Asking The Right Questions to Stretch Performance

Getting past the monolithic approach of teaching to all students (towards the middle) is essential if we are going to get past the one size fits all method of education.

With all the attention that has been generated with student growth measures, value added metrics, and the flipped classroom, you would think that teachers would be rushing to the doors to differentiate their lessons and create multiple pathways for students to demonstrate mastery.

The reality is that changing the culture of the teacher centered classroom and moving it towards a student centered classroom is hard work that requires a shift in mindset.

There are three books that I'd recommend to leaders who are considering tackling the challenging work of culture change around where the center of the classroom gravity is (sage on the stage vs. guide on the side).

1. Drive by Dan Pink - While not an education book per se, Pink lays the framework for understanding the aptitudes and skill sets that are essential for those who want to be successful in the idea and knowledge economy of the 21st century.  Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose are the three essentials that Pink believes are the drivers of intrinsic motivation and outweigh external if-then rewards (that we are so good at using in education).

2. Mindset by Carol Dweck - This book examines the growth vs. fixed mindset and spends a great deal of time exploring behaviors that can move persons towards either side of the mindset continuum.  The takeaway for educators is that we have immense power to shape and create growth mindsets by the types of interactions we intentionally have with our students.  The power of language and its ability to mold student beliefs is a big takeaway.  There are parallels to Marzano's work on effective praise that will make you think twice before telling a student 'great work' the next time s/he tells you that 'A' is the correct answer.

3. Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom by Tomlinson and Imbeau - I must admit that I was guilty of thinking about differentiation as a set of classroom strategies that could be used as part of the larger teacher toolkit.  While there are certainly strategies involved, I discovered, after participating in a workshop put on by Marcia Imbeau, that differentiation is more about having a growth mindset as an educator and deeply knowing each student as a learning.  Only when one is committed to creating differentiated experiences for all learners that capitalize on their strengths will differentiation truly take hold in a classroom.  The tools from the Formative Instructional Practices (F.I.P.) workshops by Battelle for Kids fits perfectly with the structures for leading a differentiated classroom that Tomlinson and Imbeau lay out.  The bottom line is that in a differentiated classroom, time is not the constant.  Rather, student learning and mastery take center stage, and differentiated structures are put in place to help all learners master the content.

While all-star teachers and learners will latch onto books such as those above and are always willing to try new things, the key for leaders is to figure out how to get your reluctant staff members to the table in order to eat.  I believe that the use of thought provoking, discomfort producing questions is one strategy to help this process along.

A question to begin the differentiation conversation could be:

"What plans do you have for the students in your classroom who already get the material?"

or

"How can you ensure that learning is taking place for students who have mastered the content as opposed to just letting them sit there and wither while you review with everyone else?"

Too often we try and go for the homerun ball with every professional development, and the result is that the participants feel overwhelmed and nothing ends up changing.  By using provocative, discomforting questions, teachers get moved to the edge of their zone of proximal development and they will be forced to fill in the white spaces on their own.

If you were to begin to draw these questions out to their logical conclusions, differentiation is the only place where teachers can end up.  This is where you as the leader then backfill with work around mindset and shift thinking towards a classroom environment where success can be experienced by all students.

Early August Musings

It's back to school time and the brief break has faded into the late evening sky.

I made a purposeful effort to shut it down for a week and a half in order to clear my head....this included limiting my use of devices.  I felt more recharged than I had in a while at the end of that short respite.

Now August is here and the education world is churning fast and furious again.

A few quick items that have been spinning around in my head that need to be on paper:

1. Connected Educator Month is a model for how professional development could look like in the future.  There are daily events through the end of August.  Click here for the schedule of events.

2. In college my friends and I often would refer to each other as S.C.U.O.P (pronounce it however you like) under certain circumstances.  Since you already gave up, it stands for Self Contained Unit Of Pleasure (next side note.....it's been a  LONG time since I thought of that).  To reset this for an educational context, connected educators should take to calling themselves S.C.U.O.P.D (Self Contained Unit of Professional Development).  The primary SCUOPD vehicle is Twitter, which I've been preaching about to educators in my District.  I've purposely kept the list of those I follow small, in order to not be swallowed by my feed.  Follow me @scarletandgray to tap into my list (but if you don't want to follow me, do yourself a favor and follow @NMHS_Principal).

3. While Twitter is awesome and it is revolutionizing the spread of educational ideas and enhancing professional development, I have had to force myself to moderate to a degree.  This medium represents everything that is wonderful and terrible about the web all at the same time.  The wonderful part is the amazing range and breadth of information that is at our fingertips.  The terrible part is the amazing range and breadth as well.  Without developing clear cut guidelines for using this tool (Twitter), the sheer vastness of the information torrent will overwhelm you and render all of the information useless.  For me, I do my best to check my feed once or twice a day, but if I can't get to it I usually read only the most recent day's worth of tweets.  To go back and try to make up for lost time is tough in the Twitter world.  I also try and avoid tweets that talk about the top 10 this or top 15 that.  With as many tweets as there are, you have to be purposeful with your click throughs.  Finally, while Twitter is great, I've found that it has reinforced the bad habit I've developed of skimming everything I read.  Skimming is a great way to get through lots of content, but it is a terrible tool for encoding and retaining information (at least for me).  In order to exercise all parts of my brain, I have at least two books going at any one time in order to take care of the deep level substantive work that my job requires as well.

These are exciting times in the world of education.  Being purposeful and thoughtful about your personal professional development will only aide and add to the energy that this fast paced profession elicits from the best and the brightest.

Summertime Questioning Mashup

A-ha moments are always special....this particular one was all the more interesting to as it was a twitter-ha moment.

The flipped classroom has received so much press recently that it feels a bit like it has jumped the shark.    The reality is that students, in the near term, will still be spending blocks of time with individual teachers.  The conventional wisdom is that engagement must be technology fueled (BYOD gone wild).    On a more basic level, engagement can be derived simply by rethinking the traditional teacher-student hierarchical arrangement and re-purposing the use of questions in the classroom.

Questioning has moved from an open-ended, exploratory exercise to a hollow, stale, single right answer call and response paradigm.  Wouldn't students be more engaged if we returned to an earlier form of questioning and discussion, where there were no canned, prescribed answers and curiosity ruled the day?

Teach to the test zealots will already be poo-pooing this notion, but I content that students will naturally perform better on standardized tests if they spend the other 179 days in the school year authentically engaged with content, rather than preparing exclusively for a singular experience.

So, here's the mashup part - links to two different blog posts that tackle the pedagogy and imperative of authentic questioning and classroom discussion (here's a hint, if the teacher is at the center of this web the activity is not hitting the mark).

The first comes from William Sprankles, 6-12 Principal with the Princeton City School District (This is the imperative part)

http://leadership247.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/redefining-what-educators-must-be/

See his fourth point - Be a Philosopher and Live In The Question:


The second come from Ben Johnson writing on the Edutopia website (This is the pedagogical part).


http://www.edutopia.org/blog/improving-teacher-questions-ben-johnson


Enjoy this twitter-ha mashup moment!

The Mind Control Device Under Our Finger Tips

I'm currently half way through a two-week leave of absence from my beloved iPhone. The details aren't important, but I'm now past the detox phase. While I like to claim that I use it to enhance my professional life, the truth is a tad bit sketchier. The degree to which it enhances my productivity is countered by the amount of time I use it as a digital pacifier. Tweet here, score update there, status update to boot…. I like to think of myself as above the common fray where powerful digital devices are used for mindless pleasure and distraction (think of the iPhone as a digital shovel in an all day game of Farmville), but in reality I'm not. The Canton Repository published a small piece in their Op Ed section marking the passing of Ray Bradbury in their June 7th edition. In describing the impact of his novel Fahrenheit 451, the editor said this: “More profoundly, he foresaw the potential of electronic technology as a weapon of control and oppression, not only through surveillance but also through mindless distraction.” It is this mindless distraction that I see plaguing our students today. Advertisers fill our airwaves with a steady diet of messages that pitch entertaining oneself as the highest calling a human being can aspire to. With a society that has completely abandoned the concept of limit setting as a valuable tool to develop self-control, the current generation of youth is walking around with their faces glued to screens. As I continue down the pathway towards true middle age, I am becoming acutely aware of how precious the resource of time is, and how fragile and fleeting 24 hours can be. I am concerned that digital natives, those who have never known life without devices, will lack the ability to moderate their use of devices in order to create spaces in their lives where they have the opportunity to think, ponder, and reflect without the constant drum of digital distractions. In 10th grade Biology, my teacher was giving a lesson on the impact of vitamins on the human body. She noted that taken in moderation, vitamins could have positive effects on health. However, taken in excess, vitamins have the potential to cause harm. Her tag line, which has always stuck with me, was “Too much of a good thing is bad”. How apropos in the fast-forward, hyper connected world in which we live.

Now That's Entertainment...

At a Memorial Day gathering today, I had the occasion to watch a segment of commercials on mute.  Even thought I was in a room full of people, for some reason I was transfixed at the messages that one can conjure when the audio tracks are stripped from the video.

Based on the spots I viewed, someone unfamiliar with the United States could rationally come to the conclusion that Americans' highest purpose and calling is to entertain ourselves.  I have long thought that the seductive illusion that advertisers have on us has caused a decaying of the moral and economic fiber in our country.  Watching the suggestive images roll across the screen without sound was an a-ha confirmation moment for me.

Moving forward, I believe that those who are educated and self-aware will be able to resist the allure of our consumption and entertainment based society.  I fear that those who fall into this class will continue to shrink in numbers as on-demand distractions alter our engagement patterns.

The truth is that success, be it academic, financial, or otherwise, takes hard work.  There are times when gratification must be delayed and the nose put to the grindstone in order to accomplish something of value.

For our students, one of the most difficult questions they have to answer is why they chose to engage in certain behaviors or activities.  For many, "I don't know" really is an honest answer.  Self-assessement, self-reflection, and self-restraint are all traits that have been discarded by our on-demand society.

Electronic mediums of all forms have immense power to sway our worldview and outlook on matters.  Seductive images of happy people with the latest (tech gadget, beer, clothing, etc.) saturate our screens we are glued to.  These ads are designed to make the viewer feel that the only way to measure up and not be inferior is to consume the product being pitched.

Dave Ramsey, the financial advisor behind Financial Peace University, is associated with the phrase "Live like no one else".  If more people would take this advise, and if more would pause to think about why they feel like they do about themselves in relation to products, the number of dissatisfied and discontent Americans could be impacted.

As schools continue the debate about BYOD, it is important to engage in the conversation about why schools are so eager for devices to flood the school house gates.  Is it because we, as educators, truly believe that devices can have a positive impact on student achievement, or is it just another engagement ploy in the factory batch processing system?  Devices are neither good nor bad, it is in the intentional use where meaning is derived.  I love my many devices, but I find that I have to carve out spaces away from those when I want to seriously engage in academic pursuits.

Corporate America wants as many people hooked on screens as possible.  It is a way to continually advertise and influence purchasing decisions.  So the question is how are we as educators leveraging the power of devices and screens while at the same time teaching about their drawbacks?

The fate of a free thinking society rests on this work.

To read more on this topic, I'd suggest the following:

CHEAP

The High Cost of Discount Culture

By Ellen Ruppel Shell

296 pp. The Penguin Press. 

How State Testing Mandates Inhibit 21st Century Progress

The post below originated from a post-grad assignment I was working on.  Work's been busy, so I haven't posted in a while.  However, this kind of sums up what I spend my days trying to figure out.

A quandary I spend a fair amount of time dealing with during the day is the impact of the new OTES model.  Specifically, I am concerned that the measures will produce unintended results.  Tying 50% of a teacher’s evaluation to student performance on a single or dual metric has a potential chilling effect that could derail the move towards 21^st century teaching and learning skills that are essential for workers in the interconnected, digital era in which we exist.

HB 153 is an attempt to take private sector measurement tools and impose them on public sector employees.  It is rooted in a belief that teachers and principals will do nothing to raise student accountability unless they are coerced through measurement tools that tie compensation and employment status directly to results.  It assumes that the minimum competency of Ohio students is rooted solely in teacher actions, and it further assumes that a bigger stick is the answer in order to improve student performance.

An attribution error on the part of education critics lies in blaming teachers for the approach they currently take to teaching students, when in fact they should blame the design of the current accountability system.  Under the OAA and OGT system, teachers place themselves in the best position for their students to achieve when they act as educational directors.  This is the traditional sage on the stage model of delivering a standard educational message six times per day to groups of passive students.  Since teachers never know exactly what will be on the selected response test, they operate on the cover everything mentality out of fear that the one thing fail to say will assuredly show up on the test.

On the surface all of this is supposed to change with the advent of the Common Core and the development of the new PARCC assessments.  Specifically, the promise of a performance assessment, coupled with ‘innovated computer adapted items’ (as the PARCC folks are fond of saying) is supposed to move teachers from a teacher director role to a teacher facilitator role.  Stan Heffner specializes at touting the 4 C’s in his stump speech and urging Ohio educators to adapt a student directed approach to learning.  Adding fuels to the fire of change talk are technology infusion groups such as P-21, virtual learning organizations, and B.Y.O.D. (Bring Your Own Device) advocates.  The message of personalized, on-demand, any-time learning appears to be the panacea to the disengagement and general dissatisfaction that students and parents vocalize about the current educational delivery system. 

The challenge I find as the Director of Secondary Programs in my district is how do I help teachers bridge the gap between where they know education should head (the latter description) while moving away from what seems to be a safe delivery model (the former description).  The popular argument is that if you focus on high quality, authentic, engaging lessons that capture the interests and talents of individual students, the test questions will take care of themselves.  Student choice, flipped-instruction, and on-demand learning experiences are all hallmarks of 21^st century learning.  These all require the skills of an educational facilitator who can design these types of experiences while simultaneously understanding how the learning will be measured by the State.  It requires fearlessness on the part of the teacher as well.  Giving up control with the idea that the richness of the experience will provide the necessary knowledge in order to perform well on the State test is scary when the evaluation system stakes are so high.

            This is why I believe that the mandate of HB 153 will have the effect of failing to move education in the direction that is so necessary for the students as they are prepared for the workforce they will enter.  Students need to be flexible, adaptable thinkers, with the capacity to analyze and synthesize information and create knowledge independently.  They need to be able to learn, unlearn, and re-learn quickly in order to adapt and thrive in an economy where the majority of well paying, sustaining jobs have not been developed or identified yet.  These are the types of experiences that I believe will continue to be lacking for the majority of Ohio students under the OTES model.  By tying 50% of a teacher’s evaluation to performance on State accountability tests, the teacher as director model will continue to be reinforced.  In this age of economic uncertainty, teachers will behave in the manner that is most likely to protect their economic self-interest.  As long as the State continues to place their reform emphasis on high stakes measures that are derived primarily from selected response items, educational progress and change will continue to be stunted, and students will continue to be ill-equipped to meet the demands of the current age.

Why Do We Evaluate?

The post below originally came from work I am doing in a post-graduate class on program evaluation. Current evaluation practices are designed and implemented within school systems that are ill-equipped to truly see the forest from the trees due to ingrained historical practices that date back 150 years. So, my question is: Do institutions of education have the ability and capacity to make the types of changes that digital learning demands in the new era of learning personalization?

Rhonda: You bring up an interesting point. In the evaluation processes that are being discussed in this thread, it is primarily the holders of power who are conducting the evaluation within the school system. This completely cuts out the groups who are the end users, in this case students and by extension their parents. As technology allows for more personalization and customization of learning experiences, the traditional model of schools creating common curriculum for mass delivery is at risk. It is a 20th century, outdated model. Programs like RTI and PBS are designed to provide supports for students struggling to fit within the current parameters of our age and time based system. In the near future (within five years), I believe that there will be a revolutionary shift in the way students are educated due to the disruptive nature of technology. For institutions of education to survive, evaluation should shift from past programs towards future practices. Technology tools have finally caught up with the reality that information was liberated from the school house walls with the widespread adoption of the internet in 1994. Until now schools did not have to adapt because the electronic delivery mediums were not diffused enough in society. The past three years of technological change have totally changed this. What you see now is a tension between large, bureaucratic institutions still trying to hold onto old systems and individuals who can learn at anytime, anyplace, and anywhere. If schools do not evaluate why they still insist on holding students for 13 years in a lock step progression when the tools are available for individualized, self-paced learning experiences, then they are at risk for marginalization and perhaps extinction. The current funding crisis in not going to be solved in the near term. So, what can schools do differently? (This is why I would make the case for an external evaluator on this issue. Schools just don't have the reflective capacity for an evaluation that tackles these tough questions). Here are some other resources on this issue:

Ken Robinson TED Talk:

http://www.TED.com/talks/lang/en/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

Cathy Davidson (book)

Now You See It

Tom Vander Ark (book)

Getting Smart - How Digital Learning Is Changing The World