Speaking Clearly and Edu-speaking: In Reply to Liz Willen

Liz Willen, editor of the Hechinger Report, doesn't like educational jargon. Neither do I, nor most people I know. My colleagues and I are some of the first to laugh and roll our eyes at the newest acronyms that get added to the alphabet soup we have to remember as educators. So it may seem that Willen's righteous rant against "the school establishment's 'edu-speak'" (as reprinted in the Washington Post) would resonate with me, but in fact it doesn't. Willen has painted education with too broad a brush, in the process diminishing the expertise and professionalism of educators.

Every profession has their jargon, their acronyms, their vacuous buzzwords. In the worst cases, these are linguistic signifiers, separating the "in-group" from the "out-group". I have no doubt that there are education professionals who use the language of education in that way. However...

I was taking notes during one of those tedious but important school board meetings rookie reporters are assigned to cover when I realized I had no idea what was going on. Board members and various school officials spouted an inaccessible language of acronyms. The board members spent hours talking to and over one another, using terms that must have baffled audience members. I later learned they were discussing raising property taxes to boost the school budget, a critical issue local voters and parents needed to understand.

The inability of a rookie reporter to understand the professional language of any group as they are working should not be taken as a problem with the working group. Is there any doubt that if Willen had been covering a meeting of financial executives, or NASA scientists, or NFL coaches, that there would have been jargon, abbreviations, and shorthand that she was not familiar with? Part of the responsibility of reporters is to translate from specific professional language into readable explanations for the general public, whether covering education or any other field.

Willen asks "Why do we need terms like 'value-added' or 'formative assessments?' Ugh." Well, because a formative assessment is an educational strategy that (1) research has shown is one of the most effective strategies to increase student achievement, and that (2) many teachers don't know how to use well. It's a thing in education. Asking educators not to use the term "formative assessment" is like asking a scientist not to use the term "electromagnetic field." Just because it's a semi-complicated phrase doesn't make it jargon. Derek Zoolander should not be our model for educational language.

"And what of charter-school movement lingo, replete with 'restorative practices' and 'growth mindsets?'" I wasn't aware that these were specifically charter-school terms. Our district has been working with teachers and administrators on restorative practices for several years now. And using the term "growth mindset" is shorthand within the education community for a complex and multi-faceted debate around student self-motivation and how teachers can best model for and encourage struggling learners. To dismiss the term "growth mindset" as simple edu-speak ("Har, har, kids grow!") is to miss the point entirely.

Willen seems to want educators to speak clearly. Nobody I know wants otherwise. But for professionals speaking to each other, using the terminology of the field is how they speak clearly. Asking them to speak to each other the same way they would to someone outside education is to denigrate the professionalism of the field. Willen writes:

Just try to decipher this recent press release about a new study proving“rubric-based assessment can be taken to scale and can produce valid findings with credible and actionable information about student learning that can be used to improve curricular and assignment designs and to increase effectiveness of programs and classes in advancing the most important learning outcomes of college.”

Actually, to educators conversant with their profession, that's pretty clear.

I spent several days at a conference recently with a group of fascinating educators, advocates and policy-makers, all deeply knowledgeable and committed to improving education. In one-on-one chats over a beer or breakfast, they spoke clearly about problems and solutions. And they kept the tone entirely conversational when discussing our children’s classrooms and college choices.
But everything fell apart the minute we broke up into “enabling environments” to revise “cluster logic models” and “establish comprehensive assessment systems.”

Lesson: Professionals don't speak to each other the way they do to non-professionals. This is not an indictment of educational jargon. To assume that everything in education is simple and can be explained in words of one syllable or less is to fall into the "I went to school, how hard can teaching be?" trap.

More than ever, the public needs easily comprehensible information about what is going on in schools, what is working and what is not. So what’s an education journalist to do?

 Learn the terminology and explain it clearly to your readers. In other words, your job.

Does Promoting 21st-Century Instruction Mean That 20th-Century Instruction Was Wrong?

TL;DR version: No.

Full version: Of course not. There were obviously many good instructional strategies and great teachers in the 20th century, as there were in the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries, I'm sure. (I wasn't there.) The point, however, is that our students don't live in those centuries. The world has changed. If we want to be effective in teaching students who will live in the 21st century, we can't use the same teaching practices from prior centuries, no matter how great they were in their day. Time for us to move on.

An effective teaching practice, in its time.
"Philo mediev" by Unknown - Castres, bibliothèque municipale. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

What is 21C Education? #YourEduStory TL;DR version

We can't give students the knowledge they will need for an uncertain future. But we can give them the skills they need to learn for themselves. No matter what innovation and changes happen, our students can be successful if they are able to

1. gather information from a variety of sources,
2. evaluate and analyze that information in context, and
3. do something with that information.

This means that it is much more important for students to learn how to learn deeply, independently, and authentically, than for them to master a body of facts. We must teach them to become master learners.

You Might be a Twitter Bot if...

1. Your username has a random string of numbers at the end, that humans would be unlikely to remember.

2. Your profile description is a list of general descriptions with no specific information or location. (And stars in between phrases; what's that all about?)

3. Your profile description is supposed to be "whimsical" but actually sounds like it was written by a machine who had heard of humans but never actually met one. ("Award-winning" what, Jennifer? "Recovering youth worker"? Ew.)

4. Your profile picture is a stock photo found on the web and multiple other Twitter accounts. (Do a Google Image search to check this.)

5. Your tweets are a series of random, non-sensical phrases or ads.

6. Nobody is starring, retweeting, or replying to your tweets.

7. Your tweets can be found verbatim in Wikipedia or dozens of other tweets, but none are re-tweets or replies. (To check this, copy the text of the tweet and paste it in to a Google search. Put quotes around it, to search for the entire phrase verbatim, then click "Search".)

Addendum: What can you do if you are followed by a Twitter Bot? Please report them for spam and do not follow back. It's a small thing to do, but if enough of us do it, we may have an impact.

P.S. This is just the most recent manifestation of Twitter Bots. Click here to read about a previous one.

P.P.S Got another Bot follower literally while I was writing this post:

On Cell Phones in Classrooms

Poster currently in several classrooms in my district

In the spring, I held an after-school workshop titled "Classroom Management in the Age of BYOD". My intent was for teachers to discuss and share some ideas about successful management strategies in classes where students are using their own cell phones, tablets, or laptops on a regular basis. The workshop went in an unexpected (to me) direction when it became apparent that most of the teachers there were more interested in learning how to ban cell phones and prevent their students from using them. We had suggestions ranging from "collect them at the door" to "email all parents asking them to keep the devices at home" to "remove the wi-fi from all classrooms in the district". I left discouraged.

I once had a ban on cell phones in my classroom. I had a poster similar to the one shown here. That was about 15 years ago, when phones were simply phones, and their use in public places was a novelty. Every few days, one of my students' phones would ring during class, because they weren't used to silencing them. Most of the students' phones resembled the cartoons in this poster. I had to teach them about appropriate and inappropriate times to have their phones' ringers on.

Photo by Flikr user "Images Money", CC-BY 2.0

Do I have to state the obvious? What (most) students carry around in their pockets has as much resemblance to a cell phone from the early 2000's as my laptop computer does with a bakelite rotary dial phone. Most people, including students, are accustomed to silencing ringers and notifications at the appropriate times. What they are not necessarily used to, however, is using their powerful pocket computers for learning and research in addition to socializing and games. This is because we haven't taught them how to do that. And we can't teach them how to use their phones for productive work if we confiscate them on entrance or on sight.

Which brings us to the recurrent hand-wringing article or blog post like this one from Edutopia in June. For all the concern about teachers being "tired of seeing students text each other" and "text language and spelling that creeps into student assignments", there is precious little in this article actually concerned with student learning. The author writes about "the best thing you could do for yourself", "you have to enforce it", "[e]very teacher's tolerance... varies". The closest the author gets to addressing instruction and student learning is a throw-away line:

Perhaps the most important element is minimal downtime in your learning activities, because the temptation to sneak a look is just too strong. 

The comments on the article continue in a similar vein: students are just too distracted by their phones, and need to focus and concentrate on what the teacher is presenting. This is decidedly not a student-centered mindset.

Fortunately, there are educators who recognize that these pocket computers (a) are not going away any time soon, (b) are only going to get more powerful, useful, and widespread, and (c) will be a crucial part of our students' jobs and lives, even more than they are today. Exhibit A, from 2010 (!) by Doug Johnson in ISTE's Learning and Leading with Technology. (Thanks to Chris Ratican on Twitter for the link.) Exhibit B, from Katie Martin, Director of Professional Learning at the University of San Diego. Exhibit C, from Lisa Nielsen, in Tech & Learning.

We cannot simply pretend that powerful pocket computers don't exist or are not going to be important to our students in their futures. We have to teach students how to use them for productive learning. Doing otherwise, in 2015, is educational malpractice.

UPDATE: As if on cue, here's this article from CBCNews: "Smartphones in the classroom: a teacher's dream or nightmare?" It's actually a fairly reasonable article except for this key quote:

But what about the distraction? Surely kids with a cellphone or tablet in front of them will stop focusing on a lecture and start Facebooking or online chatting?

As they should! Just as adults do in a meeting during a boring, irrelevant lecture or presentation. Our teaching methods and strategies have got to match up with students' needs. If you're trying to lecture to high school students, don't be surprised to see them tune you out, whether it's with their phone or by doodling or just by daydreaming.

ANOTHER UPDATE 12/6/2015: Here's another one, from NPR in November: How to Get Students to Stop Using Their Cell Phones in Class. As Julie Smith (@julnilsmith) points out on Twitter, the comments are terrifying. There is one comment I like, however, from user616828: "The 1950s called, they want their pedagogy back."

More about Website Creation Tools

In a previous post I shared my frustration with Google Sites. But what are the alternatives? What can I recommend to teachers who want to create a simple website for their classes?

In working with various programs over the last couple of weeks, I've become more familiar with the options. As is my habit, I created a diagram to organize my thoughts and express my understanding. You see the result here.

Most people want something that is easy to use; that's understandable. However, some people want to have the flexibility to create, arrange, and lay out page elements however they want. Other people don't want that; they want a highly structured page where they are just filling in blanks. To my way of thinking, the four tools listed in the diagram each occupy a different spot when plotted along those two axes: easy-hard, flexible-structured.

Our district has a site that pre-dates our adoption of GAFE, that some teachers still use for their websites. It is purely for hosting, with no creation tool. We have Microsoft Expressions available for teachers to use to create and edit pages, which then have to be uploaded by ftp. Within Expressions (or any other html editor), teachers have as much flexibility as they want to arrange, lay out, and design their pages. The flexibility comes at a cost; you have to know what you're doing. For this reason, I've put Expressions in the "flexible, hard-to-use" quadrant.

Google Sites is also hard to use, but it does provide some structure for pages. This earns it a spot in the "structured, hard-to-use" quadrant.

Easier to use than either of these two options are two web-based programs that offer free hosting (as well as premium upgrades for those who want them). I've tried out both of their free versions over the last few weeks. My evaluation is that the main difference between wix.com and weebly.com is in the amount of structure provided. In a Wix website, once you select your theme, you have a lot of control over the location and look of page elements, text, images, etc. Weebly provides more structure for the page, restricting what elements can be placed in what locations. The flexibility of Wix comes at a little bit of a cost: the learning curve for Wix is a bit higher than for Weebly, and Wix does not let you change design themes once you've built your site. With Weebly, you can change themes as much as you like, because the basic structure of the page remains the same. Wix, then, gets the spot in the "flexible, easy-to-use" quadrant, while Weebly goes under "structured, easy-to-use".

Whichever tool you choose to create your website, it is important to make sure that parents and students can easily find the information for which they are searching. Think simple rather than complicated, and after your students have been using it for a few weeks, ask them about how your site could be improved. Don't be afraid to make changes based on student or parent feedback. A website editor that is easy to use makes that idea much less daunting.

5 Reasons I Am Done With Google Sites

Photo by Sybren Stüvel on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Our district uses Google Apps, so all of our teachers and students have access to Google Sites. For the last three years, as teachers have asked me, I've recommended that they use Google Sites to create their class or personal website. Initially, as they struggled, I figured it was just because there was a learning curve, and it would get easier. Besides, Google is always updating their apps, so the small difficulties we encountered would surely be remedied soon, right?

As time went on, and I tried various ways to teach Google Sites to teachers, and as they continued to struggle year after year, I came to realize that it's not the teachers' problem. Google Sites is a pain in the ass. It needs to be completely overhauled, yet the only "updates" Google has made in the last two years are completely minor tweaks to a ridiculously outdated interface. Google Sites was pretty cool in 2011. It is no longer 2011, and I am finished recommending it to teachers.

1) Why in the world is it so hard to edit a sidebar or horizontal navigation bar? Even teachers who use other websites and programs with ease find this rigamarole frustrating and difficult. Teachers who just want to add a new page for a new school year find it nearly impossible.

2) Why is it so hard to simply create a text link to an uploaded file? Most of my teachers just want to upload files for students and parents to download. They can post those files at the bottom of a page or in a file-cabinet page. But then creating text links to those files, like in a class calendar, or assignment post, requires them to right-click to copy a link and then pretend that their file is NOT in their Google Site, but is actually an external URL. This is the most common thing my teachers want to do, and yet it is ridiculously difficult. I made this video when I started as a ToSA, but even that doesn't help.

3) Why can't we sort in a file cabinet page? File cabinet pages are great if you have about one screen worth of files. Any more than that, and the page becomes pretty useless. You can create folders, but you can't set the order of folders. You can't sort files or folders. You can't search for filenames. And if you happen to add a file without a description, you have to know to click in a blank white space to add that description later. Seriously?

4) Want to format a table? Hope you know HTML or CSS or both, because you're not doing that outside of the HTML editor.

5) If I never see the "Some HTML tags are not supported and have been removed" message again, it will be too soon.

It's 2015. Google should either support Sites or abandon it. I've abandoned it. Teachers who want to create and maintain a simple class website should either use Blogger or Weebly. Neither of them is perfect, but they're still hundreds of times easier to use than Sites. I'd love to hear suggestions for other free, modern, easy website builders.