Did You Know...

So I was doing some websurfing today and I came across this astonishing fact:

By the year 2049, a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the human race.

It was a part of this presentation, created by Karl Fisch, a high school technology teacher who was trying to get his teachers to think differently about what education should look like in today's classrooms.

How does this change the conversations that we're having about teaching and learning? Does our work change knowing that our world is changing drastically? Do the hours we spend in professional development seem short to anyone other than me?

What should the focus of our work become when we know that computers in the future will be so much more than they already are?

Has your school changed its focus?

Have you?

Common Challenges

I recently had the opportunity to present to a group of lead teachers about the process of creating a professional learning community. These lead teachers (or IRTs—instructional resource teachers—as they are referred to in our county) are each responsible at their respective schools for making broad, building-level decisions about curriculum, assessment, and instruction, so I was excited to engage them in conversation. One of the areas of focus of the presentation was on common challenges that I have seen and read about in the PLC creation process, and these common challenges were clearly echoed by the IRTs. They were:
• Defining a compelling purpose
• Creating necessary organizational structures
• Identifying specific team tasks
• Dealing with team dynamics and teacher personalities

Let’s be honest: developing a professional learning community is hard work. It requires an initial investment of time for collaboration, it requires teachers to work with each other in new and sometimes complicated ways, and it requires tremendous patience. In order for a faculty to undertake this difficult work, they have to believe it its underlying purpose. This underlying purpose must be compelling, persuasive, and specific—it must address the foundational belief that all students can learn, it must convince teachers that a PLC can help them improve student learning, and it must relate to the individual mission and goals of a school. For administrators and teacher leaders attempting to define and “sell” this purpose, the task is not easy.

Another challenge in the PLC creation process relates to organizational structure; specifically, how can the structural characteristics of the organization support PLC development. Of these characteristics, the most important is time. School leaders must identify ways to give teacher teams significant blocks of time during the school day to collaborate—in fact, if leaders are not able to create a schedule that allows for significant, regular common planning, then embarking on the PLC process is likely a lost cause. In addition to time, however, are other important factors. How will teams be organized, e.g., by grade level, by discipline, by common interest? What resources will they need in their work? Will teams have assigned leaders, or are all members on equal footing? All of these questions must be answered, and those answers will have an effect on the success of PLC development.

Once the structural pieces are in place for teams to meet, those teams must be given a certain sense of direction. A simple “improve teaching and learning” is too vague—in order for teams to function effectively, especially at the beginning stages, they need specific tasks to focus their work and to support their developing skills in collaboration. Tasks typically fall into two categories: administrative and pedagogical. In terms of administrative tasks, will teams be required to develop agendas? Will they be required to keep meeting minutes? Will they formally report to administrators on their progress? On the pedagogical side, what should team meetings look like? Should they be planning lessons together? Should they be reviewing student work against set rubrics? Will they focus on one subject to begin with, or should they focus on multiple subjects at once? The substance of collegial conversations during team meetings is the real meat of PLC work, and without some direction those conversations can quickly devolve into unproductive wastes of teacher time.

Finally, the most difficult challenge of developing a PLC (at least in my experience) is group dynamics. What do you do when team members don’t get along, or when some teachers openly resist the PLC process? This is an especially difficult challenge for administrators. On the one hand, too much involvement in team dynamics can cripple the development of team community; that is, unless teams have the freedom and space to resolve their own internal issues, they will never learn to trust and respect each other. At the same time, vocal naysayers can poison the PLC process—faculty members will watch to see how administrators respond to rebellion, and timidity on the part of school leaders can send a message that collaboration isn’t truly required.

For those of you who are also involved in the PLC process, do these challenges ring true? Which ones have you found to be most significant, and have you identified any successful strategies to address them? Would you add other challenges to the list?

Building Digital Communication Skills

It's been a fun few months around my room---You see, I've started to use the tools of the Read/Write Web with my sixth grade students on a pretty regular basis. Our greatest accomplishment: We've started a blog and podcast program covering current events that my students are completely jazzed by!

This work wasn't easy, however. I spent several hours downloading software, reading about blogging, sharing sample podcasts with my students, and scaffolding their intial efforts. The majority of this time came after school and on the weekends---and were a result of my own personal interest in technology as an instructional tool.

What made it more difficult was that I've fallen behind in my pacing guides and curriculum maps for social studies and science. Investing classroom time into introducing digital communication to my students has taken time away from content coverage. I've found myself justifying the time that we spend on our digital projects because standardized reading and math tests are used to determine our school's standing in the eyes of the general public.

That's why I was relieved when I came across an interesting collection of resources put together by eSchool News today. It's introduction read:

Educators, economists, and forecasters all agree on the growing importance of so-called "21st-century skills" in the workplace. While reading, writing, and arithmetic will always form the foundation of any solid education, digital communication and media literacy are on the verge of being elevated to the same level of importance. In addition to requiring advanced skills in reading and math, the employers of tomorrow are going to require a high degree of digital and multimedia fluency.

While I'm confident that I'm developing a "high degree of digital and multimedia fluency" in my students, I worry about the children in the majority of America's classrooms.

I wonder how comfortable most teachers are at incorporating 21st Century skills into their instruction. Do teachers have a clear picture of the kinds of skills that 21st Century employers will be looking for? Do they have experience with the kinds of digital communication that will become common-place in the lives of their students? Do they have the support and job-embedded professional development necessary to take risks with technology in their classrooms and with their students?

How can professional learning teams help to ensure that all teachers can develop lessons that introduce students to the digital literacies necessary for success in our rapidly changing world?

Insulting and Ignoring...

I came across an interesting article on David Warlick's blog today that made me reflect on teaching for a moment. In it, the author--John Naughton--heckles newspaper executives who seem baffled that subscriber numbers are down. Another worry, he states is that the average age of newspaper subscribers has risen to an all-time high of 54.

The section of the article that resonated with me the most read:

But in any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren't interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears - still - from the newspaper industry is that there's something wrong with the customers. And what one finds, on closer examination, is that the industry seems determined either to insult or to ignore them.

Does this remind you of education at all? Have we turned away from an understanding of who our "potential future customers" are, instead clinging to a vision of what we want them to be? Can we ever be truly successful as educators if we don't adapt to the changing nature of our "clientel?"

How many times have you heard another educator explain away struggling students by saying, "The kids of today just aren't what they used to be."

Unfortunately, those educators are right---the kids of today aren't what they used to be.

But our schools haven't changed.

Is there a disconnect here?

How do we "fix" it?

Staying Mute....

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post had an interesting column today discussing the merits of educational blogs. Citing a widely read educator named Gardner who has had hundreds of pieces published in newsletters over the past decade, Mathews wrote:

Like me, Gardner is also not very familiar with the education blogs. "I have an
aversion to them because they too often become venues for rants rather than for
reason," he said. "It's a question of time management. I do learn valuable
things at times from blogs, but they seem to attract a disproportionate number
of self-styled experts with dubious credentials who just want to ventilate."

That got me to thinking about what role blogs can/should play in conversations about education? Are blogs sources of information and ideas that we should grow to respect and admire? Do they stimulate conversation between groups of people that normally don't connect? Do they provide opportunities for writers---regardless of expertise---to refine, revise and polish their thinking on critical issues? Or are they just a collection of "rants" and "ventilation?"

Better yet, how do we contribute to the growing base of knowledge about teaching and learning when we join in electronic conversations? Do we have a responsibility as educators to speak up and let our voices be heard?

In Mathews piece, Gardner described his impetus for his writing as his "growing awareness that public education was entering a new era, with unprecedented threats to its very existence. I decided I could no longer stay mute when so much was on the line."

Do educators take great risks by staying mute?

Collective Intelligence

I was doing some research online this weekend, and I came across an interesting term: collective intelligence. The more I read about this concept, the more I became convinced that the idea of collective intelligence helps to explain one of the fundamental strengths of the professional learning team model—the whole really can be greater than the sum of the parts.

I found a number of different definitions of collective intelligence at Wikipedia. One definition was “an intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals, an intelligence that seemingly has a mind of its own.” Another definition by George Por, which rang especially true for me, was “the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation”. In fact, Wikipedia itself is sometimes used as an example of collective intelligence, given that Wikipedia is an organic outcome of the knowledge base and ongoing, collective editing process of thousands of contributors.

I have always thought of a professional learning team as a vehicle for individual improvement, as an opportunity for teachers to learn from each other through a collaborative process and to translate that learning into improvements in classroom practices and improvements in student learning. But the concept of collective intelligence adds another layer to my understanding. PLTs are also entities unto themselves (that is, something more than just a collection of individual teachers), and as a group entity they have the capacity to impact student learning beyond the individual improvements of the constituent members.

Let me give a practical example of what I mean. Let’s say that a teacher comes to her PLT frustrated that one of her students is struggling with fractions. She has tried teaching, re-teaching, working one-on-one, and nothing seems to work. As the PLT discusses this dilemma, various members bring different ideas, perspectives, and resources to the conversation. Because this is a high-functioning team, the goal of the conversation is not just to give the frustrated teacher a laundry list of new possibilities, but rather, as a team, to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the problem and how it might be addressed. Over the course of the conversation, the team discusses the concept of fractions and what it is about fractions that students find difficult. Team members share their own experiences learning about and teaching about fractions, and as each member adds to the conversation, the group identifies possible insights into the reasons underlying the struggling student’s difficulty. The team puts together a plan, which the original teacher will implement, to try several new approaches with the student.

From one perspective, we could say that the original teacher learned something from the other team members, and that she will now be able to improve her practices as a result of that learning. From this perspective, a knowledge transaction occurred: the other teachers shared their knowledge with the original teacher, and she returns to her classroom an even more effective educator. But through the lens of collective intelligence, there is also something else going on here, something of a transformative nature. From a second perspective, the team has increased its collective intelligence through purposeful, organic conversation, and the original teacher returns to the classroom not just as an individual, but as an extension of the team. The team itself has transformed, and through this transformation has increased the individual and collective effectiveness of PLT members.

This is where the concept of collective intelligence has changed my understanding of PLTs. A PLT is not just a setting in which individual teachers come together, learn from each other, and then return to their individual classrooms. A PLT is a collective entity that takes responsibility for a large group of students, and through a variety of structured processes (e.g., conversations, action research, developing common assessments, analyzing student data) is constantly evolving its collective intelligence. Individual teachers become extensions of the PLT, which is in a constant cycle of growth and improvement. By working together in collaboration, the members of a PLT are able to create something greater than themselves, a collective, organic vehicle that is truly more than simply the sum of the parts.