My Goals - did I make it?

Last year I made a post about my goals for the year. Well...the school year is almost over...lets see how I did :)


Here was my list:


1. Use more integrated resources in my everyday lessons

- Well, I did...but not in the way I imagined I would. I thought I would use technology more in my everyday classes (Chemistry 11) but instead I used more manipulatives, demos, and then some tech like twitter, youtube, phet, etc... 

2. Do more labs

- Accomplished this goal. added 7 more hands on activities/labs to the class

3. Do a better job communicating with parents...and not just the bad stuff. I want to call up a parent to say "your kid did a great job!"

- Yes and No... I communicated with parents more, but I still fell short when the kids did well. I need to work on this more.

4. Know more kids in my school.

- Made great strides here. I made a conscious effort to say hi/good morning/how was your weekend/need some help to as many kids as I could on a daily basis. 

5. Go to more school sports and support my students

- Failed miserably - having a kid during winter sport season killed this one :)

6. Be passionate about more stuff

- I found and lost and found my passion again throughout the year. As always, it was collaborating with other, when I felt the spark most (thank you PLN =D )

So, overall, I think I did pretty well this year. Starting to make my list for next year already! 

My question to you is: What did you set out to do? Did you accomplish it? Where did you fail? 

Why I don't like black and white statements....

When I was a kid, I grew up in a small community. I had a simplistic view on life... If work needed to be done, you did it... If Old Yeller needed to be put down, you manned up, grabbed your gun and shot your best friend. Unfortunately, when I became a teacher, life started to throw me problems that didn't have a single answer. Life was more gray and situations were more complex than I ever thought. A Professor once told me problems were either simple, ugly, horrible or good luck fixing and only the simple ones had an easy answer. So, I learned to develop a set of skills that allowed me to look at each instance and make better and better judgement calls.

Since then, I have lost patience with black and white thinking...

I understand when kids still see the world in this way... they haven't developed a sense of the complexity of life. But when adults make statements that are simplistic and damaging, I take offence (trying to not to say bad words). Some of you might remember my tirade over Tom Schimmer's Pro-D. His message challenged the teachers in the building to be progressive... what it accomplished was pissing off a lot of people who were already doing the right thing. Statements like: "QUALITY should trump TIMELINESS!" aren't helpful. Why even make this statement? Why just not say, timeliness doesn't matter? Instead say: "good practice in assessment and instruction will always improve the learning and therefore the works produced by your students" or "both quality and timeliness are vital and not mutually exclusive"? 

So my point is the following... be careful with your glib black and white statements. Be especially careful about making simplistic statements when you are talking about a complex problem... I expect better from the so called experts in the field of education....

 

I think Robert Frost was almost a 21st Century thinker....

The masterpeice by Robert Frost: The Road not taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that, the passing there
had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference

I read this... then watch this:

I am starting to think, that its not the road less taken, or even the road he didn't take...but instead, its the infinite possibilities ahead of us. I love being a learner in the 21st Century!!!



I think the poem should start and end:

Infinite roads diverge, then converge in a yellow wood... and I finally found one (or forty) that worked for me!

When the model for the delivery of Professional Development gets in the way...

Over this last week, I had the opportunity to be a part of three consecutive Professional Development Days. Each one was very different from the other...

Day 1: Presenter: Ruth Sutton - Best Teaching Practices, 4 Schools and approx. 300+ teachers in Heritage Woods Secondary Gymnasium.

Pros - Expert in the Field, Engaging, 3-4 good points about how to help students assess their own work

Cons - Huge group of people with varying levels of interest and background in the subject area, no differentiation of learning, barrage of information with little or no time for process.

Day 2: Presenter: Jeremy Brown (me) - Streamlining Online Involvement using Twitter and Google Reader #risdeprod. 13 people in a small room at Riverside Secondary.

Pros - Small group, great collaboration, chunked learning, lots of play time

Cons - Small group, how do you get more people involved? How do you keep that collaboration going?

Day 3: Presenter (multiple including Chris Kennedy) - TedxUBC - Fast Forward Education approx 100 people at UBC on Robson. 

Pros - short talks (20 minutes), high level presenters who are experts in a field, collaboration among physical and virtual participants 

Cons - Overload of information, no time to question or plan, little time to process that much information, only decaf coffee left after first break! 

Somewhere mixed in among these three days is the power behind Professional Development. Each of these days has a piece of the puzzle –pre-learning, experts leading, small targeted groups, collaboration & clearly defined, attainable goals. 

How I would Fix a Pro-D day for everyone:

1.       Prep it up – You need to get your staff together on the same page. Start a study group! Every Wednesday morning before school, bring donuts and coffee, order some books and talk about what you just read! Try The Big Picture by Dennis Littky, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell or Something from Fullen/Hargraves or DeFour.

2.       Experts - We still need experts in the field to teach/lead us. What we don't need, is an expert talking at us for 5 hours. We need the background, research and then some guidance where to go next or how to apply it to practice. Don't talk longer than 1 1/2 hours...MAX! If you are speaking longer than that you have lost a majority of your audience. Would you ever lecture a class for that long? Experts/Presenters need to start leading by example.

3.       Small Targeted Groups (this is the big one) - We all know that we can get lost in a crowd. There is little or no accountability and it is way too easy to get off task. When you have a small, targeted group, you have a group of individuals who are at the same level of interest/ability level. When I am teaching Chemistry and a group of students are struggling with a concept, I bring them up to the board as a group. I don't understand why we don't do this type of targeted instruction with teachers. Michelle Ciolfitto, from Heritage Woods Secondary, does this amazing activity with highlighters. As she walks by a student, she will use one of three highlighters to mark a student’s work. 

a.       If they have mastered the concept that they are working on, they get a yellow tag (happy).

b.      If they almost have the concept they get a pink mark (I think [pink] I got it) and continue to work on it with others until they have mastery.

c.       If they really don't get it, they get a blue mark and they can work in a small group with her.

Simple, good instructional techniques that work with adults and kids. Group people by ability and interest and you can focus your resources where they are needed.

4.       Collaboration – “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” Henry Ford.  Every principal will tell you, after a staff meeting, that teachers the worst audience in the world (well almost… a group of principals is even worse). We yearn to collaborate but so rarely get the chance.  During a Pro-D day, have your teachers tweet about their experiences, thoughts, and impressions as it happens. Have a twitter search tag like #rsideprod and collaborate. Bring those discussions to your next staff meeting or study group.

5.       Defined and Attainable Goals for the day: Write some “I can” or “I understand” statements. For my day, I did “I can tweet, use hashtags and create a PLN”. I had 3 others, and by the end of the day, it gave some structure to the day and clarified the goals. I think the pictures say it all.

Even though this post has nothing to do with the content of the Pro-D, I find that is seldom the problem. The structure in which we deliver it needs to be reformed and changed because it is getting in the way of good instruction. These are my thoughts…what are yours?

Being a Young Turk (despite not being that young)

In the early 20th century, when Turkey was moving towards secular constitutional republic, a group of progressive thinkers emerged: The Young Turks. They were modernists, reformists and opposed to the status quo. In modern times, it is often used to describe those of us who are unsatisfied being a follower, those who want to lead by example and seek success on our own terms.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his Young Turks

On Friday, I was at a Pro-D with the two PoCo Secondary Schools, Riverside and Terry Fox. I felt like cattle, in a room with 140 other teachers and administration. There was no sense of individual learning. It was the sage on stage...sit down and listen...

The goal was to talk about progressive 21st century assessment (grading). Things like: no more zeros, no penalization for late work and not grading homework (not revolutionary stuff I know).

Pro-D at Fox

 That was one of the problems, while I got two or three new ideas out of the session, I didn't get enough new material to challenge me. I could have been on twitter in #edchat for 5 minutes and gotten 100X more.

But what really irked me, more than anything else, was how the material was presented. 5 1/2 hours of being talked at (about differentiated learning of all things) is not good for anyone. Daniel Pink said it best...a good talk has 3 components "Levity, Brevity and Repetition. This presentation simply had a lot of words put together and spread over a morning and afternoon. How can someone talk about 21st century learning then do something like that? It's the same old, "do as I say, not as I do" approach and I am sick of it. I put my hand up 3 times to challenge him on ideas and he never acknowledged me...are you kidding me? Do you know who I am? I'm Jeremy Brown and I'm kind of a big deal!

I am done. I refuse to put up with anymore lousy, half-baked presentations. I want my Pro-D to be meaningful, not just two parts of it. I want my Pro-D to be personal, tailored to my needs as a teacher. Am I needing in terms of formative assessment? I don't think so... I do need to learn about good assessment techniques though (which is where I should have spent 5 hours).

We should demand more of our Pro-D. But on the flip side, we should demand more of ourselves and each other. Thats's one of the things I did agree with the presenter about... We as teachers need to take responsibility for our our own learning and that of the children we teach. We need to be more progressive, challenge the status quo and stop sitting on our laurels. Some of us forget that school is not about employing teachers...its about kids learning.

Ataturk (the great father of the Turkish Republic) said "Teachers are the one and only people who save nations". But we have the responsibility to push nations, the populace and ourselves...

Why am I such a better learner now?

So whats the secret to turn someone on to learning? For me, it started late...

I am a goal driven, hyperactive, excitable and sometimes grumpy individual. I love to learn now, I'll spend an entire night on Wikipedia, opening tabs going from one article to another. Where did this enthusiasm for learning come from? I never loved school (although I loved some of my teachers - a huge shout out to Mr. Carrillo and Mrs. Barnes), I picked up way more by walking through the forest with my Oma (grandma) than I did in the classroom. 

I struggled in school, there is no news in that. I failed almost all my classes in grade 9 and while at the time I blamed everyone else but myself, it was my fault. I was a lazy, uninspired and disengaged (did I mention lazy) kid. What changed? Well...the glib answer is not much. There had to be a point somewhere along the way when I started to love to learn.

I can imagine my junior high teachers would be horrified to find out that I am now a colleague. Maybe thats the point the point of this post... sometimes we give up too early on kids. We write them off as dumb or lazy when they are just late bloomers.

I work with amazing colleagues but some of them have never failed a course in their lives or even gotten a B. Many were top of their class and valedictorians of their graduating classes. They can inspire and lead their classes like generals but often struggle to understand why a student has such a difficulty picking up a simple topic or misbehaves. I think I get it more than others because I was that kid. I was the one who never handed his homework, sat at the back of the room, goofed off, etc...

From that experience I made a list of ways to help kids like me be more successful and learn to love to learn:

1. Make multiple connections: The more people I connected to, the better I did. Older students, tutors, peers, teachers, parents, etc...
2. Talk to me about stuff I love and connect it to what you teach
3. Use technology to engage me: Make my learning non-linear...allow me to explore links and connections
4. Be passionate - You'll carry me away with a story and make me cry to Charlotte's Web if you do a good Wilbur!
5. Just acknowledge my existence - If you do one thing, Say hi to kids like me in the hallways. That one piece made all the difference in the word.

So how do I learn now?

1.  Like I said, I use Wikipedia for non linear links (books are too binding)
2. I use Twitter (@jbsd43) to connect to people all over the globe: Students, teachers, researchers and parents 
3. I am driven by other exciting educators who passionately make their case for learning
4. I say say hi to kids and try to make their day as good as they made mine.(not really about learning but creating the relationship so learning is easier.)

I know these things have been said a thousand times before and its nothing new but until its contextualized, i'll never learn it :)

School Teacher Vs. Classroom Teacher

This year more than most, I have noticed the clear difference between a school teacher and a classroom teacher. George Couros' amazing blog post What makes a master teacher really got me thinking ...and the more I thought it, the more I saw it. On September 3rd, I saw teachers coming in on their days off to help with the grade 9 preview day... Michelle Burton, Teri Bates, Sue Kilpatrick, Laura Epp, Ron "the Man" Haselhan and so many others. These are school teachers... they don't teach subject or curriculum, they teach students. Beyond that, they teach every student in the school and that to me is a powerful thing.

We are so blessed at Riverside to have so many teachers willing to give up their time for each other and the kids. Every time Bryan Gee walks down the hallways, he says hi to ever kid he knows and a lot he doesn't! :) He makes 1000s of connections each time he goes to the office.

Bryan Gee, Oregon 2009

Every time Gary Horton (@ghorton) photocopies, he takes the extra minute to refill the paper in both photocopiers. That seems like such a stupid, little thing, but I appreciate it so much and this spirit of giving and volunteering is passed down the kids.

Riverside's Giving Tree

When I think about why I want to be a school teacher, I remember John Wooden's talk at TED. He talked about it the best when he said "Why do I teach? ...Where else could I be with such splendid company"