Thinking About Learning

This was my 2nd year to attend UTC.  Last year I presented, but this year I just wanted to go as a sponge and absorb.  I must say that I was very impressed and pleased with my experiences!  The Greenville County School District provides this conference free to participants.  Obviously their main target audience is their own teachers, who receive a trade day for attending.  But at the same time, the conference is open free to anyone.  What a gift!!!  In my opinion, this conference is much better than the state-wide Ed Tech conference held in the fall, because most of these presenters are teachers, people who are sharing what works in the trenches.

The keynote speaker was Chris Craft, a Spanish teacher from Crossroads Elementary in Irmo, SC.  Chris has done some phenomenal work with a global project, Life Round Here, and is currently working on completing his Phd.  His informative, entertaining presentation, “Superpowers for Everyday Heroes,” shared great tips of ways he incorporates technology in the classroom.  Chris is an expert at preparing interesting presentations.  During this presentation, he had an entertaining “dialogue” with his computer, “Maria.”  That same day, our governor, Mark Sanford, admitted to an affair with an Argentinian woman named Maria.  Just an ironic coincidence, but a little humorous!

The sessions I attended were great!  I got some wonderful ideas for assessment that I plan to share with my faculty.  One is a free web-based interactive program called Hot Potatoes.  This tool includes templates for crossword, matching quizzes, and cloze activities and provides instant feedback.  Michelle O’Malley led this great session.  Another session that focused on assessment was a session called “Creating Online Polls and Self-Grading Quizzes” by Kim Pauls. Kim demonstrated how to use google forms to create quizzes and how to set up formulas for the quizzes to be automatically scored.

Some of the other awesome sessions included:

• In “Using Collaborative Tools,” Cathy Jo Nelson and Fran Bullington had a great dueling showdown between wikis and google docs.
• My friend and colleague, Mike Edwards, did a terrific presentation on “Augmented Reality.” This has been a cutting-edge, personal exploration for him, and I have been privileged to delve into this a little with him.
• Amanda LaBlanc did a useful hands-on session on Flip Video Cameras.  Each grade level at my school is getting one this coming year, so that was a great training session.
• Ellen Gordon did a fabulous session, “Goodbye Overhead…Hello Doc Cam.”  In the new school year, my district is providing a doc cam for every classroom, and I left this session with lots of ways to use it in various curricular areas.

Another fun experience was a “Tweet-up” held at Wild Wings Wednesday evening.  It was so cool to meet people face-to-face who are part of my PLN.  Twitter is one of my best sources of professional development, and the people in my PLN are very helpful to me.  It was fantastic!

Thanks to Greenville County School District and all the presenters!  It was a very valuable personal growth experience.

Several weeks ago the Washington Post reported that 46 states have agreed to the establishment of common core standards.  I knew before I even finished reading that my state, SC, would be one of the states not participating.  Our governor has a history of grandstanding in an effort to make his name well-known before the next presidential election, and this was another opportunity for him.  Outrage at Gov. Sanford is nothing new for me!  He has never been a supporter of public education, as evidenced by his push for tax-dollar vouchers for private schools.  His last big grandstand was his refusal to accept stimulus money for schools, and I participated in a protest rally at the state house over that issue.  Now he doesn’t want the federal government telling us what our students should learn.  Okay, it might be different if our state was leading the pack in achievement, but it seems like a no-brainer to me that we could benefit from some collaboration.  Common standards could raise the bar nationally for what students are expected to learn.  In order for our students to be globally competitive, it’s imperative that we raise the bar.

After reading Clay Burell’s post about Secretary of Education Duncan, I’ve been questioning the methodology for determining these standards.  Burell identified the groups that have been selected to write the standards from an article from Education Week:

Achieve, a Washington-based group made up of state policymakers and business leaders; act Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit organization that runs the college-entrance exam of the same name; and the College Board, the New York City-based sponsor of the sat admissions exam and the Advanced Placement program.

State policymakers, business leaders, and college entrance exam creators…hmmm, there is no mention whatsoever of educators participating in this process.  The same article reveals that subject-matter groups such as the NCTE and NCTM have expressed concern about being excluded from the “Common Core” process.  I, too, have some major concerns about this.  It would be so disheartening to have such a much-needed initiative go awry due to standards being determined by non-educators.  With ACT and the College Board writing the standards, it’s easy to see the next step could be that they would create (and profit from) a national test.  It’s not that I’m opposed to a national test.  I just don’t think that the same entities should determine the standards and write the test.

States have already poured lots of money into developing standards and tests.  Although SC is still at the bottom of the barrel in performance, we have some of the most rigorous standards and testing in the nation.  That’s one reason we rank so low nationally.  Our tests more accurately demonstrate student proficiency (or lack of) than other states.  The same Washington Post article I referenced earlier said:

In Mississippi, for instance, 90 percent of fourth-graders passed the state reading exam in 2007, according to U.S. Department of Education data. But only 51 percent had at least “basic” or “partial mastery” on the test known as the Nation’s Report Card.

SC has many obstacles to improving student achievement.  A large number of our students live in poverty, and our current level of unemployment has reached 12.1%, one of the highest in the nation.  We have a state legislature that is satisfied with only mandating that each child in our state has the opportunity to receive a “minimally adequate education.”  Our governor has demonstrated at every turn that he disdains public education.  We have school buildings in the Corridor of Shame that are a hundred years old and would not be seen fit as a prison facility, but our state has been unwilling to take action.  President Obama raised awareness of the situation in his inaugural speech when he invited Ty’sheoma Bethea, an 8th grader from J.V. Martin Junior High School in Dillon, S.C., to sit with his wife and then told her story.  Even still, help for her school did not come from within our state, but from a furniture supply company in Chicago.

I recount these educational and political woes as evidence that we are in desperate need of change.  Common core standards won’t solve the above mentioned problems, but could at least put us on a more level playing field for measuring academic success.  I was encouraged to read our state Superintendent of Education, Jim Rex’s, comments in the Spartanburg Herald Journal about the movement towards common core standards:

Although South Carolina is prevented from being an “official” participant due to Gov. Mark Sanford’s refusal to sign on, I have been assured by the effort’s leaders — including the National Governors Association — that we can participate unofficially.

That’s good news!  The people of SC continue to fight for progress, in spite of a governor who spits in our faces at every turn.  We have a long way to go, but as an educator, I’ll never give up hope all of our students will one day receive the kind of quality education they deserve.

Research shows that collaborative planning and the use of common formative and summative assessments are key factors in improving instruction and achievement.  I observed this first-hand in my own school this year as my principal led change to transform our faculty into a professional learning community, based on the concepts in DeFour’s On Common Ground. Our students made a dramatic improvement in achievement due to this culture change, so much so that we were specially recognized by our district office.  Since collaboration is so effective within a school, it only makes sense that national collaboration for the development of a core curriculum has the potential to yield great results.   If the development of national standards is handled correctly and if educators are given the opportunity to participate in the process, this initiative could be a first step in molding our educational system into one that will prepare our students to be globally competitive.

I’ve had one week of summer vacation, and I’ve now had enough mental rest to objectively reflect on the growth of technology integration in my school this year.  This was the first full year that every classroom had a SMART Board, projector, and audio system.  That was a huge catalyst for change for teachers in instructional practice.  Additionally, my school experienced phenomenal gains in student achievement this year, which was hugely due to the increase in teacher collaboration and common assessments through the PLC model.   But as indicated by Marzano’s research, I also partly attribute the increase in achievement to the increased use of interactive whiteboards.

As part of my self-evaluation process, I conducted a survey of my teachers to gain some insight into their perspective on growth. (View the results here.)  I was impressed that over 70% of the teachers felt that their use of technology had grown between 50%-100%.  Even more eye-catching was that 97.6% tried something new using technology with their students this year.  During the 2 years I have been a TIS at my school, I have been so impressed with the openness of my faculty to new ideas for technology integration.  Every time I asked a teacher to participate in a project, each one has always agreed!

One example is that this year my 2nd grade team really branched out with PBL.  Every 2nd grade student in my school learned about using the Internet for research (I got to teach that lesson!), used Open Mind 2 mind-mapping software to organize research findings, exported OM 2 to PowerPoint, refined the PPT, and then presented an oral multi-media project.  It was an amazing leap in technology growth for our 2nd graders.  I can’t wait to see what these students will accomplish in the future!

I know that all of my teachers had tremendous growth in the area of technology this year.  I had 15 teachers who were new to our school and district.  Many of these came from districts that did not have the technology resources we have.  They were required to take the TTCA, our district’s level 1 technology competency test.  After some tutoring, they all successfully passed the test and have made great personal gains in their use of technology.  It was a great year at my school, and I’m already beginning to think about how to guide growth next year!