Making the Shift: How we learned we could learn from each other

My school recently celebrated its Centennial. The 2010 school year was a commemoration of 100 years of growth and dedication to developing the minds and spirit of young women. Among other events that took place was the customary filling of the Time Capsule, of which yours truly was placed in charge. I sent out notices requesting contributions with a reminder that the Time Capsule would not be opened until 2035! I requested “artifacts” that represented our school, our city, our country, or our world as we experienced it in 2010.

Among the many artifacts I received for the Time Capsule were several iPods, signed uniform kilts and jumpers, and favorite books and year-end magazines. The one item that gave me pause, however, was the stapled packet of fill-in-the-blank worksheets.

Of all the items I placed in Ziplock bags, I couldn’t stop thinking about the worksheets and wondered what the reaction would be when they were pulled from the time capsule 25 years from now. Would our alumnae remark, “Gosh! This looks exactly like what my daughter is using!” or, “Remember when we used these?

It’s true that we need to implement big changes and these changes are unsettling. To complicate matters, teaching is such a solitary profession. We go into our rooms and come out for coffee and lunch. We chat in the faculty room, mainly about students or our lives, but seldom about our practice. I struggled to understand it and to find ways overcome our isolation.

And like most big problems in need of a solution, it came to me by complete accident.

I work at a Moodle school. Moodle is our Learning Management System and we needed it to do four things: we wanted to use it to document our curriculum in a transparent way for all members of our community to access; we wanted to use Moodle to create blended learning options as a way to alleviate some scheduling conflicts; we wanted a platform for continuity of learning should we need it; and finally, we wanted to give our students 24/7 access to resources and content.

The only way to accomplish these things was for every teacher, from the 3-Day Three’s to Twelfth Grade, to attend a workshop. And not just any workshop. No. This would be the mother of all workshops: three days packed with 15 hours of learning opportunities!

We offered the workshop in June and again in August to ensure as many faculty as possible could participate. It was a blend of “keynotes” on blended learning, assessments, and curriculum documentation, workshops on Moodle for beginners and advanced users, and hands-on learning with Twitter, backchanneling, podcasting, VoiceThread, creating and embedding videos, screencasting, Diigo social bookmarking, wiki’s, blogging, and creating quizzes with HotPotato. Moodle, we said, was our “portal to learning.” We would use Moodle to direct our students to resources and activities outside of our classroom.

Any do you know who taught these workshops? We did. We taught ourselves. Our First Grade teacher and Eleventh Grade English teacher led a session on blogging and writing, a math and history teacher led the advanced Moodle workshop. Teachers from our Lower, Middle and Upper schools worked to created discipline-specific Essential Questions and discussed opportunities for new forms of assessment.

What I learned during those three days is this: I am surrounded by experts. Need help with backchanneling? Go see the Latin teacher. Want to embed video? Call the Middle School History teacher. If you want to design the prettiest, most content rich blog your students have ever seen, make an appointment to see the First Grade teacher. We learned that we all have something to share and we welcomed opportunities to learn from one another. This was the happy accident. We like learning, and we like learning from one another.

Once we started learning how to use the tools, we began to discuss why we should use them. When the chair of the History Department started blogging with her students, she wanted them to not only write well, but also to connect with experts, and she shared this outcome with members of her department. When our Fifth Grade teacher chose to use VoiceThread, she did so because she believed it would be more engaging and the feedback more meaningful than the traditional “stand and deliver” method. She was right. She told students to respond to 3 classmates in the VoiceThread project, but every student responded to every one of her classmates. Once she explained why she thought it worked better than the “old way,” other teachers were willing to try it themselves.

I am a believer in the power of professional sharing. I’ve experienced it first-hand. It is both empowering and satisfying to teach a skill, share a best practice, and learn something from someone with whom you thought you had nothing in common. And I always circle back to this question: If it works so well for us, and makes us feel so good, imagine what it would mean for our students. Shouldn’t our students have opportunities to teach and learn from one another; to develop and share their expertise?

I’m less concerned about those worksheets now. They are fast becoming just what I called them: artifacts. They’ll stay hidden away for 25 years and when removed those alumnae will role their eyes and laugh. “Remember when we had to use these?”

Remember when, indeed.

This blog is cross posted at Voices from the Learning Revolution.

Gearing Up For The Big Game

It’s Superbowl Sunday and my husband is gearing up for the Big Game. It’s only 9:00 am but he has prepared the menu (enchiladas) and is online reading about the game. He pours over the Sports Illustrated website, along with ESPN’s and the NFL’s. He doesn’t subscribe to blogs or tweet about his love of football.

It makes me a little crazy to tell you the truth.

Why would he not want to go deeper, read more, join a conversation, and share his many opinions on the qualifications of the coaches, the officials, and the players with someone other than me? Seriously. It’s hard to fathom.

Case in point. I shared the following tweet with him:

Translated: To use the night to watch a sport I do not understand, with players I do not know who is. So that I can brag about it on Tuesday.

He didn’t think it was funny. I couldn’t stop wiping the tears from my eyes.

Having a good laugh is only part of the reason I shared it with him. This tiny little exchange is an example of a door that was once shut tight now thrown wide open. I am able to laugh at a joke from a young man from Oslo, Norway because I happened to find him in a Twitter post. I found him in Twitter because people from around the world are pointing their thoughts to one place: #superbowl. I am able to translate Norwegian into English thanks to Google Translate. And I am able to share it with you because of this blog. In itself, it isn’t very significant, but the potential is great. Behold: the power of the network!

I’m the first to admit that I’m new to this. Little by little, I’m becoming more confident using these new tools to connect with other teachers and like-minded individuals around the world. As a child I knew instinctively that reading was powerful, that mastering those skills would be empowering. I feel the same way about the tools I use to connect to my personal learning network.

My network feeds my professional soul. First, I follow smart people. I remind my students that I too, stand on the shoulders of giants. Whether through blogs, tweets, or TED Talks, I learn from the finest thinkers in and out of my field.

Second, I seek out master teachers in all disciplines. Thanks to my participating in the Powerful Learning Practice community, I was able to connect (literally) via Elluminate with Silvia Tolisano (@langwitches), who shared the documents she uses to help her elementary teachers to “21st centur-ize” their curriculum. Bill Ferriter, (@plugusin), a 6th Grade social studies teacher, shared examples of student learning that facilitates social change. Dolores Gende, (@dgende), an AP Physics teacher, who so engages her students in their own learning, they speak of having a “passion” for science. These are my teachers too. The examples they so willing share help guide and improve my own practice.

Third, I need help. That’s the substance of tweets I send out to the world. I’ve asked for help to learn more about Microsoft’s Kodu programming application for young students and the qualities of a 21st Century Technology Coordinator. Recently an acquaintance that works for Facebook wanted to know if teachers were using Facebook in their classroom. I went straight to Twitter. Later, I asked for feedback “to gauge the reach and effectiveness of my network.” She replied,

“I think that it was really useful, especially once I picked up on the #edchat and #edtech conversations. Got some great stuff culling through those, some of which I was able to use yesterday and some of which I'm sure I'll have occasion to use in the future.”

Fourth, my network extends the reach of my students. I can use the relationships built through Twitter, blogs, and Ning discussions to find readers and commenters for my students’ work. Because my reach is global, so is that of my students. Are you a teacher looking for collaborators for a VoiceThread project? Would you like to give your students the British perspective on the American Revolution? Have your students gain a global perspective on something in the news (#Egypt, #Tahrir) or the President’s State of the Union address (#sotu). Twitter can help make it all happen, often by employing a powerful tool first put forth by Twitter users themselves: the hashtag.

How about helping your students build a readership for their blogs? Send out a tweet using #comments4kids and ask the members of your network to help you spread the word. It may take a while and require some persistence at first, but it’s worth it in the end. Once your students have a real audience they are no longer students, they are writers. I get excited when I discover another red dot on the Cluster Map in my blog. Can you imagine how motivating it is for a Fifth Grader?

Making the effort to grow and cultivate a personal learning network is essential to today’s teacher. It should be part of our professional toolkit and viewed as important as face-to-face, bricks and mortar, professional development opportunities, maybe even more so. As I thought about this, I sent out the following tweet:

Here are some of my favorite answers:

We model so much for our students, why not the building and use of a personal learning network? Why not demonstrate the learning power embedded in a connected world? Why not demonstrate the learning power embedded in a connected world?

This blog is cross-posted at Voices From The Learning Revolution.

How Did I Get Here?

I used to be a perfectly ordinary English teacher, someone who highlighted her books, typed up tests on mimeos, and left her classroom now and then to get coffee in the faculty room. So, how did I get here?

One day in the late 1990s, I asked my students to submit their homework on Jane Eyre to me via email.  I was overwhelmed by the response.  First, I had twenty-some emails to process – how was I going to manage all that?  Next, I couldn’t believe how good their thinking had become overnight.

Sometime around Y2K, my friend and colleague Renee Hawkins gave me a “Website-a-Day” calendar for Christmas.  I had to admit some of the websites that were popping up were really cool.

I took an online course on teaching critical thinking at Goucher College.  Amazed, I had to figure out how to be a different kind of student.  I took another course about creating basic web pages for my courses.  Before I knew what was what, I was participating in discussion forums and designing online courses and had a certificate in “Educational Technology Leadership.”

One spring day, one of my former students, Emily Brecht, came back to visit from college.  She said she had been spending all of her time commenting on other people’s “status” on this new thing online called Friendster.  “Why would anyone want to do that?” I asked her.

Spoiled from having used online course platforms for my own learning, I looked for a way to bring the excitement of learning online to my classes.  My school had blocked my website, so I needed some way around their obsessive controls.  We couldn’t afford something like Blackboard, and there was no way I could convince them to include this free new tool called Moodle on our school server, so I began to look for another way.  I found something called Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA) and began using it for my 10^th grade English class: the discussions that spilled over into class after discussing online made my earlier email revelation look like small talk. 

One summer, I had a conversation with my step-daughter, who was interested in pursuing writing professionally.  I suggested a writing workshop like the MFA program I had attended, so she could have readers who could provide feedback.  “I have lots of readers online,” she said, “what do I need to take a workshop for?”

I transferred to a new school and tried out the ICA there.  Then I had to shut down the class because my freshmen were getting carried away with political trash talk during the Bush-Kerry campaign.  My students responded by creating their own ICA class so they could talk all they wanted to without any teachers or other adults breathing down their necks.

I moved and started teaching at a school in the middle-of-nowhere Texas.  I also became an administrator, so the other teachers didn’t want to talk to me about teaching any more. I missed my friends and former colleagues terribly.  I started blogging to the void, pretending that I was modeling ways of thinking about teaching for the teachers who wouldn’t talk to me. I joined networks of teachers on Classroom 2.0 and Independent School Educators Network.  When someone I didn’t know responded to an idea I shared in a discussion forum, I got really excited. I really did have someone to talk to about teaching, and especially how my teaching was changing radically as I was influenced by all these new ways of communicating.  I couldn’t believe my luck – my colleagues were now – could this really be? – from all over the world.

I started a new blog, “The Flying Trapeze,” with my friend, Renee Hawkins.  This was a lot better than blogging to the void – at least we had each other.  I overcame my jitters and tried Twitter, though it still seemed a little silly.  I created a Facebook group for my students; I posted pictures to flickr and had one chosen for an online travel guide; I kicked around with blonde hair and a guitar in Second Life.  I got brave enough to lead a discussion at EduBloggerCon at the ISTE conference in Denver (2010), and suddenly I was being followed by smart people like WhatEdSaid on Twitter.  Renee and I started accumulating dots on our blog’s Clustrmap. I began having the richest conversations of my professional life by participating in a year-long investigation of best teaching practices with a band of amazing, inquisitive teachers through a group called Powerful Learning Practice.

I have found myself in the midst of an acronym, what people now refer to as a personal/professional learning network, a PLN, and my life as a teacher and learner has been utterly transformed.

If only Sisyphus had a team like mine...

The holidays can't help but promote reflection. One of the things that I've been mulling over is the progress I'm making in a year-long, job embedded professional development experience called Powerful Learning Practice, or PLP. I'm working with five other teachers from my school who teach our youngest (3-Day Three's) in the Pre-School and our oldest students in the Upper School. Some may say we're an unlikely mix of talent. My colleagues asked to be part of this experience and I couldn't be happier with the combination of grades and disciplines they represent. Our teammate from the Pre-School, Chris, has opened our eyes to the critical importance of early childhood education. In addition, she's trying to break down closed doors and promote a culture of "professional sharing" among the teachers in her building. Dana represents Fifth Grade. She is on fire with new ideas and a sense of purpose. She understood "how" to use the tool just not "why" she should use it. Now she does. She loves the PLP Ning and through that connection found her way to another teacher in New Zealand who answered her questions about podcasting. Rachel is our Middle School teammate. She teaches English and manages the Middle School Academic Resource Center. Rachel promotes passion-based learning not only for her students, but for the Middle School faculty too. She challenges all of us to find joy in learning. Beth is Chair of our History Department and is a respected voice among our faculty. She is not one to jump from one learning fad to the next; she carefully considers how a change in her pedagogy will improve learning outcomes for her students. This year she required the students in her Contemporary Issues class to blog and she is pleased with their progress. They are thinking deeper, writing better, and making connections with others outside our community. Lana is a math teacher in the Upper School and our PLP Team Leader. Lana is a "prove it" kind of teacher. Maybe it's because she is a math teacher of the highest quality, but she challenges almost EVERYTHING we do in the PLP. That might be upsetting in some groups, but I think we're lucky to have her. If our ideas can stand up to Lana's scrutiny, then I feel a lot more confident sharing them with the rest of the faculty. From our little community outside Baltimore, MD, we are asking questions and sharing experiences with teachers and administrators across the United States, and through them we're making connections with other educators from around the world. We found community first through the PLP and oddly enough, it led us to find strengths in one another. As for me, I'm learning to listen better, trust more, and let go and let the learning happen.

I've been working in Educational Technology for twelve years, ten years at my current school. Like Sisyphus, I often feel like I've been pushing that same rock up the hill for a long time...and I'm tired. But a funny thing happened just as we were leaving leaving for our holiday break. My PLP team came to my rescue. Faced with designing a couple of days of PD and wondering how I might both celebrate the accomplishments our faculty have made this year while at the same time introducing new concepts in teaching and learning, my teammates jumped at the chance to help me. They are also wonderfully excited about bringing a Middle School PD model, "Breakfast Boosters," to the other Divisions. "You don't have to do anything!" Chris told me. She and Dana are organizing it in the Lower Division (as are Beth and Lana in the Upper School) and I get to attend as a participant (Joy!). I volunteered to cover some of Chris' classes so she and Dana have time to plan, which is a small thing considering the enormity of their project. The rock is still there and it still needs to be moved up the hill, but I'm not alone in the effort anymore. "I've been waiting ten years for you," I told Chris. The cavalry had arrived!

Don't let anyone tell you that a learning community isn't important or that building a learning network of smart, talented people isn't worth the time. Our school took a chance and invested in the professional development of six teachers through PLP. I'm not sure the administration knows what they've unleashed. Where there was one, now there are six. These teachers are walking testimonials to the power of PLP. My hope is that next year there will be six more, and that we'll continue to grow and share and learn from each other.

On a separate but equally exciting note...You'll notice a change in the appearance of our blog. Another Christmas present I received this holiday was visit from my blogging partner and bff Susan Davis! Susan and her husband left the warm environs of Houston for the cold, blustery weather of Baltimore (go figure!). We never have enough face-to-face time, but we were able to make some needed changes to our blog. Now we just need to start blogging more regularly....

Happy Learning, Happy Sharing, and Happy New Year Everyone!

Jammin' and Blocking: Roller Derby as Metaphor for Change in Education

The pivots at the front of the pack set the pace. The blockers skate in a tight wall, looking for their jammer -- maybe they can pull her through for a chance to create a whip and sling their "girl" to the front, closing gaps to shut out the opposition. (One blocker had "Wrecking Ball" had bold letters splayed across her bottom, and she meant it too!) The jammers, those tough, fast, graceful jammers, slide right into the pack and thread their way through the crowd, dodging elbows and scooting under skaters who race shoulder to shoulder around the track. Once a jammer slips through, she races around the track to make her way through the wall of skaters again, ticking off points like a ball in a pinball game every time she passes someone. Hooey, there she goes again, circling the track in a blur, picking her way through the crowd, and wham! Some tattooed mama throws out a leg, and the jammer is down!

Having recently watched my first live event at the Houston Roller Derby, I have been thinking ever since about how the rough and tumble derby "girls" suggest a metaphor for those of us who work for change in education.

I like to think we are the jammers, our heads low and pushing straight into the pack of teachers and administrators who close ranks to shut us out, partly because they just need to get around the track and make it through the year. Anyone coming through? The blockers, who could be anyone, really, who is happy with the status quo, try every trick they own to stop us (and there are your allies, blockers too, who are trying to make a way for you to pass through the red tape and push back).  Those opposing blockers sure don't want anyone racing ahead and changing the pace of the game. We get through, not without a few bruises, and burst out of the pack only to rush around the track again. The world has changed in the last lap -- new obstacles in new configurations lie ahead. We race into the pack again, ready for everything the opposition will do to try to stop us. The blockers have regrouped -- maybe it's just a "crappy week for education," as Will Richardson describes our current troubles in his recent post on "The Wrong Conversations." Maybe the opposing blockers stop us with a body slam -- we should have seen it coming, that attack on reading relevancy in the digital world or that questionable kick from the latest cyber-scare, but we didn't, and down we go.

But, if we're lucky, we weave through the elbows and hips and start to rack up the points...engaged learning for our students, critical re-thinking for our teachers, ways to ratchet up the game to make education meaningful again.

Just call me Suicide Sue.