Lifelong Learning and the Conditions that Support It.

This Tuesday’s evening #edchat focused on the concept of  lifelong learning. As I participated in and listened to the conversation I tried to pull out the themes that answered the question, “What are the conditions that support lifelong learning?”

I focused on answering this question because I believe that human beings are, by nature, lifelong learners. I believe that, along the way, the desire to learn for the duration of a lifetime can be stifled. Anything can get in the way, it depends on the person and the circumstances in which they learn and grow.

I suspect that everyone, if they critically and honestly reflected on their lives, could identify a time in which their desire to continue learning was diminished. I believe that the return of that desire and the degree to which that desire returns are, primarily, a function of the conditions in which that person lives and works. If the conditions are optimal for learners then there is a strong probability that we will maintain momentum for lifelong learning and help those who are stifled reengage in the process of lifelong learning.

As a leader, the conditions (culture and climate) that I shape in my school are my very first priority. I am a firm believer in the power of culture and climate to have a lasting, positive impact on students and teachers. This being the case, coming to a deeper understanding of the conditions that support lifelong learning is important to me.

Conditions that Support and Facilitate Lifelong Learning (Some ideas from #edchat, some from my experience):

1. Time
   1. To think
   2. To create
   3. To collaborate
   4. To focus on teaching and learning
   5. To innovate
2. Leadership
   1. Modeling
      1. Principals and district level administrators need to demonstrate they they themselves are lifelong learners.
   2. Structures
      1. Building schedules that support collaboration
      2. Providing time for teachers to work together and learn
      3. Structure PD opportunities that allow for teacher discretion and choice
3. Hiring Practices
   1. Searching for and retaining lifelong learners
4. Collaboration
   1. Teachers with teachers
   2. Teachers with administrators
5. Choice
   1. Teachers are self-directed learners, allow them choice in what they focus on and learn

I know that this list is by no means exhaustive or fleshed out in a way that would really provide a comprehensive look at the conditions that foster lifelong learning, but I am interested in moving it in that direction. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts. Post them in the comments or use this google doc. Looking forward to your contributions.

Professional Learning?

Over the weekend I was able to tune into EduCon here and there. Each time I tuned in three things happened.

1. I became more jealous of everyone who was there.

2. I learned something or had my thinking pushed in some new, interesting direction.

and

3. My concept of professional learning shifted.

I will spare you a rant on my jealousy and focus on experience #3, my shifting concept of professional learning. Over the past few months I have developed a broad network of professionals through my PLN. They have exposed me to new ideas, strategies, and tools and I have learned more in these months than in many years of coursework and seminars. I have used Twitter and TweetDeck to access this network and I have started my own blog as a place to reflect upon and share my learning. I have been gaining proficiency with these and other tools and I have been eager to really try them out in a more structured, “conferencelike” setting. This morning I had that opportunity.

At 10:30, I joined a session at EduCon facilitated by Patrick Larkin (@bhsprincipal) and George Couros (@gcouros), A Call for all Educators: How do we get more “connected” principals? I connected to the session via LiveStream and booted up TweetDeck so that I could follow everyone’s thoughts and questions during the conversation. My desktop looked like this:

A few minutes into the session Lyn Hilt (@l_hilt) posted a google doc for everyone to use and share notes during the conversation. Now my screen looked like this:

So at this point I am really excited. I am using all of these amazing tools to actively participate in a conversation happening over 300 miles away. I am so excited that I decide to use one more of my new tools, Jing, to capture a video of all this happening so that I can share it with my colleagues. Here is the video:

Once the conversation was over, I sat back and thought:

“That was awesome.”

“I am going to EduCon next year.”

“This is really the kind of learning that everyone (teachers, students, and administrators) should have the opportunity to engage in.”

“This was really a socially mediated learning experience. I learned more today because I was able to construct knowledge through questioning and dialog.”

“Why aren’t there more opportunities like this for me, my teachers, and my students?”

“How do I bring these types of learning opportunities to my elementary school?”

Now. I am tired and I know that I missed a lot of what I should have thought as a result of this experience. So, what should I have thought? What should I be thinking moving forward?

Time to Collaborate

Me after teaching all day! (Image source: ghonie.blogspot.com/)

When I was teaching, my friends would always ask me what it was like to be a teacher. I always had a hard time capturing it, but over the years the conversations evolved into something like this:

Friend, “Ian, what’s it like being a teacher?”

Reply, “It’s like this. Everything is calm in the morning. I get my materials ready, run through all of my plans one more time, shoot off a few emails, you know. Then the kids come. 23 little people ready to learn and grow. I make about a million decisions each and every day, constantly check the progress of my students, retune my lessons all day long, get them to lunch, get them to music, get them ready to go home, get them out the door safely, and then I collapse.”

Friend, “What did you have for lunch?”

Reply, I shake my head and laugh.

The point that I illustrate with my story is that teaching is an incredibly complex and demanding field. Teachers need to be on their toes, up to date, and dynamic like no one else in the world. They are skilled at so many things across so many domains and it takes a high degree of focus and energy to execute with skill each and every day in the classroom. Further complicating matters for teachers is the pace at which the days, weeks, and years move.

The pace and complexity I describe create a situation in which high levels of professional  success and satisfaction  depend, more than ever,  upon collaboration amongst colleagues. Sharing ideas, methods, and resources is critical. Developing curriculum, generating common assessments, and looking at student work as a team are essential practices that lead to success. In theory, collaboration is key; in practice, time rules the day.

Daily 40 minute planning periods are enough to catch your breath, respond to a phone call or e-mail, go to the bathroom, and get back to your class. These periods do not provide the kind of time teachers need to collaborate meaningfully on topics and issues that matter and improve teaching and learning. For many reasons, the ability to provide collaborative time for teachers that goes beyond the 40 minutes daily model has eluded me. I have wrestled with this issue over the course of my career as both a teacher and administrator.This year things changed.

During a faculty meeting a few months ago, I was engaged in a conversation with our faculty about common assessments and looking at student work. Many teachers expressed their desire to engage in this work while simultaneously expressing the fact that there just wasn’t time in the day.  After the conversation ended and we concluded the  meeting, one of my fourth grade teachers approached and suggested that me and my assistant principal, Ben Gatto, take each grade level for half a day so that teams of teachers could collaborate for substantial periods of time. As soon as she said it, the lightbulb went on and I knew we had the answer.

It took a few weeks, but Ben and I figured out the scheduling and planned a morning full of activities that we could do with the various grade levels. Over the past two weeks we have executed a release day for both our 3rd and 4th grade teams. K, 1, and 2 will follow in the coming weeks. The response from everyone involved so far has been really positive. Our teachers are excited to have collaborative time built into their days. The students are having a blast getting special time with the principal and assistant principal. Ben and I are feeling like satisfied leaders because we are getting quality time with our students and freeing up our teachers to work with their teams, support one another, and, ultimately, support high levels of student learning and growth.

Twitter and the PLN: Value Added

As the pace and breadth of my learning has increased, I am continuously amazed by the power and potential of the PLN and Twitter to enhance the professional lives of teachers, administrators, and support staff. My most recent and engaging experiences with my PLN through Twitter have pushed me to focus on how to get Twitter into the hands of my teachers and connect them with other professionals around the globe.Making the value of a PLN concrete is an essential task in achieving that goal, one that I have been grappling with lately. I can see and understand the value, it’s more a question of how to best capture, package, and deliver the message effectively. The roadblocks I see for making the value tangible are: 

1. Educators exist on a continuum of proficiency and comfort with technology (If they don’t know how to use the tool, the value is inconsequential).
2. Educators exist on a continuum of comfort with public, uncontrolled discourse (They may not want to engage in public dialog about their beliefs and practice).
3. Twitter is vast (How do you find value? How do you assess value?).
4. Twitter is fast (How can you find value when it is streaming by so fast?).

While I was thinking about these roadblocks and how best to introduce Twitter  and the PLN concept to my teachers, I spent a few minutes on-line seeing what was happening. While there, I noticed this tweet from @tombarrett:

tombarrett:

New sentence starter tag if you are up for helping > #sentstarttree(tree related sentence starters please)

As soon as I saw his message I searched the hashtag to see what was happening with the conversation. I made it there about 50 minutes after Tom’s initial post and was amazed to see that there were already 42 responses. I went back the next day and checked in to see how things were going and I saw that he had received about 70 responses (Archive here).

Looking through the sentence starters that everyone sent along, I realized that I had found a way to introduce  the power of the PLN and Twitter to my teachers. Tom’s request for tree related sentence starters and the response of his PLN made clear the value of the networks that one can develop using Twitter.

Tom asked for help. His PLN responded. Tom took the responses from his network and created a resource for everyone to use (Tom wrote a great post that elaborates, check out his post and resources here). Simple, concrete, and a perfect example of how teachers can support one another using Twitter to build and contribute to a PLN of their own.

Thanks for the inspiration Tom!

A Lesson in Student Engagement: Part 2

Back in early December I decided to get student blogging going at my school. The decision to do so was the culmination of several months of thinking that included reading many classroom blogs from around the country, talking to a lot with folks through #edchat and #cpchat, and the final realization that many of the students in my school were just plain bored when we put them in front of a computer (See my last post, A Lesson in Student Engagement: What I Decided to Move Student Blogging Forward).

It was really the boredom factor that finally made it all click and put me over the edge on student blogging. Students were constantly rearranging bookmarks and docks, changing screen and display settings, etc. I thought to myself, “How do they have time to do all of this?” Disengagement was the answer that popped and it was like having one of those ridiculous moments of clarity that makes you feel like a fool for not seeing it before.

The next week I introduced blogging to a few of my teachers. I started slowly by introducing them to the school-wide blog I had started a few weeks prior. I focused on a few major points with them:

1. Opportunities for students to write for authentic purposes and real audiences.
2. Opportunities for students to receive constructive feedback and grow as writers.
3. Opportunities to engage students in writing and thinking beyond the school day.
4. Opportunities to engage students in writing about topics that are of interest to them.
5. Opportunities for parents and the greater community to engage in the learning process of our students.

After illustrating these topics with our own school blog and examples of other classroom blogs, many were interested in getting started as soon as possible. While many were ready, none had any direct experience setting up or starting a blog. To support the effort, I offered to do all of the back-end work, setting up the blogs, importing student usernames and passwords, privacy settings, etc. Once set up, I passed the log-in information along to the teachers with the advice to log on, muck around, and see what they could figure out on their own.

As it turns out, leaving them alone to mess around and play with it was the best thing I could do. Everyone was able to figure out the basics and get started right away. As teachers were playing around, a few questions came up (will get to those in a coming post) but nothing that got in the way. To start the student blogging project we had two first grade classroom, a second grade classroom, and a fourth grade classroom.

Teachers decided to start blogging with their students in different ways. Teachers in first grade decided to begin having students share comments on a teacher post. Teachers in the upper elementary grades decided to have students write their own posts in response to a teacher prompt. As they got started, I was excited and asking myself:

1. What will the teachers take away from this?
2. What questions will the teachers have?
3. How will students respond?
4. How will parents respond?

With a few solid weeks under my belt now, I can tell you that each of these questions deserves a post of its own. Until I can get them written (which I will), I will share the high level take aways:

1. Teacher take aways:
   1. This is fun!
   2. This is easy!
   3. I wish I started doing this years ago!
   4. Blogging is REALLY engaging for students.
   5. Blogging presents a new way of looking at student writing.
   6. Blogging presents a different way to look at the assessment of student writing and the transfer of content area learning.
   7. Parents love this and are really supporting us.
2. Teacher questions:
   1. How do I handle and moderate the quantity of posts and comments I am getting?
   2. How do we handle comments that contain external links to other blogs/web pages?
   3. What do I do when a parent comments and demonstrates
   4. How might we use blogs to assess student writing?
   5. How might we use blogs to connect with other classrooms around the world?
3. Student response:
   1. They love it!
   2. Students are writing, unprompted, on their own time.
   3. Students ask, “When can we write more?”
4. Parent Response:
   1. They love it!
   2. They are engaged and commenting on  their child’s writing and the writing of other children.

A lesson in student engagement: Why I finally decided to move student blogging forward

About three weeks ago I fielded a question from a faculty member. If I had to give an estimate it was about the 100th iteration of the same question, “Is there any way we can lock the settings on the computers so that the kids can’t change the displays, dock settings, etc.”

My gut reaction was to consider how we might institute daily maintenance routines over the network or how we might better instruct our students to not tamper with these settings. I thought for a few more minutes. I took a walk to the computer lab and moved through the rows looking at the screens. Docks on the left side, tiny docks on the right, nature displays on one, screen shot displays on another, magnification on, magnification off. I thought a bit more and I came to the conclusion that controlling the settings couldn’t possibly be the best educational solution to the problem.

Upon making these observations and thinking just a bit more, here was my internal dialoge:

Ian: How do they do this?

Other Ian: Well, they clearly know how to adjust the basic settings in system preferences. Not a skill deficit on the part of the students. Maybe the better question is, “How do they have time to do this?“

Ian: Oh, my god. They are bored, (lightbulb goes on right here) completely disengaged with what they are doing while in the computer lab.

Other Ian: And what does disengagement look like in the typical classroom setting?

Ian: Well that’s an easy one Other Ian. Kids might be doodling on their paper, having side conversations, sleeping, daydreaming. The list goes on and on.

Other Ian: So, what might disengagement look like in the computer lab?

Ian: Changing the system preference settings.

Now, if any one reading this had walked into the lab at this time you would have seen:

Image source: http://katrinalantznovelist.blogspot.com/

That’s not me but it sure captures the sentiment of that exact moment in my life. How had I missed this fact for so, so long.

How do we alleviate disengagement? How do we engage students and use technology to support and accelerate learning? Blogging seemed like a legitimate place to start. Duh!

Twitter: From Birth to PLN

This summer, I finally broke down and set up a Twitter account. At first I was hesitant, not knowing how to read the layout of the interface and unsure of how to communicate with the growing world I saw flowing down my page. Slowly but surely I waded in.

Connecting with the professionals and organizations with whom I already had established relationships were my first steps. It was kind of like “twitterfying” my existing professional network (I didn’t realize at the time that this was the beginning of building my Personal Learning Network(PLN)!). I spent the next few weeks watching and reading what these organizations and people had to say. I started to familiarize myself with the way the application worked, how to read it, and how to write using my 140 character limit. I still wasn’t exactly sure where I fit into this dialogue and what I stood to gain from or contribute to it. My first real revelation was that Twitter was a tool that I could use to channel and analyze a huge stream of information. No longer did I have to actively pursue professional information that was of interest to me. By associating myself with professionals and organizations that shared my interests, the way in which I located relevant information began to shift.

As I watched this information feed into my timeline and as I became more familiar and comfortable with reading and writing within Twitter, I was able to dedicate energy to broadening my understanding of the platform and what it had to offer me. The re-tweet was the vehicle for the next significant lesson that I learned via Twitter. A few months into using the application, I noticed that the folks I followed were “forwarding” information from others that, more often than not, was of interest to me. As I read these re-tweets and followed the links they often sent along, I thought to myself, “Who are the people and organizations that are putting out this information?”

Network (Image from 21stcenturylearning.typepad.com

The obvious next step was to follow these organizations and individuals as they were sources of great information and resources. A few clicks later and my follow list wasgrowing steadily (Not apparent at this point was the fact that I was also broadening the perspective that my PLN could bring to a subject). The less than obvious next step took me a few weeks to figure out, but when I did it was like striking gold.

One day I was reading a re-tweet from someone in my existing PLN and I thought to myself, “I wonder who else they follow?”  In that instant, the concept that I could mine the following list of others within my PLN became apparent. In skimming the PLN’s of the people and organizations I associated myself with, I was able to find many others who seemed to share my professional interests. My PLN was growing steadily.

At this point in time I was becoming very comfortable with Twitter’s interface and function. It’s utility as a tool for professional learning was clearer every day. I logged on regularly and found great information that I might not otherwise have accessed. I was committed to the tool and ready to take the next step. At the same time, I happened to be involved in a digital immersion project led by Joel Foner and during one of our sessions together he introduced me to the hashtag. Once he explained the concept it was as if the floodgates had officially opened. All of a sudden, the Twitter landscape looked very different. I now knew what all of the little #this and #that meant and, more importantly, I could clearly see how they functioned within this domain.

This was by far my most influential learning experience. Not only did I see how I could access and listen to specific conversations (#edchat, #elemchat, and #cpchat are a few of my favorites thus far) I saw how I could participate in these discussions and give back to everyone who was willing to share and listen. This was truly a powerful understanding as I now saw how the PLN could be of value to me and how I could add value to it. Here to was the point at which my own conceptualization of Twitter also changed dramatically. What I realized was that it wasn’t Twitter that was important, it was the Personal Learning Network that I accessed through Twitter.

This brings me to the present. I have a growing PLN that is of great value to me and I hope to add great value to it. I use Twitter to access that PLN and am working to further develop my understanding of other social media as a means to broaden and enrich my PLN. More than anything I am working on understanding how I can communicate the power of the PLN and social media to the educators that surround me. How do I engage them? How do I share the value added with them? If anyone out there has any thoughts on this subject, please let me know!