course I get frustrated when things don't work, but I understand that sometimes it doesn't go as planned. My biggest fear with doing TechnoThursdays is that people will be put off by the learning curve of new technology. It always takes a while to learn new things, and if you don't have the commitment to seeing it through to make sure that it is or is not worthwhile, it is very easy to give up.

How can I help these teachers push through the learning curve and make it through?

Right now, I don't know, but I have a few ideas:

• I need to help them see how it is useful. They need to see that kids are achieving better because of what I am doing. This is a hard one to measure. In language arts, it is difficult to see. I need to find/create some assessments that will show that what I do helps my students.
  
• I started the session by showing them the things that I have done this year with technology. I went through those examples very fast; I thought I might overwhelm them with everything that I have done. I didn't even get to all that I have done. If I go a bit slower, talk about one thing, and let them ask questions about it, I think they will like that better. They can go on their own time and get a brief history on the wiki. I need to be there to talk about the experience.
• I need to show them that it helps them. RSS brings websites to them. This will save them time, help them get new information (through sharing, which we also set up), and do other things. I helped a teacher set up student of the month nominations through Google Docs new survey form, and I really hope that it will make her job easier.
  

I hope that these three simple things work. If you have any other ideas for me, feel free to leave them in the comments.



Have a Good Life.

Yesterday I attended the Utah Middle Level Association Conferece entitled "Sailing the Rough Water Years: Straight Jacket or Life Jacket?" I know, I am all conferenced out. My wife is sick of me going to conferences on Saturday also. I attended the session by Patti Kinney with the same title as this blog post. The really interesting thing about the session was that it was geared toward administrators and so the makeup of the room for the double-session session was about 1/3 old people (near retirement, if not past it), 1/3 experienced people, and then 1/3 very young people. One thing that Kinney talked about was the four generations in the workplace: the traditionals (b. 1900-45), the boomers (b. 1946-64), the Xers (b. 1965-81), the millenials (b. 1982-2002). So, to put it in her terms room was about 1/3 traditionals, 1/3 boomers and 1/3 Xers. I am so close to being a millenial, and I am pretty sure I was the youngest person in there. But, alas, I am a gen Xer, apparently, though I don't know what that means--but according to her graphic I have spiked hair, a spikey choker, earrings, and I stick my tongue out all the time. Who knew?

There are three things that I want to talk about regarding her presentation: first, pay attention; second, courage; and third, a research project.


First, I posted about a video last year sometime and I will embed the updated version here:

Kinney showed this video in a session with a bunch of administrators who are not typically into technology. Karl Fisch created this video to talk to his faculty about incorporating technology into their teaching. It was very interesting to watch it with a bunch of admins. Very different way to look at it. After it was over, she had us discuss in small groups this question: What does this mean for what we are teaching our students? Nobody mentioned technology, but they did mention teaching skills and not just feeding them information. I tied informational and technological literacy into that as well. We must also teach them how to teach themselves. They need to know how to learn on their own.

Second, she talked about how leaders need courage to lead. There are many times
where a leader needs to exhibit courage even when it is not the most popular course of action. Courage is derived from the French word couer which means heart. She said that at the heart of every school there needs to be a leader with courage...or something like that. As I will most likely be a vice principal before I am ever a principal, I think that it will take a lot of courage to disagree with my principal. Sometimes, there are things that a principal feels strongly about but just don't work. It is important to have the courage to say, "This sucks!"

Marzano, Walters and McNulty did some research and published it in School Leadership that Works and Kinney spoke very briefly to that research. There are 21 leadership responsibilities that impact student achievement. The top three are situational awareness, flexibility, and discipline. I have a hard time believing this. I am also concerned that this is not what I am learning my ed leadership classes. I find it hard to believe that those three are more impactful than some others like monitoring/evaluating, culture, communication, or some of the others. As I said, she only talked about it very briefly, so there is a lot that I was missing. Maybe I should read the book ;).

All in all, I thought she did a pretty good job presenting, and hopefully I can use some of this stuff.

Have a Good Life.

I attended the Literacy Promise Conference today. It is sponsored by the Brigham Young University CITES program. I just realized that my computer shut down while I was coming home from the conference and all the notes I took are gone. Drat!!!

This poet named Brod Bagert from New Orleans (3 syllables) spoke to us and he was amazing. He read a lot of his poems and the way that he performed was so inspiring. Here is a link to the recording that I made. This is the cool part of the story. When he started introducing the poem "Booger Love" I thought it would be a great one to record. But, the only recording software I have on my compy is Garageband, and I have not had much success with that. So, I invoked Quicksilver and did a Google search for Audacity, which I had heard about and tried to use before, but never got too far into it.

So, in the time that it took him to finish introducing the poem, I was able to download the program, install it, open it, and start recording him. This is why I like Macs. If I had my PC laptop, this never would have been possible. I would have taken way too many steps to get there, and there would be a 95% chance that the program wouldn't work (that is experience talking, by the way, we have had very little success with recording or capturing sound or video on that computer). Also, the battery would have been dead at that point (45 minutes into the conference) and I would have had a hard writing surface to capture the essence of his presentation.



The only thing that vexes me is that I wasn't able to record video with the iSight camera. That would have been better because his performance was not just his voice. So, if anyone knows of an easy free way to do that, please let me know.

By the way, here are my takeaways from the presentation (actual education stuff, imagine that):

1. Perform poetry to your students and they will start to actually like poetry.
   
2. If they like poetry, they will start to write it as a natural step.
3. If they write it themselves, then you won't have to assign stupid haiku's.
4. Poetry should be loved and studied just like sports, music, technology, or any other passion that someone possesses. This is key--study and love poetry because you deserve it.

Great presentation. I bought four books (on Amazon ;)

Have a Good Life.

Yesterday, one of the teachers that was having a problem and discussed it with me gave some good feedback to other people. She didn't say anything to me about it, but other people sure did. She came in and talked to me and I sat there and listened, said that I would do what I could, and then followed up with her later in the day and this morning. All I really did was listen and make sure that she knew I cared about resolving the situation. That is important. The hard thing will be making sure that I remember that when I am an administrator.

Have a Good Life.

Here is my question of the day for my administration program: Why don't we learn anything relating to dealing with students (or parents)? That is a huge issue for administrators. We learn interpersonal skills and that is great, but there really should be a class on dealing with kids and working through attitudes, anger, depression, etc. Every administrator that I have known has dealt more with kids than with teachers. We have all these courses about dealing with teachers and making them better (and maybe they teach this because they want us to deal with teachers more), but the reality is that we are so busy dealing with kids that we don't have time to make it to the classroom and observe and help teachers. Maybe they think that because we are teachers we already know how to deal with students. But it is very different when you are an administrator and not just a teacher. I should think about this more.

Here is a rundown:
Announced when it was time to change classes
busted some kids on tardies
busted some kids for fighting
dealt with an upset teacher (three times)
gave a kid a hug
forgot to release everyone at 2:30

So, today was a much better day for administrative duties. It seemed more real than last week and I am glad, because last Thursday was not that fun. One upset teacher did not want to burden me with anything, but I told her to just go for it, I've got to be baptized by fire, I guess. She has been dealing with a student that is very passive aggressive since the first quarter, and she has just now reached the breaking point. I talked to her and realized that he is doing things to make sure that he doesn't look like he is screwing around, but that he is "not one to make trouble" (his words). I realized that there is a lot of passive aggressive behavior going on at schools and kids love it so much (and adults, too) because it is easy to get away with things. I think that we ought to have a training about passive aggressive behavior because almost every problem I dealt with had to do with that. Some were more aggressive than passive, but most are things where the kids can get away with things and still try to seem innocent. For example, one kid was "helping" a kid gather his spilled papers by pushing them to him with his feet. Right, that is a good way to "help" someone that you have had problems with numerous times before. Anyway, it was pretty silly. I think it would be very beneficial if all middle school teachers and administrators had training in identifying and dealing with passive aggressive behavior. It just makes sense to arm them with some knowledge about what it is. Maybe they already know, but I didn't understand it until Leigh VandenAkker explained it to me last summer. On Friday, I explained to some of my students what the passive aggressive behavior was that they were exhibiting, and once they knew, they seemed willing to try to change it (we will see ;).

In a more humorous note, I had to be the bell ringer today. That meant that I had to get on the loudspeaker and announce when it was time to move to the next class. When you get on, it makes a doorbell sound and then you can make your announcement. What I should have done is just let it make the doorbell sound and not say anything. At the end of the day, I forgot to ring the bell to let everyone out, so it was two minutes late. Some teachers decided they didn't care that I was late and they let the students out anyway. I got on at 2:32 and said, "Oh, I forgot to ring the last bell! Everyone get out of the building fast!" I thought it was funny, but didn't hear anyone laugh ;(.

So, I know that you have to be careful when touching students in any way, but I gave a kid a hug today. He seemed like he needed it, and so I gave him a hug when he apologized to me for being non-compliant. I was already reprimanded by the school psychologist, so now I know. Oh, well, I am just an intern. The school psychologist also mentioned that he got tears in his eyes after I gave him a hug. Was it a good thing to do? I don't know, maybe? Was it bad? I don't know, maybe. In the immortal words of Michael Scott, "Am I a hero? [pause] I really can't say, but yes."

Have a Good Life.