Quite a bit after the fact...

I was grateful for the chance to listen to many book reviews. My summer reading list has grown because of it. Being able to hear Audrey connect her reading directly to her work that she is doing right now, validated taking the time to read the book myself. Also, I am interested to read Fallyn's book: Whole New Mind as I am always curious to find out more about how the human brain works. I believe the more insight I have the more likely I am to be able to understand where my students and people in general are coming from and how they operate.

My own "digital plunge"

In the first district I taught in, there was a computer lab in the elementary school which served grades K - 4. Although there weren't computers in the classrooms aside from the teacher's computer, the students had computer class once a week for half an hour. The computer teacher centered her lessons around curriculum concepts that were being taught in the classroom. For instance, if we were learning about seasons, then in computer class that week, the students might create a picture in KidPix of a tree as it would look in each of the seasons. As a matter of fact, this was how all of the specials classes worked (aside from Phys. Ed.) but from computer to library, music to art, integrated curriculum was happening.
Well, that's not the direction I had intended this post to take, so let me get on with it. I recently read and agree with the fact that a lot of times if new technology equipment is going to be purchased it tends to go to the upper grades first. The rationale, although I can't say I agree here, is that perhaps the students at that level will be better able to utilize the resources. I have decided to take the "discarded" first generation of MLTI laptops, and see what I can do with them. The readings in this course were the deciding factor to take this initiative, and it has worked wonderfully!
I began simply by creating a portaportal account and finding websites to add to it. For those of you who are not familiar with portaportal, it is basically what I would call a "baby-sitter". It allows me to create links on a home page so that students simply need to click the links, once signed into the portaportal, and reduces the amount of "searching" that a second grader would have to do. My students access this site at least once a week, and has become just a piece of our technology learning.
I have participated in one webinar and have continued to read articles as they come to find out how others are integrating computer technology at the lower elementary grades.
In addition to portaportal, my students are word processing and we are just beginning to look into the possibilities of imovie. I am excited to keep this endeavor going, and if anyone has any sites/articles that they think would be helpful, please feel free to share!

Food for thought...

My across the hall neighbor returned from a trip to visit her daughter this week, absolutely astounded by a conversation she had with a fifth grader from Texas during her plane ride. The child had asked whether or not the students in our school took state tests and they got to talking about when they were taken. The child was amused that our students take them in the fall as opposed to his school district where they are administered in the spring.

My friend asked him if he got nervous about taking the exams and he said that indeed he did because he didn't want to stay back. Now my colleague had to pause for a moment to process what this 11 year old had just said. After recovering from the shock of what this implied she went on to ask him if many children actually were held back and he responded with an explanation that no, not many children did stay back.

Their conversation involved insight into parents having a vested interest in their children's education. This young man let her know that many parents secured tutors and participated in other preparatory opportunities to ensure that their student passed these tests. If a child did not pass, they were given the opportunity to participate in a remedial summer school program and retested in August over the areas they had not passed. If the student passed, they were promoted to the next grade and if they did not they were in fact kept back.

I am not ready to agree with retaining children based solely on testing results. After all, there is a great amount of research providing an argument of the effectiveness of retention at all. To me this conversation shed a light on parental involvement when the stakes were high enough. Again, I am not arguing for or against retention at this point, I am just wondering about the implications this idea has. I know that even at the grade level I teach, second, retention is hardly even heard of. There has to be strong data backing your decision based not just on academics as a stand alone but evidence showing that the lack of achievement is due to absenteeism, disability, etc.... and students know it!

I don't think it should be a dangling carrot day in and day out, but, and this goes along with thoughts from my last post, how do you "jump start" parents into being active participants in their children's education; from the consistency in eating and sleep schedules, to the support in learning the curriculum and achieving that standards set for them? My thoughts are forming for another blog post: Ideas on how to get parents involved.

Infected! (In a good way)

Well, I know that my whole idea of change has been based on the Ghandi quote "Be the change you wish to see in the world" and I believe that some of my "educational system rants" have indeed infected the minds of people around me. My for instance is in the paragraphs below from an email I received from a very close friend after a discussion we had about the "options" for reformation when a school has been "black listed" (AYP). As you can see in the first line, they were looking for a place to share and the words are a wonderful articulation of my often muddled thoughts. He says:

"So just a little food for thought here... I thought you might appreciate my rant. Or maybe your teacher friends.

What if you set your alarm to go off every 20 minutes during the night, for the span of a week? During this week, you would be taught in the same way you always had, and would be tested at the end of the week. Your test scores at the end of this nearly sleepless week would probably not be as high as they were the week before, right? Even though nothing has changed about the teaching methods, you'd be getting worse results.

What is the solution? Extend the amount of time for teaching / studying / homework? Of course not! You'd be even more exhausted and would probably not improve, but you may do even worse. So what would you do? Unplug your alarm clock or set it properly.

Now apply this alarm clock analogy to any number of things. Diet, exercise, household environment, patterns of stimulus [TV and other media], medication, etc. Maybe America is doing so poorly in education compared to the rest of the world, not because of our teaching methods (or not strictly so) but because of our way of life in general.

How can your learn, if you CAN'T learn? If your brain / body / neurotransmitters are out-of-whack, then no amount of "buckling down" or "getting serious" is going to help. When your car engine has fouled spark plugs, do you just mash the gas even harder, or do you replace them? Sure, pushing down on the pedal works in the short term, but eventually your engine will stop working or blow up. Suicide and self-medicating? School and workplace shootings? People shutting down or blowing up.

Why are we trying to hammer in a nail with a high heel shoe instead of a hammer? Why are we "fixing" education when we should be fixing our lives?"

Really, I could not have said it better myself. :)

Revising High School

After reading about some of the possibilities, I can see the greater good in revising how we "do" high school. As Marc Prensky put it in his article Shaping Tech for the Classroom, "A big effort? Absolutely. But our kids deserve no less." It isn't that there are just a lot of aspects to be considered and overhauled, it's taking a look at the entire picture of what a high school currently is and does.

As an educator, there is a fear of criticism from not only parents but also administrators. How can you "act radically" and try to begin the movement and still keep your job? For me, it is easier to make small changes withing my own classroom and speak up when the opportunity arises, than to create the "big wave", and as the articles pointed out, these small changes don't really add up over time but more or less just end up back at the start.

A couple of ideas that would be wonderful to put into place were, specialized academic plans for each student, student advisors that stayed with them all four years, and also offering an advisory period each day where students can gather. It is said that students will do better socially, emotionally and academically, when they are invested and involved. How else do we as humans become invested other than by building relationships with others and for students, that's with their peers and teachers.

From a student perspective, it would take some getting used to. Because learning so often involves memorizing a set of facts, when you ask students to be creative and respond in general to something, they have no idea where to begin. I can remember from my own high school education that there were some projects that now as a teacher I would have thought were a great way to assess the students learning. I would have been excited to implement such an assessment, but as a student who had never really experienced demonstrating learning in ways other than a "traditional" test, I did not even no where to begin.

In conclusion, I don't have one. The possibilities seem endless and yet overwhelming. Where do we even begin? How can we take the research that has been done, the opinions that abound, the wonderful ideas, the examples we have been shown, and design an educational system that truly prepares our citizens for at least today and hopefully tomorrow.

Parental Involvement

It would be extremely difficult for me to incorporate all my thinking each week into one comprehensive post, so for today's I wanted to respond to a point in the Current Trends article. One of the things that jumped out at me was in the section discussing the trends in Asia and how "parents, especially mothers, take an active role in their children's education...and reinforce curriculum at home..." I believe I have probably had this discussion with various people one hundred times. Families today do not appear to be as involved in their children's lives as they once were. I know there are families who still sit down together and have dinner or talk about their days together, but that is more the exception than the rule. There are a number of reasons why this may be the case, more households with working parents means less time between picking up the kids from daycare and having a meal together in addition to getting homework done and off to bed before the routine begins again. It seems kids are involved or signed up for so many different things these days too. Extra curricular activities are scheduled multiple nights of the week. Even Sunday used to be a day that sports leagues didn't meet and families could spend time together. These things have all changed. The result I think is that families have other priorities and may view school somewhat like their job, where you go there from 9-3 and move onto another focus outside of those hours.
I do know one thing, the number of children that come to school without homework completed or their school/home folders still full with yesterdays newsletters and work, continues to increase each year that I teach. Home is just generally not a place where curriculum takes place.

Testing the U.S. Way

I am wondering about the way tests are developed in other countries. I am really thinking about the way Sweden, Finland, UK, etc...develop their tests. It makes sense that tests, the Rich Tasks, are developed by educators and scored by educators. It would be nice for the U.S. to look into taking the time to train test assessors and develop meaningful tasks to assess student learning rather than the bubbled, machine scored assessments that come around once a year and increase stress levels of district administrators across the United States.
I think that sometimes officials look for the most efficient way of doing things and don't always consider the value of digging deeper. If time is so valued, and that is the reason that we continue with multiple choice standardized tests instead of tasks that cultivate independence and active learning, than why do we waste time preparing students for these tests that teachers and students have little or no connection with other than that they are used to "ensure equitable education"?

EXACTLY!

I had not heard of Alvin Toffler before I read this article. After reading this article I feel validation that I am not crazy but a part of an innovative way of thinking that schools are not doing for students what they should be! I often tiptoe around these radical thoughts for fear that I will be found out and locked away for trying to change what isn't right. Toffler hits almost every idea that I have had while reading about charter schools and other school models. Other countries follow this line of thinking, students begin specialized schooling at a much younger age than the U.S. and it has not ended in catastrophe. If anything the students in these countries are far more advanced in their education. It just makes sense that if we can diversify education to meet the needs of students then they are going to be more successful because they are engaged in their learning. I have a very close friend who made it through school just fine but didn't pursue college further than the first semester because who needs general education requirements if you are trying to pursue a degree in a specific field. It didn't make sense to him that he was paying for courses that he could have been teaching for a certificate of completion. Why was it that he already knew the information, because he researched and self taught the things he wanted to know. He continues to build his knowledge base still through investigation. He is motivated to find out more because he is interested in what he is studying. This makes sense for all students.
I am pursuing my master's not only for further career development but also because I feel that it is so important for me to continue learning. I believe Toffler's point regarding teachers needing to leave the classroom for short periods of time is important. We should not just continue to do things the same way because that's how it has always been done. There is new information and discoveries being made "at 100 miles per hour". Teachers need to be current in their teaching. We need strong people to break the molds of education and develop a new way of educating that will meet the needs of children today.

Curriculum Definition

Well, the definitions of curriculum that I found all stated just about the same thing. Basically curriculum is a set of courses and their content required to complete a particular field of study. This doesn't contradict what I already had in mind but it is pretty vague. I don't think that I would change this definition in anyway but I would want to know how do you define and include intangible concepts like the development of character? Similarly, is there flexibility in changing the curriculum to meet the needs of particular students? My understanding of curriculum, from the perspective of a 2nd grade teacher in a public school system, is that it is the material required to be covered by the end of a given grade level of school.

Regularities

Old habits certainly do die hard and at what cost? I have spent this school year examining my schedule to the point of exhaustion to see where I can make it all fit in a way that is engaging to my students, that is the key. You see, I could manage to create a schedule where I could get in the required lessons, but is that what's best for kids? Now I don't want to be quoted to say that I would like to extend the school day, I know that would result in an uproar, but I am curious when I take a look at the 6 hour day and realize that while we have had a 6 hour day for as far back as I know, a student's day does not look the way it did even when I was in elementary school.

As I said, I have been playing with my daily schedule all year to see where I can "buy" more time. The nightmare of my realization has been that while the day does allow for the students to be at school for 6 hours, there is not 6 hours for me to use. Lunch and recess, necessary things for children take out a 40 minute block (if it is not the middle of January in the state of Maine) and a daily related arts area, another crucial piece to a child's schooling, takes another 30 minutes. So now I am down to 4 hours and 50 minutes without allowing for transition time or breaks to effectively teach 1 hour of math, 1 hour of writing, 1.5 hours for literacy and at least 45 minutes for science or social studies. It won't take any of you long to figure out that really I should have exactly enough time to get in what I need to do for the day, and you would be right, if I left out any explorations and experiences that might make the learning meaningful for kids and of course the 30 to 40 minutes worth of transition times (January in Maine) that happen everyday. And there is definitely no time for crisis.

Students are supposed to go home at the end of each day having participated in all areas of the curriculum, at their appropriate level of instruction, in a style that meets their personal learning needs.

I believe it is far past time to look at why we still do things the same as we always have. Taking on the principal for the day notion, is there a way to create a curriculum that is truly cross- curricular so that students are not "dabbling in this" and then "dabbling in that"? I know block schedules are a start and I am hopeful that my own school will be looking at that very soon, but where else can we start to make more sense of the school day so that school can be a place for students to learn and grow not only in their academics but also in their development as a person as well.