Learning Communities are Built on Relationships

I don't yell.

Okay, if you ask my own children, they might tell you something different, but when it comes to my classroom, you'll find me most days guffawing and giggling more than anything else. I've been known to cackle so loudly that they can hear my laughter echo down the hallway.

But today, I yelled.

Over my years of teaching, I have come to realize that my philosophy of classroom management starts with building relationships. We start that very first week of school by constructing a social contract for our learning community. I ask for student input on what our learning and behavior expectations should be. We have candid conversations about what respect looks like, both from the teacher and from students. When I talk about the classroom, it is our classroom and our learning community. We work together.  It is not mine or yours. And it doesn't take long before students are using those same plural pronouns to talk about our class.  We reserve the opening moments of every class period to share out what things are happening in our lives. We share our highs and our lows. I know my students. I listen to their struggles. I try to provide a space that is flexible, comfortable, and safe.

And so when conflict happens, I rely on the strength of those relationships to lift us up.  If a student is off-task, I just need to quietly come stand beside her and ask how things are going. That's usually enough to help redirect her back on task.  On the rare occasion when anger fills our classroom, when someone uses profane language, or calls someone a name, I can usually get the situation under control quickly by pulling the student aside and trying to understand what is at the root of the issue and help the student see another's point of view. I point out the tenets of our social contract. This is what respect looks like in our classroom. This is what empathy looks like in our classroom.

But today I yelled.

Not at first.  At first I tried to calm down an irate student by pulling her aside. I tried redirecting. I tried separating. I tried getting the class back on task.

And then I yelled.

It is not how I like getting control of my classroom. It feels like a broken trust.

But I know that it will work out.  And I know that because as students walked out of class, I heard apologies. Students apologizing to one another. Students apologizing to me. I saw students offering to help others.  After school a student stopped by to see if I was okay. He was checking on me. It will work out because our relationships still build the foundation of our learning community.  Our walls may have shook this afternoon, but our relationships remain strong.

Lasts and Firsts

This coming Friday will be my seniors last day submitting articles to our online school newspaper, last day of standing up to present speeches in our public speaking class. It will be the last time they spin that combination to change out one textbook for another, last time rushing from class to bathroom to class again all in under five minutes time. Some of these rituals they will miss. Other routines they will wonder how they managed once they have a few weeks or months perspective on their high school experience. But in addition to the list of lasts, this past year has also been filled with quite a few firsts, for both my students and for me.

This was my first year teaching in Michigan. When I started back in September, there were some challenges that I anticipated and some I never saw coming, much like my soon-to-be-graduating seniors. I knew that this year would be markedly different from my previous 13 years of teaching just outside the Philadelphia area. Up until this year, I taught on a four-by-four block schedule with a maximum of 30 students in my classroom. Yes, sometimes 31 or 32 would sneak in, but for the most part, I worked with between 75 - 85 students each semester, approximately 160 each year.

This year, I had 137 students first semester, and 131 in my second semester classes. Some of those 268 students I had throughout the entire year, but not all. This has certainly been the largest number of students I have been responsible for in my entire teaching career. And in addition to getting to know more students, I also learned new standards, new state testing procedures, and new curriculum. I taught classes this year that were all new to me. Although I taught a public speaking class about ten years ago, it was nothing like the class I had this past semester. And the tenth grade class I had taught my previous 13 years was focused on world literature. This was my first year teaching tenth grade students American literature. All new content, all new school. New routines, new systems, new faces. I felt like a first year teacher all over again. There were more times that I can count that I ended up crying in my classroom, crying in the car, crying on the shoulder of husband, feeling overwhelmed. How do I both plan and grade? How can I effectively individualize lessons for this many learners? How can I provide timely feedback on this much writing?

Then I would catch myself in conversations with students. In the past few months, I have had students miss significant school due to in-patient hospitalizations, homelessness, and parent illness. I have multiple students sitting in my rows who have lost parents and lost loved ones to cancer, to divorce, to accidents, to addictions. I have students who feel bullied and lost and alone. They, too, are overwhelmed. And here's what strikes me: I know these things.

I may have more students than I have ever had in my entire career this year, but I also know more students this year. Really know them. The district that I landed in is one that focuses on intervening not just on the academic level, but on the personal level. Each month we meet as an entire staff, the students have a half day of school, and the teachers talk about students. We look at specific students. Why is this student failing my class and not yours? What have you tried that is working? Which students are falling under the radar? Why? Why did this students miss seven days of class in the last month? What's going on at home? We do this each and every month. We connect around the individuals sitting in our classrooms. This is a first for me.

As Angela Maiers wrote not all that long ago, "If you don’t first secure students’ hearts, you don’t have a shot at their brains." The teachers I work with this year care about more than data. During my first year in this district, I have witnessed so many students meet the challenges they are facing head on, both academically and personally. I have witnessed resilience and kindness, empathy and grit. As a first year teacher in this district, students didn't know what to expect from me and neither did I. But I would put forth a challenge, ask them to try a new way of doing something, and students met those challenges and exceeded expectations. In the process, we got to know one another. We grew as a community of learners. And they were not the only ones growing. I had challenging days, challenging weeks. My students would push me. They provided support as well as constructive feedback.

About a month ago, I was offered a consulting position which would have taken me out of the classroom. The offer came at a time when I was feeling particularly frustrated, not with students, but with some of the requirements and politics that happen in a public school setting.  The consulting position would have paid a little more and put me in closer proximity to my family, but something about it didn't feel quite right. It took some soul searching to figure out exactly what it was. The company is wonderful. Their vision and mission align with my values and teaching philosophy. Their attention to team building, dedicated time for reflection, and commitment to personal and professional development are building blocks for a position made just for me. At the time of the offer, I happened to stumble upon Caitlin Tucker's blog post titled "Manifesting My Perfect Teaching Position" and Vicki Davis's post "When Is It Time To Quit Teaching?" After reading both posts, I realized that although I am frustrated by aspects of my current position, I am not ready for this to be my last year of working directly with students. I love coaching and working with teachers, one look at the list of presentations and conferences I've attended in the past couple years is evidence of that, but I am energized by working with young people. I love teaching emerging writers. I love getting young readers excited about new books. I love connecting practicing readers and writers with real audiences and purposes. I have more to give to the classroom.

So this will not be my last year in the classroom.  Unlike my senior students, I am not yet ready to graduate high school.

#TeachingIs

Monday marks the beginning of Teacher Appreciation Week, May 4-8, 2015.  I love the initiative started by the Center for Teaching Quality to take back the narrative, take back the public story of education. All too often our news outlets are filled with stories of regret, of ridicule, and of shame in our public education systems.  But in this coming week, the Center for Teaching Quality is encouraging teachers to use the hashtag #TeachingIs to open the doors of our classrooms and share what it means to be a teacher today.  Rather than the conversation of education being told by those outside the classroom, it is time for teachers to share their joys, their struggles, their fears, and successes.  The story of what teaching is must be told by teachers.

My friend, fellow high school English teacher, and PASCD member, Brianna Crowley, put together this video to share the #TeachingIs initiative.

And so here is my #TeachingIs story:

Teaching is
     twenty-two voices clamoring
     for space, for a taste, for a chance
     to be heard, to lead, to learn
     in the span of eighty-five minutes,
     marked at both ends by bells
     that yell at students and teachers
     where to be and when,
     dictating how long to connect and to what.
Teaching is
     skillfully sliding, seamless
     into facilitator, coach, counselor,
     confidante, cheerleader, learner,
     disciplinarian and librarian,
     before the period brings learning
     to a close.
     But as a lover of literature,
     of well-crafted lines,
     of stories that sing from their bindings,
     a teacher hands over the pen,
     shows students how to see
     the blank, white page as more
     empowering than scary
     and education as something that
     expands and extends
     beyond the mark of a period.
Teaching is
     teasing out
     the nuance,
     teaching students to do
     the same.
     Look for the purpose,
     the bias, the audience,
     consider the meaning,
     the cost and the claim.
Teaching is
     the art of
     figuring out
     how to turn
     mandates into moments
     of meaningful mastery,
     how to advocate for collaboration,
     for cross-content connection,
     how to share the story of
     learning as more than just numbers
     shared as data and charts
     under headlines which cry for reform.
Teaching is
     being present,
     bearing witness
     to the joy and the tears,
     the laughter and fears,
     to listen and share
     the diversity of stories
     that enter our hallways
     and slip into our classrooms
     each day.
     We are more than the
     numbers and marks on a page.
     Our classrooms, a platform,
     where student stories take stage,
     helping students find voice,
     recognize power in choice,
     and encouraging resilience
     instead of silence.
   
 

Comfortable with Chaos

Today's the day.

March 1st kicks off the month-long blogging challenge hosted by the Two Writing Teachers blog. I participated last year for the first time in their daily Slice of Life Writing Challenge and connected with so many fantastic teachers and writers that I just had to do it again this year. So, what is the challenge? Write about a slice of your day, a small moment from each day for the month of March. Participants are encouraged to comment on the blogs of other "slicers" and share feedback using #SOL15. Interested? There's still time to join. Just head on over to the participant post.

_____________________________

I'm not sure what is going on here, although I'm sure there is a story. There always is. I walk into my boys' room, and in addition to painfully stepping onto a errant Lego brick, I find this scene, one among many, set up on their Lego table. When my eldest, now in kindergarten, first started playing with Legos a few years back, he would follow the directions that came with each set. Sets were stored in their original boxes with the directions. And you could never mix sets together. No way. But somewhere in the course of the past year, that changed. Sets are intermixed, directions tossed aside, and I can hear my two boys making up stories for their creations as they build them. Astronaut knights fight evil dragons with the help of alien robots.

My boys wanted the rules and directions when they first started to build. I would watch them at the dining room table as they pieced together each creation, carefully following the step-by-step instructions. And they still do this when opening a new set, but after the set has been built to the directions the first time, it is likely the last time that we will see the set in that form again. Now it is about the story. They've figured out the basics: how to build with joints and wheels, how to make a hinged jaw or a contraption to fire missiles.  Sets are mixed together in comfortable chaos.  Knowing the rules helped them feel more at ease breaking them.

There's a lesson here.

I want my students to be comfortable in the chaos of learning that happens in our classroom. I want them to take ownership and initiative, but I can't expect this from day one, especially when so many of them have not had many opportunities to do so. Instead, teachers expect students to follow our instructions, our directions, our curriculum. And much of the time, our students are not involved in the process of creating those rules. So to expect students to think creatively, to embrace the chaos, and take initiative from the very first day of our class is not only unrealistic, but it is also unreasonable. Just like my little master builders, my students need to be shown models, introduced to mentors, and gradually handed the reins of responsibility. Students need to be able to identify what defines the box before they can think outside of it. Students need to learn the building blocks of writing before they begin to challenge what the rules of writing mean for their own rhetorical expression.

But like my little Lego creators, I want my students to be the narrators of their own stories, to be confident in their creations, to be comfortable in the chaos that comes with creating something new and meaningful. The goal is not to have students follow my rules; the goal is to have them make their own.

Overwhelmed...but in a good way

I have too many blog posts in me! So right off the bat, know that this post is almost more of a reminder to me of all the things that I want to write more in depth about in the coming weeks. It has been an overwhelming semester, filled with a classroom makeover, presentations, author visits, and so much more.   I look forward to sharing these developments with you in the new year.

First, I need to share a bit more about my classroom redesign.  I shared some of the early steps in my classroom makeover in September, but I need to post my more recent learning space redesigns. My initial steps to create a more student-focused, student-driven classroom have lead to even more changes. As I spent time reflecting on my educational philosophy, I realized I needed to make a few more changes to my classroom space so that my philosophy was mirrored in my physical  classroom space. My classroom is open, with flexible seating in the form of stools, pillows, ottomans (which double as book storage), and a couch.  And I'm also happy to share that our classroom is featured as part of the #ClassroomCribs challenge. If you are looking for inspiration for your own classroom makeover, be sure to check out the work of Erin Klein, Ben Gilpin, and A.J. Juliani over at ClassroomCribs.com.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I learned that I am one of the Grand Finalists in the ClassroomCribs Challenge!

Click to enlarge our four essential questions.

In addition to redesigning my physical classroom, my curriculum got a big makeover this semester too. For the last decade, our tenth grade English class has focused on world literatures, connecting with the writers of the non-western world.  However this semester, our department took a more thematic approach to our tenth grade curriculum, focusing on four essential questions to guide our new thematic focus on "Perspectives of the Individual." And although initially a bit apprehensive about this change, it has afforded me an opportunity to reimagine my curriculum. I revisited the work of my language arts gurus to help me rethink what was possible. Kelly Gallagher helped me think through how I provide writing feedback (students should write four times more than you can grade) and how I teach close reading (Articles of the Week). Chris Lehman helped me think through possibilities for teaching analytic reading. And so many more mentors than I could name helped inspire my renewed focus on cultivating a student-driven classroom with students doing, speaking, and sharing more than I do. And in addition to adding new core texts, I figured now was the time to make some other big changes, the most significant of which is the move to a 100% paperless classroom. Now, four months into it, I can't imagine teaching any other way.  Going paperless has meant finding better, more collaborative ways of working with students and with working with readers and writers outside of the classroom.

Although I have been pushing my emerging writers to connect with audiences outside the classroom for a number of years now, this semester I have witnessed the pinnacle success of that focus.  My students and I used social media to connect with and invite in a number of writers from a variety of genres into our classroom.  In the last four months we have:

• heard a Holocaust survivor speak of his experiences in three death camps,
• used Skype to speak with the senior editor of Philadelphia Stories and Philadelphia Stories, Jr., Ms. Christine Weiser, about what editors look for in creative writing pieces seeking publication,
• virtually connected with Ms. Leah Nicholson of the Jenkins Publishing Group to learn about ghost writing,
• Skyped with founder and senior editor of Teen Ink, Ms. Stephanie Meyer, to get some advice for submitting our work for publication,
• invited three talented YA authors - E.C. Myers, Marie Lamba, and Ellen Jensen Abbott - to come to our school to speak with us about their inspiration and advice for writing stories,
• learned with a local psychologist about psychoanalytic theory, the 
  
  divided self, and repression which we applied to our reading of The Kite Runner,
• chatted with musician, actor, and novelist Dave Patten about what it takes to "make it" in a creative field, and
• used Twitter and blogs to connect with students and experts all of the world as we researched our #HavPassion projects.     

And the next four months look equally as packed with connections! We will be hosting:

• poet Cameron Conaway, author of Malaria Poems, who will be speaking with my creative writing students about his inspiration and writing craft,
• Elise Juska, author of The Blessings,
• Christopher McDougall, best-selling author of Born to Run,
• Zachariah OHora, children's book author and illustrator,
• Judy Schachner, children's book author and illustrator of Skippyjon Jones,
• Donna Aviles, presenter and author on the United States Orphan Train Movement, and
• Christina Baker Kline, One Book One Philadelphia author of Orphan Train.

So many of these connections have come as a result of my students and I reaching out on social media and asking.  This has been a big take-away that I need to explore more in the coming months.  In talking with Teen Ink's founder Stephanie Meyers when we first connected my students with her via Skype, she graciously showed us virtually around her office and said, "No one has ever asked me to do this, and I love it!"  In putting myself out there and asking anyone and everyone to come into my classroom - fellow teachers, writers, parents, other students - whether it is done in person or virtually, I have opened up opportunities for my students to connect with real audiences. Very little of their written work is seen by only me. We blog using Blogger and respond to classrooms around the country. Students post their work in online portfolios which can easily be shared with fellow teachers, students, and even parents.  And in talking with my students about these opportunities, I have also encouraged them to ask.  They are reaching out through their blogs and through Twitter in order to build their own personal learning network (PLN). I hope to share more of this particular adventure both here and in some upcoming presentations.

Yup, that's me presenting.

Speaking of which, wow! I need to share more of the presentations I've been doing! In the last few months I have had the opportunity to present at the Pennsylvania Council for Teachers of English Language Arts (PCTELA) as well as at the Michigan Google Summit. I was honored as an Emerging Leader at the recent PASCD conference. In a few short weeks, I'll be presenting at the upcoming EduCon conference in Philly with Christina Brennan on "Mentoring Passion" about how we connected my high school students with her elementary students through passion-based learning. And I need to share more about what I have learned from these fantastic organizations and connections.

So, I'm overwhelmed...but in a good way.

In the Name of Rigor

My English department is undergoing quite a bit of change in order to accomodate the reality of state testing in the era of Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I was told yesterday our current curriculum overhaul is an attempt to add rigor and help students prepare for the state tests our students will take in their tenth grade year, tests that are now tied to student graduation as well as to my teacher evaluation.  That word rigor has found its way into quite a few of our conversations recently.  And while on its surface, I wholeheartedly agree that our curriculums need to be challenging, need to engage students in higher order thinking skills, and encourage students to think critically about our content areas, I worry at how many are taking up the word "rigor" in light of the CCSS.

Barbara Blackburn knows quite a bit about this.  She's been writing and presenting on ideas of classroom rigor for quite a while.  And in her recent post on the MiddleWeb blog, "Five Myths About Rigor and the Common Core," Blackburn highlights just a few of the ways that idea of rigor has been misused in attempts to prepare students for CCSS realities.

Rigor is not additive.  It is not about adding more books or adding more homework. Instead, Blackburn points out,

"An environment that supports rigor focuses on risk-taking, since working at higher levels requires that students take a risk. How do we do this? By reinforcing progress, effort, and grit, or persistence."

Rigor is not found in State Reading Assessment workbooks.  Rigor lies in creative and critical thinking, in encouraging students to pursue inquiry, in choice and ownership over the learning process.  So why is it that there seems to be such a disconnect between the goals of rigor as presented by CCSS and how it is taken up by districts and departments?

This past Saturday, I helped organize Edcamp Philly, an unconference for teachers that encourages discussions about pedagogy and practice over your typical conference presentations.  It was a whole day filled with collaborations and connections.  I talked with other educators interested in inquiry and passion-based learning.  I learned how a local school has called their inquiry project DaVinci Days.  I met with other teachers interested in flipped learning and teaching for mastery.  All around me were energized teachers talking about the learning happening in their classrooms, talking about that learning in rigorous ways.  And no one was talking about using workbooks to teach students already struggling with reading.  And no one was talking about simply adding more books as a way to add rigor.

It is disheartening to hear rigor being thought of in terms of test preparation. It breaks my heart to hear justification for returning to traditional teaching methods - e.g. workbooks, assigned full class readings, required constructed written responses without audience or purpose - as a way to better prepare students.  But prepare them for what? To take more tests?  Who benefits from this? In the long run, it is not our students.

I am not opposed to the Common Core State Standards. They provide a foundation for teachers to talk about the skills we want to foster in our group of learners. However, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are not a pedagogy.  The CCSS are not a theory for teaching reading and writing. And the CCSS certainly were not intended to be an assessment strategy. Yet it seems that so much of what we are hearing is about how schools are moving away from the pedagogies and best practices of teaching reading and writing that research has shown to help develop the skills necessary for students to succeed beyond the classroom.  Choice, autonomy, purpose, creativity, inquiry, and reflection are pushed aside to make room for "rigor."

I have spent the last few months researching and presenting on why such inquiry-based teaching in the English classroom does more to grow writing and analytical reading skills than test preparation. In fact, it's what I'll be presenting in Chicago in a few months and at the PCTELA conference in October. It feels a bit of a backwards move to be talking about adding rigor in terms of simply requiring that our students "read more" instead of inspiring true rigor which comes from the student, not forced upon her. As an English teacher, my content is more than books. My content is certainly more than workbooks. It breaks my heart to see all that we know about growing engaged and empowered readers and writers undone by tests.

Resources for Flipping the English Class

On Friday afternoon, I had the opportunity to join both lower and upper school teachers from Penn Charter School in Philadelphia to discuss the flipped learning model. Many of the teachers were familiar with the term flipped learning, but had questions about what the approach looked like in a humanities classroom. Isn't the flipped model something that English and history teachers already do?  And the answer is...sort of.

Image from WGBY Education

Flipped learning is not just about students watching videos as homework. Instead, the flipped approach is very similar to inquiry-based and problem-based learning pedagogies in that at the heart of the flipped approach are students. This students-centered learning approach allows for student exploration of concepts with opportunities to practice and master skills using teacher created and curated materials that students have access to both inside and outside of the classroom. Teachers act as facilitators, mentors, and coaches, helping guide students through these learning opportunities.  What this means for me as a high school English teacher is that I use a great deal of formative assessment in order to determine what skills and higher order learning activities my students are struggling to learn.  These are the learning opportunities that should happen with my support inside the classroom. As an English teacher, I had previously assigned my students chapter-by-chapter reading homework.  However, if my students are struggling with reading comprehension, this "homework" is doing more to hinder their learning than to support it.  The same is true of teaching writing.  Previously, I expected my high school students to draft their essays outside of class.  But this didn't make sense when my students were struggling to compose their thesis statements. The skills that students struggle with need to be flipped into the classroom.  Now, we begin all of our writing activities in the classroom where students have support from both their teacher as well as from their peers.

For those new to the idea of flipping the English classroom, I wanted to take a moment to share some of the resources that I have found helpful in my flipping adventures. I am by no means an expert, and as I shared with the teachers at Penn Charter on Friday, most of my learning about this approach happened as I did everything exactly wrong.  Imagine students sitting at home watching 25 minute long videos on sentence fragments. Yikes! So to help other teachers avoid my mistakes (and wasted time creating truly awful videos), I've compiled some of my favorite tools.

Getting started:

Image from Tutor2U

• If you are new to flipped learning, start with the pillars of Flipped Learning shared by the educators at the Flipped Learning Network, an online forum for teachers to share their resources and questions about flipped learning. This document is a great introduction to the basics of the flipped approach, emphasizing the how the approach encourages a student-centered approach to learning.
• Aaron Sams and Jon Bergmann’s book Flip Your Classroom was a valuable resource in helping me think through why and how to flip. This fast read also discusses how the flipped approach can be used to encourage mastery learning goals.   
• Troy Cockrum’s book Flipping Your English Class includes not only chapters to help teachers think through the theory underlying the flipped approach, but also includes specific lessons for English teachers interested in trying the approach.  Each lesson is presented twice, first using a traditional flipped model for those teacher first implementing this approached and then as a second iteration flipped lesson with ideas for encouraging differentiation and mastery.  If you are interesting in understanding the difference between these two approaches, check out this excerpt from the book with two example lessons.
• Jason Bretzmann’s Flipping 2.0 includes chapters by English teachers Kate Baker, Cheryl Morris and Andrew Thomasson, and by Troy Cockrum. Teachers discuss how they got started, the missteps they made along the way, as well as what they found most helpful to consider when getting started.
• Twitter is an invaluable resource for teachers of all disciplines, but in particular, you will find a lot of flipping teachers use Twitter to share their resources and collaborate.  So, what flipping English teachers are on Twitter? Here's my list of flipping English teachers.
• Dan Spencer's shared Google Doc on Flipped Learning is a must-read. This resource, filled with examples and resources, is my go-to resource for flipping lessons
• Cybrary Man’s collection of flipped learning resources is another go-to resource for finding examples, and Jerry Blumengarten is always updating it with more resources
• As I was getting started, I also wanted to see models of the materials other English teachers were creating and using.  Below are the websites and blogs for some fantastic flipping English teachers:
• Kate Baker blogs about her high school English flipping experiences at Baker's B.Y.O.D.
• Cheryl Morris and Andrew Thomasson, gurus of collaboratively flipping their cross-country high school English classes, can be found online on their collaborative flipping blog.
• Troy Cockrum hosts a podcast with flipping teachers. 
• Catlin Tucker's blog on her blended learning approach to teaching high school English is a great collection of reflections and resources
• And although I am not an expert, feel free to check out my 10th grade English class site 

Considerations before you begin:

• Host your videos and materials in a space that makes it easy for students to find and navigate. Curate an online space that does not have too many distractions or asks students to make a number of clicks in order to get to your materials. More clicks = more options to click away from your materials. If you are not going to host videos/materials on your own website, try one of these curation sites:
• Blendspace for Schools
• LessonPaths (formerly MentorMob Edu)
• EduClipper (the educational version of Pinterest)
• Evernote
• Vimeo or YouTube (but only good for videos)
• Edmodo (organized like a Facebook page, and easily integrates Google Drive)
• Canvas (a free learning management site that integrates well with Google Drive)

• When creating videos...
• Keep videos under 15 minutes; most effective videos are under 10 minutes
• Make sure your materials and videos display your personality. Students want to see and hear you in the presentation.
• The less clicks the better; embed the video.
• Students must do something as they watch in order to help them practice the skill featured in your video. Consider having them take notes, craft questions, or respond to a class blog or discussion website.
• Tools for video editing:
• Camtasia - very robust, but costly. You can sign up for free 30-day trial
• Screencast-o-matic - free and easy to use, online, no download
• VoiceThread - interactive and embeddable
• Haiku Deck - interactive and embeddable
• Screenr - free and easy to use, online, no download necessary
• PowToons - create your own short animated videos, limited text
• Jing - free screencast and screen capture download

• Use materials created by others
• TedxEd is fantastic!  Pull in any YouTube video, create multiple choice or open ended questions to go along with the video, and use teacher-created student accounts to have students respond. There are a wealth of lessons already created and shared, or you can create your own.
• Khan Academy has a great deal for science and math teachers, but more and more humanities lessons are being added.
• Find example lessons shared at the Flipped Learning Network and on the Flipped Classroom Ning.  And while you are there, join the Ning network of flipping teachers!
• And ask questions! 

I'm Flipping Excited

In preparation for my upcoming PA Writing and Literature Project summer course for teachers on writing with 2.0 technologies, I read Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams' book Flip Your Classroom. I've been doing a bit of a blended learning approach in my classroom, assigning students to watch videos that introduce assignments or vocabulary outside of class so that I could spend more time writing with students in class. Reading Bergmann and Sams' book really helped me think through why and how I was using technology to engage students outside of class. It is a fantastic resource for the teacher just learning about this approach as well as for those of us easing into the ideas of a flipped mastery approach to teaching.

As a resource, I put together the presentation below to link to the wealth of research that I've found in my studies of the flipped approach. Enjoy and pass along!

From the Mgmt.

A friend and fellow teacher recently asked if he could ask me a few questions about my classroom management style for a graduate course in education he is currently taking.  And with the school year all wrapped up, this is a perfect time to reflect on not just what I do in the classroom but why I do what I do.  So I thought I would share a little bit of how I responded to my friend's request:

My Management Style - 

So two guiding ideas that have shaped how I establish my classroom community have to do with transparency and flipped instruction.  In terms of transparency, I believe that students and parents should be able to access and interact with whatever it is that we are working on in the classroom even when they are not physically in my class.  This is why I feel it is important to use my web presence not just as a place to post my assignments, but to get students interacting.  We blog our writing pieces, we use online discussion tools, take our tests/quizzes online and review class responses after everyone has finished, all so that student work is not done in isolation.  Students are writing online and posting for an audience other than just their teacher.  I've seen that this can help students in terms of how they construct their written pieces.  When writing for an audience other than just their teacher, students understand that there is a real purpose and audience for what they are writing.  Also in an effort to make what we do in the classroom transparent, students are given all their assignments for a particular unit at the beginning of the unit along with the rubrics for all assignments.  My goal is that students can see from the very beginning of a unit our objectives for learning and where we are headed.  To do this, I rely on ideas of backward design as proposed by Wiggins and McTighe in Understanding by Design. Last, I live video stream out every class every day.  I use the webcam on my laptop to stream out every class. The camera points to the front of the room so that students are not captured but viewers can hear what is happening in the class.  The first week of class and at our Back to School Night for parents, I give out the link and password to access our live video web channel.  Only those with the password can watch the class live or watch the recorded videos of our class.  I have found that students mainly access these recordings the days we do quiz/test reviews as a way to review once they get home.  Parents (and even some grandparents) access the stream on presentation days to watch all their student's preparation come together. By striving toward transparency, my hope is that students and their parents feel more engaged in the work of our classroom, but more importantly that we come to understand the classroom as a community.  It is not just "my" classroom but "ours".

The other guiding idea that I try to incorporate stems from the flipped classroom movement and the idea that class time is better used as a place for the teacher to act as a mentor/coach while students use time to practice and refine their work on writing pieces and projects.  A few years ago, I was sitting in a session at the annual NCTE conference and a presenter asked the audience if we spent more time planning our instruction or giving instructions.  This struck home with me as I noticed that my handouts were incredibly wordy.  I spent a lot of time giving instructions.  So, this year in particular, I moved all my didactic materials and instructions to video. Instead of asking students to complete writing assignments and group projects as homework, we did them in class so I could work with them, acting as a coach.  As homework, students watched videos that introduced assignments, vocabulary and literary terms, and gave directions. Most of the time, their homework was either to watch a video or complete reading homework. This meant that we could use class time to draft and revise. Flipping my instruction freed up class time for more discussions, practice, and presentations. It also meant that I did not spend as much time standing in front of the class (because I stood in front of a camera instead), so the physical set up of my classroom changed as well .  Desks were organized in pods if we were working on group work or in the shape of a U to better facilitate class discussions. Flipping my instruction also flipped a great deal of my organization and management style.  Not only that, it flipped how students thought about our classroom.

My classes are not quiet.  You will not often see students sitting in rows listening to a teacher at the front of the room.  In fact, walk into my classroom on any given day, and it might look a bit chaotic. There might be a group of students, laptops open, working on a Prezi for an upcoming presentation while another student sits on the counter reading quietly to herself, three students might be in the hallway video-taping a re-enactment of a scene from the book they are reading while four others are in the class on their smartphones doing research. But this is not chaos.  This is learning. Over the course of one semester, most of my students will post between 4-5 blog posts, teach the class 3-4 times, present research to an audience outside our classroom, submit at least one piece of writing for publication, use Skype to talk with multiple authors and publishers, and use a variety of tools to create, connect, and collaborate with others inside our classroom and those halfway across the world.  This is teaching and learning 2.0.

You'll See More Soon...No, Really, You Will!

So all my plans for my maternity leave this past school year are still just that...plans. I wanted to update my resume. Update my blog. Update my websites. I didn't. I haven't. But I definitely haven't simply let the year slip by. I became a fellow in the National Writing Project. I'm working on a grant through the National Writing Project. I'm teaching my first graduate class to teachers. I started a business. And I've been writing (sorry, that it hasn't been here). So instead of planning, I've been doing.

But you'll see me returning more in the next few weeks as I plan and teach my first graduate course with the PA Writing and Literature Project on Reading and Writing in Digital Spaces. I'm currently trying to narrow down the tons and tons of videos and articles and books and blogs that I could use in this type of course. I certainly have way more than what I need. And in the process of narrowing down my resources I ran across this TED Talk video from Will Richardson. I think this might be an interesting place for me to start our study. What do you think?

Inspiring

Said so much better than I ever could, Sarah Kay expresses why I am passionate about teaching high school writers. We all have stories to tell.

Writing for the World

Teaching is about helping students become more than just book learners. It is guiding them to be life learners. And that means that teachers, myself included, need to set up classrooms that are learning environments for everyone in that classroom - teacher included.

As a teacher, I believe that some of my best lessons have happened when I am also in the seat of the learner, learning right alongside my students. I've learned more about my own writing process as I've written with my students. I’ve learned that I have to commit to the writing process, not just to this or that essay, much like I ask my students to fully engage in writing as a process. I can’t just sit down at a computer and bang out a couple of pages, hurriedly assembled sentences and paragraphs. Like I ask my students, I need to remember that my written work is a reflection of who I am, of who I want to be. And so as I heard author James McBride once say, I must remember that “writing is rewriting.” As such, I must never look at a piece of my own writing as finished, and in turn, encourage students to return to their writing again and again and again. After all, aren’t the writers we remember those that looked at writing as a series of rewrites? Walt Whitman rewrote Leaves of Grass five times! Writing is a process that involves reflection, revision, and rewriting. Because I’ve recognized this in my own writing, I must open up space in my classroom for students to do the same. This means that I’ve had to stop assigning essays that students turn in only once, essays that I would labor over my commenting on but students either never read or did anything with the feedback.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve changed how I teach writing. Students can’t just turn in an essay to me. Instead, I ask my students to reflect on their writing goals following each writing assignment, contemplating how they addressed their previous goals with each assignment, reflecting on their progress as writers. Often times, I see essays multiple times, stressing each time that revision is not merely editing. And perhaps the biggest change to my teaching of writing involves who reads my students’ work.

Students are often asked to just write for their teacher. A single reader. What I’ve found is that the more I can open up my classroom to more authentic and meaningful writing experiences, the more invested my student writers are in the pieces they produce. The web has been immensely helpful in this process. Instead of turning in an essay on the themes of Elie Wiesel’s Night, I have students post their essays to our classroom blog site, where they can read each others’ work and give feedback. At the beginning of the semester, students write their own personal narrative essays on a core belief, in the style of NPR’s “This I Believe” program. I’ve found that when students share these essays with one another, post them on our class blog site, they generate an immense amount of feedback, and in turn, students ask to revise their essays. They ASK to revise! Later in the semester, I ask students to write editorials for our local newspaper, create web pages, and respond to each other using online discussion boards. When students learn that their writing is going to be seen by an audience other than just the teacher, they are more invested in the process of writing. They are engaged.

Teaching and Parenting

Before becoming a parent, I naively thought that my experiences as a teacher would help me as a mother. Come to find out, it was really the other way around. Being a parent has taught me to be a better teacher. Parenting has little to do with standing in front of your child, dictating instructions. Instead, it’s about letting moments unfold, learning from them, and trying to help your child explore and learn from those moments as well. Parenting is not about filling your child’s head with all your wisdom. It is about letting your child find his own wisdom and having the patience to let him come to that knowledge through a series of sometimes faltering steps. Parents guide their children. Parents coach their children. Parents are there to structure the environment, to provide models. As parents we don’t assign our students worksheets on how to behave. In the case of my son, just learning to walk, I don’t design activities for him to complete lock-step (forgive the pun) by a particular deadline. I provide him with opportunities to explore. I encourage him to try and try again. And I hope that I encourage his excitement about trying new things.

Isn’t this what good teaching also involves? What I’ve discovered is that the more I reflect on who I want to be as a parent, I am also called to revisit who I want to be as a teacher. Is it really important at the end the day, at the end of the year, at the end of high school for students to know what year Kahled Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner? Will the daily lives of my students be enriched for knowing that in chapter 16 there is a metaphor on page 211? Is it really important if students remember verbatim the definition of verisimilitude? Or, instead, is it better that my students know how to identify a theme, analyze it, and connect it to their experience of humanity? Isn’t it more important that students are able to critically analyze texts for their bias? And if this is true, if teaching should be about helping our students develop applicable skills related to our content area, why do I continue to feel it is necessary to give what essentially amounts to reading tests at the end of units?

I don’t think I’m alone here. I’m in the process of putting together my unit teaching Middle Eastern literature, centered around the reading of The Kite Runner. And in the process of gathering materials, I of course stumbled across the various pre-packaged units, many of which rely on multiple vocabulary and reading quizzes. However, even when searching various teacher prepared lessons on sites like TeachersPayTeachers, what I discovered were rafts of multiple choice quizzes bogged down with plot questions. What does a test of plot-based questions really test? That students read a text. Really, is that all we expect? I hope the message I send my students is not that we read simply for the sake of finishing a book. Instead, we read to connect to others, to empathize with the lives of others, to learn more about ourselves. Shouldn’t our unit assessments reflect that learning?

What I’ve come to realize as a parent is that the learning that sticks with a person is the learning that cannot be measured (usually) by a multiple choice test. As I mentioned in an earlier post, good teaching involves setting the stage for learning. What this means for me is that I need to spend less time standing in front of the class, and more time thinking about the skills and themes that I want my students to understand by the close of the unit. Teaching becomes more about what I hope my students are able to understand and do by the close of a lesson, and less about what they can recall for a test. That is not to say that all discrete knowledge should be dismissed. Instead, it means that I need to find more meaningful ways of helping student understand how to use and apply that knowledge rather than simply recall it. Teaching is about helping students become more than just book learners. It is guiding them to be life learners.

It's All In the Approach

I keep running into Marc Prensky. Not literally, of course, but filed away are various photocopies of his articles passed my way by well intentioned administrators during staff meetings. I first encountered his writing this past school year when some of his work was included as part of an online course I participated in. Similar to my initial impressions following my reading of his article "Engage Me or Enrage Me" in the September/October 2005 edition of Educause, his recent article "Young Minds, Fast Times: The 21st Century Digital Learner" left me with a number of concerns and lingering frustrations. I'm struggling with some of his arguments for why teachers should use technology in their classrooms. While I agree that technology must have a role in our curriculum, I don't think that technology is the answer to all the problems of student engagement.

I don't think that the goal of educators is to entertain our students. While I agree that in order to succeed, we must engage our students, get them to buy into what we are teaching, and take ownership of it, I don't think that is what Mr. Prensky is arguing. His articles seem to argue that technology is the simple solution for getting students to engage in the classroom setting. This makes sense given that his livelihood depends on us accepting this idea. However, I think some of his proposals for change are a bit short-sighted. Technology is not the magic bullet for student engagement, and it is certainly not the only tool that educators have at their disposal for encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving in students.

Additionally, his over generalizations and patronizing tone do little to forward what might be a number of very important suggestions - namely, that educators need to involve students in the learning process rather than dictate knowledge to them. While I wholeheartedly agree with this proposal, comments like "It is a measure of the malaise of our educational system that these old folk -- smart and experienced as they may be -- think they can, by themselves and without the input of the people they're trying to teach, design the future of education," do little to help change the minds of educators using what are now labeled as more traditional teaching methods. Instead, his arguments alienate the very voices that need his support for change. It is ironic that he touts himself as someone students can connect with "...because I communicate somehow to the kids that I truly respect their opinions," but he does not extend this courtesy to his fellow educators.

It is the goal of educators to prepare students to be active, responsible, reflective citizens. Technology most certainly can help us meet that goal. We should and must use technology to help students integrate fully into the modern world, but technology is not the easy answer to the question of how do we engage students. Instead, I agree more with Will Richardson's suggestion that "By inviting students to become active participants in the design of their own learning, we teach them how to be active participants in their lives and future careers." Technology certainly aids in the this endeavor, but it is not the only way we encourage students to active participants in their learning.

Today's Lesson: Speak Up

I avoid conflict. I withdraw from situations where I am asked to stand apart from my peers. I am much more content to quietly lead by example, to sit back and listen while others debate. I rarely speak up in department meetings, workshops, trainings, or conferences unless called upon. I can be painfully quiet. I realize this is rather strange coming from a high school teacher who stands in front about 90 students on a daily basis, but when it comes to touting my accomplishments, arguing my position, or debating whether or not something should or shouldn’t be in the curriculum, I am much more comfortable listening and analyzing rather than jumping into the ring. That said, I find myself recently in a number of frustrating positions where I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone.

This morning’s three hour curriculum meeting left me drained. Although I find it intensely useful to question what we teach and how, to revisit our focus and methodologies, I find it immensely frustrating when as educators we are asked to reinvent the wheel in a different format every few years.

A few years back, the curriculum that I now love to teach was a bit all over the place, each teacher doing his or her own thing, using different books and materials. In the course of the past few years, my English colleagues and our social studies counterparts set about establishing a connection between the themes taught in the world literatures course with those taught in the world history course that students take in the same semester. Over the past few summers, we established core skills and themes: what grammar, writing, and reading skills students should leave the course with in order to be successful. Our goal was to have students walk out of our two classrooms, history and English, feeling empowered, seeing connections between what they learned in class and what they encounter in their world, and feeling more confident as critical consumers of the information they are inundated with on a daily basis. We wanted to get away from didactic teaching methodologies in favor of engaging students in the learning process. In order to be successful, students must own their learning and know their voice matters. Granted, this is also my personal take on education as well. I firmly believe that true education happens when students are in the driver’s seat and can prove their understanding in authentic situations.

Stemming from this philosophy, I developed a culminating research project about four years ago which was later adopted by all the teachers in my grade level. Based on the ideals of formative assessment (now known as assessment for learning) and authentic assessment strategies, the research project not only incorporates traditional research and expository writing skills, but most importantly, requires students find ways to share their research outside our classroom community in authentic writing and presentation situations. In the last few years, I’ve had students teach their topic to middle and elementary school students, start student clubs based on their research, write senators, create online web pages and communities dedicated to their topic, compose articles for local newspapers, sponsor community-wide fund drives, and host school-wide fairs. Students have taken this research project beyond the realms of the classroom, beyond the confines of the course, and continue to be engaged with their topics even after graduation.

Unfortunately, some of my colleagues have not seen similar levels of success. This is in part due to the fact that my grade level has seen a number of faces come and go in the last five years, which translates into a curriculum that remains a bit fragmented. This morning’s curriculum meeting was to be a time to re-establish and clarify those initial goals. So when a couple of colleagues today suggested that our research project was not "Englishy" enough, and that perhaps we should return to a final English project that asks students to analyze a literary piece, at first I sat quietly and listened.

As I heard a peer suggest that our English curriculum should focus more on teaching literary analysis and devices, about writing papers for the teacher, and reading literature in order to dissect it, I grew more and more frustrated. It is not that I think these activities don’t have value (ask any of my students what a microcosm is and they’re libel to rattle off not only a definition but a nearly infinite number of examples). However, if this is all we do in an English classroom, we are doing our students a great disservice. If students do not have the opportunity to write for a real audience, to write, read, and speak about issues that have meaning and value for them, as teachers we have failed them. Teaching English should be helping students develop an appreciation of literature and writing by guiding them through diverse and authentic interactions with reading and writing, not by dictating that appreciation to them. Very few of our students will be asked to regurgitate a definition of metonymy once they leave academia. However, all students, regardless of if they go to college, trade school, or immediately enter the working world following high school must know how to critically decipher the bias inherent in the magazine articles they read, must know how to use rhetoric in order to persuade, must know how to write for a real audience. I cringe at the thought of going back to a curriculum that is based on a set of terms and not on a set of skills. Unfortunately, teaching terms is easier, more measurable than teaching skills.

Realistically, however, I also know that as this was my initial project, and I have more investment in it than some of my peers. But I don’t think that my frustration lies with the dismembering of a research project. My frustration is born in what that project represents. I see a divide among my peers, not just those within my department but within the curriculum as a whole. On the one side are the traditionalists who argue that the teaching of literature and writing should take the shape of a more formalist approach, understanding the merits of a work’s style, devices, and diction in order to pass on the beauty inherent in a particular work of literature. On the flip side are those that argue anything can be literature – from a pamphlet, to a billboard, to a blog entry – and that it is the role of the teacher to help students critically engage and produce texts of all sorts. Granted, this is an oversimplification, but it is one that I saw emerge in today’s meeting.

I understand my role of teacher to be somewhere in the middle. I cannot force my students to appreciate literature, but perhaps I can guide them in that direction. I understand that there is usefulness in simply memorizing some things (if you know your 23 auxiliary/to be verbs, you are more likely to use action verbs to structure better sentences). However, the lessons that students remember beyond high school usually cannot be reduced to a single multiple-choice exam. As a colleague asked of us today – do you remember the questions on any particular test that you took in high school? However, you probably do remember an assignment where a teacher asked you to produce something, to be the owner of your education. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t more of our learning opportunities be structured around this philosophy. What is it that we want our students to know? More importantly, what is it that we want our students to understand and why?

What should English teachers teach?

Killing Them Softly?

It all started with Billy Collins’ poem “Introduction to Poetry.” I read the poem to my third block class, and then asked them to spend a few minutes writing a response, reflecting on how they encountered poetry in school. They started their written reflections, but I couldn’t hold this conversation back. They wanted to talk. Students are taught to analyze poetry for rhyme scheme, meter, and literary devices. They’ve been asked to list countless metaphors, similes, and lines of alliteration. They’ve circled and defined vocabulary words. A few teachers have asked them to memorize Shakespearean sonnets. Some students suggested that poetry always seemed to be left for the end of the year, squeezed in during the last week - only if it fit.

The conversation changed directions when one student raised her hand and timidly suggested that school killed poetry. She has learned to hate poetry because she thought it was all about “digging for the hidden meaning.” Her voice was joined by an echoing chorus of agreement. The conversation grew as we started to talk about their experiences with reading in general. English class was all about “over analyzing” a work of literature, ripping apart the text, leaving it dissected on the page to expose some secret innards. Students thought their teachers saw secret symbols everywhere. When I asked the students what they thought the purpose of such activities were, a few voices volunteered the answer they thought I wanted to hear: “Because it teaches us to look at a text more critically.” And then one shy voice near the back of the room called out, “School’s not really about learning but more about adapting to particular teacher’s expectations. I interpret a text like my teacher tells me to.” My students felt that the purpose of school was to train individuals to be good at jumping through hoops. And this is where the real discussion began.

Their pent up frustration came flooding out, and the 10 minutes I had planned to spend on using Collins’ poem to introduce the need to balance glossing with an appreciation of literature, turned into a very meaningful 45 minute discussion on what my students felt about their educational experiences. The students felt that the purpose of school was to pump students full of expectations and discrete facts without encouraging any real learning to take place. They weren’t asked to come up with the problems; they were given them. They weren’t asked to discover any new solutions; they were told the answers. When I asked students how they could advocate for real learning opportunities in their classrooms, a girl who had been attentively following the conversation but hadn’t yet spoken volunteered that she thought honors students didn’t know how to rebel against such a system. After all, they had proved they were very good at working within it. It broke my heart to hear such frustration and sense of powerlessness.

Arthus Erea, a high school student in Vermont, expressed a similar sentiment in his recent post over at Students 2.0:

Frankly, I think schools are becoming far too business-like. Many of my peers often think of school as unpaid work. Of course, professionalism is continually emphasized as the highest principle for which students must strive. Schools even use the same reward/punishment system as the workplace: good grades = good job = $$$ and failing school = unemployment ≠ $$$. I think this is the core of what is wrong with schools: all students are expected to be professional students. That is, it is expected that we will only learn if we are forced to do so either because we desire the reward (grades) or fear the punishment (failing). In fact, this is setting up students to hate learning.

Many authors have written on the dangers of an educational system based on such bribery. Alfie Kohn's book Punishment by Rewards declares,

When we repeatedly promise rewards to children for acting responsibly, or to students for making an effort to learn something new, or to employees for doing quality work, we are assuming that they could not or would not choose to act this way on their own. If the capacity for responsible action, the natural love of learning, and the desire to do good work are already part of who we are, then the tacit assumption to the contrary can fairly be described as dehumanizing. (26)

Are schools killing our students’ desire to learn? In an educational system so focused on standards and high-stakes tests, teachers find it difficult to balance their required curriculum, already packed with multiple 500-page classic novels and units on every culture in Africa, with student-chosen reading materials and self-directed learning opportunities. Very few students have the opportunity to seek out information. They are given it. How can we encourage students to be life-long, self-motivated learners in a system that is not based on developing problem-solving skills but instead rewards students for regergitating facts? When the time crunch of the semester bares down on us, it is easier and faster to teach students functional knowledge (information that is memorized and repeated) rather than promote a conceptual understanding of the themes and ideas we are teaching. Our students know our curriculums, but do they understand what they have been taught?

The conversation with my students has me contemplating how much conceptual, self-motivated learning really takes place in my classroom. How much of a say do students have in exploring issues, developing questions, and searching for solutions on a daily basis? Even though I have been incorporating more student choice into assignments and using formative assessment techniques to guide how I teach, I know that I also rely on what might be considered traditional methods of teaching – give students the information on auxiliary verbs, ask them to memorize it, and test them on it. I struggle with my role as a teacher, attempting to find a balance between being a coach and being a conveyer of facts.

I believe there are somethings that we must just know (e.g. our times tables, that potato does not end in an "e", etc.). These are the functional bits of knowledge that students must know. However, I believe the learning that sticks with us is more concept-based, that is, a type that provides the broader conceptual framework holding together the various knowledge-bits. For example, in talking with a student not long ago, he explained that last year his math teacher not only taught students how to use pi in mathmatical equations but also had the students do experiments with a number of circles to prove that the ratio of the circumference to its diameter was indeed the same number, pi, each time. "I just thought it was a number that people memorized, but now I know why." It's the difference between knowing something and understanding it. When students in my class select an issue currently facing a non-western country to research and present to an audience outside of our classroom, they understand that particular issue and how it affects the culture in a much deeper way than I would ever have time to teach. The student poses the problem, seeks out the background research, proposes solutions, and presents the information in the hopes that change begins to happen on that issue. Students are engaged and invested in these types of learning opportunities. And in talking with my students the other day, they seem to be begging for these types of experiences.

^{Photo credit: dro!d on Flickr}

Time for Change

It’s been that day. You know the one. The day that you trek two bags of grading into school and three bags back out at the end of the day. The day that students hover over your desk asking about grades while you’re also trying to respond to thirty-five different parent, administrator, and teacher emails. The day you have two meetings after school, a student club meeting to sponsor, and two parent phone calls to respond to. The day you have to send the failure letters home to parents. The day that you’ve come to school with the third incarnation of the stomach virus that the students have been passing around your classroom for the last month and a half.

I am overwhelmed.

I have spread myself so thin, I am transparent. Between the administrative paperwork, grading, trainings, committee meetings, district testing, I’ve little time left to spend doing what I love – talking and working with students. It is unfortunate that the one area that should have priority – being in the classroom working with students – does not always seem to be a priority in the traditional educational system. I’m pulled out my classroom for fire drills and trainings. Classes are shortened for extended homerooms and district testing (check out Barry Bachenheimer’s video on this very theme below). I’m feeling the frustration that many other bloggers have recently expressed more eloquently than I.



Clay Burell’s recent post ”On Leaving Teaching to become a Teacher” has sparked a number of comments and reactions in the edublogosphere. Will Richardson’s response to Clay’s original post reflects on how modern technologies are changing our students, but in some respects, we have yet to change our classrooms and curriculums. I was particular struck by some of the ideas presented in Mr. Richardson’s post. He dreams of a school:

“…where long term collaborations and research and learning can happen over extended periods, all of it real work for real audiences, published and reviewed by engaged readers participants acting as mentors from global audiences. The adults in the room are co-learners with the students but also educators who can model and navigate the skills and competencies, the ‘network literacies’…”

However, there has been some debate over such educational reforms. Local Philadelphia educator and blogger Chris Lehmann’s response to Clay Burell’s and Will Richardson’s post offers up a note of caution. He writes, “There are some things that we have to deal with, and they can be difficult, especially if we hold onto an idealistic vision of what we want our schools to be for every child.” In some respects, I agree with Mr. Lehmann’s arguments. I believe that compulsory education is necessary and beneficial. However, I think most of his response to Burell’s and Richardson’s posts is off the mark. Change is necessary. Record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession as a result of the very frustrations I expressed earlier. Additionally, we have a growing number of students that are being tested-out of our education system, falling through the cracks created by district, state, and national mandates stemming from NCLB. I disagree with Mr. Lehmann’s suggestion that we need to “temper our idealism with a healthy dose of pragmatism…” True change does not come from working within the system but in finding a new way outside of it. In order to change the limitations of our current system, we must be willing to push those limits to discover what is beyond, what is possible.