Tag Archives: professional development

Edcamp as PD: Shifting Mindsets (Part 2)

Posted on March 24, 2012 by in Education

To fol­low up my ear­lier post with a thought that was still mar­i­nat­ing before, another thing that I have been work­ing on at school is cre­at­ing more pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment that looks like the kind of learn­ing we want to see in our dis­trict class­rooms. As a leader, I am respon­si­ble not only to set a vision and goals for my area of super­vi­sion, but to model best prac­tices for my teach­ers. If I want teacher-​​centered class­rooms with stu­dents pas­sively absorb­ing vol­umes of con­tent, then that’s the kind of pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment I need to con­tinue doing.

But if I want student-​​centered, learning-​​focused, dif­fer­en­ti­ated, problem-​​based instruc­tion, I need to cre­ate the same for my teach­ers. Pro­vid­ing a lec­ture on how to do active learn­ing projects is not the way to get it done. I had a pro­fes­sor in grad­u­ate school from whom I learned a great deal. But I didn’t learn much from the actual class time. The pro­fes­sor had an enor­mously thick binder for each course stuffed with neatly-​​typewritten (as in an actual type­writer) notes, each page care­fully slid into a plas­tic sheet pro­tec­tor. He began each 3-​​hour class by stand­ing at a lectern, open­ing the binder to the page where he left off last time, and read­ing aloud to us from the script. Peri­od­i­cally he would salt the lec­ture with sto­ries from his expe­ri­ence as a teacher, prin­ci­pal or super­in­ten­dent; these were usu­ally mod­er­ately inter­est­ing. Sev­eral times in each course (and I had at least half a dozen courses with him) he would admon­ish us not to teach as he taught, and that he was too old to change his ways.

Where I really learned were from his assign­ments. He had a way of gen­er­at­ing spec­tac­u­lar ques­tions and prompts which forced us to dig, ana­lyze, and make con­nec­tions between what we were read­ing and dis­cussing in class. What would make them even more pow­er­ful would have been to turn them into col­lab­o­ra­tive exer­cises where we worked together to research and prob­lem solve.

Where the Edcamp model really shines, and where I think it pushes the enve­lope to the edge, is going even beyond student-​​centered learn­ing to student-​​driven learn­ing. When we allow stu­dents (in this case, the edu­ca­tors) to fol­low their pas­sions and inter­ests, to explore the things that already have mean­ing for them and to wres­tle together with each other over those mean­ings and appli­ca­tions, the learn­ing that can take place will be immense. Angela Maiers is a huge pro­po­nent of this approach, and her work would prob­a­bly help us to design bet­ter teacher pro­fes­sional development.

I plan to explore ways to embed teacher-​​centered learn­ing into pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment that still moves us towards district-​​initiated goals. Just as we can have teacher-​​selected goals and still plan student-​​centered learn­ing, I believe we can embrace teacher inter­ests and needs with­out giv­ing up the over­all mis­sion and direc­tion of a dis­trict ini­tia­tive. What are your thoughts about how this could work, or how it might back­fire on me? Has any­one done this before? What are your expe­ri­ences? Tell me in the comments.

Edcamp as PD: Shifting Mindsets

Posted on March 24, 2012 by in Learning

I just attended a ses­sion by three of the founders of Edcamp, Kris­ten Swan­son, Ann Leaness, and Chris­tine Miles. They shared an inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic: in the two years since the first Edcamp Philly, there have been 101 sep­a­rate Edcamp events around the world. There has been a great deal writ­ten in the blo­gos­phere (includ­ing this blog) about the value (or lack thereof) of this model for improv­ing teacher PD. I’m not going to extend that con­ver­sa­tion here, though I think it is still a valu­able one and worth pursuing.

What struck me, though, in the crowded ses­sion, was the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance that was going on when the teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors in the room tried to wrap their heads around the con­cept. Many of the ques­tions by the par­tic­i­pants pointed out that most of us still see pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment as district-​​centered, administrator-​​led train­ing ses­sions where all of the teach­ers receive the same packet of knowl­edge and skills in a “sit-​​and-​​get” session.

The idea of putting a bunch of edu­ca­tors in a room and just let­ting them be, well, edu­ca­tors together was just not work­ing for many of those in attedance. Sev­eral com­ments were clearly com­ing from a per­spec­tive where there was fear that the time wouldn’t be pro­duc­tive and the teach­ers would goof off, grade papers, or sim­ply cut class. Behav­iors which, frankly, we often see in tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment ses­sions. If we don’t closely con­trol the day, the think­ing goes, noth­ing will get done.

One of my own roles in my dis­trict is plan­ning pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment with the rest of the cur­ricu­lum team. One of the biggest requests I hear from teach­ers is, “We need time together as a group to discuss/​work on _​_​_​.” Why not sim­ply give it to them? The les­son from Edcamp, and events like it, is that given the oppor­tu­nity to learn together, teach­ers will actu­ally learn together, and the learn­ing that hap­pens will be valu­able (because they gen­er­ated it them­selves) and the time pro­duc­tive (because they invested it them­selves). Will it be the spe­cific, tar­geted, standards-​​based objec­tives that the cen­tral office wants to make hap­pen? Maybe, maybe not. But it will con­tribute to an improved cul­ture of teach­ing and learn­ing, and it will help build capac­ity within the teach­ing staff. That in itself is a wor­thy goal.

Hacking the Math Curriculum

Posted on February 26, 2012 by in Collaboration, Math

Monopoly Hackjam 1You know it’s not your typ­i­cal inser­vice day when you find the Assis­tant Super­in­ten­dent play­ing Monop­oly with a group of third and fourth grade teach­ers. That is exactly what you would have seen last Fri­day, how­ever, as some of our ele­men­tary teach­ers learned how to hack their math curriculum.

In an attempt to model the kinds of learn­ing I hope to see teach­ers using in their own class­rooms, to engage my learn­ers, and estab­lish a con­text for the work we would be doing the rest of the morn­ing, I used stole hacked an activ­ity which I learned about from Chad Sans­ing and Meenoo Rami. Although I hadn’t attended their ses­sion at Educon, I read a few Twit­ter and blog posts by oth­ers who did, after which I promptly began kick­ing myself for miss­ing it.

After an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with my super­vi­sor (Me: “Can I spend a lit­tle money on my inser­vice work­shop?” Boss: “Of course, what do you need?” Me: “Do you trust me…?”), I began plan­ning how I was going to use the Monop­oly Hack­jam. My goal was to use the game as a way to get teach­ers think­ing (as Seth Godin says) at the edges of the box.

We were going to be work­ing with two fairly mun­dane top­ics: plan­ning for the last three weeks of math instruc­tion prior to our state exam, and devel­op­ing resources for our high­est achiev­ing learn­ers to use when they test out of a unit. I had two goals: to stretch the con­straints (both real and per­ceived) to get to the most effec­tive plans pos­si­ble, and for the teach­ers to own the process.

What bet­ter way to prime the day than with a Monop­oly Hack­jam? Teach­ers entered the room to find at each table a brand new Monop­oly set and a large zip top bag con­tain­ing a fairly ran­dom assort­ment of other items: paper clips, sticky notes, small stones, etc. The guide­lines were sim­ple: on your turn, hack the game by chang­ing a rule or intro­duc­ing a new one.

A few teach­ers were uncom­fort­able with such an open-​​ended task. “I thought we were going to be work­ing on PSSA plan­ning,” one said. “What is the point of this?” asked another. I reas­sured them there would be a debrief­ing after­wards and I would con­nect it to our other work. The groups for the most part dived in with gusto, how­ever, and soon we had some rather inter­est­ing variations.

My friend Kris­ten Swan­son, vis­it­ing the ses­sion as an out­side observer, made an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion: the group in which the Assis­tant Super­in­ten­dent was play­ing had cre­ated the most con­ven­tional of the games; they made straight­for­ward and incre­men­tal changes. The group next to them, how­ever, had the most extreme ver­sion. The first player began the game by flip­ping the board over to its blank, back side. Almost imme­di­ately, there were real cash and credit cards out on the table, and it wasn’t long before they were using sticky notes to cre­ate their own spaces, includ­ing my favorite, “Make Mike tell you his PIN number.”

There was a wide vari­ety of direc­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions in the room. One group started the game with all prop­er­ties in fore­clo­sure and the play­ers had very lit­tle cash. Another char­i­ta­ble group cre­ated a rule that the first prop­erty you bought had to be given away to some­one else. A third group was more self-​​centered and each per­son was cre­at­ing rules that ben­e­fit­ted only them­selves, includ­ing this by the youngest player at the table: “The win­ner is always the youngest player.”

Dur­ing the post-​​hack debrief, there were a num­ber of thought­ful reflec­tions, some of which are para­phrased here:

  1. Even in the extreme group where the final prod­uct least resem­bled the orig­i­nal Monop­oly, the rules set­tled towards a group norm, and later rule changes tended to tweak or finesse the game rather than cre­ate major upheaval.
  2. All of the games were gen­er­ally rec­og­niz­able as Monop­oly, and the broad para­me­ters were essen­tially respected.
  3. Despite the wildly dif­fer­ent direc­tions and think­ing, the pri­mary goal was accom­plished: all the par­tic­i­pants ended up with a game they loved and enjoyed playing.

We fol­lowed with a dis­cus­sion of what hack­ing was, and landed on an under­stand­ing that hack­ing was not whole­sale rein­ven­tion of some­thing, but rather tak­ing some­one else’s work to remix and remold for your own purposes.

The group now began to tackle the task of hack­ing the state assess­ment. I am not a fan of test prep for the sake of test prep. I do believe, how­ever, that there are some valid things we can do to enable each stu­dent to approach the assess­ment with suc­cess and con­fi­dence. Let me be clear: by “hack­ing” the assess­ment, I was not propos­ing any­thing ille­gal, immoral, or uneth­i­cal. What I did want the teach­ers to do was think about their instruc­tion and sched­ules in flex­i­ble, even unusual ways, to make the most of the time. Some of the para­me­ters were hard bound­aries: we can­not push the test back, and I was not will­ing to sus­pend reg­u­lar math instruc­tion to replace it with addi­tional test prep. But even with these restric­tions, teach­ers came up with some inter­est­ing and thought­ful proposals.

We applied the same kind of hack­ing thought process to the enrich­ment mate­ri­als. Ear­lier in the year, I had intro­duced cur­ricu­lum com­pact­ing as a strat­egy across all class­rooms in grades 3 and 4. Because of some mis­takes in the way I com­mu­ni­cated the process, it came across to many teach­ers as a need­lessly rigid and restric­tive man­date. To cor­rect this, I asked the teach­ers to hack the process. Given a few non-​​negotiables (there must be a pre-​​assessment, stu­dents who test out will get replace­ment learn­ing activ­i­ties), the teams worked for about an hour to remake my work into a use­ful and usable tool instead of just one more dis­trict initiative.

The teach­ers who com­mented on the morn­ing to me seemed to think it was both pro­duc­tive and fun. For me, how­ever, the real win was in the con­ver­sa­tions I heard as I was cir­cu­lat­ing to assist and answer ques­tions. Every one of them was cen­tered on what we can do to improve teach­ing and learn­ing for all our students.

Edcamp: A Professional Development Amuse Bouche

Posted on May 23, 2011 by in Learning, Networking

I spent this past Sat­ur­day at edcamp Philly. Edcamp is an uncon­fer­ence: a gath­er­ing of pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tors that is delib­er­ately struc­tured dif­fer­ently than your typ­i­cal pro­fes­sional con­fer­ence. Instead of a set sched­ule of pre­sen­ters and ven­dors, pre­de­fined and pre­s­e­lected by a com­mit­tee, the atten­dees cre­ate the sched­ule on the fly by propos­ing their own sessions.

The top­ics at this year’s edcamp Philly ranged from “Mod­els of 1:1 Com­put­ing in the Age of Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics” to what was billed as the last-​​ever “Things That Suck” by Dan Calla­han (sorry, Dan, you may never get away from the con­nec­tion). The tone of the con­fer­ence and the ses­sions is almost self-​​consciously casual and irrev­er­ent, cul­mi­nat­ing in a “Smack­down” where par­tic­i­pants came to the podium and shared in rapid-​​fire suc­ces­sion a web site or app they thought was par­tic­u­larly use­ful, pow­er­ful, or sim­ply cool.

This is my third uncon­fer­ence (fifth if you count Educon, which has a sim­i­lar feel, but is more struc­tured). The first time I attended one, I left feel­ing like my head was going to explode from the sheer vol­ume of ideas that had been gen­er­ated over the week­end. Since then, I have had sim­i­larly pow­er­ful responses and believe there is some­thing to this that could be trans­lated into more tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment are­nas. That was, in fact, one of the ses­sions I attended on Sat­ur­day, and there was some pow­er­ful con­ver­sa­tion around the idea of dis­tricts adopt­ing an edcamp-​​like model for some of their inter­nal training.

But I can’t help but think that there ought to be more to this, also. I’m won­der­ing of some of the energy is sim­ply from the new-​​ness of doing PD dif­fer­ently. There was a con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter last night (in which I did not par­tic­i­pate) prompted by a very fair ques­tion by Bud Hunt:

“Have been check­ing in on #edcamp tweets off & on today. Still wait­ing for the use­ful bits. What’d I miss? Worth your time to go to #edcamp? I see plenty of state­ments regard­ing the awe­some­ness of #edcamp, and plenty of smart peo­ple involved, but no steak to match the sizzle.”

I have to agree with him: I seem to be miss­ing the steak, and I’ve been won­der­ing why. It got me think­ing about why edcamp still feels pow­er­ful and impor­tant to me, even though I walk away from many ses­sions feel­ing as though noth­ing of sub­stance actu­ally took place. On reflec­tion (which isn’t done yet, by the way), I’ve come up with some rea­sons that edcamp is still worth the time:

  1. It’s about the rela­tion­ships. The great­est thing I have received from each of the uncon­fer­ences I’ve attended is con­nec­tions with other edu­ca­tors. I have made some very good friends through the con­ver­sa­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tion that has devel­oped from each edcamp I have attended. I have found peo­ple who have sim­i­lar beliefs and inter­ests, and in many cases we have extended our work beyond that day.
  2. My bat­ter­ies get recharged. Each and every time I attend one of these, I am sud­denly immersed in a deep pool of peo­ple who care deeply about edu­ca­tion. In my every­day work envi­ron­ment, I am extremely for­tu­nate to work with sev­eral oth­ers who are as pas­sion­ate about edu­ca­tion as I am, but even so, it is a pow­er­ful thing to walk into a room where there are over a hun­dred peo­ple who have vol­un­tar­ily cho­sen to use their week­end talk­ing about work. It is next to impos­si­ble to walk away from that envi­ron­ment with­out feel­ing ener­gized and renewed.
  3. My map gets big­ger. It never fails that in every ses­sion I attend at an edcamp, I am exposed to a thought, idea, tool, resource, or con­nec­tion that I wasn’t aware of or hadn’t con­sid­ered before. I find out that some­one has already been doing some­thing that I was con­sid­er­ing, and now I have a place to go for advice. I learn about a tool that will solve a prob­lem I’ve been hav­ing, or I add a resource to my col­lec­tion and now have more ways to approach something.

Edcamp ses­sions never bring me to the point of mas­tery of a topic, and often we are no closer to a solu­tion to the prob­lems fac­ing edu­ca­tion than we were at the begin­ning. There are no deliv­er­ables at the end, there isn’t often a great deal of mea­sur­able growth or action.

I’m begin­ning to real­ize, though, that edcamp and sim­i­lar gath­er­ings can’t and won’t be the entire meal. It is more like an amuse-​​bouche: a tan­ta­liz­ing, bite-​​sized taste, designed to pre­pare the mouth for the later courses, to excite the taste buds and waken the senses to embrace the entire expe­ri­ence of the meal to come.

Should more sub­stance, more meat, be brought into the mix? Should the orga­niz­ers of edcamps think about how to begin grow­ing the model out of its infancy into a more sophis­ti­cated thing? Should there be out­comes and evi­dence of real learn­ing at the end of the day?

Per­haps. I leave it for another day to pon­der how that might hap­pen. But for now, I’m con­tent know­ing that edcamp has a very valu­able and worth­while place in inspir­ing me to keep work­ing hard at mak­ing things bet­ter for kids, not only in my own dis­trict, but as part of the larger edu­ca­tion community.

How about you? What other rea­sons is this kind of uncon­fer­ence still worth­while, even if the meat isn’t there yet?

Teach Me How to Teach

Posted on November 29, 2010 by in Content and Methods

This post was orig­i­nally writ­ten for the ntcamp blog and is cross­posted there.

Jack Nick­laus was an excep­tional mas­ter golfer. In his leg­endary career, he won a record 18 major tour­na­ments, and had a total of 115 pro­fes­sional wins. Many writ­ers have listed him as the great­est golfer in history.

You’d think the guy who is the world’s best golfer would have noth­ing new to learn about the sport. Yet every year, Nick­laus would go back to his teacher, Jack Grout, and say, “Teach me how to golf.” Grout would treat him as a novice golfer. They started with the absolute fun­da­men­tals: grip, stance, setup, align­ment. Why? Here’s how Nick­laus describes it in his book, Golf My Way:

Apart from rein­still­ing their impor­tance in my mind, this often has the effect of iron­ing out some of the bad habits I may have slipped into the pre­vi­ous year.


This was a habit that Nick­laus main­tained through­out his career, and it is a habit that teach­ers would do well to emu­late. Every year as you plan to begin a new school year, take the oppor­tu­nity to think of your­self as a brand new teacher again. Here are a few steps you can take and the rea­sons they are valuable.

  1. Get your own “teach­ing pro.” Jack Grout would likely be the first to admit that in a round of golf he’d prob­a­bly have no shot at play­ing bet­ter than Nick­laus. That didn’t make him less help­ful as a teacher. Even if you are the most expe­ri­enced, most accom­plished pro­fes­sional in your school, find a col­league whom you trust and respect to part­ner with you. Hav­ing another teacher to give you hon­est feed­back, share ideas, and help you focus your atten­tion on the essen­tials can keep your skills sharp.
  2. Review the fun­da­men­tals. Just as Jack Nick­laus needed to start over every year learn­ing how to grip the club, teach­ers ought to start every year review­ing the fun­da­men­tals of their craft. Revis­it­ing things you may take for granted, like your teach­ing phi­los­o­phy, basic class­room rules and pro­ce­dures, and instruc­tional design, will help you refine your tech­nique. You may also rec­og­nize areas where you have taken short­cuts or allowed bad habits to creep into your teaching.
  3. Keep up with the lat­est changes in the sport…and in you. Many changes hap­pened in the golf world as Jack Nick­laus pro­gressed through his career. Equip­ment improved and golf course design evolved. Advances in phys­i­ol­ogy helped golfers under­stand their swing mechan­ics bet­ter. Sim­i­lar changes hap­pen in edu­ca­tion every year–and some­times every week. Not only that, but your stu­dents are dif­fer­ent. And so are you. To ignore all of those dif­fer­ences and assume that we can con­tinue teach­ing exactly the same way we taught five or fif­teen years ago is to do a dis­ser­vice to our stu­dents. Stay current.
  4. Prac­tice. This cer­tainly means some­thing dif­fer­ent for an edu­ca­tor than it does for a golfer. We don’t have the lux­ury of spend­ing hours at the dri­ving range and on the prac­tice green tweak­ing our swing and our stroke. We are on the course every day, play­ing a match that counts. So we have to prac­tice dif­fer­ently. Reflect every day on what took place in your class­room and what you want to do dif­fer­ently the next day to make it work bet­ter. Share with your col­leagues things that worked well–and that didn’t. Blog reg­u­larly and read blogs. Build your pro­fes­sional net­work and con­tribute to the field.

Even though the start of the year is the log­i­cal time to take these steps, you don’t have to wait. Start tomor­row: what’s one thing you can do now that will make a big­ger dif­fer­ence in your stu­dents and will make you just a lit­tle bit bet­ter than you were yesterday?

Social Networking and Teaching

Posted on June 23, 2008 by in Education, Social Networking

I’ve been try­ing to work out ways to inte­grate what I cur­rently con­sider two dif­fer­ent sides of my life into one–to let the strengths and ben­e­fits of each side feed into the other and cre­ate a syn­ergy that ele­vates both of them to become some­thing they can’t be on their own.

I’m talk­ing about my online blogging/​social net­work­ing life and my pro­fes­sional one. David War­lick wrote today about some of the poten­tial for using our online inter­ac­tions in teach­ing and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment. But I strug­gle with mak­ing them work together. So often it feels like a square peg in a round hole. How do I find and con­nect with peo­ple online who are going to help me be a bet­ter teacher?

Right now, I have two blogs and accounts on Face­book and Twit­ter. I hardly ever post to Twit­ter, but I’m very active on Face­book. All of the peo­ple I con­nect with there are peo­ple I know from the “real” world, though. A lot of my time there is spent in recreation–partly because I’m not quite sure how to go about con­nect­ing with other pro­fes­sion­als and mak­ing it more of a learn­ing tool for myself.

I com­ment on edu­ca­tion blogs from time to time, when I have some­thing to say, and I’ve tried to link in with some of the pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tions that have a pres­ence on Face­book, but I can’t seem to get beyond the stage of just being another mem­ber of a huge group. I don’t even really know where to begin to look or how to get connected.

I exper­i­mented with Sec­ond Life for sim­i­lar reasons–I even man­aged to end up with two dif­fer­ent avatars, somehow–but once I was in, I didn’t know where to go, how to find what I wanted. I wan­dered around a bit, tin­kered with a few things, but never really got immersed like War­lick seemed to.

So how does one net­work in a new coun­try when you know no one and no one knows you?