Next month I will have the pleasure of working on curriculum mapping with Heidi Hayes Jacobs for two days in New York City!
The Problem
With this opportunity in mind, I decided to rewatch her TED Talk from a few years ago. One of her lines caught my attention:
“Every textbook, in every school, that’s in paper, is dated.”
So, I ask myself, in general…Are we (educators) being a bit melodramatic when we talk about the struggle of having to instruct with outdated textbooks?
If you were to take a five-year vacation from your current school district, you would hope that “things” would look noticeably different upon your return…But would they?
The Potential Problem
Would all the glaring differences be worth the time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears? Or, would things look very much the same, despite the daily (and sometimes painful) grind experienced by so many educators?
Progress takes place if/when we are intentional about making it happen, not when the majority of our time is spent on daily managerial tasks with a few forward-thinking ideas sprinkled in arbitrarily.
A few weeks ago at the Edscape Conference I co-facilitated a one-hour session titled, Non-Negotiables of Professional Development.
The Problem
My partner, Erin Murphy (@MurphysMusings5), and I only made it through 6 of our 23 planned slides. All it took were the first few slides and a thinking routine to generate an intense, on-topic discussion that lasted the entire hour and could have easily gone on for much longer.
Daggett’s Presentation
A week ago I had the privilege of attending a full-day presentation by Bill Daggett. If you ever have the opportunity to work with him, do it! Highly recommended! Prior to the presentation I had heard so much about his ability to engage an audience. So, I was as interested in watching a world-class presenter do his thing as I was in the content that he would bring to the table. In both regards, he did not disappoint.
This past Monday I facilitated an introduction to Writing Pathways professional development with two of my district’s Reading Specialists.
[Read more…] about Writing Pathways Professional Development
Dissonance.
According to dictionary.com, dissonance can be defined as “lack of agreement or consistency.”
From my research, it is one of the hallmarks of any successful organization.
In Good to Great Jim Collins declares:
A handful of years ago I was teaching fourth grade when the whole idea of the flipped classroom entered my radar. The Educause definition of the topic states:
The flipped classroom is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions.
In short, get the direct instruction out of the way so class time can be dedicated to problem solving.
The Problem
Front-loading direct instruction goes against everything that I believe in as an educator, and therefore, so does the way in which most classrooms are flipped.
In the last post we explored three ways in which educational books can be used (or misused) during professional development to impede our progress. One of these points touches upon making professional development more focused by (1) starting with the end in mind (or with what enduring understandings you want participants to walk away), and then (2) focusing only on the parts of the book that pertain to these understandings.
In Instructional Coaching, Jim Knight talks about the “art form” of instructional coaches being able to take a book and present/teach its contents in a simplistic fashion. He explains that ideas “will catch on much quicker if they are (a) powerful and (b) easy to use.” As implementers of professional development, I believe that we must own the process of making our resources and books as absorbable as possible (and not be so quick to blame teachers who may not “get it” the first time around). As Knight declares, “Teachers do not resist change so much as they resist poorly designed change initiatives.”
With my thoughts and Knight’s research in mind, here are the steps that I generally follow in order to “transform” a book into professional development:
[Read more…] about How to Transform Educational Books into Professional Development
A few months ago I was consulting with a principal who was planning to roll out differentiated instruction professional development in her school. A great deal of this planning time was dedicated to researching/deciding what book should serve as the basis for the learning.
After some conversation we started to ask ourselves if it was truly necessary to distribute a book to the teachers.
[Read more…] about Do Educational Books Impede Our Progress?
In the previous post (part 1 of 2), we explored the fact that student response apps (Socrative, Kahoot!, Plickers, etc.) are often mislabeled as “formative assessment tools.” What makes them formative depends on the context in which they are used. Formative assessment is a process, and in order for a tool to play a part in this process the results/data it produces must be leveraged to differentiate instruction or learning.
The Problem
Now, let’s explore a second problem with these apps, which is the belief that they are not generally associated with higher-order thinking.
[Read more…] about The Problem with “Formative Assessment Tools” (part 2 of 2)