Lessons Learned

Hsinchu International School (HIS) follows the common principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). One of these principles is the “demonstration of mastery” via the Exhibition. The Exhibition is the public demonstration of student learning. Our 8th and 10th grade students did their Exhibitions this past week before fellow students, faculty, and parents. Next year we will have our first graduating class who will join the other two groups in Exhibition evenings as they move on from Institute I (grades 7 & 8 ) and Institute II (grades 9 & 10).

I was very impressed with our students especially noting that most of them are ESL students who come to HIS with very little experience presenting before an audience. They quickly have opportunity for crafting their presentation skills as HIS students routinely share their learning from their class Expeditions during our twice weekly all school gatherings.

The 8th graders focused their presentations on how they were making progress towards reaching our Five Student Learning Outcomes. They used examples from their classes using images, video, audio recordings and text to document their learning. As one of the Learning Outcomes is “Effective Communicator”, I especially enjoyed how the students used good speaking skills, authentic images and excellent design in their presentations.

Three administrators will join us for our June 12th Shifting Our Schools podcast. We will be seeking to understand why from a leadership position it seems so difficult to shift our schools.  Rick Pierce, Educational consultant, Andy Torris from Shanghai American School and Struan Robinson from International School Bangkok will be our guests.

As I am not an administrator, I am not in a position to comment on this topic from a admin point of view. While Jeff and I have commented numerous times on what is needed to help schools shift, our number one conclusion is that administrators must lead the effort.

I really am looking forward to hearing what Andy and Struan have to say and how Rick might respond. Rick has been working with the leaders of my school, Hsinchu International School, over the past year and a half. Rick’s background as a professor at Penn State University and as an administrator at the Milton Hershey School puts him in position of really understanding how to bring about change and the transition process that follows it.

Rick points out that schools often put their energy into coming up with new programs leading to change but the do not think very much about and plan for the long transition that follows the initial change. The first season of our SOS podcast ends with this very important discussion. It should be a very good one.

Chris O’Neal will join us this Monday for the SOS podcast. We will be discussing the Essential Question of whether or not we need standards for technology as a subject area. If technology integration is the process of finding of ways where technology can help teachers of math, science, music, etc. reach their own subject area standards, then the answer seems pretty clear.

Thus, on first glance, it doesn’t seem that we need standards for technology. Yet, we need to ask ourselves where are we hoping the technology will take us? As we speak about in our the SOS podcast, we want our schools to shift from a 20th century learning focus to what EduBloggers term “21st Century Learning”.

It is these 21st century learning skills that do need standards and benchmarks that just like the technology, need to be integrated in all curriculum areas of our schools.

Three years ago we went through the process of reviewing and defining our technology standards at my old school of HKIS. A team of teachers, instructional technologists, librarians and administrators from the start looked at learning and not technology tools to drive our committee work. After months of research and discussion, we came up with the “Information and Communication Literacy” standards and benchmarks that focused as the name implies totally on the handling and communication of various forms of information.

What really drove home the point that technology is just a tool to support learning is that we didn’t spend one moment in standard creation or the dreaded wordsmithing. We simply adopted the very forward thinking “Academic” standards and benchmark that another committee had previously created! They already had begun the process of bringing 21st century thinking skills into our curriculum by making them the learning outcomes for all our academic efforts.

I wrote a short piece for our school yearbook describing how being a 1:1 laptop school affects our learning community. I cover just a few of the ways these wonderful learning tools affect the way we communicate, organize ourselves and learn.

The 1:1 Apple laptop program drives much of the learning at HIS giving students and teachers access to numerous software programs, online tools and the Internet. From early morning through the evening, our community of learners uses their laptops to communicate, gather information, organize their day, generate learning projects, and expand the learning community.

Students start their days by checking their Google email accounts for any messages from fellow students and teachers. The next step is to log in to our classroom management Web resource named Moodle. Moodle is a virtual learning place where teachers post homework assignments and use several tools like forums, wikis and Web site link directories to manage their courses. Moodle also brings our community together by listing important dates, links to our student-created videos and online photo slideshows.

Accessing information is central to the learning expeditions our students and teachers take together. Whether venturing forth in teacher created WebQuests or pursuing one’s own questions, the laptops make inquiry learning a significant part of our curriculum. Online textbooks, simulations and Web site resources add to the information rich environment.

The student MacBooks come with the iLife suite of multimedia software programs that provide the instruments to:

-edit and manage photo collections
-shoot and edit video
-create multimedia presentations
-generate original musical scores for multimedia projects
-record and edit podcasts

Moving into the evening, students check Moodle for assignments and updated information from their teachers. They might log into their Google Documents account to revise an essay they are sharing online with their teacher. Or maybe they are just starting an essay or video project so they go to their Mindmeister concept mapping Web site to brainstorm their ideas which can then be reviewed by their teachers. Finally, it is time for reflection and seeing what is happening in the world. This is when students check their favorite news sites, think about their learning and go to their blogs to record their thoughts.

We will be discussing this question in the SOS podcast this week. As an Instructional Technologist much of my work deals with the integration of technology into instruction and assessments. The integration process begins from the big picture (Macro) by looking at the needs of the students and teachers as we design the curriculum as well as when we create a learning and technology plan focused on student learning. The other approach is when we collaborate working on individual lessons (Micro) to reach the stated learning objectives.

The Macro:  Learning and Technology Plan || The Curriculum Development Process

We recently formed a committee and are working on our “Learning and Technology” plan right now at Hsinchu International School. The process centers upon how we work to have our students reach the five learning outcomes. The Learning Outcomes are:

• Effective Communicators
• Critical Thinkers & Problem Solvers
• Persons of High Character
• Active Learners
• Community Contributors

There are three main ways we work to help our students reach these learning goals:

1. Instructional Models
2. Assessment Techniques
3. Learning Communities

We are using Mindmeister to map out and collaborate as we develop our plan. The screen shot above is our initial effort to prime the committee work. As one can see, there is no listing of any technology tools at the primary level. It is all about teaching and learning.

Looking closer at the mind map, one category is “Instructional Models”. Two models that we use frequently at HIS are project-based and inquiry. Our next step is to define what each of these models looks like in our classrooms and then look for ways that technology and Information & Communication Literacy (ICL) can support and enhance each approach.  If we were using a multi-level concept-mapping tool like Smart Ideas, the technology tools would begin to appear on the third level. The technology infrastructure is down at the fourth level, way in the background, providing the foundation for the technology tools that support the learning at the upper two levels.

We will use the Learning and Technology plan to design our professional development goals for the coming school year. The focus will be on improving instructional and assessment techniques while expanding the learning community. We will provide the PD to help educators learn the technology and ICL tools/skills that our plan shows as needed to support the 3 main categories that support our 5 student learning outcomes at the center of our plan and school.

The curriculum development process is a part of our plan in the Learning Community category. We use the Understanding by Design process to create our units of study that also involves the integration of technology and ICL skills.

The Micro: When working with teachers one on one or in small groups, we again use the UbD approach to determine what the learning will look like and how we will assess it to then work backwards in creating the instruction and content. As the collaboration progresses, we discuss possible ways that technology and/or research skills can support and enhance the learning. Just as with the broad, school-wide approach of the Learning and Technology plan, the technology does not enter the picture until we are far along in designing how to meet the learning objectives.

The learning determines the technology. Not the other way around.

They complained a bit, giggled and balked but finally started their presentations. Three eighth graders stood in my classroom in front of their MacBooks speaking out across the room as the laptop built-in video cameras recorded their speeches directly to iMovie. To graduate from Institute 1 (grades 7-8) at Hsinchu International School, all 8th graders must give a an end of the school year forty minute presentation to fellow students, parents and judges where they give examples of their learning demonstrating growth in our five student learning outcomes. With their “Exhibition” evening fast approaching, we realized that the MacBooks could become versatile feedback and learning tools.

After the initial recording session, the 8th graders reviewed their videos while making notes about their presentation skills. Whether it was poor eye contact, low voice output or killer smiles, the students found themselves facing undeniable evidence of their weaknesses and strengths as public speakers.

We could have used a camcorder and had the students take turns presenting but this would mean taking time to transfer footage from the camera to each student’s laptop. Students would also spend even more time sitting and watching classmates present when they could practice themselves and get immediate evidence of their progress. While we do set aside time for whole grade practice sessions, we are hoping that our version of the valuable technique of videotaping presentations will help our many ESL students not only feel more comfortable in their speaking but will push them to practice more on their own.

A coinciding use of the MacBooks is taking place in our 7th grade Language Arts class where Thomas Perkins has his students constructing a presentation skills rubric. The students first worked to create the rubric on paper. Now they are “laptop” videotaping themselves presenting for each of the criteria at the different score levels. Score a “4 out of 4” on the teaching rubric for Thomas in having his students engaging and learning about presentation skills by using thinking skills at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Thomas also gets bonus points for using technology to support and enhance the learning.

This was first posted at U Tech Tips.

Dave Navis will be joining us for this week’s SOS podcast where we will discuss the essential question of “When not to use technology?”. Dave has a nice post up on the topic so I will only mention a couple points.

The most difficult aspect of my job as an instructional technologist is when I need to work with teachers using technology that doesn’t support student learning and/or doesn’t teach the correct skills in using the various tools. Working as an instructional technologist means one must be a leader and a champion for student learning no matter how uncomfortable the situation might be. When teachers use and model technology ineffectively or have their students spend valuable time working on projects that don’t help their learning, they sadly can do a great deal of damage in that moment and in the future use of the technology.

What makes these situations so difficult is that the teachers are trying something new and often get excited about the creativity that goes with using technology. They are doing as we ask them in trying new ways to support learning by using technology. One needs to read these situations carefully to decide in some cases to simply remain silent but to be ready the next time the teacher wants to try something new. At other times the planned project might involve days of student technology work that could be used so much more effectively if the instructional technologist and/or library media specialist can get in and collaborate early in the planning process.

I think we often devalue the teaching of technology skills and the importance of using good design and communication principles. Teaching technology skills is no different than teaching reading, writing, math, art, etc. skills. However, with technology, users sometimes think just being about to put a project together is all there is to it.

A good example is that many teachers would say they know how to use PowerPoint and Paint so they can see themselves teaching it. And as instructional technologists, we want the technology to integrate and diffuse to the point that teachers model its use and teach it themselves. Yet, the dilemma arises when an untrained teacher doesn’t teach the needed basic design principles or worse, models poor design skills. The following, for example, are some basic skills that must be taught with everyday tools as PowerPoint and Paint:

• the value of using white space
• minimal use of but large enough and projector friendly fonts
• large single student created images
• when images used from the Web that they are cited
• no clip art
• no animation
• no sound effects
• simple, non-distracting backgrounds the same for each slide
• colors that are natural and compliment each other

How many adult presentations of PowerPoint have you seen that do the exact opposite of this list? Plenty. We cringe seeing the technology get in the way of the presenter’s lesson.

So are we ready to speak up when teachers go as far as to model the opposite of what we want our students to learn regarding design and communication skills? This is what teachers of technology sometimes face. In many cases they do so without the support of their administrators who don’t know know themselves the discreet skills that are needed for 21st century project creation and communication. Instructional technologists and library media specialists are peers with their fellow teachers thus making it even more difficult to offer ideas and propose instructional changes during the instruction. This is really the role of the administrator as instructional leader for the school to step forward and support the proper use of technology.

We can all read, write, do math, sing a song and paint something but in most cases, we know that it takes training and set of skills to teach these disciplines. I believe we are more comfortable in our schools stepping forward in speaking up to teachers making mistakes in teaching writing, reading, art, etc.  I think we value those skills much more than we do technology and information literacy skills and in many cases our teachers and administrators just don’t know how important those skills are for our 21st century learners.

This means that our leadership efforts must also include the ongoing teaching and promoting of the value of using proper technology, design and communication skills by teachers, administrators and students. Besides the usual efforts for technology integration through professional development and ongoing work with teachers and teams, we must celebrate successful uses of technology via our school Web site, our blogs, newsletters and any other available venue that models the proper use of technology.

How connected are your students, teachers and parents to the mission statement and student learning outcomes of your school? We often spend a great deal of time working in committees developing these guiding documents but fail in our efforts to communicate and embed them into our school cultures. Sometimes the sharing is little more than placing copies of our mission statements and learning outcomes on classroom walls. This really doesn’t slice it in our media rich world. Our students’ brains want a much richer media format that can start discussions, develop ownership and build understanding.

Much like our efforts to integrate technology and various literacy skills into the curriculum, we need to think about ways to combine technology and learning to deliver our respective schools’ mission statements and student learning outcomes into the classrooms and out into the larger school community. One idea is to pull together a team of students to go through the video production process to create videos that paint the picture of the mission statement from a student perspective. This real world, project-focused effort can be done at each school division involving the usual steps that go into videography production.

Multiple intelligences come into play as student teams apply their language arts skills to storyboard, write the scripts and contact the “talent” for each of the scenes. Roles for actors, camera people, director, music creation and video editors are also assigned.

Once the videos are produced, they need to be shared in as many possible venues as possible. Play them on your closed circuit TV system along with your normal student news shows. Post the videos to your school Web site and make sure you have links on your prospective parent and employee pages as well. Also, think about getting your school leaders to add the videos to their blogs. Ask them to post about their plans and actions to move the school community towards making the mission and student learning outcomes a focus in how decisions are made.

Strong connections are made with the viewers due to the social and visual nature of our brains. Students want to see the work of their video producing classmates and we know they really connect to images over text any day. They also will see the mission statement as more meaningful when explained by fellow classmates and teachers. You probably will find more success with your elementary students interviewing adults to explain the various segments of your school’s mission statement and/or student learning outcomes. As you move up in divisions, the students can take on more independence interviewing each other as well as adults or work to create scenes that depict their own interpretations of what the mission and learning outcomes look like.

To get you started with an example, here is a link to one of a five part video series created by Mrs. Brings’ Third grade class to promote the Hong Kong International School’s mission statement. It is a streaming WMV file so hopefully your media player can handle it.

Service & Global Understanding

Note: This story was originally posted at U Tech Tips.

Jeffrey Sachs was a guest on the NPR “Science Friday” last week where he continued the conversation on how he believes we can eliminate poverty around the world. He focused on how advances in technology will help us deal with economic growth and pollution. Sachs spoke about how we use research and design to come up with programs to deal with problems at around the world. He shared his process for designing solutions to problems that he termed “RDDD” that reminded me of the design work instructional technologists do.

On a side note, a terrific book that reviews studies of efforts to go into communities around the world to bring about change by groups like the Peace Corps, UN agencies, etc. is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. It was a textbook in one of my graduate courses that consistently reminds the reader just how difficult it is to bring about change and have it diffuse through a community.

As an instructional technologist working with teachers to design curriculum, I follow a model similar to Sachs’ that starts with Understanding. I work to understand the teacher and students’ needs and the specific learning outcomes the teacher is aiming for. The next step after gathering the needs information which sometimes includes observation and working with the students by teaching the Information and Communication Literacy (ICL) curriculum, is to Analyze the information from an instructional and assessment viewpoint. Research comes into play by seeing what other teachers did with the lesson in the past and by checking my Web resources to see how lessons posted there could be helpful in designing this one. I then Develop the lesson with the teacher or adapt what he/she already has in place. The lesson is then Implemented by the teacher or we team teach it if ICL skills are involved and the teacher wants the support.  We then Evaluate and Refine the lesson for future use. I remember this process, Understand-Analyze-Research-Develop-Implement-Evaluate-Refine (UARDIER), by appreciating my teaching partner with the phrase “You are dear!”.

Sach’s model, Research-Develop-Demonstrate-Diffusion (RDDD), adds the final “D” for Diffusion which is what also happens when classroom lessons are designed where the assessment data shows real student learning taking place. Word gets out to fellow teachers and the instructional and assessment strategies spread from one classroom to another.

Looking at the bigger picture of planning professional development programs, the key word is plan. This means getting instructional leaders on the PD development team who know how to design programs that originate from the needs of the teachers and students. As I have posted before, PD that really works happens consistently week after week one on one and in small collaborate grade level or departmenta teams once a learning community is created. One shot quarterly PD days, non-differentiated for all the teachers at once usually involving just direct instruction, can at times even do more harm than good especially when it comes to learning technology skills. Throwing various software and Web 2.0 tools scattershot at a weary group of teachers on a Friday afternoon can lead to their feeling confused and inadequate which can move into frustration and potentially to anger.

Adult learners need to bring new learning into the context of their experiences while having the time to practice the new skills to gain comfort and to see if they have practical value. Dr. Sach’s model starts with “Research” which means connecting to the users and getting to know what their needs are. While Dr. Sach’s acronym might be shorter than the one I follow, I think our two models have a lot in common.

Michael Lambert will be joining us for SOS Episode 9: How To Go Deep In Student Learning? Why? where he will share some of his instructional and assessment practices that take the learning deeper and make it more meaningful for his students. Mike will talk about making connections in the brain and in the learning to other areas of study.

One way to go deeper in student learning in a school is to choose concept-based standards and benchmarks that support well-developed Essential Understandings and Questions. By focusing on concepts and big ideas we then work backwards in our curriculum design to choose instructional strategies and assessments that lead our students to discovery learning. In many cases, this will lead to efforts to keep direct instruction limited to skills development leaving most of the learning to inquiry and other constructivist approaches where students apply their research and other literacy skills to find, analyze, reflect upon and create using information that they are in charge of finding.

If one follows this path, it becomes very difficult to try and do the wide “coverage” that many teachers are forced to do especially when the standards are knowledge or comprehension focused. If you really hold yourself to assessments that measure student learning and the learning is student discovered, then you have no choice but to start deleting standards and benchmarks from your curriculum maps. Fewer learning goals frees up the time to go deeper in how we teach our units.

A good place to start reading more about concept-based standards and benchmarks is the work of H. Lynn Erickson.

Looking at the classroom and brain-based learning, there are lots of resources to support our efforts to connect to our students’ minds to engage, make connections and get those “brain pops” of understanding that we want. The more we tap into the brain for active learning, the deeper the learning goes.

Good teaching is about asking big, “fat”, open-ended questions that help students make connections while giving students the time to think and come up with further questions. Jamie McKenzie is a real leader in this area reminding us that it isn’t about the technology, it is about the learning that comes from asking questions and pursuing the answers to them. Technology can support the effort, of course.

As for the question of why we should go deeper in student learning, is it really learning when our curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep when our students are working to become adept at moving information around? Enough said.