As a prosecuting attorney presents evidence to live up to the burden of proof, my son’s teacher presented baggies containing his wrongdoings, one after another, in our first conference.  The pencil, split in half lengthwise, demonstrated his lack of respect for the environment.  (I thought about his burning desire to learn the internal workings of tools.)  The tongs, carelessly broken while using them as a lever to lift increasingly heavy cylinders.  (I thought about his testing of mechanical advantage as a 4 year-old.)  Lastly, the end of a stick, once wielded as a sword on the playground, riling up his playmates to a Lord of the Flies frenzy.  (I thought about his leadership qualities and boundless energy that could shift easily to a new focus if encouraged.)
     Before I could ask questions or suggest my thoughts of ways to help, the teacher pushed the baggies aside and turned to the four pages of rubric descriptors and my son’s scores.  In an effort to “cover” all of the descriptors, we failed to have real conversation about any of them.

How different the conversation might have been if only…

• I  had known about issues as they happened.
• I had heard a balance of feedback about my child.  What was he doing well?  What positives might not be represented in a rubric score but could be seen in his interactions with his peers?
• I had a chance to review those scores in advance or had been given some guidance on how best to support the specific skills in which he excelled or struggled.
• I had been asked to share my hopes and worries about my child.
• I was encouraged to ask questions and to make meaning during our conversation.
• I heard from the teacher she wanted and needed my partnership to help my son succeed.

That conference made me think about the parents coming to see me for conferences and the power of dialogue before, during and after those meetings.  While I often began conferences with questions (What does your daughter tell you about Freshman Composition? or What have you heard from your son about our study of focus in Creative Writing?), I typically transitioned into my monologue from there. No more, I vowed.

Instead of sharing the same data with parents they had seen online, I began asking more questions and helping them find ways to focus their support of their child.  I shared anecdotes, suggested resources, and elicited feedback on what they saw as their child’s greatest assets and struggles.  The conference became more of a conversation, and both sides of the table learned something new during our time.

How do you promote dialogue with parents during conferences?  How has online grade access shaped that dialogue?

Ask people outside of education what the job of an instructional coach might entail, and they describe a person blowing the whistle around her neck, calling out bad teaching as she walks through the halls.

In reality, my job is to be a good partner: to listen, ask questions, plan, co-teach, observe, and reflect.  Some still might have a difficult time envisioning this model of coaching, where the coach and teacher are both partners in learning, so below are some examples of our work this week.

As I met with teachers from the Pioneer School of Business, we studied how to engage our students in evaluating the role societal norms should play in affecting our legal system.  I refreshed my learning on the  Bill of Rights and the Rule of Precedent, and together we learned which freedoms our students hold most dear.  I researched Socratic discussion questioning and ways to encourage engagement, and then we reflected on the success of the discussion and ways to deepen student learning.  I learned the power of SWOT analyses in determining appropriate marketing strategies for clients, and together we shared ideas on how to rebound from student setbacks.  We reflected on the “why” of teaching and coaching.

Math and Science teachers talked with me about their desire to shift some of the ways they assess.  We studied screencasting and TedEd; we deepened our understanding of the thought process behind constructing meaningful capstone projects that tap into students’ passions and challenge them in new and exciting ways.  (I also learned about slope, bacteria, and the Never-Rise Region.)  We talked, we planned, we learned from each other.

In World Language teachers shared their authentic learning experiences for students as I shared how to use keepvid.com to capture the videos they depend on so much for those experiences.  The days of my WL teacher playing audio tapes of isolated vocabulary terms are over; students read authentic newspaper clippings, watch videos, and speak in their target language a greater percentage of their class time than many of us did in college.

New teachers experimented with web design.  We researched, we played, we asked a great deal of questions (some of which we answered).  We participated in the struggle of learning, and I walked away with the knowledge that once again, KHS has hired the best teachers.

You are teachers who take risks, teachers who put their students’ learning at the forefront of their decisions, teachers who are connected through the reasons or the “why” we teach.

We want to challenge every student every day, and no whistle-blowing is needed to spur us to action.  A partner to sit beside us and support us is all we need.

How might having a coaching partner help you?

In  less than a week, my daughter begins Kindergarten.  While my older son fearlessly sped toward the doors of his elementary school, eager for the opportunity to meet new friends and navigate a whole new school, my daughter’s gait is slow and trembling.  Her fears reveal themselves mainly at night as we cuddle together, heads atop her unicorn pillow pet.

“Will I be allowed to play outside?”  “Can I draw there?”  “Will the other kids laugh at me?” “What if I don’t make any friends?”  “Will they have mac ‘n cheese for lunch?”

Her questions, some seemingly simple to answer and others heartachingly difficult if one is to be truthful, remind me how fragile many students are this year at KHS, too.

As we are prepare our classrooms and lessons, let us remember that sometimes the questions we ask are not as important as listening to the questions posed to us.  

My soon-to-be kindergartner would like to add that recess and drawing might help kids feel better, too.  

Grades, candy, calls home, high fives, stickers.  Do these truly motivate our students, or are we using incentives research reveals have little impact on behavior?

Before meeting with teachers of five or fewer years of experience, we watched Daniel Pink’s TedTalk on the Surprising Science of Motivation, where he revealed many businesses have created incentive structures that either don’t work or actually do harm. Sure, incentives can work for a simple set of tasks that lead to a clearly defined outcome, Pink argues, but how many 21st century American jobs will require that kind of thought?  If outsourcing and automating continues, not many.

He contends (and social scientists reportedly agree) that to motivate workers in today and tomorrow’s innovative careers, you need to design work environments that foster autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

The Five or Fewer group discussed how to structure classroom environments where students experience rich, deep learning as a result of these intrinsic motivators, not the more traditional sticks or carrots.  Wading through mentor’s tried and true lessons, unfamiliar texts, and various instructional strategies, our newer teachers find their footing by placing students in the center of their own learning.

They give their students the freedom to learn from failure and the support to advance toward mastery. They have conversations with their students about their lives and dreams, guiding them toward finding purpose.  They understand that learning is not always comfortable, as they, too, are learning while doing.

What have you learned from a new teacher lately?

My son Tag is a Lego-maniac.  His pudgy fingers built tall columns of soft, red and blue Legos when he was 2.  At the age of four, his nimble hands foraged through his 5-pound tub of space Legos to recreate the spaceships he had seen in his dreams.  Now, at eight, he faithfully requests Star Wars Lego kits for his birthdays and Christmas, only to build the AT-AT kit from a manual one day, destroy it the next, and from its pieces create a rebel ship that has yet to appear in any Star Wars film.  After stepping on and over numerous creations in various stages of construction and demise, I now keep the door to Tag’s walk-in closet closed. To keep the sharp pieces from getting underfoot.  To contain the mess.

I wonder how many times I attempted to contain the mess of my students’ learning as well.  When they struggled with writing, did I swiftly replace their awkward prose with my own, or did I ask them to scribble more, to make meaning, to trust their own voices?  As they read a difficult text, did I give them a step-by-step manual for reading my way, or did I help them ask questions of the text, create hypotheses and find their flaws, and notice how the beauty of language moves us all?  I hope on most days I guided them through the latter.

Real learning requires students to think, and thinking is a messy business.

In a recent Tedx-Talk, Dr. Derek Cabrera uses Legos as a metaphor for what is happening in education.  He contends that Lego kits inhibit creativity and thought by only asking one person to think creatively: the designer of the kit, not the child putting it together. Cabrera believes we can help our students get more comfortable in the mess of learning by practicing 4 thinking skills throughout their education: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives (DSRP).  By teaching these skills, educators will put thinking back on the desks of students and stop packaging the right answers for them in neat little kits.

Those kits don’t last very long, anyway.  Just ask Tag.

What does messy learning look like in your classroom?

How do we get kids to think for themselves?

 I keep returning to this question after yesterday’s meeting of teachers who have been in the profession for 10-15 years.  We met to discuss how education has changed during the course of our profession and to think about where we need to go from here.

How do we get kids to think for themselves?  The question sounds simple, right?  Of course we want our students to be independent thinkers.

But do we, really?

How do we set up our classrooms?  Who delivers the content?  Who deems what is important or valuable?  Who is the terminal audience for what our students create?  How do we balance our passion for our content with what is valuable to students in the real world? What are the big ideas about our content (and about life) we want students to understand when they leave our classroom or school? How do we handle the mess that often accompanies real learning?

Our students are not that different than those in this youtube video: A Vision of Students Today.  So, how are we engaging them and helping them figure out the ways they learn best?

How do you encourage your students to think for themselves?

Many teachers at KHS are tapping into the power of social media and using Twitter as a tool for their teaching and learning.  Getting started with Twitter is easy, and this article by Paul Boutin might help you get started.  Begin by following some KHS teachers to see how they communicate with their students and their colleagues.

Once you have mastered some of the basics and selected a few people to follow, you might check out #Edchat onTuesdays at 6:00 (CST).  Jerry Blumengarten (a.k.a. the cybraryman) composed a list of other educational hashtags you might consider as well.

For those of you who are the more savvy of my tweeps, check out All You Need to Know to Twitter.  Think about sharing a fur.ly link with your students via Twitter.  Fur.ly allows you to compile resources for your students in one shortened URL.  (All of those research projects and webquests where students needed to type in long URLs, only to miss a key letter or underscore?  Fur.ly eliminates those issues and the inconvenience of opening numerous windows or tabs.)  Students can click on the shortened fur.ly URL in your tweet to view the resources immediately.

What is your Twitter handle, and how do you use Twitter for teaching and learning?

Light up the small screen with videos of you and your students introducing new topics, reviewing difficult concepts, digging more deeply into advanced applications and more!

Jing  is one of many free web tools teachers and students can use to screencast.  For those of you who are new to this term, a screencast allows you to capture video of your computer screen combined with an audio narration explaining the process on the screen.  Visit Jing’s site (www.techsmith.com/jing.html).

Some teachers at KHS are already using Jing or other screencasts to help their students:

• When Physics students have mastered a topic, they may choose to record a screencast not only to demonstrate their mastery but also to share with their peers who may need a review of the topic.
• Calculus students are encouraged to view screencasts to receive just-in-time support from their teacher and their peers.
• Other KHS students may watch their teachers’ lessons on youtube, leaving classroom time for the difficult work of applying the knowledge or skills from the lecture.

When gathering resources for teaching your next lesson, consider looking through the eBook selection provided by the KHS library.

Easily accessed through the library page, these eBooks can be “read online,” allowing multiple viewers to access one book at the same time.  These viewers can add their own notes to the texts and then print them out to turn in at the end of a daily lesson.

In addition to graphic versions of some Shakespearean plays, you will also find a collection of great speeches, a visual encyclopedia, and some new fiction selections as well.  These texts can be read by students on their laptops while you display a larger visual on your Activboard, or students may choose to read them from the comforts of their homes/mobile devices.  For your teacher login and password, contact the library.  Students can login to eBooks by navigating to the eBooks section of the KHS Library website, entering “p StudentIDNumber” for their login and “StudentIDNumber” for their password.

How might you use eBooks in your classroom?

What if students’ voices played a role in teacher evaluation and development?  According to Tracy Crow in “The View from the Seats” (Learning Forward, JSD Dec. 2011), teachers in Memphis City Schools are about to find out.

Through their partnership with the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, Memphis teachers will receive student feedback on their level of care for their students, their classroom control, their ability to clarify difficult ideas, their desire to challenge their students, their capability to captivate, their wish for students to confer, and their skills of consolidating the day’s learning.  Data gathered from almost 3,000 classrooms suggests teachers who receive high ratings on this survey have classes that score at high percentiles.  As a result of this correlation, administrators might use survey results to plan teacher development and write evaluations.

Should student voices contribute to crafting teacher development and evaluations?