North Teachers Wrestle with 1:1 laptops

Here is an email I sent to the NHS teachers in week two (day 8) of 1:1 laptops in our school.  I borrowed a quote from Tom's blog and some info I got from Twitter!  Yeah!

Dear North High,

Is it Friday, yet?!?   ‘Cuz, Dang!  I’m tired!  I am really challenged by all the new thinking I’ve been doing.  Dropbox, Google Docs, the best way to implement this or that.  How to make sense of it all… and my website is crap (please don’t look at it unless you just need to feel superior).

Last year our structure and approach to our work was the same as it had always been—we just worked our butts off to refine it to the best possible version of that.  And it worked!  We saw huge gains that brought us up to everyone else’s level in the District.  Well, okay, we surpassed most of the rest of the district by a few points—but that Register reporter is right, if we keep doing what we did last year we’ll level off or even drop back a little.    

This year we are rethinking the fundamental paradigms we all hold about teaching and learning… together.  Data Teams, Instructional Rounds, Staff Development—all of it—is designed around the idea that we’ve got to help and support each other because this is hard. No one feels like an expert, not even our experts.  I worked hard last year but I am thinking hard this year.

A technology education instructor at Drake, Jerrid Kruse said,  "Learning sometimes involves modifying deeply held beliefs.  Making sense of complexity, paradox, and nuance is not straight-forward.  Reinforcement of established beliefs is easy, but learning is frustrating." 

Jason Glass, the Director of the Iowa Department of Education, sent out this link yesterday to a blog about the “must have apps for the classroom”.  Check it out.

http://usatodayeducation.com/teacherlounge/index.php/2011/08/the-blog-must-have-apps-for-the-classroom/

Commonly asked question of the week:  Do I HAVE TO use Dropbox?

No, it is an option.  Some people are using Moodle.  Some have discovered Edmoto.  Some are using email or Google Docs.  There are so many right ways to do this and that is a paradigm shift.  It used to be we would all use the same technology in the same way (Example: we all log into Infinite Campus and take attendance and post grades the same way).   But now, with so many options, it can be dizzying.  All you must do, is to try something.  Give it a good run, don’t back off of it too soon.

One thing I noticed during the debrief on Tuesday (yes, two days ago), was that there was a gradual shift from the defensive posture (“We can’t determine the level of questioning because we only saw 20 minutes of the class!”) to an analytical posture.  We just started to make an objective analysis of where we are right now, without emotion or worry, and where we want to be as a school.  Our next steps are to think about how are we going to chart a path—as individuals and as a whole school—between the two.  That was our staff development yesterday.  (Administrators had their own staff development session at 2:20 to discuss how they are going to refine their practice, too!)

So, hold hands with your neighbor, help each other, do the best you can and then do it better next time!

You are doing courageous things, North High!  And it will make a HUGE difference in the lives and performance of our students.

Staff Instructional Rounds

I've been talking about our Instructional Rounds at NHS a lot recently.  Usually, when I take on a project like this I hit the books and learn everything I can so that I can anticipate problems and give focus and direction to our efforts. 

This time, however, there isn't very much out there about having a staff doing Rounds on themselves.  Everything I've found says things like, "Staff Rounds are the next progression of this practice."  I hear that Robert Marzano is currently writing a piece about staff rounds but is yet unpublished.  We're on the clock at North and we don't have time to wait. We did them yesterday.  Luckily we have a lot of brilliant people on staff.

We trained ourselves last week on being objective and taking good data.  That part went really well.  People were dressed up, on point, really thinking and listening (and we only had 2 people who were sick).

But when it came time to do the analysis in the debrief, even our very best teachers were hesitant and defensive.  It is hard to look objectively at the practice of your friends or make realistic assessments of our beloved school.  I have a particular understanding of that dilemma, having taught at North for 13 years before becoming a School Improvement Leader.

By the time we had concluded the Debrief, we were starting to come around and doing actual objective analysis.  It really started to catch!  We need to do it again then I think we'll really start to get develop the skills we need to have a staff full of Instructional Leaders. 

And boy, are we all tired today!

Twitter?

I am still trying to get my mind around the purpose and value of "Tweeting".  As I look over my Twitter Feed, I see one-sentence snippets of conversations.  My instructor, Tom Buckmiller, says that this is like a menu of conversation options-- I just have to decide which conversations to participate in.

Well, now that I can read the menu, I find that I don't know how to order.  How do I get involved in these conversations?  How do I stop and linger in one spot as the tweets wiz by?  There is a way of thinking about it that will resolve these questions... an approach, an attitude or an understanding about Twitter.

I understand the value of "ReTweeting" or RT now.  When you RT, you take what you see in one network that you follow and push it out to your network of followers.  And unlike the game of telephone, the message and its originator do  not get distorted.  

It seems to me that it is not about the flow of tweets it is the network that you build by who you follow.  I appreciate Tom's generosity in sharing his lists of who he follows.  Maybe that will get me started. 

I've been wanting to learn how to use Twitter for about a year.  Now, I have the opportunity because it is part of a class and therefore now on my priority list.

Conclusion:  Twitter is aptly named.