Chalkdust

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Indications That You Are Moving in the Right Direction

This from teacher I worked with a few weeks ago on establishing a wiki for her AP US History Class:

did you see the first completed review page on my wiki--pretty awesome. some of the links are careless and even useless, but I've noticed so far with the new page that they're linking in more useful resources. i am very pleased with the content and organization. thanks!

And then this from her students:

it makes it easier to communicate with ALL of your classmates, not just the ones you normally talk to outside of school.. also, its awesome because its a group project that everyone can collaborate on but we don't all have to be together to work on it

But also the project has opened up valid discussion about the merits of using such technology in schools:

I hate the AP review project. It is a superfluous use of technology that only leads to frustration. More time is spent organizing the page and competing with overachievers for things to do then actually learning anything about history. Scrap it please before it evolves into a worse monster that no one can manage.

On Thursday and Friday of this week, I worked with two groups of teachers on the merits of feedback as a means of self-assessmen t for teachers. While the workshop wasn't packed to the gills, the teachers I worked with began to see why I survey them every time they leave my classes.

As people in the art and science of education, we have to be able to get constructive feedback from our stakeholders in addition to the few observations that are done by our administration. Two or three snapshots are not enough to transform our teaching in a meaningful way. Our most important stakeholders, our students, need to be voiced in the process of their own education. Imagine using the survey results as a basis for class discussion where the points made by the students are validated and discussed, or using the results as a basis for planning a new lesson and informing the students that this lesson was driven by their comments on the last unit, or last lesson.

Ownership

Since hearing Alan November speak, I am intrigued by the idea of ownership of learning and the roles of teachers and students in a classroom. I have spent the last year talking about authentic learning, tools, technology, and pedagogy in the 21st Century and how different it should be, but what does that look like? My wife asked me a question last night: how do I engage my 4th graders in their own learning? I had no direct answer. It took a few minutes of really thinking and brainstorming to find out where she needed to go (I also asked the Twitter network) I realized that it takes a lot more than just knowing that there needs to be a change, and that there will be a change in our classrooms, than actually affecting that change.

Surveying the students and finding out what works for them in your lessons and units begins to take them towards ownership of the learning because they begin to see their role in their own learning. "Hey, I can drive this process!" It takes a teacher willing to listen and act on those suggestions heard.

Technorati Tags: alannovember, wikis, survey, pedagogy, twitter, classrooms, 21stcentury

Sunday, October 28, 2007

My Thoughts on Mr. November, Part II

"Schools remain cut off from the rest of the world despite web 2.0 technologies. We need to connect them and publicize those connections."

Alan spoke about the need for us to connect our students to the world at large, about the changing global economy and workforce and the radical shifts that are happening in economies worldwide. Like all else I do, I needed to filter that statement a little before letting it run loose in my own world.

I had an interesting conversation today with a good friend of mine regarding what it's like being out of the classroom and what we notice now that we are "on the other side" at least for part of the time. My friend said that, being in the classroom for a while, you often feel like you have exhausted every possible angle on a certain unit, a particular lesson, or maybe even a particular grade level. Leaving the classroom for a while and having the opportunity and the time to devote to finding new angles, new strategies, and new learning adventures gives you fresh perspective, and you find yourself trying hard to get back into the classroom to try what you have found. Why is that so often the case? Is it that we have our system structured so that it's focused less on the quality of instruction and more on the quantity of instruction you can deliver in a set time.

In looking at Alan's quote from above, and in thinking about this situation of perspective and time, they both are matched perfectly. If we have networked teachers, communities of practice either locally or virtually, sharing knowledge, strategy, and especially their students work, we have solved the problem of time and the problem of stagnation. Change the model of how teachers are developed once they are hired to one where they are networked with others of like and unlike mind. Connecting the students, then follows soon after, as the teachers can begin to see the possibilities and benefits of connected learning. I know there is more to this than this brief post, but I truly think that the key to future professional development has to start with networking teachers. For a more thorough look at what this can be, be sure to check out Sheryl Nussbaum-Beech's latest post at TechLearning.

A lot of technology, a lack of vision.

What am I doing to help provide the teachers I work with the ability and desire to have vision? Alan's statement echoes what's been said by so many lately: we have great tools, but what can we build with them? I looked hard at the courses I have offered over the past year to my staff, and I looked hard at the model I offered them in. Had I not accepted this new position (still holding out on that post), I would have restructured the entire way I offer PD. I don't think this 2-hour, sit-and-get is the best way to facilitate change, promote innovation, and instill my staff with the confidence they need to start having real vision when it comes to how they can now teach. And who knows, with your help, this slate of classes in November might be the beginning of that shift for my district.

What is my vision for the classrooms I work in? That's not an easy one, but it's one that we should get a handle on soon. If you asked me now, I'd go with this:

We are the change that we want to see; it starts with us and how we enable that change in others around us. We want globally connected learners because we may not be all that our learners need us to be. Our classrooms should produce students whose sense of community is not constrained by their geographic location because they never learned that way; the world was always their classroom. Our teachers and students should know audience to be much more than just teacher, or class, or school, but nation, and world beyond that. And our methods will be the subject of debate and critique among our peers.

Flickr Image Credits:
"Be the Change," from dmal's photostream
"Do you Believe in Change?" carf's photostream

Technorati Tags: blc08, alannovember, education, philosopy, professionaldevelopment

My Thoughts on Mr. November

Friday, at TechForum New York, the keynote speaker was Alan November, of November Learning. Alan is someone whom I have read much about via other's experiences in meeting him, attending BLC, or hearing him recently in Shanghai, but never really did any focused research on myself. Who was this guy, and why did he always leave behind a wake?

His bio in the conference program started off with a great piece of information: his first professional gig was that of an oceanography teacher at an alternative high school in Boston Harbor. Where can't you go after that?

Needless to say, I was impressed, and tried to take notes on his presentation, but when your network shows up, it is difficult to stay focused on much other than your twitterstream. Also, however, I find it hard to take notes any more unless the speaker is talking about something other than tools. Thankfully, Alan seemed to care less about the tools, even at one point, throwing a jab to the aggressive vendor crowd assembled.

What he did give me was this:

Turn your fears into goals.

That sounds simple enough, but let's put it into practice for a minute. Here are a list of fears/obstacles that I often hear when working with staff:

I am not technologically savvy.
There is no time to implement this into my curriculum. I am held to state standards on tests like Regents/GEPA/HSPA; I need to focus on that.
The students will not take this seriously.
They (the students) just copy and paste everything anyway.
I can't add one more thing to my list of responsibilities.

And as Alan was speaking, he impressed me less with his rehearsed ideas, but more with his spontaneous addressing of crowd concerns, taking direct questions from several people who iterated some of the same fears/obstacles above. Looking at that list, I can do that. Here is my revised version:

I will become comfortable teaching in a manner that appeals to the learning needs of my students.
I will use resources contributed by teachers who are using technology to help students reach state standards on tests.
I will create lessons that matter to my students, ones in which they will work on without realizing it as work.
My assessments and assignments will be authentic, so that students cannot merely take the work of others and pass it off as their own.
I will focus on adding one new method to my teaching repertoire this year.

As I ready myself for a switch in job titles (more on that as the time nears), these type of semantic shifts are things I want to embrace. I have long thought that leadership determines institutional attitude more than any other component. My experience in the schools I have worked in bears this belief out. If I am to be someone who expects change, pushes innovative measures through, and enlists the creative forces of my staff, then I have to able to transform negativity into a goal-setting mentality like Alan prescribed.

This is the first in a series of posts I am generating from his session, and from the subsequent round tables and discussions from Friday.

Technorati Tags: blc08, alannovember, philosophy, education, change

Professional Development Workshop Dates

If your interest was piqued by the classes I listed in a previous post and you want to participate, below are the titles, dates and times for the classes. I also included the descriptions again so you wouldn't have to keep going back and forth between two posts.

As for bringing you all in, suggestions? Ustream? Skype/Yugma? I am all ears.

Note: Classes are offered twice to accomodate the different schedules of the buildings I work in. So if you can't make one, check the other.

ALL TIMES EASTERN STANDARD TIME, U.S. (UTC/GMT -4 hours)

Presenting with Google Earth in the Social Studies Classroom, 4hrs
Location: SMS Room 121
Presenter: Patrick Higgins
Date(s): TBD
Time: TBD
Limitations: Grades 5-12 Social Studies and English/Language Arts teachers only
Course Description:
Teaching has become such a visual profession, with great emphasis placed on the context within which you present the material to the students. Using traditional methods of presentation such as PowerPoint can be augmented with several emerging technologies. Google Earth allows teachers to create dynamic, visually engaging presentations that employ the use of video, image, and geographical interfaces.

Participants in this workshop will use Google Earth to create a class lecture or presentation that they otherwise would have created using standard methods (MS Word, PowerPoint, etc.). Follow up with the instructor is recommended after the class ends.

Presenting with Google Earth in Social Studies Classroom, 4hrs
Date(s): November 19-20
Time: 2:30-4:30
Limitations: Grades 9-12 Social Studies and English/Language Arts teachers only
Course Description:
Teaching has become such a visual profession, with great emphasis placed on the context within which you present the material to the students. Using traditional methods of presentation such as PowerPoint can be augmented with several emerging technologies. Google Earth allows teachers to create dynamic, visually engaging presentations that employ the use of video, image, and geographical interfaces.

Participants in this workshop will use Google Earth to create a class lecture or presentation that they otherwise would have created using standard methods (MS Word, PowerPoint, etc.). Follow up with the instructor is recommended after the class ends.

The Classroom Blog: How to move your students writing to a secure, online community. 4hrs
Date(s): November 26-29
Time: 8:00am-9:00am
Course Description:
Our definition of literacy is quickly changing, so much so that we really need to rethink what it means to be "literate" in this century. According to a study commsioned by the National School Board Association,, more than 50% of high school students have produced content on the web. Whether that means they are posting to a MySpace or Facebook page, or building a website or wiki, our students are active online. Just as with anything else we teach them, we need to be able to teach them how to create good content, content that has real value both in design and delivery.

Blogging with your students is a great step in this direction. Student writing proficiency and their desire to write will amaze you when you give them the freedom to create on their own blog. We will use 21classes to create your classroom blog. Depending on your level of comfort, we will allow your students writing to be viewable to others, or just to registered members of the site. Other topics to be discussed: online safety, online collaboration, and copyright.

The Classroom Blog: How to move your students writing to a secure, online community. 4hrs
Date(s): November 26-27
Time: 2:30-4:30
Course Description:
Our definition of literacy is quickly changing, so much so that we really need to rethink what it means to be "literate" in this century. According to a study commsioned by the National School Board Association,, more than 50% of high school students have produced content on the web. Whether that means they are posting to a MySpace or Facebook page, or building a website or wiki, our students are active online. Just as with anything else we teach them, we need to be able to teach them how to create good content, content that has real value both in design and delivery.

Blogging with your students is a great step in this direction. Student writing proficiency and their desire to write will amaze you when you give them the freedom to create on their own blog. We will use 21classes to create your classroom blog. Depending on your level of comfort, we will allow your students writing to be viewable to others, or just to registered members of the site. Other topics to be discussed: online safety, online collaboration, and copyright.

Feedback Matters: How student feedback can change your lesson design: before, during, and after, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 1-2
Time: 8:00-9:00am
Course Description:
We spend a good portion of our school year assessing our students on what have learned in our classrooms. But how often do we assess them on how they learned best? Asking students for feedback on your classroom practices, lesson design, and subject choice can lead to great strides in your professional practice. A simple five-question survey, skillfully designed, can yield feedback from the students such as what presentation mode the students enjoyed most, what articles mattered the most to them, or what area they would like you to have spent more time on.

Using Schoolwires, you can easily create a survey with varied question types. Schoolwires also provides an analysis page, plus a way to download the results to an Excel spreadsheet. This class will also explore how to create embeddable polls that can be placed on wikis or blogs using services such as PollDaddy and SurveyGizmo.

Feedback Matters: How student feedback can change your lesson design: before, during, and after, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 1
Time: 2:30-4:30pm
Course Description:
We spend a good portion of our school year assessing our students on what have learned in our classrooms. But how often do we assess them on how they learned best? Asking students for feedback on your classroom practices, lesson design, and subject choice can lead to great strides in your professional practice. A simple five-question survey, skillfully designed, can yield feedback from the students such as what presentation mode the students enjoyed most, what articles mattered the most to them, or what area they would like you to have spent more time on.

Using Schoolwires, you can easily create a survey with varied question types. Schoolwires also provides an analysis page, plus a way to download the results to an Excel spreadsheet. This class will also explore how to create embeddable polls that can be placed on wikis or blogs using services such as PollDaddy and SurveyGizmo.

The Wiki Way: Using Wikis as Collaborative Environments, 4 hrs.
Date(s): November 12-15
Time: 8:00-9:00am
Course Description:
Several teachers in the district have begun to use the power of wikis to enable their students to work collaboratively on web pages centered around a particular subject or project. Sites that use “wiki” technology are turning the ideas we have held about online research upside down. A Wiki is defined as:

a type of web site that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content.... This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative website itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, ...and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.

Wiki technology lends itself inherently to collaborative learning and creation. The very idea that several students can work on a body of information both simultaneously, independently, and from any location where they have an Internet connection, immediately extends the classroom beyond the 40 minutes that we see them and beyond the physical walls of our classroom. Participants from any content area will benefit from the balance of student freedom and teacher control afforded by wikispaces. Some examples of projects that teachers using wikis have created are: classroom study guides for full and half-year courses and even individual exams, collaborative projects with other schools in other countries, choose-your-own-ending stories, and student-driven tutorials for all levels of mathematics.

Internet Safety: What you need to know about keeping your students safe online, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 20-21
Time: 8:00-9:00am
Course Description:
If ever there was a hot topic among educators, it is the issue of how to keep yourselves and your students safe as they venture into the realm of online content creation. We wrestle with our fears and those generated by the media regarding the dangers of online activity, but we long to connect our students to the growing amount of quality information, interaction and creative outlets that the web offers. Where is the line?

This workshop will delve into common-sense strategies to help you feel more comfortable about using the internet in the classroom, working with your students in an online collaborative environment, and teaching your students true online ethics.

Internet Safety: What you need to know about keeping your students safe online, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 6
Time: 2:30-4:30pm
Course Description:
If ever there was a hot topic among educators, it is the issue of how to keep yourselves and your students safe as they venture into the realm of online content creation. We wrestle with our fears and those generated by the media regarding the dangers of online activity, but we long to connect our students to the growing amount of quality information, interaction and creative outlets that the web offers. Where is the line?

This workshop will delve into common-sense strategies to help you feel more comfortable about using the internet in the classroom, working with your students in an online collaborative environment, and teaching your students true online ethics.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Track Student Writing and Foster Collaboration through Google Docs, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 30 and December 1
Time: 8:00-9:00am
Course Description:
Working with students as they learn to become writers is often a trial and error process, and we struggle sometimes with the ability to track changes in their revisions. Also, sometimes we have students that truly need more than just a conference or two to set them on the right path to creating a quality piece of writing. What if you could write alongside your students from the very first sentence to the final revision? What if you could provide scaffolding for the students to help them organize their thoughts and see the changes they make to that structure in real time?

Welcome to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, where you can collaborate on a document with a student from the outset, and track changes in their work as they complete it. This application, free from the folks at Google, also allows for a permanent storage place for student writing that is secure and trustworthy. Have a student that loses work, CD's, or flashdrives? Google Docs automatically saves writing every 30 seconds and allows the students to access their writing anywhere they have an internet connection. If you are serious about improving the quality of your student writing, think about taking this workshop.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Track Student Writing and Foster Collaboration through Google Docs, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 28
Time: 2:30-4:30pm
Course Description:
Working with students as they learn to become writers is often a trial and error process, and we struggle sometimes with the ability to track changes in their revisions. Also, sometimes we have students that truly need more than just a conference or two to set them on the right path to creating a quality piece of writing. What if you could write alongside your students from the very first sentence to the final revision? What if you could provide scaffolding for the students to help them organize their thoughts and see the changes they make to that structure in real time?

Welcome to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, where you can collaborate on a document with a student from the outset, and track changes in their work as they complete it. This application, free from the folks at Google, also allows for a permanent storage place for student writing that is secure and trustworthy. Have a student that loses work, CD's, or flashdrives? Google Docs automatically saves writing every 30 seconds and allows the students to access their writing anywhere they have an internet connection. If you are serious about improving the quality of your student writing, think about taking this workshop.

SearchSmarter: Increasing Online Productivity through more efficient research, 2hrs.
Date(s): November 5
Time: 2:30-4:30pm
Course Description:
How do you judge the worthiness of an internet site? When we search for information, or ask our students to search for information, we need to be able to use as many filters as we can to eliminate excess choices that detract from our task at hand: we need to search smarter. The percentage of students who venture beyond the first three or four hits on a Google search is minimal. As those charged with teaching them to delve deeper, providing them with failsafe strategies for making those top three quality sites is imperative.

Using simple Boolean search strategies, as well as alternative search methods and search engines, this workshop will arm you with a multitude of methods for helping your students find a higher percentage of useful information with their searching. You will also be shown how to create a custom search engine that limits the sites that students can search to only those you want them to access.

Introduction to Social Networking and Personal Learning Environments: Using Smarter People to Raise your Level of Thinking, 3hrs.
Date(s): November 5-7
Time: 8:00-9:00am
Course Description:
Professional development is often thought of as being the "sit and get" variety, however, with the emergence of new social networking software professional development can be taken to a whole new, interactive level. This workshop will explore the power of using a network to help you learn "socially," through the use of professional networking sites, social bookmarking, and RSS, participants in this class will learn to find intelligent people in your field and "attach" themselves to them. As they learn and acquire resources, so will you!

Some of the applications used in this class will be the Classroom 2.0 Social Network, del.icio.us bookmarking, and Google Reader. Teachers and staff with familiarity with any of these applications are strongly encouraged to attend.

Introduction to Social Networking and Personal Learning Environments: Using Smarter People to Raise your Level of Thinking, 3hrs.
Date(s): November 14-16
Time: 2:30-3:30pm
Course Description:
Professional development is often thought of as being the "sit and get" variety, however, with the emergence of new social networking software professional development can be taken to a whole new, interactive level. This workshop will explore the power of using a network to help you learn "socially," through the use of professional networking sites, social bookmarking, and RSS, participants in this class will learn to find intelligent people in your field and "attach" themselves to them. As they learn and acquire resources, so will you!

Some of the applications used in this class will be the Classroom 2.0 Social Network, del.icio.us bookmarking, and Google Reader. Teachers and staff with familiarity with any of these applications are strongly encouraged to attend.

Copyright or copy wrong, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 16 and 19
Time: 8:00-9:00am
Course Description:
As a district we are entering a phase where our student work is becoming increasingly public, as is the content we create for educational purposes. At what point do we as teachers leave the protection of "Fair Use," and enter into the area of copyright infringement? This is information we need to know.

Our society, and especially our students, are becoming increasingly a "cut-and-paste" society, where information, pictures, audio, and video found on the internet are viewed as free for the taking. This is far from the truth; having a clear understanding of what is copyright and what is "copywrong" will help you steer yourselves and your students away from potential legal issues down the road.

Additionally, this workshop will explore the idea of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to "creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare 'some rights reserved.'"

Copyright or copy wrong, 2 hrs.
Date(s): November 29
Time: 2:30-4:30pm
Course Description:
As a district we are entering a phase where our student work is becoming increasingly public, as is the content we create for educational purposes. At what point do we as teachers leave the protection of "Fair Use," and enter into the area of copyright infringement? This is information we need to know.

Our society, and especially our students, are becoming increasingly a "cut-and-paste" society, where information, pictures, audio, and video found on the internet are viewed as free for the taking. This is far from the truth; having a clear understanding of what is copyright and what is "copywrong" will help you steer yourselves and your students away from potential legal issues down the road.

Additionally, this workshop will explore the idea of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to "creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare 'some rights reserved.'"

Technorati Tags: professionaldevelopment, classes, education, school2.0

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Fall Professional Development Workshops, so far

While we are painfully late in getting these out to the teachers, here are the courses I am offering to our staff this fall. Please let me know of a few things as you read this:

opinions on the descriptions and appeal to the classroom teacher.
resources I can use to further strengthen the offerings
how you might want to adapt them into your offerings
if you are interested in participating via skype or any of the myriad conferencing options we have now.

The classes:

Presenting with Google Earth in the Social Studies Classroom
Teaching has become such a visual profession, with great emphasis placed on the context within which you present the material to the students. Using traditional methods of presentation such as PowerPoint can be augmented with several emerging technologies. Google Earth allows teachers to create dynamic, visually engaging presentations that employ the use of video, image, and geographical interfaces.

The Classroom Blog: How to move your students writing to a secure, online community
Our definition of literacy is quickly changing, so much so that we really need to rethink what it means to be "literate" in this century. According to a study commisioned by the National School Board Association, more than 50% of high school students have produced content on the web. Whether that means they are posting to a MySpace or Facebook page, or building a website or wiki, our students are active online. Just as with anything else we teach them, we need to be able to teach them how to create good content, content that has real value both in design and delivery.

Blogging with your students is a great step in this direction. Student writing proficiency and their desire to write will amaze you when you give them the freedom to create on their own blog. We will use 21classes to create your classroom blog. Depending on your level of comfort, we will allow your students writing to be viewable to others, or just to registered members of the site. Other topics to be discussed: online safety, online collaboration, and copyright.

The Media Rich Classroom: Using Video to Engage and Assess students
We have a multitude of resources at our disposal on a daily basis, and our students live and consume digital media on a daily basis. How can you get that media into your classroom in a manner that allows for thoughtful discussion and dissection? This workshop will focus on ways in which you can embed media into your teaching style without completely redesigning everything you do. Primarily, we will look at unitedstreaming's Quiz Builder, which allows for the creation of independent assessments based on videos. These assessments are completed online by your students and the results are emailed to you.

This class will also utilize YouTube, Google Video, TeacherTube, PBS, and other video sites that allow for the legal playback of material on a website or in educational materials. Participants in this workshop will leave with several assessments created, and lessons augmented by video and other digital technologies.

Feedback Matters: How student feedback can change your lesson design: before, during, and after
We spend a good portion of our school year assessing our students on what have learned in our classrooms. But how often do we assess them on how they learned best? Asking students for feedback on your classroom practices, lesson design, and subject choice can lead to great strides in your professional practice. A simple five-question survey, skillfully designed, can yield feedback from the students such as what presentation mode the students enjoyed most, what articles mattered the most to them, or what area they would like you to have spent more time on.

The Wiki Way: Using Wikis as Collaborative Environments
Several teachers in the district have begun to use the power of wikis to enable their students to work collaboratively on web pages centered around a particular subject or project. Sites that use “wiki” technology are turning the ideas we have held about online research upside down. A Wiki is defined as:

a type of web site that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content.... This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative website itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, ...and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Teaching, within 5 Years

If you had the gift of foresight, what do you think our profession would look like in five year's time? Are the powers of change severe enough to move the field of education out of the rut it has settled so comfortably in, regardless of the myriad changes going on in the professional world around us? This post came to mind as I read the following from David Warlick:

I think that it’s part of the job. It is my job, as a teacher, to be able to teach today — to be skilled at using today’s information technologies within today’s information environments and apply pedagogies that reflect today’s information environments. We suffer from the myths of old world education, that you go to school so that you will be prepared for the next 30 or 35 years. But the teacher we are at graduation from college, is not necessarily the teacher we need to be five years later. Those days are long behind us — and I think that the job has become a whole lot more exciting as a result.
Formal staff development is important. We all need new ideas, new energy, new inspiration. Districts and service agencies should continue to make available any kind of professional development opportunities that are successful. But it’s still the job of the teacher to be competent to teach in the classrooms that today’s students need.

Certainly, the situation is far more complex than this. Teachers do not have nearly enough time, nor enough compensation. They do not have the resources, and many resources are actually blocked from access. They are expected to do so much more than teach, and they are held responsible within conditions that are often entirely beyond their control. I’ve often said that the very best thing we could do to improve teaching and learning is to give teachers the time. Every teacher should have one hour of on-the-job professional time for every hour they spend in instructional supervision.

Warlick, whose ideas are championed in many blogs more renowned than this one, had, in the past, spoke of teaching students to teach themselves in a post not too long ago. The generation of students that is graduating college today and will become teachers in the next few years should also not be allowed to escape this responsibility as well. We need learners as much as we need teachers. We need, I should say, those willing to unlearn and relearn much more than we need anything else.

The Teaching Meme I Never Responded To....

Cindy Barnsley passed this meme on to me on 8/22/07. Despite showing a lack of technorati use, I figured I would honor the meme and continue it along even though it is quite belated.

I am a good teacher because…I think about how my students will be changed when they leave our classrooms, and do everything I know to do to affect that change.
If I weren’t a teacher I would be a…struggling writer, professional trailrunner (I wish), professional student.
My teaching style is…entirely based on my passion for the subject matter. If I don't feel it, I find it hard to believe that the students will either. Think about it, people have so much on their minds anyway that if we don't make it matter to them, we are just noise.
My classroom is…wherever my laptop and LCD projector can be plugged in, or even further, wherever I can find wifi.
My lesson plans are…more and more being influenced by UbD; I start with the end in mind more than I ever have before.
One of my teaching goals is…get rid of the term "integrate" in regards to technology.
The toughest part of teaching is…creating authentic assessments to examine whether or not our students have reached the level of understanding we need.
The thing I love about teaching is…the satisfaction of hearing your students talk about your class material serendipitously outside of the classroom.
A common misconception about teaching is…it ends at the end of the last period of the day.
The most important thing I’ve learning since I started teaching is…every parent was once a student too, and their experience as a student bears mightily on their attitude towards you as the teacher of their child.