BLC13 Pre-Conference July 23

Basic thoughts on my first day at BLC. Will be revised and reflected upon later.

BLC July 22 2013 from OctoberCamel

Grammar is not Glamour

It's summer break and the time when all good teachers put workbooks in front of their own children.

Despite all of my talk and beliefs about the need for learning experiences marked by discovery, collaboration, connection, relevance, and authenticity, my son spends time with a grammar workbook several days a week. 

If I make a Wordle of what his summer looks like, it's something like this, filled with a variety of great summer activities, places and people:

In my mind, though, admitting the existence of the workbook makes his summer look more like this:

He doesn't fight the workbook. In fact, he seems to enjoy it. I think he feels accomplished because he's good at it and it's concrete. Grammar is not glamour and requires practice, practice and more practice.

If you have any suggestions on how grammar can be taught in a way that would capture the minds and hearts of more students, I would love to hear from you. 

1999 and 2012

This adorable little girl was my student back in 1999 when I started teaching in a computer lab at an international school in Bangkok.

Her kindergarten class came in once a week for 45 minutes to learn how to use the computers. At the time, nobody on administration truly felt the kindergarten students should be in the computer lab, but apparently the parents clamored for it. A good international school would have computer instruction.

I was a bit against it. I thought young minds should not spend their time in front of a screen staring, being passive. I thought they should be out playing or possibly inside reading books.

But I was determined that if they had to be in the computer lab, I would try to make it as worthwhile an experience as possible, even given the rather limited resources.

So we played number munchers. It was a cheap PacMan knock off aimed at practicing math facts.

And KidPix. They all liked the bomb, but I hated the bomb and refuse to put a picture of it here.










Number Munchers and KidPix, I felt I could justify. We were "integrating technology into the curriculum." Yes, even back before the year 2000, we said we were aiming at that. (Are we there yet?)

I thought Mavis Beacon was going a little far for kids that age. I even read articles that said young children should not be keyboarding. They had plenty of time to learn that.

Some teachers wanted to get kiddie-size keyboards. Eventually the school moved to a new building with kiddie-sized toilets. Some felt placated.

We used floppy disks that were no longer floppy. These were very modern. They were all sorts of pretty colors. And we almost never filled them up!

The floppy disks went in computers like this which was pretty advanced also. It had a cd-rom.

The crazy man is my husband who was helping me demonstrate that students were not allowed to touch the server. EVERYTHING was on that server. The school's finances. The library program. The guidance program. All of it. It sometimes got backed up to a location from which nobody knew how to restore it. That's how things were and still we slept well.

This was my student in spring 2012, graduating high school. She's all grown up now and even has herself a long-term boyfriend. (We approve of him.)

Now she is never without one of these. If she's like me, she may even walk around with several similar devices.

















She probably texts like this now. She always was all thumbs. (I can't stop thinking about my thumbs as I type this. I want to thumb type.)

I'll try to digest some of this in my next blog post. I want to reflect on what we really taught students about technology a decade-and-a-half ago and how it may or may not have changed. I want to examine what was useful and what was not. Most of all, I want to try to draw conclusions about how what we are teaching today may or may not be relevant for our kindergarten students when they graduate twelve years from now.

And below is my student's comment upon seeing this post.

If I ran PD

We are all born as learners. As children, we want to hide in closets, climb trees, follow paths through the woods, and generally get into mischief. If we are fortunate, we have teachers who nurture these desires in us. They make us ask questions. They make us look for answers. A good answer will lead to a new question. Good teachers make us wonder.

When I read Ben Beaton's quote from #slide2learn a few days ago, a lot of recent ideas about learning coalesced. You see, I recently had a discussion with my principal about what our teachers do with technology in their classroom. We briefly discussed PD at the school. It's pretty normal in schools for teachers to diss PD, right? But do we ever offer solutions other than, "Let's meet less often?"

What if we redesigned PD so that it was a model for our students? What if instead of trying so hard to teach teachers how to personalize learning, we personalized learning for our teachers? What would that look like?

Such professional development would

1. Be relevant
2. Give teachers choice about what to learn
3. Allow teachers to set their own goals
4. Encourage collaborative learning
5. Engage the broader educational community
6. Be inquiry based
7. Give permission for teachers to learn how they learn best
8. Be self-sustaining in that it would not require external "instructors" or significant planning by administration
9. Allow teachers to follow their passions as learners

Now, we may not be able to take all these ideas and implement them quickly or in large scale in our classrooms. But, could we do this for professional development at a medium-sized international school? If so, what would it look like?

Given that it's unlikely that the powers that be would give up each week's 90 minutes of PD time, let's assume that this New PD Model would take place once per month. I imagine something like the following:

During the first session, teachers brainstorm together in a giant room about what they want to learn. 

They share ideas about their passions and their needs in the classroom. Some things teachers might want to study could include things like reaching ELLs, PBL, using twitter for PD, what unique needs students from name the place have, teaching science using examples you find in the movies, cross-disciplinary projects, etc... You name it. Nothing would be off the table at first.

The community would corporately decide on a variety of topics to study. Each teacher would be able to chose the learning community they wanted to partner with.

Each learning community would meet to discuss their own goals. Each individual in each community need not have the same goals. Rather, each community member should be willing to share his own goals with the group and frame the goals in a way that will contribute to the larger learning community.

If people really are pursuing their own interests in the way that suits their learning style best, learning might look very different for each person. Let's imagine we have a four person learning community studying strategies to use with English Language Learners. One teacher/learner might love TED talks. She might decide she's going to approach her inquiry by watching one or two TED talks a week about language acquisition, differences in languages, or brain based learning. Anything remotely connected to ELLs would be fair game. A second teacher/learner might have a book about ELLs that he has meant to read for months but hasn't found time. His investigation would take the form of finally reading that book. A third teacher/learner might decide to participate in weekly twitter chats about ELLs for the duration of the project. And the fourth ELL might decide to study the data the school keeps on ELLs to look for new insights. 

Each group member would conduct their inquiry. Members would meet monthly to share ideas and discuss their progress. Each member would be responsible for reporting back to the group on their progress. Members might bring something tangible to the table while reporting their inquiry such as a prezi or a keynote. Or they might bring discussion questions and lead the others in a Socratic dialogue. The point is, the learning does not look the same for each learner. Each learner is pursuing what is relevant to their needs and interests.

In fact, let's dream big. The learning communities might not even meet during the regular weekly PD time. We are all educational professionals. If we decide to use our Learning Community PD time for student meetings, grading or even to catch up on sleep, then we will be responsible for meeting at a different time, perhaps at a coffee shop, to share our findings.

This learning would

be about what matters to us as professionals
give us choice about what to learn
allow us to set our own goals
encourage collaboration
engage the broader community
lead to more questions
let us learn how we learn best
not be a burden for those planning PD
allow teachers to follow their passions as learners

Now wouldn't that be more productive, and perhaps actually easier, than having one person talk at us for PD? And what a powerful statement about the value of inquiry such a model would give. It would expose teachers who have only met a traditional model to a more personalized inquiry-based approach. It would build community and learning would be fun!

Here is a sample of a school that let's its students learn how I've just proposed PD to be.

Let them max out the resources

Apple is doing the following things right right now at ADE2013 to see that the new ADE community maximizes and internalizes learning.

1. Encourage friendships.
2. Allow free play time. 
3. Take care of basics – sleep, food, potty breaks and bug spray.
4. Make the environment pleasant. 
5. Celebrate failures.
6. Provide frequent documentation of learning.
7. Allow the students to teach.
8. Let them max out the resources.
9. Create lessons in which the hardest work of the day is reflecting, not memorizing facts and figures.
10. Instill in learners the knowledge that you are taking care of them.

If they forget what day it is, you are probably doing a good job.

8. Let them max out the resources.