Parents need to know

I was lurking around in an #edchat Twitter conversation this morning when the discussion turned to the question of why parents do not cry out against standardized testing in education. I began thinking about the 15 (yes, that is a number high enough I don’t have to spell it out according to grammatical rules) tests that each student in Texas must now pass in order to graduate from high school. It has taken a long evolution to get us here, but here we are, expecting every student (in some districts) to grasp the concepts of physics, every student to understand more Chemistry than I did as a second year science major in college, every student to embrace the concepts of pre-calculus to the extent that they can pass an exam at the “end” of the year (the tests are mostly finished by the end of April).

I am old enough to remember the movement that started all of this. I remember hearing news stories about people graduating from high school who couldn’t read or sign their own name, perform simple addition and subtraction, or compose a complete sentence. Appalling, yes. How did we get from there to here?

I believe it has a lot to do with trust.

Parents trust the education community to be the experts – to know the best practices that facilitate student achievement. The slow evolution of testing from making sure every student has the basics – reading, writing, and arithmetic – to this expectation that every student is a carbon copy of the next one, and therefore, should know exactly the same things before graduating from high school has effectively desensitized parents (and I say this as a parent myself). It simply doesn’t register when our 3rd grader wakes up one morning, begging us to cook a huge breakfast for him because his teacher said he would fail his high-stakes test if he didn’t eat well, that there is something wrong with a child this age being stressed about performance. We don’t connect the dots when our sixth grader calls herself stupid in math when it used to be the subject she loved the most that her confidence level is directly proportional to the score she got on the district benchmark test.

Parents trust that the institution forced upon every child in America knows what it’s doing, and the fancy titles “Exemplary”, “Recognized”, an “A+ school” are indicators of student success, but what they don’t know is that these titles are only measures in a moment of time. These measures only reflect how much that student knew in that moment when they were taking their test. It has more to do with “cramming” and test-taking strategies than it does with any skill needed to live a successful, productive life.

As a parent, I am disgusted with the importance that is placed on test scores. I am disgusted with grading policies that reflect how well my kids can comply with their teachers’ directives than how well they can apply what they know.

I have wished that I didn’t know – that I could just trust.

The good news is, I see a revolution on the way. I see more and more parents saying “wait a minute!” and asking the questions that need to be asked, giving their children the okay to not stress about the test, and demanding recognition that each student be seen as an individual, not one who came from the same blueprint as the next one, but one whose unique abilities and interests should be championed. Even students are keenly aware of the impact this reduction in their individual worth has had on their own futures and are speaking out.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long for them to be heard.

 

Because I am a teacher

When I was in college, I had a professor tell me that I was made to be a science teacher. At the time, I was an English major and science was the furthest thing from my mind. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that she was right. It was my Biology class that I was excited to go to each week and my English classes I dreaded.

Still, she had said “teacher”, and I wasn’t so sure about that. I had teachers through my K-12 education who had made me want to be a teacher and I had teachers during that same time that made me want to have nothing to do with education. I was skeptical.

During my sophomore year, I got a paid gig doing supplemental instruction for Biology students. This wasn’t tutoring, per se, it involved planning on my part. I had to attend various Bio lectures, then create a supplemental lesson plan designed to revisit the content from lecture in more visual or hands-on ways. My students were usually either athletes who were being forced to attend by their coaches or non-traditional students who really didn’t want to have to pay for the class more than once.

I found that I loved those classes. I loved sitting in the lectures, I loved planning, I loved getting to know my students, and I loved differentiating for them (before I had ever heard that word in reference to education).

I changed my major to Science Education, then Biology itself, and happily continued pursuit of a degree. During my senior year, I found myself restless and anxious to finish, anxious to have my own students. At the time, Yahoo had a feature that allowed users to create chat rooms and I began to create one called “Biology tutoring”. I would get students from all over the word and of all ages. A few continued to chat with me throughout their Biology experience (and two of them still contact me from time to time, all grown up). I found these little snippets of “teaching” to be something like sustenance.

Fast forward through my high school science teacher career to where I am today, an instructional technology specialist. This means I don’t have a classroom – or students. I take on teaching gigs for online classes, which helps to sate my appetite for teaching young people. However, I have discovered one way that also satisfies that need without any effort on my part – a YouTube video.

Yes, a YouTube video. Not just any video, but one that I uploaded three years ago. This thing is embarrassingly simple and goofy-looking. I created it quickly to help some of my online Chemistry students learn an alternative to dimensional analysis. I posted it to YouTube for them. I never thought that three years later, I would be approaching 20,000 views.

The part about the video that satisfies me are the comments. They ebb and flow. Sometimes I will get a new comment each week. Other times, I might have to wait a month, but those comments always give me that warm fuzzy feeling all over again. Sometimes they just tell me thanks, sometimes they ask me questions (which I try to always respond to), and sometimes they share the video with their friends or teachers.

I have the heart of a teacher. I might not be in a classroom. There might not be any students who even know my name, but I have made a difference to, surprisingly, mostly college students who are struggling through Chemistry and find my video.

When we are struggling with whatever stresses are coming our way – and as educators, this is an ongoing flow – we must always remember that we are making a difference – because we are teachers.

DENSI field trip fashion

I’ve been participating in the Discovery Educator Network Summer Institute (affectionately called DENSI) since Saturday. Today, we took a field trip to Yellowstone National Park. This trip brought the number of things that DENSI has crossed off my bucket list to three:

• Visit Montana
• Visit Wyoming
• Visit Yellowstone National Park

It was a great trip, and if you do a search for #DENSI2012, you will find all kinds of pictures on Flickr, tweets on Twitter, and probably blog posts from other participants.

What I want to talk about today is gear. This institute is all about technology, so everyone always brings lots of it. I have been experimenting over the last year with scaling down, so the tech I brought with me fit into a small bag. In the spirit of my experiment, I thought a lot about what I wanted to take with me on the field trip.

As we loaded on to the buses, I saw lots of people with stuffed backpacks. I even saw some taking large tripods. I know that a place like Yellowstone definitely calls for tripods for some serious photography, and this post does not mean to say the people who took them are wrong. On the contrary, I would say that for them, it was definitely right. Do a search on Flickr for #DENSI2012 and you will see some incredible photos and I bet some of them were taken by the people who took their tripods.

I had carefully chosen the items I would take with me. Here is my photo, just before getting on the bus. I would like to suggest that my choice of gear was appropriate – for me. I do not have a nice camera, and as I said before, I am experimenting with traveling light. Take a look at the photo and tell me what I missed.

Did you guess what I forgot? Yes, I have a bright red forehead now, because I decided I didn’t need sunscreen. Oh well, the rest of my gear served me well. I got some decent pictures with my phone because of some tips we received from a professional photographer on the way to the park, I got some videos to add to the institute video collection, and I looked cool with my tripod hanging off my wallet, just like the guy in front of me in the line to get frozen yogurt looked cool with his gorilla tripod hanging out of his back pocket.

How about you? What would you take?

Igniting and restoring passion

Today was the first official day of Podstock. Brad Flickinger was the keynote speaker this morning and many of the things he said really resonated with me. The title was “The Secret Path to Great EdTech Lessons”.

Brad quickly revealed the “secret” is passion. Igniting passion in students is the only way to get them excited about learning. The first step was instilling curiosity and he showed some of the ways that he does that – through projects and extracurricular activities. He said once students get just a taste of success, they will continue to work hard and do well. It is human nature – we feel that small indicator of success and we want to try again – and do it better next time.

Brad is a dynamic speaker. His style pulled me in and even though he was talking about elementary projects, I could see ways that his ideas could work for my schools. He talked about making everything seem real so that students will work harder – if they know something is contrived, they will give less effort to it.

I sat listening to Brad’s sincerity, being pulled in to the peaceful idea of students achieving because they are excited about what they are doing, when he decided to give us the real “secret”. This secret wasn’t about igniting passion in students, but was the surprising benefit of focusing on students . . .

Teachers regain their passion for teaching when students are passionate about learning.

So many teachers are burned out – tired of the administrative tasks, tired of the uncertainty of political agendas, tired of fighting against apathetic students. Many of them end up leaving the profession or retiring at the earliest possible moment because they just can’t continue. What Brad talked about just might be a solution.

Later in the day, as I introduced myself for my presentation, I talked about the Girls of Technology – an organization I co-created to build a sense of community among girls who have chosen to follow STEM career paths. What it has become is so much more, and I have found myself even more passionate about that organization than I was the day we first began brainstorming the creation of it. I thought about what Brad had said – that the passionate students didn’t even have to be the ones in your classroom – they could be an after-school organization, a sports team or a band – the result is still a teacher with a renewed passion for education.

I thought back to my first year teaching, when seeing just one student’s face light up during a pond water lab gave me the energy to teach another year, and I really understood what Brad had said.

We saw a similar dynamic yesterday during LaunchMe, when Ben Honeycutt gave his presentation about Open World – a solution created by students to solve a real-world problem. His talk, and the passion behind it, ignited passion in the educators who witnessed it and helped us remember the reason we are all here.

Let’s all try to find our own passion by igniting passion in our students. It is all about them, but what an awesome and unexpected result – loving our jobs again, remembering why we started in the first place, and making a difference in somebody’s life.

Kansas or bust!

I never really understood what exactly “or bust” means, but I was really tempted to write it on the car windows. I think I would have if it weren’t a rental.

We started the day by using the expertise of Andrea’s husband, William, to get all of our bags in the small trunk of the rental car. I think he did an awesome job!

We are preparing tonight for the preconference event we will be attending. It is called Launch Me and we have to make short presentations as part of our participation. We will get critiqued and will also learn valuable information about professional speaking. I’m really looking forward to it, but standing up and speaking to a room full of presenters is a little daunting. I speak in front of audiences frequently, but they are there because they want to hear what I have to say. Doing a presentation in front of a group who is there to critique my speaking skills is very different.

The lesson of the day: Careful planning makes for swift and satisfactory completion. We planned this trip well and we arrived in Kansas quickly and with everything we need (I think). A teacher can take this lesson to heart – approaching a classroom without a good and effective plan will make for a very tired and frustrated teacher at the end of the day, not to mention students who feel like their time has been wasted.

Life is short – don’t waste their time!

Let the adventure begin!

I have had summers that have been full of trips before. I tried to keep myself from doing that to myself this summer so I narrowed my work-related trips down to two. However, the two must-go education trips happen to be back-to-back!

I’ll be attending my two favorite events when it comes to learning about education technology. First, I’ll be at Podstock in Wichita, Kansas, then I’ll be at the Discovery Educator Network Summer Institute (DENSI) in Bozeman, Montana.

Both events are sure to overload my brain with exciting new possibilities and my network with new, fun friends. I’m a little daunted by the exhaustion that is sure to hit me somewhere in the middle of it all. Thankfully, I have a friend, Andrea Keller (@akbusybee) who has also chosen to go to both of these conferences (she also attended ISTE this year), so she and I will be leaving tomorrow to drive a rental car up to Wichita. We will be in Wichita until Saturday morning, when we will fly to Montana, then fly back home the following Thursday.

I’m going to try to blog through our road trip, Podstock, and DENSI. Stay tuned and hang on – it is sure to be a wild ride!

The Zen of DEN

A lot has happened in this last year for me with the Discovery Educator Network. The thing that was most exciting was being named one of five DEN Gurus for 2012. This was something I had wanted for a very long time, and being privileged to get the title during a year when there were so many worthy opponents humbled me.

I’ve given a lot of thought to my experiences with the DEN. I’ve been a member since January, 2005, and have ridden the roller coaster that has facilitated the growth of the network, not only in numbers, but in a certain level of maturity as well over the last seven years.

What happened to me in January, 2005, when a coach/teacher I was replacing mid-year handed me a sheet of paper and said “this has something to do with technology, you might be interested in it”, was life-changing, both personally and professionally. That piece of paper had the pass-code for my district’s unitedstreaming (now known as Discovery Education streaming) account. I had no idea what it was, but I was desperate for help. I visited the website, entered the pass-code, and discovered a vast library of videos, but more importantly, lesson plans and related materials that I could use instantly in my classroom. Later that year, I was invited to a Day of Discovery and even though the roads were icy and school ended up being closed that day, I made the trek to see what more I could learn from Discovery. That day, I became a member of the DEN, and would later become a STAR when the program was rolled out during regional institutes that summer.

I loved the DEN, and when the big “shake-up” happened, leaving only five people on the DEN team, I was devastated. I can remember (even though he probably doesn’t) having a conversation with Lance Rougeux, who I had never met at that time, about how disappointed I was and how unprofessional it all seemed. Lance was very patient with me, which is amazing because I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who he had heard from, and he didn’t even know me. Lance explained to me that the decisions that had affected so many were completely out of the DEN team’s hands, and began filling me in on the vision the five had for the future of the DEN. He spoke of a DEN that was by teachers, for teachers. He talked of opportunities to change the DEN for the better. I was skeptical, but if those five people, who could have easily thrown in the towel at that point, believed in it, then I was willing to make the effort to help them succeed.

A few months later, the announcement of the formation of leadership councils in each state was made and I jumped on board. In the very beginning, it was myself and Linda Rush who began building the Texas leadership council. Shortly after signing on, we attended a professional development event hosted by the DEN and AFI called “Lights, Camera, Education!”, where I finally got to meet Lance Rougeux for the first time, and where Linda and I recruited Howard Martin, Anne Jablonski, Beth Weeks, and Judith Valle to join our council. Later, we added Lori Reed as a representative from west Texas. I wrote the blog alone for two years, while Linda worked with the other LC members to create events and begin to make a name for our LC. Eventually, I served as chair for two years, then Linda, Howard, and I stepped back to make room for a new, energetic leadership for the LC, which had grown to nearly 30 members. Recently, new changes to the structure of the LCs were announced, and intead of being skeptical this time, I jumped in and joined the Innovation and Strategy team.

What does all this have to do with the Zen of the DEN? To me, it is evidence of the things that have made the DEN so great. I am often asked why I think the DEN is best over other educator groups. Part of my answer, of course, has to be because it got me first, but there are other reasons that I think can point to the essence of the DEN:

1. The DEN is ever-changing. The DEN team is reflective and flexible. They have seen ebbs and flows in their numbers, they have worked through varying policies, they have tried innovative things and been willing to give them up when the time is right. Without this adaptability, the DEN would not have survived.

2. The DEN is a sharing group. Because of my affiliation with this group, I am able to tap into the collective expertise of hundreds of educators across the country. Above that, I am introduced to additional experts who I can learn from. This may be at a summer institute, or it might be through the Twitter network that I am only a part of because Steve Dembo said it was a good idea (and he was definitely right).

3. The DEN is a wonderful venue for professional development. I have often told people that I learn more in the first ten minutes of a Discovery event than I do in a day of traditional professional development. Those of you who have attended such an event know what I’m talking about – that sense of being overwhelmed, but so excited with new knowledge . . .

4. The DEN is a friendship. The warmth and genuine appreciation the members of the DEN have for each other define it as a group that is more than a professional association. When people walk up to me because I’m carrying a DEN bag or wearing a DEN shirt and they introduce themselves as a member of the DEN, I immediately feel a kinship to them and I hope that I reflect that feeling back to them.

Are we enlightened? No. If we ever start to think so, we will be wrong. But for some of us, the DEN can give us new ways of thinking about things, new people to bounce ideas off of, and a new understanding and appreciation of networking.

I’m excited to see where the next seven years takes me . . .