STM are in upper case, too

I recently attended the 2012 STEM Education Conference in Galveston, Texas. During lunch one day, there was a panel of individuals from the STEM industry, talking about the things they see as important issues facing STEM education today.

One of the speakers was an individual from National Instruments. When the panel was asked a question about their own children, she said something that really rang true with me.

“We need to quit making the E so big in STEM.”

Now, I might be upsetting some folks out there with this, but I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree with her. There are four pieces to STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, yet every Academy that was represented at the conference puts a focus on their engineering pathways.

I do understand the value of teaching all students the engineering design algorithm and its applications. It is a valuable tool for them as they go through their problem-solving activities, setting and evaluating goals, and measuring their own progress. However, I do not see why every student should be encourage to BE an engineer. There are so many occupations out there that involve Science, Technology, and Mathematics – Engineering is only one of them, yet so much emphasis is put on that one focus.

Overall, the panel was pretty clear that they want educational institutions to stop placing all of their emphasis on college readiness. Students should not be made to feel like there is something wrong with them if they don’t go to college. Learning in STEM can be focused on the concepts while highlighting the many careers that individuals with and without degrees can hold by pursuing STEM studies in school.

Wrong all over doesn’t make right

I have written in the past about incidents and experiences my children have had in their schools. I want to make clear that my children do not attend schools in the district for which I work, but rather, attend school in neighboring Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD (HEB ISD).

Recently, my 14 year old son was disciplined for coughing during a test by having his grade reduced from an 83 to a 40. The teacher claimed that he laughed and distracted the class (students I talked to said he cleared his throat). After talks with the teacher, the principal, and other students in the class, it was revealed that the teacher’s rule about test-taking is that any noise coming from a person will result in the test being taken up and being graded to the point at which the student was finished at that time. This means students who are sick, sneezing, coughing, hiccuping, etc, better not come to class during test day.

The principal upheld his teacher’s policy, so we had to take it up with one of the assistance superintendents at the district. She agreed with us, and left it up to the principal and teacher to come up with alternative discipline for the coughing. His grade did get restored, and hopefully other students who have had this same thing done to them this year will have theirs restored, as well.

Today we learned that the alternative discipline is to be In-School-Suspension. ISS was created back when I was in high school to be a more acceptable alternative to suspending a student from school entirely. It was meant to be used for those infractions that are serious enough to warrant suspension. My son coughed during a test and now he is suspended for a day.

Progressive discipline is clearly called for in this case. After interviewing other students in the classroom, it is clear my son did not intentionally distract the other students and that classroom management in this particular teacher’s classroom is poor, at best. As the assistant superintendent herself said, this teacher’s very strict rules only serve to encourage students to disrespect their teacher.

This incident, unfortunately, is not the first evidence of an embedded problem throughout this district. I have five children who have attended schools in this district over the past 12 years, and there have been repeated instances of teachers giving students failing grades for not bringing in signed progress reports, or giving “free 100s” for bringing in a box of tissues. This abuse of grading power has got to stop.

Further, going from zero to in-school-suspension – without stopping off at detention or parent conferences, and the like, is unacceptable as well. This practice discourages students to behave well in school because they know if they make one mistake (such as coughing during a test), they will be suspended. The assistant superintendent made the comment that ISS is “no big deal” – it IS a big deal to students who haven’t become accustomed to it.

I had to write this post to vent a little. I would love to hear your thoughts on these issues – does your district have similar policies? Is it time for a change?

Texting in class?

I’ve recently been training teachers on ways to change their “research and report” lessons into more meaningful assessment of mastery. One of the tools I’ve been sharing utilizes a communication venue our students are quite familiar with – texting.

Fake iPhone Text is a simple web-based tool that creates visual representations of text message conversations. It is easy to use and visually engaging for students. Just type in a conversation

Mom: When will you be home from school?
Kid: idk

Then click Create and you’ll quickly see an image that shows the text conversation as if it appeared on a smart phone.

Ideas of how to use it in a classroom include:

1. As a bell-ringer, have students determine who the text conversation is between. Note that the visual does not include the speakers you typed, so students will have to find clues that will tell them who the conversation is between. In my example above, a student might say “I think this is between a parent and a student because the parent used full sentence and proper grammar while the kid used a texting abbreviation”.

2. For a writing prompt – give students the incoming text and tell them to use the fake text creator to show the resulting conversation between two given individuals.

3. In groups, assign students a pair of individuals or a situation to create a text conversation about. After they are finished, share the resulting visuals with other groups to see if they can determine who or what the conversation is about.

4. As a character study, have students create a conversation between characters in a book or historical characters, or better yet, characters from different books or time periods, such as Edward from Twilight texting Romeo for dating advice or President Obama texting President Lincoln for advice on how to handle the budget.

5. This could work for anything that has a relationship, so think outside the box and have students create a text conversation between fluorine and lithium – would it be an explosive relationship or a peaceful one? In Geometry, there are many relationships – have text conversations between Geometry terms for a better understanding of their relationship.

What about your ideas? Give the website a try and comment here with any ideas you come up with – and share if you use it in your classroom!

Feed the teachers!

I just finished up a full week of professional development at two campuses. This will be my first year being responsible, at least in part, for two high school campuses in my district.

Thursday morning, teachers at one of the schools were treated to a panel presentation by current and former students, who talked about what their education at our school meant to them.

It was like food for our malnourished souls.

Going into this year, many of us had deflated dreams. Still there, but not gaining altitude. That short presentation had all of us floating out of our chairs, many of us near tears, and renewed.

I presented several sessions to teachers throughout the week on how to bump up the level of technology integration in their classrooms. After the last session at one campus, two teachers came to me and invited me to work with them on really exciting and innovative ideas they had after attending my session.

Sustenance.

Today, I spent the day at the second campus – the one that is new for me. I didn’t know what to expect. This was the first time I had presented on this campus and I don’t know the teachers, so I didn’t know what style of presentation to which they would respond. I still don’t know because my topic was something so unknown that I only had a total of six teachers wander into my classroom throughout the day. I began the last session with the highest attendance of the day – three.

I began my presentation deflated once again. My intent was to just get through the presentation and it would all be behind me. The teachers in this session were excited, engaged, and full of ideas as I went through my presentation, planting seeds in their heads. They took over at times, excitedly talking about ideas, collaborations, and ahas.

Well-fed.

Looking back at this week, I realized just how easy it is to get us (teachers) back on track. Students are what we are here for. Hearing from those students on Thursday morning redirected our focus – away from new district policies, away from new state mandates, away from budget cuts – and back to the reason we are here. The students.

I’m no longer in the classroom, but even I could feel the energy return. I’m a support person and although I don’t often have direct content with the students, I know that what I do is trickled to them through their wonderful teachers.

Today, I was in my classroom – with students (teachers) – who fed me their enthusiasm and revived my own. Even though it was just a few, their enthusiasm sustained me.

One student on Thursday talked about being so stressed about grades at college that she would forget to eat for long periods of time. She said she wished we would have taught her that “it’s just a grade.” She has learned the hard way what is important.

Teachers often forget to “eat”, too.

When that happens, we need to be fed. We need to be taught that “it’s just a policy” or “it’s just a rule” – and what is really important is our students.

Virtual schools and cheating

Why are educators so sure that virtual classes are good for cheating?

I was recently in a discussion with potential virtual teachers and that was one of the biggest parts of the discussion – how can we know that our students are the ones doing the work?

My response? Tell me how you know your student in a face-to-face classroom did the work? How do you know his older brother didn’t write that speech he’s delivering in front of the class? How do you know her friend who had your class last year didn’t give her a heads-up on a particular assignment?

You don’t.

I’m an advocate of creating curriculum in our classrooms that makes it so cheating doesn’t matter. Students have cheated as long as there has been something to cheat on. Whether they are in face-to-face classrooms, virtual classrooms, or being home schooled, they will find a way to cheat. The key is in making it so that even if they do cheat, they don’t benefit from it.

One way to do this is to create project-based assignments that truly assess individual student mastery. Throw away the tests, whether you give them online or on paper, all they really measure is your student’s ability to memorize something long enough to answer a question.

Another way to do this is to make only those things that assess final mastery a part of their grade. Assignments designed to assist them in learning the content can’t count toward that kind of a grade, so students will either cheat and not benefit at all, not do the homework (and not benefit from it), or they will do what they need in order to learn the content.

Those opposed to this way of thinking will say that students just won’t do work that doesn’t give them a grade. I think they are wrong. Yes, our students have been raised in a world where they have learned the way through the system is to do just enough homework to pass the class so that if they haven’t learned the content, they still get credit for their compliance. However, after the initial adjustment period from implementing the new system, students will eventually figure out that if they don’t do any of the work, they will not pass the summative assessments – or if they do pass the summative assessments without doing the work, it means they already knew the content.

I recently finished teaching three online speech courses over the summer. All of my students were new to this grading philosophy and during the first half of the course, they struggled to understand that they had control over what assignments they completed in order to master the content. Many of my students had already been through several courses that gave them knowledge of pieces of the curriculum and they figured out that they could fly through the modules that had that information in them, then spend more time with the new content. Others had no prior knowledge of any of the content and after initially thinking they could skip to the summative assessments, they realized they needed to be honest with themselves about learning the content.

Virtual classes really are not much different than face-to-face classes. My experience has been that my virtual students grasp and retain the content much better than my face-to-face students. I give credit to the lack of distractions and my own ability to focus on the teaching, rather than the classroom management.

Start with what we have

I recently read a blog post by Chris Lehmann entitled Root Causes and the Save our Schools March. It was a very thoughtful post and clearly shows the sincerity of Mr. Lehmann’s education philosophy. In the post, he describes a classroom he observed and why he supports the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C.

I was directed there by a former collegue’s Facebook page, which shared the link, saying she wished she could work for a principal like him. After seeing who she was talking about, I knew that I would be writing a blog post about it.

You see, Chris Lehmann is in fact a really good principal. He is respected by many educators across the country, including me, as a forward-thinking education reformer. From his school, the Science Leadership Academy, Mr. Lehmann is able to try new things, make observations, learn from his teachers, and spread the word at conferences throughout the country. He is a true education leader. However, it isn’t all about the principal.

Principals have people who give them directives, who have people who give them directives, who have legislators who came up with the directives, who are following the lead of the nation’s leadership who have the ideas behind the directives. It all trickles down. Each individual principal has to make a decision about how much they are willing to put on the line for their vision. At the Science Leadership Academy, administration and teachers have the support of people who are able to provide a bit of an umbrella around them so that teachers can teach the way we all believe they should teach. Even as I type this, I’m thinking that Mr. Lehmann might have a different opinion – maybe he struggles against directives, as well, and just doesn’t make that as apparent to us as he highlights the really great things that happen at his school, and that is how it should be.

Which brings me to the reason for this post.

I listen to educators complain all the time about administration, about standards, about testing, about their students. I have witnessed educators whose response to something they don’t agree with is effectively a removal of good practices from their classroom. They decide to throw out everything they ever hoped for in their classroom and instead sit behind their desk and let their students figure everything out for themselves. While student-centered learning is a good practice, this type of learning is not – same lessons every year in the same sequence with a product of one PowerPoint with 13 slides, etc.

I have seen teachers who leave the profession because they didn’t agree with one administrator. I have seen teachers who turn into the teacher Mr. Lehmann described or the one I described in a post two years ago: Burnout: Trickle or Flood? They focus on what they don’t have. They focus on what they don’t like about their job.

They do not focus on what they do have.

They have students sitting in that classroom who want to learn. Those students have been conditioned to expect the burned out teacher instead of the one with a plan. They also have colleagues who share, or at least once shared, their vision.

Yes, they have standards they must teach. Tests they must proctor. Administrators they must satisfy. But 95% of the time they spend in the classroom, nobody is watching but the kids. They have control over the how in their classroom, even if they don’t have control over the what.

The end result – whether our students master the content – should be what we are focusing on. Any time we spend focusing on the negatives of our job is time we have stolen from children.

All of this is not to say I don’t see a need for education reform. I do. I just have an opinion about how it should come about. In presentations, I will often put  a picture of a mountain up. When it appears, I talk about the approach we have to take when we are tackling a problem and I see this as applying here, so I’ll share:

When we are climbing a mountain, we often lose sight of the top. We can’t necessarily see how to get up there – our view is obstructed by many obstacles and still others that we haven’t encountered yet. Once we get to the top and look down, we can see clearly the path we chose and the obstacles that path offered, but we can also see the path we should have chosen – the one with fewer obstacles – or the one with the kind of obstacles we could handle.

When we talk about education reform. We have to do it from the top down. As long as Washington is doing what they are doing, our states will do what they are doing, our districts will follow, and our principals will have to comply. As educators, we have the choice to either focus on the negatives or instead, to start with what we have. Run with what we’ve been given and make the best of it while we fight the fight from the top down.

I vote for starting with what we have.

A movement

I had the opportunity to attend the annual Podstock in Wichita, Kansas, this weekend. As I tweeted, using the hashtag #podstock2011 as instructed, I started to get replies from my Twitter followers – “what is podstock, and should I be there?”

This post is an attempt to explain, just a little, what Podstock is. If you “get” it, then you just might begin to think about what Podstock can be.

Podstock is a conference.

Or rather, it is an un- conference – with a conference-style format, the sessions lend themselves more toward discussion than traditional sage on the stage programming. Around 250 people attended this year, which is not quite twice as many as attended last year. If it doubles again next year, it will have outgrown its traditional venue, The Hotel at Oldtown.

Growth can be a good thing. The beauty of this conference, though, is the sharing and discussion, and I fear that could get lost if the conference gets too big. Even the vendor interaction is personal and relevant – I saw vendors participating in the sessions, just as enthusiastic and devoted as the full-time educators who attended.

Podstock is an attitude.

This was my first year at Podstock. I had a friend who had told me a little of what to expect, and I had done a little research on my own. I even attended a shorter Podstock of sorts in Tyler, Texas, (Podstock Pineywoods), where I had the opportunity to listen to the glue that holds Podstock together, Kevin Honeycutt. Kevin has a vision and a dynamic charisma that makes people want to learn, to share, and to grow. Kevin’s hope is for Podstock to become a nationwide movement, with small un-conferences happening on regional levels so that the original idea can be maintained with smaller attendance than the mega conferences that are becoming so successful across the country. Then it just might be a movement . . .

Podstock is.

Just when I was giving up on the value of attending an educational technology conference, there Podstock was. From the new technology adopter in a small school district to very advanced users in very large districts, educators came together for two days to share, discuss, and learn. It was an opportunity to dream, dream big, and start making connections that might actually facilitate true change.

Podstockers are a faithful group, often using personal funds and driving hundreds of miles to attend. They are what Honeycutt calls a “family” – these educators get to know each other well enough to be a support network outside of their profession.

“What is Podstock, and should I be there?”

Podstock was an exceptional experience. I would encourage any serious educators who have been finding traditional conferences lacking, and who want to get re-charged by finding others who are just as geeky as themselves to save the dates – June 28, 29, 30, 2012 – and start planning to attend.

Yes, you should have been there.

What should we teach them?

I’ve been going through a bit of an evolution as a teacher over the last year or two. If we are honest about it, we all go through evolution from the first day we walk into a classroom until the day we walk out for the last time, but I’m talking about major shifts in the foundation of my pedagogical beliefs.

I’m going to confess some things here:

1. I was brought up in a sage-on-the-stage educational culture and I thrived in it. My individual learning style demanded that someone feed me information and I would ingest it and make it my own.

2. I hated group projects. All a group project meant to me (and still means to me as an adult) was that I was going to do all the work and everyone would get credit for it. This wasn’t, and isn’t, always because nobody else is willing, it is really because I often don’t want to give up control of a project. I’ve gotten better about this in recent years. If I’m in a group of able people, I will gladly let them all decide everyone’s roles and I will fulfill mine and nobody else’s.  But put me in a group of people that seem incapable, and I’m all about doing the entire project myself.

3. This is probably the most important confession/thing I’m willing to acknowledge: just because I don’t like group work and just because I prefer to have someone lecture to me in order to learn, doesn’t mean that I think everyone should be taught that way.

And that brings me to my difficulty with education today. The standardized nature of education today demands that we make a decision – which way are we going to teach students? What specific lessons are going to cover the all-important standards, no more, no less?

I was in a session today at Podstock 2011 where we discussed the future of professional development. When the presenter/facilitator asked us what professional development needs, it was very difficult to answer, because teachers are a diverse set of learners, just like our students are.

What is my point?

Maybe we need to quit teaching standards and instead teach how to learn.

Someone told me today that Kansas standards don’t include ANY history for elementary students. A couple of weeks ago, I found out that Texas doesn’t require students to EVER learn about the dinosaurs.

If we can’t engage students with lessons that focus on things that interest them, what are we doing? If we constantly cater only to standards that some unseen set of people found to be important and we don’t try to speak to a student’s natural curiosity about the world around them, what message are we sending them?

I’ve always been a proponent of major education reform. I’ve often said that what we need to do is pretend like we never knew anything about teaching and start with square one again.

What would it look like?

In today’s connected society, I think it would look like a place where students gathered together based on an interest. They would explore their world in a knowledgeable way because in their early education, they would have learned how to find information, how to discern what was credible and what was not, and they would have learned how to apply that information to completely different situations.

In the process, they might even learn about dinosaurs and about history because they want to know about them. It saddens me to hear experts tell me that classroom teachers no longer have time for lessons that don’t specifically address a standard.

Look it up. The dictionary definition of standard means that it is something ordinary, expected, something someone with authority has come up with.

How can we ever expect to have Einsteins, Newtons, and Da Vinci’s come out of educations that make students adhere to ordinary?

Define “cheating”

As the result of a tweet by Milton Ramirez, a/k/a @tonnet, I visited a blog post by Scott McLeod, a/k/a @mcleod, entitled Geometry homework: Is this cheating?.  It really resonated with me because it discusses a piece of the symptoms I have been trying to find a cure for in classrooms today.

In the post, the author discusses a dilemma in which he found himself, where his daughter was working on Geometry homework and trying to decide whether using help from the internet was to be considered cheating.

My response to this was “if she learned from it, isn’t that the objective?”

I am so tired of education being all about how well students can comply, rather than how well they have mastered the content. I am so tired of teachers who try to keep their students from using the tools at hand to facilitate their own learning. I am so tired of traditions that keep us standing in front of a classroom or sitting behind a desk. I am sick of looking at my own children’s gradebooks and seeing that their grades were hurt by the fact that they didn’t turn in a roll of paper towels or didn’t turn in a progress report with my valuable signature.

I join my students and children in their lament over meaningless assignments and purposeless routines in their classrooms.

The Geometry assignment in question should have included a mandate that students find their own answers on the internet or by asking someone else. The student who finds the answer to a question on the internet should be guided to understand what to do with that information. Teaching a student how not to simply copy an answer but to use it instead to figure out how to work the problem will not only help them immediately, it will assist them in their learning throughout their lives.

I, myself, learned how valuable having the answers can be when I was in college. I took a Physics class and struggled with it. I couldn’t ever seem to “get it” and I finally dropped the class. I knew that I would take it the next semester, so I routinely went to the homework binder that the teacher would leave in the computer lab to look at the answers to the homework, even after I dropped the class. The next semester, I got an A in Physics. Did I cheat? I don’t believe I did, because the homework taught me how to solve the problems and it also taught me the one little piece of the course that I had apparently missed the first time, which shed light on the rest for me.

Of course, this college experience was different from a student’s experience in high school. I was graded only on my performance on summative tests, which I had no way of examining ahead of time. Most students in today’s high schools are graded on their formative work, as well.

Assessing a student’s mastery of a subject should be our only concern.

Sometimes we get so lost in the routines and the traditions that we never take a step back and ask ourselves “what is the point of this assignment?”

The process of learning how to learn is far more valuable than teaching a student how to comply.

The power of a student’s words

In an earlier post, “Power of a Teacher’s Words“, I talked about the power that teachers have when they speak to their students – whether positively or negatively. Today, as I was remembering my first year teaching, I came to realize that can be true in reverse.

My first year teaching, I started at the beginning of the second semester. My students had become quite familiar with the teaching style of my predecessor, who told me, among other things “let them have open-book tests and limit the answer choices to two – it makes them feel better.” I was enthusiastic about my new role and very excited about practicing all the things I’d been learning in my alternative certification program.

I planned my lessons really well that year – thoughtfully considering how my students would remain engaged, learn something, AND think I was a good teacher. The reality hit me fairly quickly that I had just stumbled upon the hardest job in the world and I frequently asked myself on my drive home in the dark “have I made the wrong choice?” I would stand in my classroom, looking at the faces looking back at me and think “I’m failing them.”

I struggled with the fact that my students didn’t love Biology as much as I did. I struggled with the reality that they often really wouldn’t do their work at home. I often heard them complaining that I was making them work too much.

Around the end of the 5th six weeks, I was sitting at my desk after school, grading papers when a girl walked into my room.

“Mrs. Plybon?”

“Yes?”

“I know you don’t know me, but I just wanted to tell you I wish you were my Biology teacher because my friend tells me that she is really learning in your class.”

The truth is that right before that girl walked into my classroom, I had resolved to make a drastic change in my classroom.

I was going to follow my predecessor’s advice – assign no homework; don’t expect anything out of them; give them all the answers; make it easy on them; pass them all.

After she walked out, I was thankful for the reminder of why I wouldn’t do any of the above.

One student changed the rest of my life. If I had, indeed, fallen victim to my desperation that night, I can confidently say that I would no longer be a teacher.

One student. One sentence. Powerful. My advice to new teachers – don’t focus on the multitude of complaints – hang all of your strength on small sentences. They will be enough to carry you through.