Swimming lessons

For one year when I was younger, I took private swimming lessons. This
was in the stage after I had learned all of the basics with a bunch of
other kids my age. We could all do the breaststroke, tread water, and
do relay races for extended periods of time. And it was before any
official swim team existed for our age group. I saw potential in
myself; I wanted to do more advanced things than were going on in a
group, but I wasn’t yet ready to compete.
 
The reason I am relaying this rather personal story is that I feel
like this happens often for educators. They get to a point where they
need some one on one attention in order to continue their learning.
They are ready to fine tune their skills, ready to move beyond the
simple strokes that all teachers posses. So, where do they get this
one on one help? If they have a personal learning network, they can
get it quite easily. They can ask questions and create a relationship
with another teacher who has just had the benefit of “private
lessons”. But, if they see themselves as disconnected from all
teachers who aren’t in their school, then this kind of learning
doesn’t happen.
 
“Private swimming lessons” are much harder when everyone around you is
just treading water.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

The Ripe Environment: Collaboration as Instinct

I sat at the over-long table, as I always do on Mondays and thought about the next time I would meet my students for Extended Learning Time (our version of a multi-discipline course without any set curriculum or standards to give guidance or restrict us).

“Well, it is earth day in a couple of days.”

Immediately, my colleague and I started a Google Document called Earth Day 2008. We started dropping in links to pages we found.

“Oh, I did hear something about an event on the National Geographic Channel. Did you hear about it. Something about the human footprint.”

We were pushing hard now, 25 minutes before kids arrive. Link after link being proposed as a starting point.

“What is the question we are really trying to get our kids to answer here.”
“Is Earth Day important and why?”

And we we started writing out a discussion, a plan of attach. We eventually came to the conclusion that there were others who were interested in asking this same question, experts even. And yet, within 30 minutes we created an authentic question and activity around it. Our instinct was to create and collaborate, rather than offer worksheets as an attempt at lesson planning. This is our Ripe Environment, and the class that the students came into that day was Ripe too.

They couldn’t wait to see who had the bigger footprint. They couldn’t wait to collaborate on their own weekly or monthly collection of soda cans or milk jugs. This process of not waiting to be told, of instinctively knowing that it is the right thing to do, that makes it truly authentic.

So, how do you foster this instinct for collaboration. Well, by saying yes to it as often as possible. It is my personal belief that there is never too little time to create, too little time to collaborate.

If you have only a minute:

1. Put a request for a resource out on twitter.
2. Do a delicious search instead of a google search (it is a community of people waiting to help).
3. Link to someone who is talking about it.

If you have a half-hour:

1. Start a google doc and invite a few others to join in.
2. Search technorati for new blogs, videos, and people who are interested in the same thing.

If you have a longer:

1. Start a wiki and get people to contribute.
2. Start a blog and get people to contribute.
3. Start a movement and get people to join.

Community requires tending.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a story mostly about tyranny and the corruption of utopian ideals, but in the very beginning there is a passage that means something very different to me. It deals with the leadership of Mr. Jones before the rebellion, before the animals decide to take the farm into their own hands.

“The fields were full of weeds, the buildings wanted roofing, the hedges were neglected, and the animals were underfed.”

This quotation represents all of the things that happen when Mr. Jones gets too distracted to work, to maintain his environment, and to make life better for all those involved. To me, this is about not tending the community. It is about letting things lie fallow which must be uprooted and overturned to see what is underneath them.

Our communities are just like this I think, both in our classroom and outside of them. The communities within our classroom, especially the collaborative ones that we are all striving for, require an immense amount of tending. The Discovery Utopia wiki that my students are working on (and the reason that we are reading Animal Farm in the first place) is not an exception. If I do not constantly draw attention to the great things that are going on there, the community seems to just pass right on by them. If I do not look for the troubling points, the issues that nearly every student seems to be struggling with, students stop using the community. They find other ways to occupy their time. And that is one of the most interesting parts about our communities. They are communities of choice.

All communities of choice are ones that can be thriving in one minute and vacant in the next. So, how do we tend for consistency? Well, we feed the animals (is it weird that I am referring to my students as animals). We put up new buildings for them to play in. We design the space so that it is inviting and provokes the best kind of authentic creativity: their own.

I think that the lesson is pretty clear. If we do not tend to our communities, they will fail. The inhabitants will rebel and either stop using them, or turn them into something that rejects their purpose. And, if Animal Farm is any indication, the inhabitants of a untended community will become just like us and not tend to their communities. I mean that in both a virtual and real-world sense.

I hope this comes across as something other than a Language Arts teacher’s metaphorical analysis.

links for 2007-11-29

• Teacher Professional Development and Teacher Resources by Annenberg Media
  Great resource for teachers and students in an online setting (lessons, videos, etc.)
  (tags: elearning video TeacherResources)

End of the Year Denouement

For all of the times this year…

that we have doubted ourselves.

that we have felt like we haven’t made a difference.

that we hoped for more.

that a lesson didn’t go according to plan.

that we have worked toward something that didn’t come to fruition.

that we have been wrong.

We must know that these things are better than any sense of certainty or definitive answers that we can muster. Doubt is the manifestation of powerful reflection. Knowing that we haven’t reached everyone shows us just how many we have reached. Hope for the future is why we are here in the first place. Failure is only a negative when it is uninspired; inspired failure is the birth of the most authentic teachable moments. The direct path toward change can’t always be plotted, even if we are working for it. But, we are changed by the work we do, and that can be enough in most cases. Finally, being wrong is beautiful when we can acknowledge it and strive to make it right.

I had to write this because of all of the great things that I have done this year, I have so many great regrets. I say that they are great both because they are large and because they are valuable to me. I hold them close to me to show me the way forward. I gather them together and wear them as a badge of honor. These are the things I will tattoo across my curriculum next year, the things that I will use to transform my teaching, again.

The Perfect Online Professional Development Community

I have really been thinking a lot about how to create an online community for all of the teachers in my school district who are as passionate about technology integration, reflection and collaboration as I am. The way that it stands, I feel so isolated in my quest for new and more effective ways of teaching. I know this is not the case, that there are probably hundreds of teachers who feel the same way, but that isn’t really much comfort when I don’t know who they are and I have no way of contacting them. I almost feel like I need to send out a classified ad: Young passionate teacher seeks the same in order to learn and collaborate about technology and pedagogy.

I can’t think of a better way to ask for a community than to create one and hope that other people join up. I have already run this idea by a few, more experienced, Edubloggers, Bud Hunt and Karl Fisch. They have both responded pretty well to the idea and are willing to help me get it off of the ground.

After my initial e-mails to my administration and these two great teachers/resources, I thought that there would be no way of stopping such a mammoth idea. My principal loved it, and the feeder area coordinator thought it would work well with some of our other goals. But last night, I received an e-mail from the Web Services manager of my district. In it he said that I should consider using two semi-crippled technologies (Firstclass and SchoolCenter) that teachers in my district are already fairly comfortable with (and the district has already paid for). I say that these are crippled technologies because they have real holes in their capabilities. They just can’t do everything that I want to do with this community.

Even with this minor setback, I have decided that I will not compromise (at least initially) my vision of the “Perfect Online Professional Development Community.” I would like to see just how collaborative, easy to use, scalable, social, and reflective I can make this experience for other teachers. So, without any further explanation, I would like to unveil what I think are the essential pieces of a new generation professional learning community.

A central portal will give you access to the following (I am thinking about using protopage):

1. A master blog that would guide discussion.
2. Blogroll
3. Recent Blog Articles (a la SuprGlu)
4. Archived Blog Articles (in a newsletter type format)
5. A Google Earth Mash-Up of all of the school represented in the community
6. Bios of the teacher bloggers (if they wish to include them) done in a social way so that collaboration is easier (an Elgg.org-type personal page)
7. A calendar for event planning (Skypecasts, Classroom Demonstration Webcasts, Classroom Picture Flickr Stream)

The other aspects of the community that will not be directly shown on the portal’s front page except for simply linking to them:

1. A Q+A section for both teaching questions and technical help questions (Ning.com has a great set-up for something like this).
2. A Digg-Style Article/Website recommender.
3. A Wiki for success stories of technology integration or improved practice (a little like David Warlick‘s Telling the New Story Wiki)
4. Walk-Throughs (screencasts) for how to create blogs, collaborate, etc.
5. A way of dealing with comments both attached to and unattached to their original posts. (co.mments.com has a pretty great strategy)
6. A professional development bookshelf (akin to either this one or this one)
7. A way of signing up for an e-mail RSS system for new posts (most teachers check their e-mail religiously)
8. A belief statements wiki about technology or teaching in general for certain collaborating members or individuals (this could be a running list of belief statements and/or a running list of questions that these belief statements beg to be answered. I also like the idea of using standpoint.com somehow).
9. A system for sharing lesson plans and ideas (both formatted and unformatted) including a collaborative document center.
10. A cross-school project starter (partnering up similar teaching styles)

Questions I still have about how to get this done:

1. How do we get as many different positions represented in this community (principals, core teachers, librarians, elective teachers, etc.)
2. Should we try to protect anonymity on the blogs?
3. Just how much do most people know about these technologies? Will it be like starting from scratch for most people? And if so, should I send out a formal (or informal) survey about these ideas (What have you done in your classrooms with technology? Do you like to create you own lessons? How much do you enjoy reflection? Do you want feedback on your classroom ideas from other teachers? How worried are you that this is going to take too much of your free time? How many of you already blog?)?

Well, that is pretty much it. I would like to make this project as appealing and voluntary as possible, so that everyone who is in the community has a lot of buy-in. Let me know what you think of this grand scheme. What is possible and what is not possible?