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.

It's Going to be a Busy Fall

Here are some of the professional engagements I have between now and the end of the year:

• October 4 & 5 - GAFE Summit Coronado
• I have applied to present about Add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets, specifically Flubaroo, Doctopus, and g(Math). I expect to hear whether or not I have been accepted in early September. Either way, I hope to get a team from our district to attend.
• October 18 - EdCamp San Diego
• I'm one of the organizers for this event. Last year was our first, so since we (presumably) know what we're doing this year, I think the planning will not be nearly as arduous as it was last year.
• October 24 & 25 - Fall CUE, American Canyon HS
• I will be presenting about Blackboard Summer Academy, but broadening it to the use of any LMS, so I've re-titled my talk "[Insert LMS Here] Summer Academy". It will be very similar to the talk I gave at the Blackboard workshop in Chula Vista last year.
• November 15 - SDCUE Tech Fair, La Costa Canyon HS
• I will be presenting (again, hopefully) about Add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets. And, since it was my suggestion to bring the SDCUE Tech Fair to LCC in the first place, I will also be working closely with SDCUE as a liaison for the district.
• December 12 & 13 - eSS Symposium, San Mateo
• Here I will be reprising my [Insert LMS Here] Summer Academy talk.

Whew!

How My Dogs Contribute to Teachers' Professional Learning

Mayer always wants to know what you are doing.

I love dogs. My wife and I have two: an older female named Emma, and a younger male named Mayer. We got both of them from animal shelters, so we don't really know what breeds they are, although it's obvious that Mayer is a pit bull mix, and that Emma has at least a little bit of husky in her. Other than that, it's a mystery. We also don't know much about their history, including their exact ages, since they were each picked up as strays by animal control, without any identification.

Whenever we get a dog, especially from a shelter, we make sure to do as much training with the dog as we can. A friend of ours runs dog training classes, and we very much like her approach, so we take our dogs through her class. They learn to come when called, to drop a toy or bone they are playing with, to be gentle with us and with others, among other important skills. Most importantly, we learn to be consistent and effective with our commands for the dogs, so they are constantly reinforced for behavior we want to encourage (and not for behavior we want to extinguish).

Emma (left) and Amelia (right), who died in 2010.

Every dog responds differently to training. Emma is easily distracted and often stubborn. She will respond to our commands when she feels like it. Mayer, on the other hand, is extremely smart and eager to please. He is very good at figuring out what we want him to do.

We have also had several dogs that we have fostered for various times, up to six months. For each of them, we have to teach them the rules of the house and how to behave. In each case, their training always has the same central idea: marking behavior that we want to encourage and positively reinforcing that behavior with a reward.

Which brings me to my main point in writing this post on an educational technology blog. It's a subtle idea, so follow me closely here:

Teachers are not dogs.

Teachers do not need "training". They need workshops, seminars, hands-on learning, professional development, conference sessions, classes, courses, discussions, meetings, round tables, symposiums, forums, conventions, conversations, colloquiums, interchanges, assemblies, pow-wows, and palavers. (Thank you, thesaurus.com.) They do not need to be trained to behave in certain ways through the use of positive reinforcement.

I think of my dogs every time a teacher asks me, "When will we be trained on this?" or "Are you going to have any more trainings?" The use of that word for professional learning is like nails on a chalkboard for me. I think it demeans my role and the role of the teachers who are doing the learning, by reducing it to a "button-pushing" training: push the right button, get a reward. By changing the language we use, I hope to change perceptions of professional learning, if only in a small way.

Blackboard Summer Academy 2013

One of my projects last year was upgrading our Blackboard Learn LMS. Because of the hardware limitations of our server, we were about 4 updates behind. Additionally, I wanted us to add features that would make it easier for teachers to blend their classes and for students to access Blackboard. We upgraded the system to include content collections, moved to managed hosting (so we don't maintain the server) and purchased mobile access for smartphones and tablets. Because we wanted teachers to take advantage of these new features, and to support teachers using blended learning, I developed the Blackboard Summer Academy (BBSA).

I designed a four-day course to be delivered to teachers over the summer. Each day would include 2 hours face-to-face, and 1 hour online. The course was delivered through the our upgraded Blackboard; teachers were enrolled as students in a BBSA course with all the content I developed. They also had a "practice" class where they were the teacher, as well as their own classes for the upcoming school year.  When I opened signups, we were overwhelmed with the response; unfortunately, we were limited in the amount of money we could spend to pay teachers. We ended up running two workshops, each with 12 teachers.

The goals of our workshop were to familiarize teachers with existing and upgraded features of Blackboard; to encourage the use of Blackboard for more than just posting documents for students to download; to expose teachers to concepts of 21st-century skills (the 4 C's) and to the requirements of Common Core; and to create a cadre of teachers who are able to support their colleagues with Blackboard.  The content I developed was a mix of hands-on, directly applicable Blackboard skills ("What button do I push?") with higher-level considerations of blended instruction. The class was delivered through a flipped model of blended learning; teachers were given all the content ahead of time to read or watch. Each class day started with a short 5-10 minute introduction, and then teachers had the rest of the time to work on their own, as I offered individual help and support. The culminating project was for teachers to develop a blended unit that they could deliver in one of their classes this year.

Teachers who enrolled came in with a wide variety of Blackboard expertise, from novice to expert. I felt like the flipped instruction allowed me to differentiate for each teacher, meeting them where they were in their experience. Teacher feedback at the end of the workshops bore that out, with 90% of participants agreeing that it "helped me to learn at my own pace." In the evaluation of the workshop, I asked teachers to (anonymously) write what was the best part, and what could have been improved. The responses indicated that teachers appreciated the opportunity to learn the software and prepare for their own classes at the same time, as well as the flexibility inherent in the flipped learning. (Interestingly, many teachers expressed to me their uncertainty and confusion about the flipped model at the very beginning of the workshop; by the end, they all seemed to appreciate it.) When I asked what could be improved about the workshop, most of the answers were some version of "more of the same": more people involved, more time, etc.

I'm going to be presenting about our BBSA at a Blackboard one-day conference next month. In reflecting on my take-away lessons, two stand out to me. (1) Teachers appreciated the differentiation provided by flipped learning, and (2) teachers found it valuable to work on an authentic task: developing their own class rather than some arbitrary made-up exercise. Not surprisingly, we know that those two factors are also characteristic of truly effective classes for students, as well.

I'm quite proud of how the Blackboard Summer Academy turned out. I think we achieved our goals in a way that modeled effective instruction for teachers. I'm hoping that we'll be able to run the workshop again next summer, hopefully for an even greater number of teachers.

In the Good Ol' Summertime

What to do, what to do?  Summer approaches, and teachers' thoughts turn to... well, nothing, actually.  It's enough just to get past June 14th.  But once summer gets underway, and you get all your nothing accomplished in the first few weeks, you might wonder how you could catch up on all the things you were interested in doing during the school year but just didn't have time.  So here are some ideas for things you might try out this summer:

• Read a book: I've mentioned books that you could borrow here, here, and here.  I also have three more copies of Flip Your Classroom to lend out.  Let me know if you'd like any of them.
• Make new friends: Build your personal learning network by joining Twitter.  You don't have to say anything at first, just read what others have to say.  You can try it out on Sunday nights at 8:00 for California Education Chat, using the hashtag #caedchat.  Or you can review some of the resources I've posted with the hashtag #SDUHSDtech.  (Here's a good list of other hashtags, some for education in general, some for subject-matter specific discussions.)
• Share your thoughts: Write a blog, reflecting on your experiences this year.  Or contribute to someone else's blog, by writing comments or by writing guest posts.  Contact me if you'd like to be able to post to sduhsdtech.blogspot.com.  I'd love to hear what you have to say.
• Review resources: My weekly emails are posted here. This blog is not going away.  Handouts and recordings from the fall's Web 2.0 sessions are posted here.  Slides from the spring's EdTech workshops are posted here.  Videos highlighting district teachers' innovative strategies are posted here.  Lists of useful websites are available in Diigo for math, science, ELA, social science, world languages, and general edtech.  Help files for Google Forms, Blackboard, Google Sites, Turnitin, and other programs are available from the district start page.
• Talk to yourself: Take some time to record screencasts or powerpoints.  I have two microphones available to borrow.
• Revise your website: If you're still using Expressions/FrontPage to maintain your website on teachers.sduhsd.net, give some serious thought to switching to Google Sites or to Blackboard.  You will thank yourself later.
• Do something different: Doing something outside of education makes you a better person and therefore a better teacher.

Have fun!

Notes from CUE 2013, Friday 15 March

Keynote: Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken gave a very entertaining talk, reiterating much of what had been previously expressed by Catlin Tucker.  What I thought was salient about his keynote was his reminder to focus on preparing students for an unknown future. We don't know what the social, economic, or technological circumstances will be when our students are adults; the best thing we can do is to prepare them with skills to adjust to change.

After the keynote, I spent some time in the exhibit hall; I'll write about that in the next post.

Edtech Costs

Andrew Schwab has been both an IT director and a classroom teacher, so his presentation on "hidden" educational technology costs included both perspectives.  He examined not only the up-front costs of desktops, laptops, netbooks, and tablets, but also the ongoing costs of support and maintenance.

Is BYOD a good idea for my school?

This was the best session I attended on Friday.  As we begin to think about expanding Bring-Your-Own-Device in our district, I was looking for sessions about implementing BYOD.  Dennis Grice teaches at a private school that requires students to bring an internet-enabled device.  He went through several conditions that he thought necessary for a successful BYOD, including cloud-based tools; solid wireless connections; training for teachers, students, and parents; and clearly stated technical requirements for student devices.  We are well situated for all of those; not everything is complete, but we're working on all of them.  Dennis's presentation is available online here.

Notes from CUE 2013, Thursday 14 March

First session: Torrey Trust on building and using Personal Learning Networks (PLNs)

Torrey, as many of you know, is Jerry Trust's daughter, and was a graduate of LCC and a student of mine.  She is now a PhD student at UCSB in educational technology, studying the social dynamics of how teachers learn.  (Short version, according to her: nobody knows.)  Torrey presented about the different types of resources available to construct PLNs, about the types of roles that people take on in social networks, ideas for moving teachers from lurkers to participants, and about recommendations for different tools to use.  She recommended starting with Google Reader as an RSS aggregator, and I agreed completely, except for the ugly fact that just yesterday Google announced that they are going to pull the plug on Reader on July 1.  Torrey looked distraught when she heard that news.  So was I, frankly.

My big question when thinking about this topic was, "How do we get reluctant teachers to start?"  Most of the time, when I've convinced teachers to jump in, they see the value of learning from a PLN.  The big hurdle is convincing them that it is valuable enough to even start.  One idea I have is that we should stop calling it "social" media.  The label "social media" implies fluff and timewasting, and most teachers do not want to be "social" with their students, and rightly so.  But what I think many teachers don't understand is the professional connections that can be made through Twitter, Edmodo, or other community tools.

Torrey's website is edpln.wikispaces.com .

Second session: Technology needs for the Common Core

This group of three teachers from a virtual school in Temecula had a fantastic presentation addressing the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the implications of that for teaching 21st-century skills with technology.  Their bottom line take-away message was that the CCSS, if implemented well, will automatically address 21st-century skills, and will require that we infuse educational technology into instruction in order to be effective.  Their prezi hit all the right notes, and afterwards I asked if I could borrow it as an outline to bring back to our district.  I suspect that very soon I (or someone else) will have to give this very presentation to our district teachers, as we prepare ourselves for transitioning to CCSS.

Their discussion site is techcommoncorecue13.blogspot.com .

Third session: Rushton Hurley on inspiring staff

I had never heard of Rushton Hurley before today, but that is clearly my loss.  This guy was dynamic, entertaining, thoughtful, passionate, and insightful.  Every few minutes I thought to myself, "I need to remember that to bring it back to our teachers."  After several of those thoughts, I revised it, and instead thought, "I need to bring him back to talk to our teachers."  I can't do this inspiring talk justice, but I will mention that he had five lessons to remember when trying to implement change among reluctant or resistant teachers.

Hurley works at Next Vista for Learning, an educational consulting firm.  Their website is www.nextvista.org .

Keynote:  Catlin Tucker

Catlin Tucker is a high school English teacher who has made herself a leader in the educational technology field simply by being dissatisfied with the way she was previously teaching.  She described her own story of being a traditional English teacher, and failing to engage students in thoughtful discussions.  Her presentation detailed her journey through the "stages of grieving" until she finally decided to try engaging students through technology.  Her keynote was entertaining and motivating, and I suspect that her personal story would resonate with many teachers I know personally.  If and when the video is posted on the CUE website, I will put a link to it here.  UPDATE:  Here is the link to the keynote video on YouTube.

Link Medley

Sharing some good reads with you:

• Tweet to Learn (Scientific American Blog Network)
• Research on students' use of cell phones (The Innovative Educator)
• Professional Development: Whose Job Is It?  (Education Week)
• Chromebooks vs iPads (Jamie Reaburn Weir)
• The Teacher's Guide to Copyright and Fair Use (Edudemic)
• A Physics PLC: Collaboration at a Distance (Learning and Physics)
• 4 Tips for Transitioning Your Classroom to Digital Media (TeachThought)

EdCamp!

I spent Saturday in Los Angeles at EdCampLA, an un-conference.  This was a professional development opportunity put on by a group of teachers and sponsored by various companies.  What makes it an un-conference is that there was no pre-set program of presentations.  In the morning, there is an empty session board and a pile of index cards.  Participants decide what sessions they would like to present (if any), then write it up on an index card and post it on the schedule board.

I rode up with Holly Clark, formerly of Carmel Valley Middle School, currently an administrator at San Diego Jewish Academy.  The session was held at the Center for Early Education, in West Hollywood.  We got there a little before 8:00, and the schedule board was empty.  By 8:45 the board was full and the organizers had opened up another room for sessions.  After a few introductions in the gym (which served as the central location for the day), we chose the sessions we wanted to attend and moved out.

The first session I attended was a discussion about flipped learning; the second was a more traditional presentation by a group of four teachers who had prepared their ideas ahead of time.  The third session was one that I had come up with about 8:15 that morning.  I didn't think I would host a session; I knew I hadn't prepared anything.  But as I was talking with people in the morning, I realized that I had a question that I wanted to discuss with colleagues.  So I posted the session, emphasized that it would be a discussion, not a presentation, and started off with "I hope you're not here for answers!"  It turned out to be great having about a dozen dedicated teachers and administrators sitting around talking about effective ways to present professional development.

The last session I attended was about a tool that works with Google Apps to allow you to easily distribute files to students.  I appreciated that the sessions I attended were a nice mix of high-level, thoughtful discussions and immediate-gratification tools-you-can-use-tomorrow.  The other great part about this conference for me was that it was conducted by teachers, for teachers.  There wasn't a vendor in sight, nobody selling a book, just teachers who wanted to talk about their profession and think about how we can all make education better.

Holly and I had already kicked around the idea of bringing an EdCamp to San Diego, specifically to North County.  At lunch, we sat with four or five other San Diego-area teachers who are also interested, and we decided to start planning.  If you're interested in attending, or interested in helping out, let me know!

Tips for Tech-Cautious Teachers

Some people get excited by finding new websites, new tools, new strategies for students: the more, the better.  Other people get easily overwhelmed with too much new information: how can you select the valuable from the worthless?  Brianna Crowley has some suggestions for you if you fall in the "overwhelmed" or "cautious" camp.  In her October 24 article in Education Week, she gives some tips for managing information overload and evaluating new tools for their usefulness in your classroom.  Read her article here.