Tag: agenda

153/365 The Agenda Book is Dead! Long Live the Agenda Book!

Who knew it would be getting rid of something that helped herald the coming of mobile devices the most?

Starting last week, our team at work has been holding initial meetings with middle school principals in our district to discuss the coming 1:1 iPad mini distributions in their schools. Teachers are receiving their devices a semester before students so that they can become accustomed to the new tools before they need to help entire classrooms of folks shift their learning and making.

The conversation that’s come up in almost every meeting – Schools won’t need to buy agenda books for next year.

For the uninitiated, agenda books are a catch-all in middle schools. What others might call planners, these spiral bound beauties do so much more. They are the base of much home correspondence, hall and bathroom passes, and finally the place for collection of deadlines on homework assignments.

The coming of the iPad, complete with students’ Google Apps for Education accounts will do agenda work better and more efficiently.

It was in one principal meeting that I realized a key component of the professional learning we’re building for teachers as they move to these new devices is an introduction to how Google Calendar can work for them. More than putting dates on class homepages, teachers can have students subscribe to calendars. If they create groups of contacts, they’ll be able invite students to events like, “End of Quarter English Project Due,” and students will be able to set reminders via email, text, message, etc.

All of this will live in one space and be a more active alert for students than the passive thinking of, “I’m going to ask you to write this down, knowing many of you will not look at this again until I ask you to write something else down.”

As for hall passes, teachers will be able to quickly shoot an iMessage to whomever the destination teacher is alerting them to the fact that Student X is on his way – complete with time stamp.

Bathroom passes are a bit trickier and my unfamiliarity with them makes me tend away from solving this problem. In my last few schools, we didn’t have bathroom passes. If a student needed to advocate for himself and seek some relief from the classroom, I just needed a heads up in the case of a fire drill or the like.

I’m convinced asking to go to the bathroom throughout my school-age years is the reason I still, as a professional working adult, feel the compulsion to let people know, “I’m going to the bathroom” when I leave the office to do just that. Not healthy, right?

The point here? These mobile devices are going to allow teachers and students to learn, teach, and create in new and exciting ways. They’ll hold the most advanced field notebooks and multimedia studios in their hands each day. To start, though, to act as an in-roads to the value we see, they might also have to be sold as the best agenda books EVER.

And that might be okay – to start.

Image via Jacob Haas

Things I Know 223 of 365: Everybody has an agenda

Education isn’t part of my agenda. It is my agenda.

– Kenny Guinn

In 1980, Hugh Mehan published a study of children participating in “circle time” in their classroom. Throughout the study, Mehan placed a wireless microphone on the back of students for one hour each morning to document their interactions.

Up to that point, Mehan wrote, classroom community had been studied from the teacher’s perspective. He wanted to se what was going on with everyone else.

Students like teacher, have objectives that they would like to meet during the course of a given classroom event, a school day, a school year. And like teachers, students employ others and their surroundings as contexts for achieving these objectives. The simultaneous presence of students’ and teachers’ agendas suggests that the classroom be viewed as a social activity in which teachers and students mutually influence each other and collaboratively assemble its social order.

In his published findings, Mehan reported interactions between a triad of girls who were talking to one another during circle time while the teacher was attempting to divvy up classroom jobs.

It all happened simultaneously.

Hair combing, securing snacks, discussing play dynamics, they all happened at the same time.

Mehan writes, “All this indicates an ability to monitor and participate in several activities simultaneously, a skill that cognitive scientists have called ‘parallel processing.’”

By teachers in any ordinary classroom, the actions of Carolyn, Leola and Ysidro would be taken as insubordinate. Not telling-the-teacher-off insubordinate, but certainly working-against-the-teacher’s-agenda insubordinate.

They don’t have to be.

Mehan’s point, and the deeper implication of the study is when teachers see “off-task” behavior, it doesn’t necessarily mean the students are off-task. They are on the tasks they deem important. And Mehan claims also on-task with the items on the teacher’s agenda.

This isn’t an argument that children should be allowed to do whatever they want or that their agendas should trump any agenda set forth by the teacher. There’s literature about that, sure, but this isn’t about that.

Instead, it’s about realizing everyone in the classroom has an agenda, and to each individual that agenda is personal and important.

Mehan writes the study’s findings shed light on the fact “that participants to interaction, including socializing interaction, mutually influence each other.”

Yes.

And.

The study serves as a reminder that teachers face the task (perhaps their first agenda item) of persuading each student in a class that the teacher’s agenda is worthy of student attention and perhaps even adoption.

It’s a tough sell all around.

Citation:

Hugh Mehan, “The Competent Student,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Vol. 11 (1980), 131-152.