Dedicated to relinquishing responsibility for learning to the students
I first published this post at the start of the 08-09 school year.
It’s since been revised, updated and reposted here:
First Day of School? Here’s How to Get Students Thinking
Follow the link to two great activities you can use anytime of the school year.
Last week, I did a 90 minute keynote at the New Mexico School Board Association’s Leader’s Retreat. I used a “Socratic approach” and framed my talk around a series of themes and sample questions in a talk called “What Questions Should School Boards Be Asking about 21st Century Learning?” For details on my keynote theme, essential questions and blog reader comments click here.
The school board leaders had some interesting responses to my evaluation that inspired me with their willingness to rethink the landscape of teaching and learning. Here are my three evaluation prompts and some of their responses:
What did you find to be most valuable from today’s workshop?
What was a frustration you had today?
How will today’s workshop impact your school board planning?
Image credit: flickr/ Wolfgang Staudt
Next week, I’m keynoting at the New Mexico School Board Association’s Leader’s Retreat. I plan to take a “Socratic approach” and frame my talk around a series of themes and sample questions that I think school boards should be asking in response challenges and opportunities of 21st century learning.
I wanted to offer readers the chance to offer their suggestions – via this blog’s comment or Twitter/edteck.
I plan to address three themes and pose some reflective questions for board members to consider.
Theme 1. Learning must engage student in rigorous thinking at higher levels of Bloom – analyzing, evaluating and creating. School boards should ask:
Theme 2. Learning is relevant when the student understands how the information or skill has some application to their life, has an opportunity to figure out their own process rather than just learn “the facts,” and is given opportunities to reflect on their work and their progress as learners. School boards should ask …
Theme 3. The digital age has redefined literacy. To paraphrase David Warlick, Literacy now means the ability to: find information, decode it, critically evaluate it, organize it into digital libraries, and be able to share it with others. School boards should ask …
And finally I will wrap up the talk with an overarching perspective on accountability and assessment. I find it ironic that while schools chase NCLB “proficiency,” life has become an open book test. We need to unleash the power of assessment that targets and inspires. One-shot, high stakes tests are just autopsies. Students need regular check-ups where teachers can gauge student progress and target instruction. Ultimately the program must be designed to foster student self-assessment that gives them responsibility for monitoring their own progress. Students should be supported in on-going sell-reflection that addresses questions such as:
Schools will need to become places that create engaging and relevant learning experiences, provoke student reflection, and help students apply the learning to life. Authentic accountability is reciprocal … leadership is responsible to provide resources for success, educators are responsible for results. Simply sorting students along the “bell curve” won’t do.
… Please add a comment below or Twitter to let me know if I’m leaving anything out.
Sept 22, 2009 UPDATE: For School Board Leaders’ responses to the workshop see: School Board Leaders Reflect on Essential Questions / 21st Century Learning
I’ve been preparing for an upcoming two day workshop at Nassau County SD (FL) – assisting high school teacher with strategies for teaching in a block schedule. It got me thinking about my attitude about class length and how my perspective evolved as my instructional vision changed.
When I first started teaching high school social studies the central planning question I asked myself was, “What am I going to do with my students?” The focus was on my activities, because I thought my job was to convey information to my students – to tell them things they didn’t know. Then they could practice working on what I told them. Finally my students could prove they “got the things” by giving me back what I gave them on a test. Thus my curriculum planning centered about how I was going to deliver the information to them. I had a lot of information to cover and had to figure out how to cut it up into 180 bites. “This year I hope we can at least get to WWII!”
Seen from the “lecture” perspective, I liked short classes – holding the attention of 30 high school kids was a challenge. I remember when our class periods got cut from 48 minutes to 45, I thought – great, now I don’t have to talk as long. I can shave a few minutes off my delivery.
When I first started teaching, the question I repeatedly asked myself was, “What am I going to do with my students?” The focus was on my activities, because I thought my job was to convey information to my students – to tell them things they didn’t know.
After a few years of lecturing, I had the realization that I was the hardest working person in my class. I was doing most of the learning – research, analysis, synthesis and preparation of summaries to share with my students. And so I began the long journey of redefining my role as teacher from “teacher as talker” to “teacher as designer of learning environments.” I had to figure out how to create situations where my students could “research, analyze, synthesize and prepare summaries” to share with audiences (other than me). And as I made the transition, I longed for longer blocks of instructional time. I found that students needed time to decide how to approach a task, trouble shoot their approach, execute their plan, present what they learned and reflect on how it went.
Thus I learned the first lesson of transitioning to the block schedule. Don’t ask teachers who lecture to suddenly work in a block schedule – get teachers comfortable with student-centered learning and wait for them to demand longer class periods. In other words, instructional vision precedes organizational tinkering. (Later as an assistant superintendent, I put that lesson to good use.)
So how will I structure this week’s block scheduling workshops ? For starters I won’t spend the day talking at them. Of course, teachers will want specific strategies they can use. While I will share many approaches, the workshop has to be more than a collection of lesson ideas. That’s too much like my early method of teaching – me simply delivering information. Besides I won’t be the smartest person in the room.
Staff development should model what you want to see in the classroom. As Donald Finkel has written, teaching is “providing experience, provoking reflection.” My goal will be to give the teachers the experience of transitioning through a variety of learning situations of varying lengths. I want them to see the learning strategies in action and get a feel for how their level engagement can impact their sense of passage of time. I want them to leave with more than teaching ideas. I hope to provoke their ongoing reflection on what happens when students have more time to take ownership of the content, process and evaluation of their learning.
I’ve come to depend on the folks I follow on Twitter to keep me informed and thinking. One of my favorite contributors is Instructional Technology Coordinator, Ben Grey. This morning I followed his tweet to the post “Why Technology?” he did at the TL Advisor Blog. Ben raised an important question,
“Something has been happening lately in education, and the implications are a bit unsettling. People are beginning to ask a cogent question, but I fear it’s being framed for the wrong reason. I’m hearing more and more important decision makers asking, “Why are we using technology?”
… If tomorrow you had to stand in front of your Board of Education and respond to the question, “why should we continue to use and pursue technology in our district,” what would you say?” more
I invite you to join Ben’s conversation. I posted a response to his question at the TL blog. But I want to reprint it here to share with my readers.
My response:
It’s a great question and one that I’ve had to answer as an assistant superintendent for instruction. Here’s a few elements of what I’d say to the school board.
As more information is digitized, we move from a top-down broadcast model of communications to one that fosters creativity and collaboration. The digital age devalues lower-order thinking skills but provides tools that allow us to analyze, evaluate and create.
New technologies can put our students in charge of the information they access, store, analyze and share. Many of our students only have access to those tools in our schools. They have the right to participate in the digital age.
Investing in technology should not be a thoughtless response. New technology does not necessarily improve the quality of instruction (We have all sat through dull PowerPoint presentations that were as “mind-numbing” as an old filmstrip.)
We should continue to look for a ROI on our technology investments, but it may not be tracked in test scores that simply measure lower order recall of information. A better metric would ask if a technology helped us to create learning experiences that provoke student reflection in a new, more engaging and collaborative way. Such as…
Here’s an example of all three put to use in a collaboration by a self-directed international group of teachers (It was mainly coordinated / promoted via Twitter.) “Build Literacy Skills with Wordle”
Shouldn’t our students have access to the technologies that allow them to create, collaborate and share their thinking on subjects that matter to them?
Image source: Flickr / Money ~ by PT Money
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