Category: TIK365

Things I Know 276 of 365: #ThingsThatNeedToEnd

I’ll get to things I’m thankful for tomorrow. Tonight, twitter’s trending with #ThingsThatNeedToEnd and a few popped into mind.

  • Talking and calling it conversation.
  • Not saying anything and calling it listening.
  • Walking by the person on the street asking for change because you’re sure they’ll just spend it on alcohol, but never donating a dime to your local homeless shelter or food kitchen.
  • Assuming.
  • Requiring people to take their shoes off at airport security.
  • The Bachelor.
  • Calling schools failing and then asking them to muster momentum to improve.
  • Illiteracy.
  • Abuse.
  • Fast food.
  • Pay inequity.
  • Anything that would lead a kid person to feel less than.
  • Talking about teachers as though they aren’t trying or don’t care.
  • Talking about students as though they’re incapable of learning and creating amazing things.
  • Admiring the problem.
  • Fracking.
  • Complaining that social networking is keeping people from truly connecting, while still remaining silent in every elevator.
  • Seeking the one silver-bullet answer.
  • Claiming you’ve got the one silver-bullet answer.
  • Taking ourselves so seriously.
  • Calling anything that highlights a difference we don’t understand or wish didn’t exist “the X gap.”
  • The McRib.
  • Teaching by telling instead of showing.
  • Feeding students anything other than the best possible food for lunch.
  • Marketing electric cars while completely ignoring the source of most of America’s electricity.
  • Leading with anything other than a question.
  • Asking, “How are you?” with anything other than the utmost sincerity.
  • Letting others do the heavy lifting.
  • Subscribing to a belief in the importance of caring for the least among us and then denying them access to health care.
  • Comparing anything that’s not actually Hitler to Hitler.
  • Treating the symptom while ignoring the problem.
  • Expecting more from people without giving them space and resources to grow.
  • Ignoring the value of personal experience.
  • Valuing personal experience as though it is representative of the group.
  • Daylight Saving Time.

Things I Know 275 of 365: I’m from around

You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

A friend of mine was explaining her family’s Thanksgiving spread the other day, “We’re Italian,” she began and then described the menu.

It got me thinking about how I would start that explanation. My forebears got around. While I’ve always had a twinge of jealousy toward friends who can trace their lineage to one or two countries, I’ve also felt a sense of pride when I explain my mixture of heritages.

I can certainly take it back to pre-American roots and examine the tour of Europe. I don’t feel tied to those countries though. Growing up, there were no traditions rooted in my German or French ancestry. No big family meals featured foods of a specific culture on the table.

My most immediate sense of where I’m from comes from where the last five generations of my family found their homes. The Oklahoma Territory, Colorado, Missouri, Illinois. These places signify the geography to which I find myself most attached. They are where I consider myself to be from.

My dad, grandparents and great uncle live in houses dotted on what, a generation ago was our fully functioning family farm. Rusting on a sign post along the road is a sign, now nearly 20 years old, certifying the land as a sesquicentennial farm. Before it was the Land of Lincoln, and not long after it became a state, Illinois was the place of my people.

A stone in my dad’s back yard bear’s a plaque noting where my ancestors built their first cabin upon arriving in Illinois.

While my roots are somehow in the soil of far-off lands, it is in these more local spaces that I feel most planted.

Some friends took a year or a summer abroad after graduating college. They backpacked through Europe and got to know the cultures and history of spaces unknown.

To me, this is odd.

Much of this country to much of its people is made up of spaces, histories, and cultures unknown.

A person could travel from Chicago to Birmingham or vice versa and find they’ve crossed tremendous boundaries.

This is lost on many.

We speak of America as a monolith, which is what I suppose comes of naming them the United States.

The paradox of it, though, is the pluralism of our unity.

Often I read of schools whose missions are to take their students to several countries or continents before they graduate.

Think of the education possible in the goal of ensuring all students visit each of the 50 states before they graduate. They would graduate not only with a high school diploma, but with a certificate in advanced citizenship as well. They would carry with them an understanding of the complexity of democracy few could match and one sadly lacking in much of our national discourse.

The threads that tie me to my ancestors of other nations are gossamer. Those that tie me to where I’m from are those that matter most.

Things I Know 274 of 365: Letters make great teacher gifts

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

– William James

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.

It sits on the shelf in my bedroom – a manilla folder that should be a box, but whose contents I haven’t taken the time transfer. The tab of the folder bears the faded name of a former student, but the work inside isn’t his.

If I were to give it a name, I’d go with something like, “The Good Stuff.” This is the folder that holds the notes and letters received from students over the last eight years. I don’t have them all, but I have enough.

When I was teaching, this file lived in a drawer in my classroom. On days when I felt like the last thing I should be doing with my life or to the lives of my students was teaching, I’d flip through it and convince myself there must be some good there.

The folder inspired my annual end-of-year assignment that asked students to write a letter to a teacher who had inspired them giving an update on their lives and letting them know the impact their teaching made.

The folder is also what inspires my recommendation for a holiday gift for a teacher. Write a letter – a real letter – letting them know the effect they’ve had in your life or your child’s life. The only thing it will cost you is time, but it will be more valuable to the receiving teacher than you can know.

Take it a step further, write a letter of appreciation about the teacher and send it to the principal.

One of my favorite parts of having my students write their inspiring teachers was the chance to write letters to my own. Even if you are not a student or the parent of a student, consider giving the gift of a letter of appreciation this year to a teacher who’s made a positive impact in your life.

I know from experience how much those letters can mean and how their contents can sustain us in moments of doubt.

Things I Know 273 of 365: Value added isn’t

Value-added assessment is a new way of analyzing test data that can measure teaching and learning. Based on a review of students’ test score gains from previous grades, researchers can predict the amount of growth those students are likely to make in a given year. Thus, value-added assessment can show whether particular students – those taking a certain Algebra class, say – have made the expected amount of progress, have made less progress than expected, or have been stretched beyond what they could reasonably be expected to achieve.

– The Center for Greater Philadelphia

Professor Andrew Ho came and spoke to my school reform class tonight about the idea of value added and its space in the conversation on American education.

We started looking at a scatterplot of local restaurants situated by their Zagat rating and the Zagat average price per meal.

Ho then plotted a regression line through the scatterplot and took note of one restaurant that had a higher score than predicted for it’s cost.

The temptation was to claim our overachieving restaurant was a good buy for the money. Who’d expect a restaurant with such inexpensive food to have such a high rating?

Then he asked us what we didn’t see.

Portions, ambiance, quality, location, service, selection, etc.

Any of these is familiar to someone who’s debated with a group of friends when attempting to select a restaurant.

His point was simple. Expectations changes based on what you base expectations on.

Ho relabeled the axes – this year’s test results, previous year’s test results.

He asked us what we didn’t see.

Content, delivery, socioeconomic status, race, home life, sports, after-school activities, tutoring, mentoring, etc.

This is to say nothing of the fact that perhaps there is a natural spread to knowledge and growth that is beyond the influence of a teacher or the fact that different combinations of teachers in the life of a student in a given year could have varying effects on achievement.

A psychometrician, statistician and policy researcher, Ho then laid some data on us from the research on value added:

  • Estimates of value added are unstable across models, courses that teacher might teach, and years.
  • Across different value-added models, teacher effect. ratings differ by at least 1 decile for 56%-80% of teachers and by at least 3 deciles for 0%-14% of teachers (this is reassuring).
  • Across courses taught, between 39% and 54% of teachers differ by at least 3 deciles.
  • Across years, between 19% and 41% of teachers differ by at least 3 deciles.

He then made a point that’s come up time and again in my statistics course, “Any test measures, at best, a representative sample of the target domain.”

But we’re not seeing samples that are representative. According to Ho, “In practice, it is an unrepresentative sample that skews heavily toward the quickly and cheaply measurable.” We’re not learning about the population. Put differently, we can’t know all that we want to know. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

When questioned on teacher assessment in his recent Twitter Town Hall, Sec. Duncan said he favored multiple forms of assessment in gauging teacher effectiveness. Nominally, Ho explained, this makes sense, but in effect it can have unintended negative consequences.

Here too, Ho cautioned against the current trend. Yes, value added is often used in concert with observation data or other similar measures. If those observations are counted as “meets expectations” or “does not meet expectations” and all teachers meet expectations, though, we have a problem. The effect is to mute the impact of this measure in the composite. While it may be nominally weighted at 50%, if value added is the only aspect of the composite accounting for variance, “the contribution of these measures is usually much higher than reported, as teacher effectiveness ratings discriminate much better (effective weights) than other ratings.”

Ho’s stated goal was to demystify value added. In that he succeeded.

He left us with his two concerns:

  • The current incentive structures are so obviously flawed, and the mechanisms for detecting and discouraging unintended responses to incentives are not in place.
  • The simplifying assumptions driving “value added,” including a dramatic overconfidence about the scope of defensible applications of educational tests (“numbers is numbers!”), will lead to a slippery slope toward less and less defensible accountability models.

I’d hate to think we’re more comprehensive in our selection of restaurants than teacher assessment.

Things I Know 272 of 365: Sketching a school brought clarity of practice

Architecture aims at eternity.

– Christopher Wren

Tonight, in preparation for our next learning task, the class was asked to think about the physical design of a school or learning organization.

What would it look like?

On the heals of drafting our theories of learning and how we might design for difference, this learning tasks makes sense.

It’s also right up the alley of thought I’ve been strolling down recently. Design has been on my brain.

Interestingly, when the professor gave us time to play and told us to see what we could come up with in sketching out what our schools would look like, I had no previous experience to draw from.

I’ve spent the last 8 years re-tooling, rearranging and rethinking classroom design. For the last 6, I’ve been thinking heavily about the systems, structures and pedagogy that work best to the good of the children and adults in schools.

If you asked me what I thought it would look like to see teachers and students interacting in these environments, I’d rattle off words like caring, collaborative, curious, reflective. Then I’d pepper it with examples from my own experiences.

The thing I haven’t done, that I hadn’t done until tonight, is sit down and sketch out what the physical structure of that place might be.

Part of that is likely tied to the fact that those in schools rarely get input into the spaces in which they teach and learn. Often, it’s a rehabilitated building or one that’s been around for decades. To design the physical space is a rarity.

I doodled for a bit tonight, playing with shapes and trying to piece together the structures I’m drawn to and where my students have told me they learn best.

More than anything, I wanted a set of LEGOs. The paper didn’t do what I wanted it to. I needed something bigger and more malleable.

Just before time was called, my group asked me to piece all of our sketches together for a composite final product. You can see it below.

What I said to me team, and what is still true, was that this space is a place I’d both want to teach in and send my kids to.

And that’s just one the first try.

I wonder what would happen if teachers took five minutes to doodle their ideal teaching spaces and then worked to teach as though they were in those spaces. I wonder what would shift. I wonder how interactions and expectations of the students would change.

I wonder what they would sketch with their practice.

Things I Know 271 of 365: Innovation takes both less and more

Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?

– Plato

While the reading in grad school is just as ridiculously intense as promised, if I time it properly, I can still be curator of at least a small sliver of my reading diet.

This morning, heading out the door, I picked up a copy of William Glasser’s The Quality School. I’m not sure where I got it, but it was on my shelf.

Early in the book, Glasser writes, “We should keep in mind that the power of innovation is not that it increases the number of innovative people but that it gives the effective people we have a better chance to demonstrate their effectiveness.”

The quotation struck me as tweetworthy (and given the tonnage of reading I’ve been doing, that bar is high).

Joan Young responded, “That quote makes me wonder how many innovators lie dormant in settings that don’t foster creativity. Thanks for making me think.”

John Spencer jumped in, “I agree. And yet creativity often thrives because of the limitations, barriers and restrictions of a context.”

The conversation turned to the allowances afforded by limitations. Young commented she had arrived at her most creative solutions when confronted with distinct limitations.

This makes sense to me. It echoes the sentiment of last year’s EduCon Friday panelists.

Innovation, the panelists seemed to contend, comes from the intersection of necessity and limitation.

I don’t contend this is untrue, but it can’t be the only path to innovation. Or, they aren’t the only necessary ingredients.

When I think of spaces where creativity and innovation can thrive, I think of the playgrounds of my youth. Before everything was safety-coated, they were spaces of steel, wood and gravel. If you squinted, they looked like residential construction sites.

For my friends and I, they were castles, pirate ships, mansions, and underground lairs.

Our resources were certainly limited. I’d also argue our excess stores of energy necessitated building some sort of imaginary worlds.

There weren’t the only pieces that let the playgrounds become whatever we wanted and needed them to be.

Two other factors cleared the way for our imaginations.

Our parents were nearby, watching from the periphery in case someone got hurt, but otherwise refraining from interference. They needed to be their for their own piece of mind, and we needed them there in case we got in over our heads.

We also needed one another.

These were our first moments of collaboration. We were writing the rules of the game. Where I saw a castle, another might see a space ship.

Because of our limitations of space, our necessity of play, the safety provided by our parents’ watchful eyes and the want to play with another, we settled on a space castle.

And that was the beauty of the recipe. We didn’t know what we couldn’t do, so we did it.

Gradually, our parents increased their perimeter and we became more responsible for ourselves. Unfortunately, this also led to access to more resources. While they weren’t castles or space ships or space castles, they were new and shiny.

I sometimes wonder about the guy in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” I’m certain, after seeing the light and the forms of things, he had to wander back home. With all he’d seen, I still imagine him working some cave Thanksgiving to see what his family saw dancing across the wall.

“Oh, look at that fernodan!” someone must have said.

“There’s no such things as a fernodan,” I bet he said.

How they must have laughed at him.

Things I Know 270 of 365: Blissmo boxes make great teacher gifts

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.

A few weeks ago, a small cardboard box showed up at my door. While I didn’t know what it held, I knew from whence it came.

It was my first blissmo box, and I recommend it for your consideration as a gift for a classroom teacher.

The Basics:

  • for $19 US each month, you choose from one of three themed boxes curated by the folks at blissmo
  • each box is filled with between $25-$50 (or more) worth of merchandise
  • the products are “either certified as organic or eco-friendly, or that have a people & planet positive approach in the DNA of the business”
  • either keep all the products for yourself or hand them out to your friends as gifts

I was gifted 3 months of blissmo boxes by a friend, and I loved the first one. Guest-curated by the folks at Good, it included:

  • a $25 gift from PACT underwear (I used it on socks)
  • a miir water bottle ($1 of each bottle sold “provides one person with clean water for one year)
  • organic, small-farm-grown tea from the folks at runa
  • a set of To-Go-Ware bamboo utensils in a pouch made from upcycled plastic bottles (it lives in my backpack and has already saved me from using at least 10 sets of plastic silverware)
  • a 3-pack of notebooks from Scout Books made of 100% recylced paper, printed with soy ink and sourced from local paper mills (think eco-responsible moleskins)

I was a little worried I wouldn’t dig every item that showed up. My worry was misplaced. You can gift a blissmo box here or sign a recipient up directly here. While my thinking is running along the lines of teacher gifts, these would be a great monthly care package for college students as well.

Things I Know 269 of 365: I’ve got an idea for disrupting PD

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

– Charles Darwin

I’m working to understand a framework for professional development and capacity building that disrupts traditional thinking and builds toward the type of risk-ready culture Richard Elmore describes and of which I was a part at SLA. In the simplest of terms, it’s a culture of responsible citizenship and stewardship for the educational community. Several different ideas have been influencing my thinking.

The first was the idea of the “Chinese restaurant” approach to “spreading” an educational model described by Charles Leadbeater in his TED talk. Not everything looks the same, but you know when you’re in one. For me, the idea of a coffee shop works best. They are places I seek out, that “pull” me as Leadbeater said, and invite me to stay longer than I intend. It’s got me thinking how one could design a space (physical or virtual) where this is the reaction of those students and teachers who are part of the community.

As my studies returned me to our thinking on “the instructional core,” I started to think about a recent Forbes interview with Don Tapscott. Describing the path to “Enterprise 2.0” and a looming crisis of patent expiration in the pharma market, Tapscott said, “You need to change the whole modus operandi of the industry and how you do research. They need to start sharing science and sharing clinical trial data… The current model is unsustainable, even if it didn’t happen to be coincidentally all coming together over a cliff.” I’ve started to wonder if pharma’s cliff is near education’s cliff.

In many ways, this strikes me as the path to the type of interaction and capacity building Richard Elmore writes about. It also seems a fair way for inspiring risk-taking he mentions. This is a similar idea to that of KIPP Open Book, a project of Philadelphia’s KIPP schools meant to make their data and practices more transparent. It’s an example of system-level transparency of practice, that could potentially influence the transparency of teachers and students, though it would likely require a substantial shift in pedagogy to allow for the agency required for teachers and students to feel more comfortable to take risks associated with such transparency.

This returns me to the question of how I would build a culture comfortable with risk-taking and responsible citizenship to increase capacity and align our practice with a goal toward improvement. To the extent possible, I’d hire the “right” people. At Science Leadership Academy (SLA), each interview committee included the principal, teachers from the department with the open position and at least one student and one parent. These committees were formed ad hoc. Though the principal maintained final say, I cannot recall an interview where the final decision differed from the consensus of the committee. This practice was built into the culture of the school. Oftentimes, students were the first to speak up in deliberations to point out that a particular candidate was a poor fit for the school. In my own practice, I would adopt a hiring approach similar to if not the same as SLA’s.

As to the question of professional development, I’m tempted to stray further from the norm and suggest a rotating position of Professional Coach. Each year a different teacher would assume a reduced course load to work with the school’s leadership team as the director of professional development. The role would entail observations, leading PD around the school’s improvement goals and helping to research particular issues of practice in the coach’s own classroom. The position would last a year, after which, that teacher would return to a full load. Other teachers would submit their names (and perhaps an application) for the following year and the leadership team, whole faculty, or principal would select the next year’s Professional Coach. Again, it’s an idea I’m toying with, and I’m still working to conceptualize the possible impact on school culture.

The thing I want to know is this, how can we prevent the standard testing accountability measures from being the tail that wags the dog of professional development and setting the definition of improvement?

Things I Know 268 of 365: I loved teacher gifts

A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.

– Lucius Annaeus Seneca

One of the things I unexpectedly missed when I moved from teaching middle school to teaching high school were the little gifts from kids (read parents) around the holidays.

Something about a carefully chosen gift from the families I served meant I was doing okay.

Even when I was teaching older kids, it was special to get a card on the day before break with a few sentences letting me know I was cared for.

One family consistently included a gift card to the Trader Joe’s up the block from SLA. More than once, those cards came in handy when I was out of cash or another student needed some money for a meal after school.

For me, any gift or card from a student or parent was a sign I wasn’t in it alone, that the work I was doing meant a little bit more. It meant, when they sat down to think about who they felt compelled to appreciate, who I was in that student’s life meant enough to be remembered.

When I was in school, I remember creating holiday gifts for my teachers with my mom. One year we bought each of them a coffee mug and made homemade hot chocolate mix. I think there was a tea towel thrown into the mix as well. As I got older, I didn’t see why the gifts were important. They seemed childish or uncool. Still, my mom insisted, and I would hall a shopping bag full of small gifts in to dispense just before break.

When I was a teacher and my mom and sister Rachel prepared gifts for Rachel’s teachers, I could empathize with what it meant to be remembered as someone worth receiving a gift. I got that it wasn’t childish, but part of what we do when we want to say to others that they are worth our gratitude, worth our remembering.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.

Things I Know 267 of 365: I got some advice on designing for difference

Last week, I was working on an assignment that asked me to define difference as it related to educational design. From there, I needed to develop my principles of school design. It seemed like the perfect chance to draw on the wisdom of friends, so I sent out an e-mail to some designers I know with the question from my assignment:

What counts, or should count, as a “learning difference” in the organization of learning environments?

The paper ran long, and some of the responses came back after I’d shaped my draft, so I didn’t get to explicitly use their responses. They took the time to craft their responses, though, and I wanted to honor that by sharing them here. My text on the question is at the bottom.

I can’t help but lean towards a student (at the scale of one) having the proactive ability to discern useful resources / flexibility found within a given learning environment, rather than just to assume that clarity will be given to them. Thus, how we set up a student to seek such resources / clues (within a test, within a project, within a team, within a community, etc) may therefore suggest a way to measure (or design for) differences.

– Christian Long

We are going to have an interesting conversation on Thursday at the Goldberg Center on “alternative assignments” for students.  that is, rather than a teacher saying “term paper due on Friday,” the students can devise their own ways to demonstrate their knowledge (we will have one example on Thursday of a student who demonstrated his knowledge by choreographing and performing an interpretive ice dance of a novel he had read…)  I can recall a student once who said to me “rather than an exam, I would much prefer to give a speech to demonstrate what I know.”  I’ve often thought that would be an intriguing way for students to own their learning.

– David Staley

What if one of the first thing a learner did was to design how they would be measured and configure their learning experience to match that and then have that be a part of some sort of public “learning identity” allowing their differences to both set up the parameters for their education and encourage peers to understand each other and connect to one another because of their differences?

e.g. I see from Sally’s profile that she is so good at advanced math that she was able to test out and focus on French history – I wonder if she would consider tutoring me in math and whether we could team up on our French Revolution project?

– Andrew Sturm

Listing the learning differences for which we are accounting, we risk inadvertently neglecting or denying a possible impact of a difference. In thinking about possible differences, it is helpful to appropriate Rosabeth Kanter’s (1993) understanding of difference from “A Tale of ‘O’” in which she defines the normative culture as those who are found in large numbers and those who are different as “the people who are scarce.” Different learning tasks create shifts in populations. In a classroom where students are expected to remain at their desks, a student in a wheelchair could be considered part of the normative culture, while the hyperactive child who squirms and wiggles in his seat looking for any reason to move would appear different. This same group of students on a soccer field during a P.E. class shifts the norms of expected behavior in such a way that the former student now appears different while the latter student becomes normative. Context must be considered when considering the organization of learning.

Non-physical differences can also impact student learning. Personal perception as affected by the stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) or a fixed theory of learning (Dweck, 2000) shift student performance on learning tasks. Unlike those differences described above, these internal differences are not easily perceived, nor should they be presumed in students belonging to one group or another. All possible differences should be counted a differences affecting learning in organizing learning environments. This means subscribing to David Rose’s (2011) rejection of the notion of the standard child, and acceptance of variability as universal.

– me