For the past few months I have become increasingly interested in Kathie Nunley’s Layered Curriculum. Although I had attended a conference workshop several years ago presented by a teacher using the Layered Curriculum in her science classroom, it wasn’t until my fall Master’s class when I had to present on brain-based research and curriculum design, that I came across Nunley’s work again.

I continually question, as I think every educator does, whether what I am doing in the classroom is really changing with the times, or just using technology tools to engage kids in doing the same old things! As I make efforts to pilot a 1:1 laptop initiative, I have become more and more aware that, although I dream up great ways of using the web 2.0 tools, I need to make a fundamental 180 degree shift in my presence in the classroom. And I am feeling more and more like the Layered Curriculum is the guide I’ve been looking for to effect this change. Given its student centeredness, how could it not move the teacher from the sage to the guide?

This leads me to really question the circumstances of a portion of today’s staff meeting. Our school leaders require weekly lesson plans be submitted to them prior to 8:00 every Monday morning, and due to the fact that many teachers have been submitting MANY versions of lesson plans, they have decided to “standardize” (I cringe as I write) the lesson plan format we all use. So they have offered two “choices” for us to use. One is a very detailed, reflective-type lesson plan, the other the typical 7-point style taught in undergrad coursework. They have nicely formatted them into Word templates which we can save and work on from home or school, and submit either in printed form or digitally through email. Now, I agree, research shows that well-prepared educators who create a plan for what and how they will GUIDE students more successfully meet the goal of preparing student learners (or in the words of our administrators, “relate our teaching to the Standard Course of Study”). However, in a classroom designed to empower and engage students individually, like mine where I plan to incorporate the Layered Curriculum methodology, what happens to the 7 point lesson plan? How do I teach the way I passionately feel is the most empowering way, yet meet the requirements of my administration? I would love to hear what you think!

Photo Credit:  Story of my life… 

Today’s Ripple and Splash ~

Remaining positive can be a difficult thing to do as the dreaded EOG testing approaches.  Many of the forums I have been a part of this past week have been filled with lamentations concerning the stress of NCLB and NC standardized testing!  From the math workshops being frantically conducted in our county, to speakers and scientists at the 1st Annual Event of the NC Science, Math, and Technology Education Center, to the Annual Celebration of the Kenan Fellows, to my graduate class being conducted via Polycom with educators in Arizona and Missouri, the tone is dismal!  This year, above all others I have experienced, seems to be the worst!  Teachers are worried, kids are stressed, administrators are in a panic, and the entire school system could implode at any moment!

However, in an effort to provide teachers with tools they need as they review, our Principal asked that all projectors (we don’t have one per classroom - YET)  be moved to the classrooms of 3-5 grade math teachers.  I created some wikis (Gr. 3, Gr. 4, Gr. 5) with math review sites and content, and several teachers have created great PowerPoint reviews to use with their SMARTboards.  Now, as you walk down the hall, projector lights are burning, ELMOs are displaying manipulatives to small groups, and kids are engaged in math!  Qwizdom sets are being checked out to review skills, and we have had to order more cords and splitters for the increased need!  Although not the seamless integration with Problem Based learning I hope will come, it is a start - a hook, so to speak!  Maybe, just maybe, after being “pressured” to use the technology, they won’t want to give it up!!

Photo:  Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining 

This post is a huge shout-out to my good friend and talented colleague, Danita!  And it comes at the perfect time!  After emailing back and forth yesterday about an interesting (and depressing) dinner outing she had with fellow educators last week, I had not been able to stop thinking about her lament.  What can we do to encourage educators doomed to become extinct industrial-age dinosaurs to use technology?  In my comments to her, I voiced that I was going to focus my efforts on those educators who are working hard to change the way they teach, mainly because I am assured that my energy will be put to good use!  I have begun to shine huge spotlights on teachers in my school who are trying new technologies, engaging their kids in projects that are collaborative, thought provoking, and technology-infused!  I have posted their class projects/products on our wiki, in emails (cc-ed to the superintendent and others at the CO), on my blog, and anywhere else I can think to put them.  Guess what?  My phone is ringing off the hook!  Teachers calling to check out the new ELMOs, the Qwizdom sets, the projectors!  It is like with children in our classrooms, praise and support goes much further (and promotes fantastically infectious energy) than complaints and constant nagging!  I’m going to continue to focus on the courageous educators around me!

Now, back to the reason for this post!  My son, Carlos, a 7th grader, came home today excited that he had gotten to see the new wiki of his social studies teacher, Ms. Unangst.  They read some laptop guidelines from it as a class, and then, using the laptops, were guided to a link on the wiki where they worked at a geography website.  Although this lesson did not utilize the wiki in the collaborative sense, it’s a start!  Just the fact that my 7th grader, who rarely speaks about school unless provoked by his meddling mother, was excited about it speaks volumes!  Way to go Danita, for continuing to open the eyes of educators at our middle schools!  Some of them ARE listening! 

Flickr: Black Swan Cocktail Cap

I was just reading one of my two “allowed” reads from Education Week online, a commentary by C. Jackson Grayson, Jr., chairman and CEO of APQC, the American Productivity & Quality Center, entitled, “Benchmarking:  What It Is, How It Works, and Why Educators Desperately Need It”.  The main thrust is to explain what benchmarking is (an active and disciplined set of steps to determine how a best-practice organization achieved a benchmark, then to learn that, and finally to use it in your own organization), and how it could improve the quality of today’s educational system in the US.  The section that really caught my attention and made me pause to think follows:

There will be some academicians, researchers, and policy people who will be horrified with my recommendation that all 6 million teachers, principals, and administrators be involved and empowered to search for and adopt any best practice that works for them. Their objections are reminiscent of the management terror evoked in the 1970s and ’80s, when the Japanese automobile industry (Toyota in particular) adopted a model that involved assembly-line workers and empowered them to make decisions that would assure quality control. They could literally “stop the line” until a problem was solved—by them.

U.S. managers said, “It won’t work. Those employees don’t have the judgment, skills, or attitudes to make those decisions. They’ll goof off, quality will go down, costs will rise.” But for those firms that followed the empowerment model, the reverse happened. Quality rose and costs fell, because employees were trusted, trained, and treated as competent professionals. The federal No Child Left Behind Act assumes that educators won’t or can’t make the right choices on hiring teachers and choosing teaching practices. Are educators less committed than business employees? I doubt it.

I suggest that we drop the “highly qualified teacher” and “research-based practice” requirements from the law. Accountability mandates would be kept at current high levels, but administrators and teachers would be involved more directly in reaching them, and empowered to search for and implement best practices that work for them. This is a radical proposition, I realize, but our education system is going to fail under its present behaviors and assumptions about how to improve—namely, by setting high goals and then micromanaging key processes. It was a mistake in business, and is a mistake in education.

I would love to know what you think!

Photo: Old School Sign

Taking advantage of a very surprising day off due to some ice on the roads (I still have to chuckle at what will close the schools here in the South), I worked on my curriculum for the Green ‘N Growing Project and LearnNC.  NC State Library’s Special Collections Archive has digitized a great collection of photos and documents related to the history of Home Demonstration and the 4H program.  In cooperation with LearnNC, they have asked teachers around the state to develop some lessons which incorporate these primary documents.  Although I was always more of a “shop” girl myself (my son’s wall displays the wooden gun rack I made back in middle school), I did take Home Economics class and even made a skirt (no pockets, no zipper!) and a lopsided pillow!  So, being the challenge-obsessed person I am, I agreed to create some lessons!  Wanting to incorporate as much technology as possible, I decided to create a Powerquest (thanks to some training last summer at Teacher Academy) which would guide the students through many of the archived photos.  But I also want to make it as problem based as possible, so the kids aren’t just aimlessly glancing at old photos.  So, I was reassured to read Ben, The Tech Savvy Educator’s most recent post, Chocolate Ice Cream and Mario Bros.  The part that ruminates the most for me is this:

Too often I feel that computer labs are seen as the exact opposite of this experience. Teachers will walk their kids in (quietly! No pushing), sit them down, talk them through logging in, carefully explaining each step of the process. The lesson is some predetermined exercise or activity on a website in which the students must follow step by step instructions and all they really end up caring about is hurrying up to finish so they can go to their favorite game site and play an inning of math baseball or some other game. The spark for learning is nowhere to be found, just the drive to finish and go play. Too often this was the case in my early teaching with computers; do as I say, make sure you follow the steps, then you have free time afterward. I’m thankful that I’m learning from wonderful veteran teachers, so that the experience I had today of kids eagerly chatting away about their favorite video game character or ice cream flavor was a rewarding one for them and myself. In a way, it’s important to remember that students need choices on the computers just as much as anywhere in the school, just different choices than what game to play.

Sound familiar?  What if we actually gave them choices and (gulp) decisions to make on their own??  They might actually learn something!  Oh, my….

Picture:  Fork in the Road

Isn’t it funny how just at the point when you are feeling the most overwhelmed in life, God sends you a message?  That message came for me tonight (only five hours after my stressed out post for the day!) when I read today’s blog post from Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher).  I think I must’ve said AMEN aloud about twenty times!  Make sure you read “Sometimes You Add To Your Life By Subtraction”.  Here’s to enjoying one ripple at a time!

Photo: http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/ripples.jpg

Another of my favorite educational bloggers, and one whose work appears all over current technology education publications is edublogger Will Richardson. One of his recent posts captures the dire need for change in educators. I wanted to select a meaningful quote to include from his post, but thought the entire thing was necessary to share:

Owning the Teaching…and the Learning
I’ve been growing more frustrated lately and I’m feeling more pessimistic about the prospects for any serious change in how we as an education system see teaching and learning, and I think I’ve figured out why. I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students. Many will say that they understand to varying degrees the changes that are occurring, that the Web is in many ways rewriting the rules of communication and socialization, that the world our students enter when they leave us will be much different from the ones we ourselves were prepared for. But it feels like there is this unspoken belief among most that we can deal with these changes without changing ourselves. And that’s is a huge problem.
Lots of teachers I talk to want blogs and podcasts and wikis. Without question, there are thousands of teachers, tens of thousands in fact, who are already using the tools with their students. I see new examples every day. But I’m still bothered by the fact that very, very rarely do I see new pedagogies to go along with them that prepare students for the creation of their own learning networks. That allow them to take some ownership (or at least envision the possibility of it) over their learning. That help them learn self-direction and get them to stop waiting for someone else to initiate the learning. And even rarer is to find one of those teachers exploring his or her own learning through the tools.
More than anything else, I think, teaching is modeling. As a writing teacher, I wrote with my students. As a journalism teacher, I wrote for publication with my students. As a literature teacher, I practiced and modeled reading for my students. Modeling is teaching, and never has that been made more apparent to me than when my own children act out and reflect my own bad behavior back to me. (It happens more than I like to admit.) My own kids, it has become clear, learn less when I talk, more when I do. And so it is with me.
We go back and forth in this community about whether teachers who use blogs should blog, or podcast or read RSS feeds. I’ve always hesitated to come down on one side or the other in that debate for a variety of reasons. But it’s become clear to me that the answer has to be yes. If you are an educator, I think you have little choice but to choose option 3 in the Marco Torres mantra: “You can complain, quit or innovate.” I know in many ways it stinks to have to be an educator at a moment in history when things are changing on a glacial scale. But what you signed up for is preparing kids for their futures. You have little choice but to deal.
Why won’t our kids be as well served if we don’t change ourselves? I mean we’re all products of the system, right? We all did ok. Things were changing when we went through school, right? Um, no. Not like this.
Our students will by and large have the ability to learn anything, anywhere, anytime (if they can’t already.) The level of their collaboration and connections with colleagues and peers in online environments will be of a type that is hard for most of us to imagine (myself included.) The information and knowledge that they will be awash in will require skills and literacies that most of us simply do not have. Their futures (and to some extent their “presents”) look very little like our vision of what it means to be educated. (And if you don’t believe that, spend some time reading “The Education Map of the Decade.”)
And so here is the friction: Recently, I had a teacher tell me that she spent about 10 minutes a day online and that frankly, that was quite enough. She said that she’s not going to sacrifice the other things that she already does in her life to spend more time on the Internet. I wanted to say, as Yochai Benkler says in the Wealth of Networks, you have the “greatest library in human history” at your fingertips. You have a billion potential teachers. You have an opportunity to learn in ways that you or I could not even have dreamed of when we were in school. And you have an opportunity to shepherd your students into a much more complex, much messier, and much more profound world of learning in ways that will help prepare them more powerfully for the world they face.
Many of our kids are already doing this without us. Many of them have much more of a clue of what it means to learn using these tools than we do. Imagine if we could teach them to leverage their connections even more powerfully, if we could show them how powerful they are in our own learning. That we are not just engaged teachers but engaged learners. That we’re not afraid of what’s ahead because we know how to learn.
Surely, that’s worth more than 10 minutes a day.
But the litany of reasons why this can’t happen are on the tips of too many tongues. Today, in our parent conferences, I asked my daughter’s teacher if there were opportunities for her class to work on extended projects, projects that in the end would have a purpose beyond the grade and the classroom. Projects that, to quote Marco again, would “have wings.” The response I got was this: with all of the objectives that must be met for the state tests coming up in the spring, there just isn’t time for it. When I asked my son’s teacher whether she had read his blog, her answer was that blogs were blocked at school and so, no, she hadn’t.
And so I am frustrated, and I am wondering what will it take to make our classrooms places of learning rather than places of teaching. And I’m wondering if teaching really is dead. And I’m wondering, like the survey question from a few days ago, what classrooms might look like 10 years from now, if they will be fundamentally different from what they are today.
My guess right now is not much.
Listen to this podcast

However, I refuse to give up! At the NC Science conference last week I attended a session by a very dynamic science teacher who uses technology in his classes and for his own learning every day, in one form or another. He made the audience take a pledge that the next time we are in a conversation with a pessimistic nay-saying teacher who is either complaining about the kids, about the school, or about teaching, we would make the statement, “We are not going to have this conversation”. That by interacting with that negative karma, we would only be draining our positive forward-looking, dream-providing selves! The kids we serve deserve positive, forward-looking, dream-providing teachers! So, complain, quit, or innovate? I choose to innovate! How about you??

It’s been a busy week, but one of my favorites! Since changing roles in the world of education, I have been homesick for the individual conversations with students and the daily rush of watching them enjoy learning in the classroom. Thankfully many of the teachers here have invited me into their classrooms to co-teach several lessons integrating the SMARTboard and Smart Notebook lessons we’ve been working on! FUN, FUN, FUN! So, today’s quote from another of my favorite bloggers Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher) is very timely! She writes:

“Educating children and teens requires passion. I believe that a good teacher has one thing undergirding everything in their classroom… an honest, genuine love for their students. Because students see frigid indifference and they tune it out. They see enough frigidity in this tough, cold world. What they want to see are warm bodies with open arms who will push them to excellence beyond what they realize that they can do. Teachers and administrators who will push their own envelope of knowledge before they ask students to do the same. Teachers who don’t just “bide their time,” call in sick to staff development, and complain. I’m sorry, folks, but if somebody invited me to a pity party … I’d skip. No one wants to be around the hopeless, indifferent frigidity of a person who has given up the dream of making a difference! Educating is truly the greatest calling on earth. Instead of just putting money in the bank, you are carving meaning into the lives of students and leaving a mark on your own soul. If you truly love your students. If you truly give them all you have and come home at the end of the day used up on your quota of words and wondering how you will even move from one room to the next. If you teach with all you have and all you are. If you care so much that you lay awake at night thinking and praying about how to reach that one student who is not just getting it…then you have achieved greatness.“

As we approach one of the most hectic times of the quarter, I want to pass along a blog entry from another of my favorite education bloggers, Vicki A. Davis (AKA Cool Cat Teacher). Unfortunately, you’ll have to read it from home due to the county blocking of blogspot. This post is a must-read for stressed out teachers! AMEN!

I have recently read two articles that have impressed me as far as their attitude concerning the importance of the classroom teacher. Although, as good 21st Century educators, we should be actively moving toward more of the “Guide on the Side” as opposed to the “Sage on the Stage”, we are important Guides! If we were to invest in a tour of the Grand Canyon, and our guide was not knowledgeable, could not answer our questions, and took a “Well, you’ll figure it out” attitude we would want our money back. And more importantly, we would have missed the opportunity to learn about a wonderful national treasure! How true for classroom educators infusing technology as well. In his article, “What We’re Here For“, in the October issue of Teacher Magazine, Doug Noon sums it up like this:

“There’s a myth out there that goes something like this: When it comes to technology, children need no teachers. Show them any high-tech gadget and they seem instinctively to know how it works, even if they’ve never seen it before. This instant familiarity has convinced many educators that, when the topic is computer instruction, we teachers should simply provide the hardware and get out of the way. But if we did that, our students would learn very little.”

He goes on to say:

“If the job of a teacher is to help students orient themselves to the world, then that responsibility has to include the world of computers. Proficiency on a video football game doesn’t make kids Web-savvy any more than it qualifies them for the NFL. Even though students dive right into technology, they still need to be taught how to swim. “

The other article that has stayed at the forefront of my thoughts lately is entitled, “An Open Letter to Elementary School Teachers” by Kenneth J. Willers, an article written for techLEARNING. It is a wonderfully empowering piece in which he states:

Students don’t need a $50,000 computer lab to learn how to create a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation. Students may not even need a computer teacher to teach them these skills. Imagine if we created pencil labs so we could teach all the students how to use a pencil. We laugh at this image, but we have done the same thing with computer labs. Students need to learn to write, so we give them a pencil, we demonstrate how to hold and move the object, but we do it in the context of writing the alphabet, words, sentences, or paragraphs. The pencil is merely a tool used to advance the language arts curriculum and/or learning of the student. The emphasis is never placed on the tool (pencil). When it came to technology, rather than providing access to the tool, schools got caught up in teaching the tool. The structure of technology placed too much emphasis on the tool, as if teaching students “computers” was the goal. Students may have acquired the skills to use a computer, but skills taught outside of instruction defeat the goal of curriculum integration. Besides, we don’t teach computers, we teach language arts, math, science, social studies, religion, etc…”

So, here’s to teaching “literacy” (as David Warlick would say) using technology tools seemlessly in our classrooms!