Gorilla or Fish? It’s a Win/Win

“Humans waste words. They toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot. Everyone knows the peels are the best part.”      (from The One and Only Ivan)

Told from the perspective of a silverback gorilla and inspired by a true story, The One and Only Ivan is a book that deservedly won the Newbery Award which was announced earlier this year. Katherine Applegate’s doesn’t waste a single word in this heartwarming tale. She tackles the issues of animals in captivity in a way that will make kids think twice about zoos. Are zoos good or bad? Children will be able to grapple with this question and realize that the question isn’t really boolean.

Cover image taken from npr.org

The Caldecott medal this year was given to John Klassen’s This is Not My Hat. Beautifully illustrated, it tells a tale of a fish who steals a hat from another fish. A great picture book is one that uses illustrations to great effect in the story telling. Even though it’s designed for very young readers, it is refreshing as the main character isn’t exactly one with upstanding character traits (after all he does steal a hat right at the beginning of the story).

In the end, both books are fine examples of storytelling at its best.

Here’s a trailer someone made for The One and Only Ivan:

What Does Censoring Children’s Literature do to Critical Thinking?

It saddened me to read in the news that a book by one of my favorite authors, Patricia Polacco was restricted in a Utah school district on Monday.

Patricia Polacco is a prolific children’s writer and for some of my readers we engage in an author study featuring her books. She tends to write from personal experiences about family and friends and her themes vary widely. Some of her most famous books include:

Thank you Mr. Falker, a book about a young girl with dyslexia who realizes her potential thanks to a fifth grade teacher named Mr. Falker.  The epilogue is quite touching when you realize that the girl with dyslexia is the author.

Pink and Say, a book about two boys (one black and one white) during the Civil War. Another touching book.

Mr. Lincoln’s Way, a book about overcoming bullying.

Thundercake, a book about how the author overcame her fear of thunderstorms.

The book that was banned was called In Our Mothers’ House, which is a story about family or three raised by two mothers. I always worry about children’s books that may contain ‘issues’. Often they can be preachy and end up not being very good literature. This book is simply a good story. We had it in our library, so I read it to my students.

I asked them why they thought this book might be banned for children, and it was quite refreshing to hear their responses. The overwhelming response was, “I think some adults don’t think children can handle stories with sad endings.” Only two children identified the two moms as the possible reason and one child said, “I think it might be about the two moms because in some places, they just don’t get it yet.”

I try really hard not to provide any answers for my students. They need to analyze and think for themselves. I enjoy opportunities to do this. If books are censored, how can children develop critical thinking skills? This doesn’t mean I need to read every book on a banned list, but it’s important to get kids thinking.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/01/utah-school-district-rest_n_1564118.html

Innovation and Change

In education, when the words ‘innovation’ and ‘change’ are mentioned, many teachers roll their eyes. These words are almost seen as ‘bad words.’  There are several reasons for this:

1) The words are over used (the way the word ‘epic’ is used these days to describe every summer blockbuster coming…even worse is ‘most epic’).

2) In education, it isn’t easy to change or innovate.

3) The words don’t mean the same thing to different people.

I recently read Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World by Tony Wagner.

Near the beginning of the book, Wagner writes about a group of leaders at Olin College who were asked to discuss how to create environments that support innovators. A senior executive from IBM said, “It’s a lot easier to name the things that stifle innovation like rigid bureaucratic structures, isolation, and a high-stress work environment.”

Well, that could describe most work environments, especially schools.

Wagner describes innovation as the place where motivation, expertise, and creative thinking skills come together. With motivation being far more important than skill or expertise. In his previous book, The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner lists essential skills that students are going to need to be successful in the world. While these aren’t new things, and the seem like common sense, they are definitely things that schools do not emphasize enough, if at all. In that book, the 7 survival skills listed were:

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills

Collaboration by Networks and Leading by Influence

Agility and Adaptability

Initiative and Entrepreneurship

Effective Oral and Written Communication

Accessing and Analyzing Information

Curiosity and Imagination

Anyone looking at this list would say those are great things. They make perfect sense. But sadly, most students across the country are not getting opportunities to engage in learning that require them to use those skills. There’s still a lot of emphasis on getting the one right answer. As Wagner further explored innovation, he found that his list needed a few more skills:

perseverance

a willingness to experiment

take calculated risks and tolerate failure

have the capacity for ‘design thinking’

According to Wagner, these can all be learned. He makes a strong case about letting kids make mistakes so they can learn from them and develop resilience. He criticizes the “tiger mom” method that doesn’t allow play or have any room for failure, and he criticizes ‘helicopter’ parents that indulge and insulate their children from failure. “Neither kind is likely to produce innovators.”

So how can teachers create environments for innovation when their own working environment doesn’t promote that kind of independence? School change seems to happen at a glacial rate. Most don’t have the capacity for “design thinking.” That’s where you identify a problem, and you set about trying to solve it. First, you experiment. Consider this first experiment a prototype. It may fail at first, but the idea is to keep refining that solution, getting feedback, experimenting further with more trial and error, and eventually end up with something better, more efficient, and often more beautiful. Schools work on yearly calendars. Once the wheels on the bus get going in the fall, heaven forbid that one look at a problem during the school year and try to make it better. The time schools usually take to decide something new is at the end of each year. Why? Because changes during the school year can be too disruptive. But disruption is often the outcome of good innovation.

Innovation, in this sense isn’t simply about trying something new. It’s not about whimsy. Innovation should be purposeful. Being an Innovator requires one to challenge the status quo and constantly ask questions. Innovation is about looking at ways to simplify, make things more efficient, and make them more affordable.

Creating Innovators is a great book, with excellent stories and suggestions for parents and educators. There are many books about innovation, but this one appealed to me as it focused on how to foster these skills in our youth. Hopefully, I’ll write a little more about this book in the near future as Wagner provides ways to help foster innovation, and he also explores school change. Again, ‘change’ isn’t a bad word, if it is done with meaningful intent.

Speaking of change, I’ll leave with this quote:

“To know about change is to know about inertia, which is to say that sometimes the status quo needs a wakeup call. You can’t wait for success, you have to kick start it.”

(Fullan, 2009)

How Rational Are Our Choices?

A rational person might take a few light reads when they go on vacation, but instead I chose to read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. One downside to a Kindle is you don’t really get a sense of the physicality of a book. Kahneman, a cognitive psychologist, won the Nobel for economics in 2002. His book delves into his life’s research.

First, he describes the two different systems at play in our brains: 1) Fast thinking, which is automatic, subconscious, emotional, and requires very little effort. 2) Slow thinking which is conscious, requires much effort, is more logical, and is deliberate. He provides plenty of evidence of why we might overestimate human judgement, and in general, we do not make very rational choices. In test after test, human subjects mostly fail to think statistically and don’t do the math. The final part of his book discusses his research on happiness. Our minds on that topic are also divided. We can measure our happiness by our experiences, but what dominates our own perception of happiness is how we remember the peak and valleys of the pain and pleasures.

It’s not a light read like one of Malcolm Gladwell’s book that pieces together research of other people. Rather, it’s an intriguing account (and sometimes memoir) of his own research on how we think. I highly recommend it. Thinking Fast and Slow is a difficult book to summarize or review, so I’ll simply link to a couple of of them:

Here is the WSJ’s review and the NYTimes review.

There’s one simple math question in his book used as an example that I like:

A ball and a bat together cost $1.10. The bat cost a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Over 50% of Harvard and M.I.T. students got this wrong. Why? They did not bother to check. They relied on their intuition that happened to deceive them.

After writing about our divided brains with two systems, Kahneman says that these systems of thinking aren’t really separate but it’s important to be aware of those two systems. It’s amazing how irrational some of our own decisions are. Kahneman suggests that we approach our thoughts as an outsider at times. It will help us lower our overconfidence and reduce many of our own invisible biases. As we become more aware of how we think and when we should tap into deeper thinking, I hope we can help our students to do the same. 

Here’s a TED talk he gave a couple of years ago.

Are Disruptive Questions Necessary for Innovation?

“I don’t really see any innovative teaching around here.” That was something a parent said four years ago during a meeting regarding our school’s mission. Given that our school’s mission statement begins with, “Through innovative teaching…,” the comment made by that parent stuck with me, and innovation in education has been one of the areas that has become an interest of mine. I keep reading and hearing about the necessity of schools to change. Not just in terms big reform movements that we’re seeing across the nation, but in terms of fundamentally changing the way we teach to adapt to the way children learn today. Yet, the culture of schools is so deep – from the expectations of parents to the way we teach; from the way policies are set to the way schools are run – there is so much resistance to change. So often books are read and conferences are attended by teachers and school leaders, they come back excited and say, “…yeah I got some great nuggets out of that. I can’t wait to share them.” The new ideas are usually shared briefly if at all, and then everyone returns to the way things used to be done.

I just finished reading  The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators by Dyer, Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen (author of Disrupting Class). 

The book’s introduction claims that “a recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one ‘leadership competency’ of the future.”

The book emphasizes that to innovate, it requires courage. First, courage to challenge the status quo, and second, courage to take risks. It also states that innovators “have a passion for inquiry.” They are always asking questions. Asking why once isn’t enough. Continuing to probe until a novel (usually efficient and well-designed) solution emerges is what innovators do. Asking insightful ‘what if’ questions is just as important.

This book’s main claim is that innovation is not genetic. It can be developed. If so, how do we develop these in our students (challenging every child to be courageous and curious are part of my school’s mission). If most of the stakeholders in a child’s education aren’t developing these innovation skills themselves, then what chance do our students have? Without going into too much detail, the 5 skills according to this book are:

1. Associating
2. Questioning
3. Observing
4. Networking
5. Experimenting

I’ve heard from educational leaders and teachers from schools of all shapes and sizes that school culture is deep, and those who have challenge the status quo continue face an uphill climb. Most prefer to do what they’ve always done. I’m glad I work with colleagues that continue to ask good questions and have the courage to ask why. In the end it’s best for our students.

My favorite quote comes from the chapter on experimenting.

” I haven’t failed…I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.”

— Thomas Edison

I asked earlier in this post about how to develop these skills in students. In a couple of week’s, Tony Wagner has a new book that comes out: Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World. I can’t wait.

Moving from Congeniality to Collegiality

I recently read an article, “Getting to No: Building Collegiality in Schools,” by Rob Evans in the most recent issue of Independent School. It draws from his book, Seven Secrets of a Savvy School Leader,”  which I just started to read.

This article resonated with me because it’s the kind of collaboration, collegiality, and work with my fellow teachers that motivates me. For the most part, we do a great job of this at my school, but this article reminds me that we can always do more.

Evans mentions many obstacles including the structural ones, personal ones, and the culture so many schools have where they avoid conflict. From my experience, the culture he refers to in schools is very strong, and while it is changing, I wish it would change more rapidly. Teachers are getting better at conflict: respectfully dissenting and listening to opposing voices. What teachers need to get better at is finding the common ground, figuring out how it meets our school’s mission and strategic plan, taking action, and moving forward. Otherwise we return to the “culture of niceness” and nothing changes.

As Evans states in his article,

“[Students] will need to be self-motivated to keep learning and changing and will also need to be adept at working with people from diverse backgrounds with diverse perspectives. If educators are to help students develop these skills, the argument goes, they themselves must be able to model them both in their teaching and in the ways they think and talk about their work.”

Best 2nd Grade Books for 2011

It’s that time of year again where ‘best of 2011’ lists in every conceivable category seem to pop up everywhere. I figured I may as well compile my list of best books for 2nd grade.

In the past few years, there have been many children’s books that would have made my list, except for the fact that they weren’t really suitable for all 2nd graders. Books on those lists would have included Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me (2010 and 2009 Newbery Award Winners). I keep hoping for another book like Kate DiCamillo’s 2004 Newbery winner The Tale of Despereaux, a book that has deep complex characters and themes, that although sometimes dark, are balanced with just the right amount of light for young children. It’s no accident that one of Despereaux’s foes is named Chiaroscuro.

There were many engaging chapter books that 2nd graders gravitated towards this year, but most were books that were part of a series like, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. My list of top 2nd grade books for 2011, therefore, does not include a chapter book. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Grandpa Green by Lane Smith

You can say so much with so few words and marvelous images. A great book about memory, aging, gardening, history, family, and much more.

 

Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature by Joyce Sidman, pictures by Beth Krommes

Not surprisingly, Beth Krommes has already won a Caldecott Award. The illustrations are mesmerizing.

 

Press Here by Herve Tullett

For all the people who are averse to reading on a tablet, this book has a great sense of humor in the way one is supposed to interact with a physical book.

 

 

The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (illus. by Chris Van Allsburg; written by various)

Originally published in 1984, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, was a book of fantastic illustrations, each with only a single caption. These illustrations and captions have been great story starters that have inspired children to write. Now, well known authors like Sherman Alexie, Kate DiCamillo, Stephen King, Jon Scieszka, and Lemony Snicket have all contributed their story to one of the illustrations. I haven’t all the stories yet, but the ones I have are great!

 

The House Baba Built: An Artist’s Childhood In China by Ed Young

An amazingly illustrated memoir of the author’s childhood in Shanghai during WWII.

 

 

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen

Another book that says so much with so little. It’s also wickedly funny.

 

 

Everything On It by Shel Silverstein

Books that are published posthumously often seem to be a random compilation of odds and ends. That’s not the case with this collection of poems, each as silly, witty, and fun as any in his other collections.

 

The Lego Ideas Book: Unlock Your Imagination by Daniel Lipkowitz

Currently, it’s the most sought after book in my classroom library.

 

 

There are several books that were published this year that I have yet to read, something I hope to do this winter break. Among them are Wonderstruck, Inside Out and Back Again, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, and Secrets at Sea. I’m hoping one of these will make a good read-aloud.

Have a wonderful holiday!

 

Does it Matter if You Read the Book First or Watch the Movie?

The holidays are around the corner, and the offering of children’s movies often grow at this time. I usually cringe when I hear about a children’s book being turned into a movie. Not because the movie infrequently lives up to the book, but rather because children read or listen to the book with preconceived images from the movie. They miss the opportunity to create images from their own imaginations and the text. Sometimes, however, it really doesn’t matter.

This weekend I saw the movie Hugo (based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick) and I was pleasantly surprised. The movie Hugo, is directed by Martin Scorsese. I wasn’t surprised because I was expecting the carnage one is used to in his movies (Goodfellas, Gangs of New York). I was surprised at how this beautiful book was transformed to film and still managed to capture the magical elements in its storytelling.

 

For those familiar with the book, it is a visual feast. The movie is too. Scorsese doesn’t imitate the book. The movie is quite different in style. Instead he uses the same elements of visual storytelling. There are long moments in the film, like the book, where there is no dialogue, but the plot advances beautifully. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t either read the book or seen the movie. In this rare case, I don’t think it matters which one you do first, both are exceptional.

 

The Man Who Walked Between Two Towers

A lot of people have written and reflected upon the tragic day that occurred 10 years ago. It affected everyone in some way, and while have have memories good and bad seered into my memory of what happend, I thought instead I’d share a resource for children that I like to use.

It’sa Caldecott winning picture book called The Man Who Walked Between The Towers by Mordecai Gerstein. It’s a gorgeously illustrated book and tells of a joyous ture story of a man who walked on a tightrope between the towers just shortly before they were completed.

It’s a great story as it is unrelated to the events other than the words on the penultimate page, “Now the towers are gone.” The children I taught that day in ’01 are now seniors in high school, and the children I teach today were born post 9/11. Yet, the questions from the children remain the same and unanswered. I just hope they keep asking questions. Inquiry  is just the beginning.

A month prior to the horrific event, I visited NYC for the first time, and as a tourist, it was on my agenda. Below is my fond memory of the WTC. Below that is a youtube video that was made of the book. Enjoy.

Math is a Fine Art

This weekend, I read the book A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Artform by Paul Lockhart with a Foreword by Keith Devlin. It starts with this quote from Antoine de Saint Exupéry:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

In the foreword, Devlin says that “It is, quite frankly, one of the best critiques of current K-12 mathematics education I have ever seen.” He recommends that every policy-maker, educator and parent of a school-aged child with any responsibilities of teaching mathematics should read this book.

We’ve all seen children humming songs without care to the key that it’s in or how that song might be notated. We’ve also seen children take paints and crayons and experiment with the different media before they are taught about line, color, tone and other aspects of art. Yet, in math, Lockhart says we do not allow children enough time to enjoy and play with math and we ought to do so. According to Lockhart, the current K-12 curriculum in almost any textbook series only teaches kids a series of steps in how to solve a particular type of problem, along with some special notation. As Lockhart puts it, the current system “[destroys] a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern making.” He claims that math is “simple and beautiful.”

He gives an example  of a triangle in a rectangular box.

How much space do you think it takes up? How do you suppose you can find out?

What Lockhart laments about is that without teachers who understand the beauty of math, we don’t allow children to grapple with this problem long enough before we rush to give them the formula 1/2bh.  If we allow kids to ‘play’ with this puzzle, they may actually discover it themselves.

 

Children will delight when they discover that by drawing a vertical line from the tallest part of the triangle, they will see that they have created two rectangles, and that the area of each triangle part is half of two smaller rectangles.

Today in class we were working with geo-boards and rubber bands. I teach second grade and the main objective was to create a variety of shapes with right angles to measure area (in square units) and perimeter (in units). When one student, who clearly got the concept was done early, I asked her to play with this puzzle for a while. I built a 3X2 rectangle and a triangle inside it. I asked her to think about how she might find the area of the triangle. After about five minutes, she lit up and with much excitement explained that she could divide the shape into two smaller rectangles and found the area of each one to be half of the rectangle. I asked her to try with a different rectangle and triangle, and her response was instant. What I didn’t give her was the traditional formula. She had basically discovered it on her own without realizing it.

Remember, I teach second grade, so this was exciting for me too. With the other children, some were excited in discovering the area of a rectangle to be the base multiplied by its height. This too was a discovery for these students and the joy of math was evident. I also did not provide a formula for them even after their discovery.

There are many critics to Lockhart’s point of view that it took centuries to arrive at many mathematical theories. He would argue that math which is rich “has been reduced to a sterile set of facts to be memorized and procedures to be followed. They are given the formula: Area of a triangle = 1/2 b h and are “asked to apply it over and over in exercises…By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject…By concentrating on what and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell.”

Finally, here’s one last quote: “Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions.”

In the next few weeks, our school is about to go through a selection process for a math curriculum. While I empathize with Lockhart, there also needs to be a balance. I hope that when it comes time to discuss and debate the pros and cons of each math curriculum, we keep an open mind to process, discovery, and relevance, rather than what’s easiest to implement or what is an efficient way in transmitting a set of rules for practice and compliance.

Anyway, the book is an easy read, very compelling, and makes you think. Whether or not you agree completely with the author’s point of view.

 

Go Dog Go!

Last week, in celebration of Dr. Seuss’ birthday, our class read his book, Oh the Thinks You can Think. It’s a great book about unleashing your imagination and the unlimited possibilities that are all there in your mind. What’s even greater is the story of Dr. Seuss’ persistance (and luck) in publishing his first book which I first learned from a book a colleague gave me titled, Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned from a Children’s Book written by Anita Silvey. I was reminded of Dr. Seuss’ story on her blog: Children’s Book-A-Day.

This weekend, I finished reading Poke the Box, by Seth Godin which is a book about taking initiative. It’s a book that basically says you have to do more than simply think thinks. It says you have to ship your product. It’s simple message reminded me more of P.D. Eastman’s book, Go Dog Go! which sums up the message nicely: Go! In Eastman’s book, he also shows that by putting yourself out there, you have a pretty big chance of being criticized and failing. If you don’t takes those risks, however, you won’t succeed.

“Do you like my hat?” says one dog to another throughout the book.

“I do not!” replies the other dog. This doesn’t stop the dog who asked the question from redesigning her hat over and over again. She takes the initiative to keep innovating. By the end of the book, he likes her hat. So Silvey is right. Everything you need to know, you can learn from a children’s book.

What prevents a lot of us from taking initiative? According to Godin: the fear of failing is one part of it. As educators, we want to instill the value of failing to learn in our kids. How can we do this without being risk takers ourselves? We can’t be completely foolish, or course, but as Godin puts it, we can’t wait for permission either.

TED talks are all about people who take initiative. The TED 2011 conference took place last week. While I look forward to learning about some of this year’s ideas when this year’s talks get posted, there are many talks being given in a TED movement called TEDx. These are independently organized events for those who think they have ‘ideas worth spreading.’ TEDxNYED took place yesterday featuring a diverse group of speakers. Its theme was: Empowering Innovation in Education. You could stream the all-day event live or view some of it later. There were a lot of calls to transform education using technology to engage the learner. The views varied among the speakers I watched, but one thing  they all seemed to be saying resonated with me having read Godin’s book: We need to engage our kids to take initiative, and to do that, we have to do so ourselves. There were a lot of people who suggested a flaw in the TEDx talks saying that they were all lectures. Godin would say to those people, start your own TED talk and make it more interactive. Don’t wait for someone else to make it happen.

Our school’s values statement includes: “We foster resilience and expect all to search and find, to fail and learn, to risk and succeed in a changing world.” According to Godin, taking initiative is an intentional act. We can schedule it. In fact, we’re trying this at our school. Wednesday March 23, after school, our faculty are all going to “start something.” Whatever that something is, I’m excited to find out what they did that afternoon. Poke The Box is a quick and good read.

I’ll end with this quote taken from Daniel Pink’s (author of Drive and a Whole New Mind) review of Poke the Box:

“Indeed, the message of this book is so profoundly simple and so simply profound, I can encapsulate it in a single word.

Go.

Don’t cogitate. Don’t ruminate. Don’t plan on getting started or wait for permission to begin.

Go.”

 

NAIS Conference Begins – Find the Bright Spots

Last year, I was fortunate enough to attend the annual conference put on by the National Association of Independent Schools and, along with a few books I had read prior to this conference, I was inspired and propelled to make some major changes in the way I taught and viewed education. The limits of this change, however, were something I wasn’t prepared for. Change is slow and I’m impatient. What I need to do is focus on the bright spots.

The general climate for teachers in general is not a great one at the moment. Rather than focusing on bright spots, most education policy makers around the country seem to be focused on the dark spots. Could this be a consequence of No Child Left Behind, the recession, state budgets, teacher evaluations, or other factors?

Last year’s conference provided each of its participants with the Heath Brothers’ new book at the time, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. I read the book right away, wrote a post about it, and put it aside. Whether it be for personal change or institutional change, Switch is a good book to revisit and reflect upon.

One of the authors, Dan Heath will be speaking at one of the general sessions of the NAIS conference tomorrow. I hope one of the four people from our school heading to the conference this year will attend his session. Why is change hard? Here’s a quick reminder of the book’s central ideas.

1. Decisions are usually made by our overpowering emotional element – it is, however this emotional side that provides us with the energy to get the job done.

2. While we like to think we are logical, this rational side almost always plays second fiddle to our emotional side.

According to the authors, in order to direct our rational sides while still being able to use our emotional energy, we have to:

1. Find the bright spots.

2. Script the critical moves.

3. Point to the destination.

And we can ‘feed’ our emotional sides by:

1. Finding the feeling.

2. Shrinking the change.

3. Growing your people.

 

Change in education is hard, which is one of the many reasons education reform across this country is in the state that it is. Of course, when autocratic decisions are made that do the opposite of the above, for example, growing the change and shrinking the people while focusing on the dark spots with no clear destination in sight, it’s easy to see why there is a lot of tension among teachers. Michelle Rhee made a huge splash in the papers in the past year, but slowly, there are many stories highlighting the flaws in her own pursuit to change education (rather than looking at ways to grow teachers, she fired many that she deemed ineffective). Again, if you look at the headlines across the country, teachers have been made out to be the bad guys and there’s something wrong with this picture.

Change is just one topic amid a myriad of others, but it covers many of the other topics in education: innovation, technology, motivation, citizenship, and so on.

With my students, I know that finding the bright spots has been an excellent way to engage and help them learn. Rather than fixate on a child’s poor spelling, for example, looking at what makes them come alive and shine in sharing their stories with others has done wonders. By giving that child more opportunities to share their writing, they have self-identified the need for proper spelling in order to communicate more clearly.

I’m interested to hear what my colleagues take away from this year’s conference. You can click on the ‘nais link’ on the sidebar to learn more about what’s going on, and who the other featured speakers are. Here’s a short video of Dan Heath speaking about finding those bright spots. According to the Heaths, focusing on the biggest problems is the wrong way to go about growing. It only fosters mediocrity.

The Influence of Teaching (or not)

A new book came out this week called, The Influence of Teachers: Reflections on Teaching and Leadership by John Merrow. It’s a good read that received some great advance praise including this:

“John Merrow’s incisive observations and powerful, moving stories in his new book, The Influence of Teachers:  Reflections on Teaching and Leadership, are prescient at a time when the public is searching for solutions to America’s systemic educational challenges. His dedication ‘To Outstanding Teachers Everywhere,’ and his preface ‘Fighting the Last War’ foreshadow the problems and solutions that the book richly develops. A ‘must read’ for those responsible for American’s children and their future: that would be all of us.”

– Patrick Bassett, Executive Director, The National Association of Independent Schools

Daniel Pink states in his book Drive that as long people are paid enough, they are motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Even though teachers are only paid modestly, I can agree with those three things.  It’s obvious Bill Gates doesn’t need to ‘work’ anymore, but he continues working through his foundation trying to make this world a better place.

Pink’s name came up as a potential speaker for our regional fall conference, but it was clear that he needed a big carrot (too big for us) to come and speak. I don’t blame him. While he want’s to influence education, speaking to educators is clearly not is main purpose. But Whatever that is, I’m sure he has a great sentence that gives him meaning as well as enjoyment. I’m sure he wants to get better at it, and continue on his own  growth trajectory.  I’m also pretty certain that he has plenty of autonomy and can do whatever it is he loves without anyone else setting limits for him (except his publisher, perhaps).

Most great teachers make modest incomes, so they clearly didn’t go into education for the pay. It’s because of this that teachers fight so hard to protect the implied promise of tenure and increased pay over time. New teachers being paid low wages and the very senior teachers making the most. This implied promise of this pay scale, however, is being eroded in almost every state. Nonetheless, it’s not pay that drives teachers to teach. It would be nice if the US were like Singapore in this respect. They offer their top 20% of high-school graduates full scholarships (and stipends while they’re in college) to go into education. I know I work with many teachers who would meet this qualification. They are extremely smart people.

Teachers in the U.S. enter the profession after spending five years in college (most having much debt to contend with) and are then expected to go through all kinds of bureaucratic hoops to be state certified. Many teachers will also go back to school to get a more advanced degree in order to increase their compensation. Some of the various teaching specific degrees can be found on Online Teaching Degree’s college program listings. Going to college is, of course all at the cost of the young teacher

This, of course is all at the cost of the young teacher – unless you are at a school that supports this and includes it in their professional development budgets. Some of those hoops are better in some states, but in the name of ‘accountability’ they are hoops nonetheless, and teachers must jump through them in order to remain certified. I know many teachers who spent three days away from their families to visit other schools as part of an accreditation team. Does the state recognize this time as professional development? Nope. In two weeks, the National Association of Independent Schools will have their annual conference. I was lucky to have my school support me attending this conference last year. This year others will be given the opportunity, and I can’t wait to hear back. Because this conference is out of state, however, teachers from outside that state will not be given any credit towards their professional development requirements by the state. Nonetheless, this conference last year made a huge impact on me. In fact, that conference was one of the main reasons I was inspired to start this blog.

Furthermore, new teachers (whether new to the profession, or new to a district are usually given the worst assignments – whatever that means). For me, my first year in public school, I taught in a portable with no furniture in the middle of a playground. It was still an amazing year, because walls and furniture aren’t the things that make a classroom, the relationships among the kids and what they learn are. In private schools, thankfully there is no seniority. While I don’t agree with teachers having permanent tenure, most independent schools only offer teachers one year contracts. There’s a downside to this, as some teachers feel like they cannot speak freely in fear that they may not have their contract renewed.

A lot of non-teachers will say, “but you get your summers off.” Well, they haven’t met most teachers. We work during the holidays. It’s not the same kind or pace of work as teaching during the school year, but let me assure you that all the teachers I work with put in significant amounts of their own time.  In the summer, many may use the time preparing for the new school year, adopting new curricula, learning new things to bring back to our classrooms. Teachers may seem to get more holidays than the average person, but teachers are not well compensated and are not able to choose when to take their vacations.

The book is a balanced, but provocative look at education, its problems, and possible solutions and Tony Wagner suggests both practitioners and leaders read the book. We’re held responsible to create healthy learning environments for children. Our leaders also need to create environments where teachers can truly be caring, collaborative, and respected.

I am extremely sensitive to our profession right now with all of noise, blame, and finger pointing in the headlines that place almost all the responsibility on the teacher. I’ll be the first to admit that teachers play a huge part in that responsibility and need to be accountable, but so do parents, administrators, and any policy maker involved in education.

The book talks about teacher pay, tenure, teacher evaluations, seniority, accountability based on testing and many other issues. Merrow also boiled down the reason for high teacher attrition to three things:

“Schools underpay and mistreat teachers and eventually drive them from the profession; inept school districts cannot find the qualified teachers living under their noses; and substandard training ill-prepares young men and women for the realities of classroom life.”

Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania told Merrow, “we can recruit all kinds of qualified people and persuade them to go into teaching, but if they get into jobs that aren’t well paid and don’t have particularly good working conditions in which they’re given little say in the way schools operate, it’s not going to really solve the problem because a lot of these people will leave.”

There is an illusion that teachers have a voice, for example, there are 8 people on the Think Tank for the NAIS national conference in DC which takes place in a couple of weeks. Not one of them is currently a classroom teacher. For an organization who prides itself on diversity leadership, I would suggest that the group (all administrators and one trustee) overlooked representation from a very important, but high stakeholder – a teacher. I’m glad to hear next year’s conference (in Seattle) will include a teacher.

I started this post with Daniel Pink’s main thesis about what drives us to do what we do and, unless it’s a mundane, repetitive task, carrots and sticks are not what motivates teachers. It’s not the pay nor the time off that motivate teachers. And while teachers influence their students, teachers don’t really influence policy makers. Most teachers will agree that educating a child gives them plenty of meaning and a satisfying sense of purpose. Wanting to grow and become better at what we do, is something I firmly believe most teachers are committed to as well. When teachers become micromanaged, disrespected, and lose our autonomy to do what we do best, that drive (which includes working hard, caring deeply about what we do, and developing strong relationships with our students, for example) diminishes. And those impacted the most are the kids.

Meetings Are Toxic

The title to this post comes from the title of a chapter in a book I recently read called, Rework by Fried and Hansson. It’s meant to be a business book and almost all of its suggestions go against conventional wisdom. For example, in the chapter mentioned, the authors consider meetings one of the “worst interruptions” and they go on to make the following points about meetings:

• They’re usually about abstract concepts, and not real things.
• They usually convey a small amount of information per minute.
• They require thorough preparation that most don’t have time for.
• They frequently have agendas so vague that nobody is really sure of the goal.
• Meetings procreate. One meeting leads to another meeting leads to another . . .

The authors had more, but some weren’t quite as civil. They also talked about the loss of productivity. Just think of 40 people attending a one-hour meeting when they could be more productive doing something else. That’s just not one lost hour for an organization, that’s 40 hours of lost productivity if the meeting is meaningless. For some, that’s a whole week of work! Now start multiplying that by the number of meetings in a year and you get the authors’ point.

Another chapter that resonated with me was one called “Decommoditize your product.” Here, the authors suggested that “if you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do.” To protect yourself from that, you have to be unique. That is one of the main reasons I am against scripted curriculums. Anyone at any school can read a script, but does that mean they can teach? The book uses Zappos.com as an example, a company which allows their customer-service representatives to speak “at length with customers” and do so without a script. Pour ‘yourself’ into your business, school, or whatever it is you do. “Competitors can never copy the you in the product.” They give a good example of companies that have tried to be the next iPod killer. Well, Apple is defining what that is, the rest are just copying. Microsoft’s Kinect is an example where they have just taken a giant leap in gaming. It’s unique. They have defined a new product. Now watch others try and copy them.

Another chapter that resonated with me was called,” Start at the epicenter.” The chapter mentions the stuff you could do, want to do, and have to do.  The authors suggest starting at the have to do. When I think about how this relates to all areas of teaching (at our school we use the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching), none of those suggest attending meetings. “Participating in a professional community,” can mean so many more things than showing up to meetings. Furthermore the framework speaks to the comment above about being unique and asks teachers to do a myriad of things that only each individual teacher can do. A lot of what I have to do is know my students well, communicate with their parents, prepare instruction for their individual needs, continue to grow as a teacher, work with my colleagues, know my stuff, and teach it well. For example, I have to write report cards. It’s not my favorite kind of writing or how I like to spend my time , but communicating with students’ parents is an important and crucial part of being a teacher.

Many of the things teachers are told they have to do, don’t fit Danielson’s framework and take away from a teacher’s primary role. If you’ve read Daniel Pink’s book Drive about what motivates us, you will have read that things like meetings, standardization, loss of autonomy and individuality actually kills motivation.

The book Rework can at times be irreverent, but often makes one stop to think about what they’re doing or what they’re being asked to do, and whether it is relevant to student achievement. Schools and education are often the slowest institutions to change, but for an independent school, not bogged down by the type of bureaucracy many public schools are forced to deal with, change can and should take place faster.

Another nugget from the book: Hire the best writers. Whether it’s sales, teaching, or designing, “their writing skills will pay off…. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.”

I’m still working on knowing what to omit. Brevity is not a strength of mine. I would definitely recommend this book as it’s a short read, and one that provokes thought. One last thought from the book: meetings aren’t that bad if they do the following:

• End in fewer minutes than scheduled if that is all the time it takes. Don’t stretch it out to the time allotted just for the sake of filling the time.
• Begin with a specific problem that can be solved and make someone responsible for implementing it.
• Invite only those necessary, keep the others productive in some other way.
• Always have a clear agenda.

“I Believe We Can Be Better.”

How many books about differentiation can Carol Ann Tomlinson write. Here is a list:

• The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of all Learners (1999)
• Leadership for Differentiating Schools and Classrooms
  
• How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-ability Classrooms (2001)
  
• Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom (2004)
  
• Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiated Curriculum (grades K-5/5-9)
  Tomlinson, C.& Edison, C. (2003)
  
• Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiated Curriculum (grades K-5/5-9)
  Tomlinson, C.& Edison, C. (2003)
• Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design: Connecting Contents and Kid
  
• The Differentiated School: Making Revolutionary Changes in Teaching and Learning (2008)

Well – she’s got a new one out called: Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom. At first I rolled my eyes and thought seriously, another one?

Differentiation continues to be a big buzz word in education these days and truly, you can go back to the title of her first book and see that differentiation is simply ‘responding to the needs of all learners.’ Those needs are going to vary a lot among students and change from year to year. Being able to adapt to your students’ learning needs is the essence of differentiation. Those of use who realize this, get it. Now what more could she possibly add. But then I opened the book and read the preface which began with this quote:

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.  — Louisa May Alcott

For some reason, that resonated with me. It had “Growth Mindset” written all over it. The author then began to tell a story. An autobiographical account of her epiphanies (many which she didn’t even realize until much later in her career) regarding differentiated instruction. Some she realized on the spot. “… I understood at that moment that an effective teacher is not someone who just teaches content. He or she is someone who teaches content to human beings, and the classroom has to work in such a way that each individual in it has a legitimate opportunity to grow as much as possible from his or her starting point.” Classroom management is not about keeping kids in their seats but about giving good directions, providing an engaging curriculum, and adapting to individual and group needs. She ends the preface by saying that the book is an aspirational guide. “We have no illusions that any teacher — even the best among us — reads a book and emerges with radiclly different teaching style in tow. We do believe, however, that there are many teachers who aspire to grow as professionals every day.” And that was just in the preface.

Then, in chapter one she calls on classroom teachers to be leaders for change, and she says in order “to achieve such a level of leadership we must

• Work from and aspire to an objective that is an improvement over the status quo.
• Articulate this vision so that those who are asked to follow have a compelling reason to do so.
• Move knowledgeably toward this vision while simultaneously attending to the voices and needs of those who will necessarily help enact it.
• Be patient with and supportive of followers, yet impatient with artificial barriers to progress (I was so glad to see this as this describes me quite well – I thought my impatience with those barriers was a flaw. Woo Hoo! Carol Anne Tomlinson says it’s ok to be impatient with certain things).
• Maintain a pace that consistently ensures visible progress without pushing the system beyond it’s capacity to change. (Well here’s where I could learn something – As a wise colleague once said to me, “It’s a marathon and you can’t sprint the entire race.”)
• Monitor outcomes of the change and be willing to adapt, when necessary to achieve desirable outcomes and eliminate undesirable outcomes.

The rest of the book helps define what differentiation really is, uses it as a philosophy, clears up many misunderstandings about differentiation, discusses how to be a more reflective teacher, and how to begin that journey.  The second half of the book focuses on the mechanics of managing an effective differentiated classroom. There are some excellent ideas posed. She then ends by responding to almost every possible resistance in order to go on this journey.

Perahaps that earlier quote resonated with me because earlier I was reading the president’s speech regarding the recent tragedy in Tucson. His words were simpler, but echoed the earlier quote of Louisa May Alcott. He said, “I believe we can be better.”

Maybe Carol Ann Tomlinson did have more to add on differentiation. Teachers can learn to differentiate well, adapt to the needs of their students, and continue to grow.

Reading Fluency – It Matters

What is fluency? Is it simply reading quickly and accurately, or does a fluent reader also need to read with expression as well as comprehend what is read? Interestingly enough, a more recent definition (Good and Kaminski, 2002) has left out both expression AND comprehension! You know a book is a good book when it makes you think about how you teach and why you do what you do. In Richard L. Alliongton’s book What Really Matters in Fluency: Research-Based Practices Across the Curriculum, he addresses those same questions I posed, and yes, fluency should include expression and comprehension.

One of the conclusions is that reading volume (the amount read) has a huge impact on reading success. The more one reads, the more fluent one becomes. A fluent reader also knows where to place stresses or inflections on words. An example he uses that I like is if you ask someone a question like, “Who threw the ball over the fence?” A normal response would be:

JOHN threw the ball over the fence.

The stress placed on the first word. But if we asked the question, “How did the ball get over the fence?” a typical response would be:

John THREW the ball over the fence.

The stress now is placed on the second word.

A fluent reader would know this and place the stress on the correct word whether speaking or reading. What the author worries about is that many teachers are in fact not teaching fluency skills. The kind of expression needed in order to convey meaning. Like the way we talk.

• One of the most important strategies for reading fluency is reading aloud to children so that you model good fluency. Just imagine those who enter Kindergarden and have been read to every night vs. those who have not had that same opportunity. The gap between the amount of words, phrases, sentences heard (even if the child cannot really read by then) is in the millions.
• Another strategy is making sure kids read appropriate texts. They need texts where they feel successful in order to foster fluency development.
• Accuracy is also very important. Children need to develop “at-a-glance” recognition, also called automaticity with many of the words they read. Kids who have trouble reading often do so with the little words both in meaning and their orthographic similarities (of, off, if; where, were, there). When was the last time you asked a child to define the word “of”?
• As mentioned, reading volume. The more they read or are read to, the better. One suggestion in getting struggling readers to read more, is by pairing them with reading to younger developing readers.
• Repeated readings is also a strategy that works, but there are caveats, one being that it limits the opportunities of the child from experiencing unique texts.
• Do not interrupt a reader when he/she is stuck on a word. One should pause, then provide a prompt if needed, and then praise the effort. Too often teachers interrupt the struggling reader too soon. In second grade, we teach our students to do this as well when partner reading.
• Have students engage in Free Voluntary Reading or other sustained silent reading times.
• Be careful of basal readers or anthologies – often the range in reading difficulties is so great. The author found a third grade anthology with texts ranging from 2nd grade reading levels to those of a 6th grade text. A teacher should not assume that the publishers have done their job in vetting the stories for reading levels.

Finally, what I found most interesting in this book is the author’s disdain for the assessment tool called DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills). Each subtests calls itself a fluency test, but all it is measuring is the rate and accuracy of reading with no regard to comprehension or prosody. Often children read for speed, score well, but don’t comprehend a thing they have read and are given texts that are inappropriately too hard for them. Others may fall in the “at risk” factor based on this assessment because they are reading slowly and carefully, but they read with more expression and understand what they have read. Unfortunately many of these students across the country are also given the wrong texts. Why do I find this interesting? This author devoted a whole chapter to assessing fluency, half of that chapter, he spent dismissing the reliability of DIBELS as an assessment of fluency. Our school uses it as one measure. It’s validating, though, that we take a lot of other things into account, many of which are mentioned in this book and use multiple assessment strategies as well, but if DIBELS is really all that unreliable, should we be using it at all?

In the end, I couldn’t agree with the author more, that both reading aloud to students and reading volume is important. It goes with the persistent practice theories mentioned in The Talent Code and other similar books. Kids need opportunities to read, at school, at home, wherever. My only complaint of this book is the $37 price tag for a 138 page paperback. Thank goodness it was left in the teachers lounge on Friday to be passed on, where it will return tomorrow for someone else to read. Thought provoking and written in a style that is easy for teachers to read, the book also offers many strategies for fostering fluent readers.

 

 

I ♥ Picture Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have to add this book to my top 10 of 2010 list. I don’t know which book I’d bump out, but this one would definitely make my top 10 … A Sick Day for Amos McGee (Stead/Stead). Simple and sweet with illustrations that evoke picture books of the past. I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in creating caring classroom climates (I apologize for that alliteration. It was completely accidental).

Engage Through Story

I sometimes find that my own perceived strengths in certain contexts can also be my weaknesses in others. For example, when I’m teaching, I think that one of my strong traits is patience. However, outside that arena, I can be extremely impatient. Educational reform, for example – Why hasn’t it already happened?

For me, the same contradiction applies to giving presentations. Years ago, when I sang in a chorus, I enjoyed getting a solo, and it didn’t matter what the size of the audience was, it wasn’t something I feared. I currently have no problem getting in front of my students when I need to present something to them. Still, public speaking in front of adults has always intimidated me. Whether it be for a parent curriculum night or presenting something I’ve learned to other faculty members, it is not something I have a lot of confidence in. I have learned, though, that one can only get better at something by practicing, and one learns from their errors. So, when asked to give a presentation today about using and integrating technology in the classroom, I said, “Yes,” but was rather intimidated by the idea. After all – what do I know? I’m still learning about it myself. But like my own fears in the areas mentioned above, I know that using technology can be something a lot of teachers find intimidating themselves. With that knowledge, my goal was to hopefully demonstrate some of the possibilities with the tools that we have, so that they can be used to engage kids in meaningful ways – as well as make some of my audience feel like they had the capacity to get outside their comfort zone, take risks, and in the process – learn.

I think I watch too many expert presenters – whether at conferences, or through TED talks and my expectations for presentations has risen. A few good examples of who I was lucky enough to hear in person last year include John Medina, Sir Ken Robinson, Michael Sandel, and Carol Dweck. Watching these presenters is a good way to learn, but you still need to do it for yourself in order to get the practice.

Over the break, I read a great book called Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. I have to say that this book influenced me a lot on how I went about putting my presentation together. Here are just a few things I learned from the book: Tell a story with your audience as the protagonist. Define the journey and where you want to take them acknowledging the risk and resistance. Make the reward worth it. Value brevity and understand there is always room to improve. Use evocative visuals.

And so, for my presentation, one of my first slides was an image of the spaceship USS Enterprise, and I started by stating Star Trek’s Mission: To boldly go where no one has gone before. Followed by a Maslow quote: “We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, directions, missions, and callings.” I then went straight to an image of the USS Lincoln with the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner, letting my audience know that we can avoid this if we focused on our own mission. What flashed up next on the screen was my school’s Mission Statement. It’s something that hopefully made a connection with everyone that was in the room. Only then, did I state my objectives for the hour to come and continue with my presentation. Opening that way is not something I would have normally done had I not read the book or seen great speakers, but it was a great learning experience for me and upon reflection, worth taking the risk. I’m hoping I influenced my colleages just enough so that they will also take some risks in trying to use some of that technology.

Below is the author of the book mentioned above giving a quick summary of why it’s important to engage through story.

Graphic Novels: Sophisticated Enough for Adults

At the advice of a colleague, I took some time to read some fiction, only to find out that the first book I picked turned out to be a biography. Nonetheless, I was engrossed in the graphic novel called Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. For all those who look down at writing that isn’t in the traditional western canon of literature, they are certainly missing out on some complex, innovative, and satisfying story telling. It turns out to be about math, logic, and insanity told from the perspective of famous mathematician/logician Bertrand Russell. Unbeknownst to me, there is even a bit of educational philosophy along with traditional Greek math and philosophy as well. So much for non-educational reading. It’s been on my list for a year and I finally got to it. Who knew?

I’m guessing that those who dismiss graphic novels as literature have yet to read a good one cover to cover. Earlier this year, from a recommendation of a middle school English teacher, I read a graphic novel called American Born Chinese. Not only is it engaging, it deals with serious topics such as cultural biases, racism, self-loathing. It has a very literary quality to its structure, but overall, is an excellent work, was glad it was recommended to me, and am also glad to see him engaging his students with that book. It also happens to be the 2007 Printz Award Winner (The Caldecott/Newberry for Young Adults).

I did finally manage to relax and read some fiction though, yet it’s amazing how reading fiction can spur one to want to learn more about the factual events about the time and place where the story is set.

I’ve found the graphic novels for younger students (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, or The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, for example) have a high engagement quality, are great for reluctant readers, but are still lacking in the sophisticated story telling. I have two new goals. 1) To find a graphic novel of literary quality for second graders, and 2) To ensure that the literature I give my students to read engages them in a way beyond the text. There is definitely a place for graphic novels in schools.

Happy 2011!

 

Best of the Year

The New York Times recently posted their top ten list of books for the year, and only one that I’m reading made that list: Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim – if you’re a fan, you’ll appreciate his genius lyric writing and his sometimes self-critical commentary on them. He also comments on lyricists such as Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, and Cole Porter. It really is a great book and one that is made better as you listen to the music as you read it. On that same list is Jonathan Franzen’s new one Freedom, which, if like The Corrections in anyway, will be a spectacular read (I’m just waiting for either the paperback version or an e-reading device of some kind as it’s very thick and heavy).

Anyway, here’s my best list for a variety of things.

Top 10 Books somewhat related to teaching (in no particular order):

1. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
2. Brain Rules by John Medina
3. Catching Up or Leading the Way by Yong Zhao
4. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Sir Ken Robinson
5. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Stephen Johnson
6. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable by Seth Godin
7. Transforming Professional Development into Student Results by Douglas B. Reeves
8. Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book: Life Lessons from Notable People from All Walks of Life (various authors)
9. The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching & Learning (various)
10. Mindset by Carol Dweck (Even a couple of years old, I read it again, so it counts and beats out Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, the Heath Brother’s Switch, and Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap)

Top 10 Chil

dren’s Books

1. It’s a Book by Lane Smith
2. Children Make Terrible Pets by Peter Brown
3. Art and Max by David Wiesner
4. The Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood
5. Bink and Gollie by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee
6. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (thanks MB for the recommendation before it was even a Newberry winner) – one of my favorites
7. The Curious Garden by Peter Brown
8. Olivia Goes to Venice by Ian Falconer
9. The Odyssey (by Homer) but the graphic novel by Gareth Hinds
10. Henry Knox: Bookseller, Soldier, Patriot by Silvey and Minor

Darkness and Light in Children’s Literature

“Reader, you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform.”

That line is from one of my favorite books, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, A Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread by Kate Di Camillo. It may be my all time favorite, for each time I read it, it gets better. I’m almost done reading it aloud to my class and have treasured every moment so far. It is undoubtedly a rich piece of literature. A tapestry of beautiful language, structure, and themes.

My favorite are the characters though. Deep and not without flaws. It could have been a simple good vs. evil / mice vs. rats story, but like humans the characters are much more complex. Here’s another quote:

“There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman.”

That quote alone could launch a great social/emotional learning lesson.

Despereaux has some very dark moments, but unlike Harry Potter, which I saw this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed, the darkness of Despereaux is easier to handle with children because its characters include mice and rats. While still frightening, it doesn’t have the intensity that the later Potter books contain. And in a movie, that intensity is amplified, but the sound, special effects, and cinematography. In a book, the intensity is created by the author, but the reader or listener can make many more choices as to how they choose to view those things.

Despereaux won the Newberry Award in 2004 and no book has grabbed me that same way until the last two winners. 2010’s When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Unfortunately, both unsuitable for 2nd graders. They turned Despereaux into a cartoon in ’08 and, in my humble opinion, butchered it. Stick to the book.

Like the name of one of its characters, Chiaroscuro, The Tale of Despereaux is full of darkness and light, and if not my very favorite, certainly in my top ten. Children learn so much about people not being good or bad, but sophisticated and complex. They learn that sometimes its the choices that characters make, not their souls that have added to their darkness or light. With this book, children are able to develop empathy, even for the book’s villain – and that takes a good story teller.

The Innovator’s Way

I just started a new book called The Innovator’s Way: Essential Practices for Succesful Innovation by Denning and Dunham (avail. at the Seattle Public Library) .

Even though I’ve just started the book, I really like the way the authors define innovation: “Innovation is the adoption of new practice in a community. ”

Notice that the authors focused on the word practice and not on the word product or program.

The mission at my school as I’ve mentioned in my blog begins with the words, “Through Innovative Teaching …” and I’ve really been trying to explore what that means this year.

This book really focuses on the definition above and focuses on the following four areas:

1. Community: the people who change their practices. How large is the community? What do its members value? What do they sacrifice to get the innovation?
2. Practices: the ways of doing things – distinguishing the practices being changed inside the community from the innovator’s practices that bring about the change.
3. Adoption: the commitment to new practices and their incorporation into the prior practices of the community.
4. Success: the goal of adoption  is achieved. Three environmental factors support success: content expertise, social interaction, and movement into new opportunities. How do we cope with failure? Learn and come back for later success? Abandon when the practice is obsolete or low in value?

The book breaks down the structure of innovation practice into 8 parts:

1. sensing
2. envisioning
3. offering
4. adopting
5. sustaining
6. executing
7. leading
8. embodying

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get through all 8 before the holidays are over. So far, this book is intriguing and fascinating. We’ll see how it goes.

 

Can One Be A “Champion” and “Well-Balanced” Teacher These Days?

I’m currently reading two books –  Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College and Mike Anderson’s The Well-Balanced Teacher: How to Work Smarter and Stay Sane Inside and Outside the Classroom.

The first of these piqued my interest when a nytimes article titled “Building a Better Teacher” appeared featuring Lemov’s book. The second book grabbed my attention mostly because if you try to do everything that a school asks you to do as well as use the techniques in Lemov’s books (by the way, many of those techniques are excellent for anyone who is a teacher), it is almost impossible to balance teaching inside and outside the classroom.

Here is an example in Lemov’s book about one of the “champions” he talks about: Julie Jackson who leaves her two children at 5:25 in the morning and doesn’t arrive home until 8pm later that same day. “After spending time with her family, she often flips open her laptop and emails until late in the evening.”

Lemov goes on to say that a good teacher isn’t someone with a gift, but someone who has “work ethic, diligence, and high personal standards.” I agree with that, but there’s often a cost – one of imbalance.

Lemov’s so-called 49 techniques are excellent, and while a little regimented, make perfect sense. For example, he suggests that you use precise and technical vocabulary. If you’re asking for the difference between two numbers in math, you are not asking about the difference in their properties. If you ask a child what the difference is between 10 and 8 is, and they answer, “One is a two digit number and one is a single-digit number,” in a way, the child is correct, but Lemov argues that you immediately correct this and define the term in math. Unfortunately, a lot of his techniques do not contribute to critical thinking or great dialogue among students, but also include some rather old-fashioned drill and kill ways to score well on a standardized test or simply to control one’s class.

Apart from lesson planning (also some excellent advice) what Lemov doesn’t do is talk about what teachers need to do outside of the classroom: collaborate with one another, discuss new curriculum materials, share what they have learned with each other, communicate with parents, consult with counselors, continue learning, read about best practices, correct student work, provide meaningful feedback, and so on. All of which require time, and yet so many schools have meeting after meeting only to read a list of announcements.

I’ll be sharing a few things I’ve learned with our faculty at our meeting on Wednesday. If they read this blog, they would have already seen my posts on those items. Since I’ll be presenting in a different format, I’ll try to make the most of it and try new things. We’ll see how that goes. Nonetheless, it will take preparation and time.

In Anderson’s book, he has some good advice. Advice though, that is difficult to take. He lays out his book in these sections:

1. The importance of managing stress – Studies cited in his book find teachers have one of the highest levels of stress at work.
2. Meeting our most basic needs – it’s true that I sometimes do not have the time to eat lunch because of supervisions, meetings, etc. He suggests journaling as a way to escape – somehow my journaling doesn’t disconnect me from work.
3. Belonging: Becoming an Important Part of a Community – one of his suggestions in here is to engage in crucial conversations which he describes as those that can be difficult, however, I’ve noticed some people aren’t always receptive to those conversations.
4. Significance – Teaching with a Sense of Purpose – Anderson suggests  creating a blog. He also says to remain creative and retain your voice. Today’s standardizations and textbook curricula are “sapping teachers of creativity and voice”.
5. Competence – The Importance of Self-Efficacy – you’ve got to know what you’re teaching and feel good about what you do. Still, there is so much to know. This year, for example, my school took sustainability as its theme. While I’m a big proponent of this theme and its values, I’ve become more skeptical about organizations like LEED and the ‘greening’ of things. The bottom line is what behavior is really greener, not because it will get you a point, but because it is indeed a more sustainable practice.
6. Fun -The Importance of Positive Engagement – when time is already an uncontrolled factor, how does one make a happy-hour fun. How does one build camaraderie, without it feeling like it’s forced? I’d love to create a lunch group for example and take turns bringing different things for members of the group, but with recess duties during lunch 4 days a week, that’s highly unlikely.
7. Balance – The Importance of Planning out Time and Energy. Anderson’s suggestion of figuring out what to eliminate is a really good one. Last week, we only had half an instructional day due to snow days and the Thanksgiving holiday. We now have 3 weeks until a long 2-week break. Today, I sat down and prioritized the things that were most important to finish in these 3 weeks, and my job later will be to eliminate or postpone the items on the bottom of that list.

All in all, both books are good, but not great. Ultimately, I’d love to be a ‘champion teacher’ as cheesy as that book title sounds and be a ‘well-balanced’ one as well. Neither book  provided immediate help, but maybe over time they will.

 

Liberating Learning

I just finished reading a book called Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education by Moe and Chubb. It’s a great book that shows you where American education might go in the future, and how some schools are already on the cutting edge. I know the last thing I want to do is show up in my pajamas in front of my computer to interact virtually with students everyday. I need the face to face contact, yet many virtual acadamies are popping up all over the place – some more successful than others. That is one trend of the future. Another trend includes “charter schools that have embraced technology with a passion, showing that even brick-and-mortar schools that look wholly conventional on the outside can be transformed on the inside.” This fits so neatly with my school’s mission which begins: Through innovative teaching in a caring and traditional environment…. The caring and traditional environment, I get. The school is a bricks-and-mortar (literally) school. But inside, there’s a lot of resistance to innovation. To me, innovation means trying new things, be it using technology or a different way of teaching. It also means something different depending on the children you teach. I know I’m going to make mistakes along the way, that’s what happens when you try new things. But my schools values embrace that – “We foster resilience and expect all to search and find, to fail and learn, to risk and succeed in a changing world.” I hope that applies not just to our students, but also to the teachers and the administration.

Teaching in an independent school means that we should be free from some of the stifling government mandates such as required textbooks and pacing charts. A good teacher is going to try to know his/her students well and use a set of tools to reach those kids which may include part of a text. They are going to do their best to customize and individualize. Why do only the struggling students have an IEP? All students should have an individualized educational plan.

It also means going beyond the scripted curriculum or one that comes neatly packaged with a few bells and whistles. Many of these bells and whistles exist for free! It means stepping outside your comfort zone and trying to create some content for those interactive whiteboards and engage the kids to interact with it. Create a website, start a blog, a wiki, whatever – move forward.

If we harness it correctly, according to the authors “information technology has enormous potential for transforming — and improving — the way children learn, the way teachers teach, and the way schools are organized and operated.” This week’s NYTimes had an article about how distracted teens are with technology. Perhaps it’s because they weren’t taught to turn their instant messaging, text messaging, or email notifications off when they need to attend to a task.

Reform in Education is not new, but all it’s done is incrementally increase the pressure to perform on various tests. While countries like China are tyring to emulate the Americans, we are trying to emulate their rote style of learning. In my humble opinion, rote learning isn’t real learning. There’s definitely a place for rote learning; that is if you use that tool later, otherwise it’s pointless.

Here are some of the things the authors suggest as exciting possibilities:

• curricula can be customized – rather than standardized
• parents can be more included in their child’s education via technologies
• data systems can show all who need to be concerned the progress (or lack of it) thus increasing accountability
• schools can operate at lower costs, pay their teachers more, and have funds left for more technology (which is relatively cheap these days)

How are we supposed to know if technology actually does increase student achievement? The research and evidence is still new, but if used correctly, increases have been shown in student achievement (Marzano 2009).  Students use it much more frequently outside of schools than in it.

The majority of experiences in school with technology for students is teachers using powerpoint to present, and students using the internet to do research. But there’s so much more they can be doing. They can write blogs (contained or completely open depending on the age group), create wikis on subjects that interest them, and the list goes on. If we are investing for the future, we need to stop buying audio books on spinning media and store them in the cloud. We don’t need a server room at our school anymore and teachers need to discover what kinds of tools are available free on the web. I’ve blogged about many here, as well as other blogs that highlight sites like that, and yet many seemed surprised when they see it for the first time.

Technology programs are getting very good at analyzing students with reading difficulties such as fluency and dyslexia and yet, most schools do not have this technology.

I used to use pull-down maps, but now with google earth, we’ve got a model of the earth that we can zoom in and out of and go from place to place. And that’s just the beginning.

There are great short videos on National Geographic, Youtube, among others. Recently, Scholastic.com showed reenactment of a Wampanoag Thanksgiving. Not all kids can go to Plymouth.

The authors continue that scores of tech-based programs “are sold by lots of small entrepeneurial firms including the big three textbook Publishers: Pearson, McGraw-Hill. and Houghton-Mifflin.” There effects are quite modest. Why? Because it doesn’t fit in the schedule and there is not sufficient time to train teachers. Nowhere does it say it’s because of the technology. Besides, a lot of this tech can be found for free on sites like the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives.

In the end, nothing increases achievement more than an effective teacher. I believe that today, an effective teacher needs to integrate technology, avoid the politics, and look forward.

Here is something I stumbled upon earlier: 8 Ways Technology is Improving Education.

Multiple Perspectives 2

Teaching most kinds of historical events, it’s important to ask the kids the following:

1. Who wrote it?
2. Why did they write it?
3. Who was the audience?

There’s a great picture book (yes, it’s a picture book)  on the revolutionary war titled George Vs. George and it attempts to describe the events from two perspectives: that of the British, and that of the Colonists.

Last Friday, after the children read two different accounts of the event and viewed a 4 minute online video, they were asked to examine Paul Revere’s illustration below.

During our discussion the following questions were asked: Who looks innocent in this picture? One of the men killed, Crispus Attucks, was an African American, yet he is not portrayed here – why do you think that is? The British soldiers are all standing in a straight line with their weapons all aimed the same way. Did the illustration match the descriptions you read? Why or why not?

With todays image rich world, it’s important for kids (yes, even 2nd graders) to be able to analyze, think critically, and discern for themselves what’s going on beyond the story. The children looked up the words ‘massacre’ and ‘riot’ and they had to decide for themselves if one word fit the situation better based on the multiple sources they were exposed to.

Another project the kids did with their first grade buddies this week was to look at a Picasso work from the exhibit here at the Seattle Art Museum which we will visit in January. The Picasso piece was this one here:

Before giving the children the title of the piece, we asked them what they thought they saw. Some mentioned color. Other’s mentioned shape (we threw in some math terms where we could). A few mentioned texture. I told them that this hangs on a wall and we may see it on our visit. We then discussed whether they thought this was a painting or a sculpture – or both.

We then told them the title of the piece was Violin and asked them if they saw any elements of a violin. We then showed them an image of our new school and asked them to deconstruct it and build shapes that reminded them of our school building.

This is what they came up with:

When we first thought of taking a field trip to the exhibit, we thought it would be an excellent opportunity, but didn’t really see how it fit into the curriculum or our schoolwide theme of sustainability.  Nonetheless, we discovered that using recycled magazines and using the school as the subject, we fulfilled two of the three subtopics of that theme: sense of place, and reduction of paper. Our objectives also included collaboration and the sharing of ideas. If you look closely, you might see elements of a solar panel, native plants, a green roof, and a sundial.

Whether it be a history lesson, or an art lesson, seeing things from multiple perspectives often leads to new insights both for the kids and the teachers.