Lessons Learned

Rick Pierce is supporting Hsinchu International School in multiple ways as we grow and develop as a learning community. He recently started blogging as I could not find him many blogs to read on the topic of educational leadership. You have to love it when a person sees a need and jumps in trying something new.

I responded to one of Rick’s posts as it applied to leadership in international schools. Here is a direct link to Rick’s excellent post followed by my comment.

As Jeff and I continue our discussion on the SOS podcast about how to help schools make the shift, Rick really hits home on what I think is the number one factor needed for shifting our schools- leadership with knowledge, skills and vision to help us work together to become the schools we want to be.

My Comment:

Your points really hit home especially when institutional change does, at times, seem to devalue staff members and their feelings. Many international educators living away from their home countries connect into the school community as part of their emotional support network. When the school leaders make decisions or act without participation and consideration of these very connected community members, a wide array of emotions involving anger, loss, fear, etc. come into play.

As you point out so clearly, there are models and books to help our school leaders focus on the individuals in the community to involve them in the discussion, decision-making and eventual transition period when changes do occur. This begs the question of what is happening internationally to support the professional development of our school leaders? All of our schools have PD programs for teachers. What is happening for the administrators?

I would add that many school leaders will say one of the biggest barriers to this community building and group decision-making process is the lack of time.  I would counter that especially in large, fast-paced international schools, the lack of time for thoughtful reflection and processing is due to poor leadership as schools try to do everything under the sun for their clients (i.e., students and parents) and barrel forward out of control without focus and direction.

Well-thought out strategic plans, structured communication systems and guiding mission statements/learning outcomes that are truly held to can alleviate many of the problems that come with the “lack of time” argument that is so often put forth to explain why problems occur in our schools. School leaders need to have the courage with compassion to say “no” to us educators as we bring forth new ideas and proposals that do not fit into the structure of our school missions. We really do need to be lean learning communities in our schools using our time so thoughtfully and carefully.

By knowing who we are and what we can and cannot do, our international schools can improve in how we use our time especially when it comes to preparing for change and the needed thoughtful transition process that you so correctly point out in this post.

Thanks for starting this discussion that will hopefully continue to a wider audience.

We talk about how technology can enhance learning. It can be a big part of the shift in moving how we focus on learning as opposed to teaching. While some teachers for various reasons can be uncomfortable trying new technologies, I would like to share some examples of how going digital makes our lives easier, more productive and frees up time to do the planning to design lessons that helps us make the real shift to discovery learning by our students. Here are just a few ways to be more efficient by going digital:

Video Lab Report: Brent Loken, our Director of Curriculum & Innovation and teacher at Hsinchu International School shared a couple student e-porfolios with me the other day. While we promote writing across the curriculum, Brent decided to offer his students a multimedia way to report their laboratory results. As we are an Apple 1 to 1 school, the students just used the internal video camera on their laptops and recorded into iMovie.  They could “show and tell” exactly what happened in their respective lab experiences. This is a nice alternative for our ESL students who are moving along with spoken language and sometimes need an outlet other than writing.

The Writing Process: My students recently spent several weeks going through the writing process to produce personal narratives.

The students did their writing in Google Documents and shared their work with me and classmates who helped them as peer editors. It was so easy for me to go through each draft adding comments and questions into each student’s document. I enjoyed seeing the comments by their classmates as we formed our learning teams to help one another with the writing.

What I also liked was that we were not in the documents to edit the words, grammar, etc. as so many Language Arts teachers do. We were partners using the language of the 6 Traits offering guidance but not taking over the writing. Once the students completed their final draft, they went in and deleted all the comments. I could then go into the history of the revisions and see the progress and thinking of the students as they worked through the writing process.

I also enjoyed saving time! We saved so much time not dealing with paper. Access is instantaneous and no papers are lost on the way to school.

Mind Mapping 2.0: My wife Margaret and I have been big proponents of using mind/concept maps for a long time. Our tool of choice in our last school in an elementary environment was Inspiration.

We really enjoyed the power of using visuals with our elementary and ESL students. Now that I am working with MS and HS students looking to help them collaborate, I am moving on to 2.0 mind mapping tools. There are many choices but at the moment, I am using Mindmeister. It doesn’t offer the graphics but I am guessing that they would not use them much if offered. The students create their mind maps for various research, writing or just reflective purposes and then they share them with me. I can monitor their thinking and add comments. My 7th graders are starting a WebQuest on Africa where each student with a partner shares a common Mindmeister mind map. They are diagramming their questions and using the note tool to record their research and potential answers to their questions.

MacBook Camera:  While I am pushing my students to make sure they have a camera that can take still and video recordings, we are finding that their MacBooks can be pretty versatile photography tools. As Brent Loken’s science students use their cameras and iMovie software to record their science lab reports, we are finding numerous other ways to enhance learning via the MacBook camera.

A part of the Hsinchu International School culture is that students should be sharing and presenting their learning to the school community as much as possible. As they complete their work in the second year of their “Institutes” (Institute I is grades 7-8, Institute 2 is grades 9-10, Institute 3 is grades 11-12), the students are required to present their efforts to reach the five student learning outcomes that are central to the school.  The advisors for the institutes work with the students to document their learning and to then prepare their presentations. As we get closer to the end of the year, each student will practice his/her presentation in front of the other institute students. We will have them bring their MacBooks to the podium to record their efforts. They will then have the videos to review at home using the provided presentation rubric. We won’t be dealing with the hassle of using a camcorder and having to transfer footage to each student in some form or other. The footage will already by on their hard drives. Going digital leaving out the normal in this case digital tool for the more flexible laptop will save lots of time and energy.

Differently than children is the obvious answer yet we often don’t remember this when creating professional learning opportunities for teachers. Picture a library or other large room with adults listening to a guest speaker hour after hour. This is a case where adults and children are similar. Direct instruction and passive so called professional development don’t get the job done. However, we continue to follow the model of setting aside a few days a year to rush through a topic of learning that supposedly will meet everyone’s needs. We preach differentiation but don’t apply it to our own peer learning opportunities.

Instead of discussing professional development, I will focus on the learning needs of adults leaving how we design learning communities as an ongoing processes as opposed to one shot PD days.

One of the nice aspects of my instructional technology graduate program was a seminar class where we studied the learning needs of adult learners. The following are some of the main points I remember from the class and from the past few years working with teachers individually and in small groups.

• The purpose of the learning must be relevant and useful.
• The adult learner brings a vast amount of life experience to the learning that in many cases will be applied to any new learning.
• If you really want to connect and lead to buy in, individualize the learning to one to one and small teaching team groups.
• Many teachers sitting at a bank of computers for a PD session quickly forget that there are other teachers in the room. This sometimes leads to their going in different directions which means that the session provider must be diligent in working individually and with the group at the same time. Really look to support technology learning in one to one situations for many adult learners.
• Work with the practices already taking place in the classrooms and build on them by facilitating discussion and sharing from the team.
• Immediate application and on going practice and support of the learning really works for adults.
• Adults need to guide and direct their own learning.
• Adults deserve differentiated instruction that meets their learning styles and learning speed just as all learners do.

My wife Margaret who lead our effort at the HKIS Upper Primary to support differentiation while building on student love for learning, added the following comment to our Shifting Our Schools (SOS) podcast blog. It contains lots of useful advice that definitely lead to passionate learning at the Upper Primary.

Margaret’s comment:

Thanks for the podcast on this important topic.

I’ve been thinking about what nurtures a passion for learning and I agree that creating a culture for exploration and expression is key in the lively elementary school years, as the podcasters expressed. Furthermore, being involved in curriculum writing is where the rubber hits the road and where tech use will become part of the program students engage in to show their learning. It helps to build technology use into the common assessments used at ends of units. It helps when the integrators volunteer to shoulder the load of co-writing the actual documents for instructing and assessing those projects (rubrics). That shifts schools.

I have a couple ideas that tap into children’s natural EXPRESSIVENESS and social nature to fuel passion:

-Building CHOICE into student assignments;
-providing instruction to nurture skills for expressing themselves in a variety of (high tech and –don’t forget–low tech) ways;
- connecting students with other students on their wave length and with their unique interests so they can go farther and deeper instead of just skimming the surface of someone else’s bag (Dungeons and Dragons anyone?);
-helping them to identify their learning style and the technologies that honor learning styles and that showcase their special talents;
- creating a culture that encourages asking questions and taking responsible risks;
- training children on asking relevant, meaningful, open-ended, higher level questions… and giving them the subject-specific vocabulary to analyze concepts in depth “like professionals”;
- connecting students to mentors;
- keeping expectations high (and safety nets strong and nurturing);
- letting students formulate their own questions for research or literature discussion (rather than find the answers to the teacher’s questions);
- helping kids and teachers tolerate “ambiguity” when a clear black and white answer may not exist (success is “an enjoyable, stimulating and question-generating exploration” rather than “getting the answer right and the A”) This can be a cultural hurdle in certain parts of the world…;
- rewarding with the good grade the demonstration of “HABITS OF MIND” (see Art Costa) instead of “correct answers”;
- training students to provide constructive, specific, meaningful and skillfully expressed feedback.

Students need to know there is a “real” audience for their efforts, and so many technologies and the Internet provide them such when traditional showcasing is so limited. (It’s hard for a child to get excited when the paper is only going to be read by the teacher.)

When I worked as a coordinator of programming for gifted and talented students at Hong Kong International School, a great deal of my time was spent setting up “platforms” for students to share their work with authentic audiences (web pages, podcasts, videos, literary magazine, etc.) It was spent making sure strong students had enough complexity, challenge, and choice in the assignments given them, and a peer group that would connect on the same level or theme as them where they could enjoy the sense of “flow” that comes from being on the outer, exciting edge of what they know and can do.

It’s always great to hear what other educators are doing, so thanks for a podcast that connects us to one another on this work that we all care so much about.

Kim Cofino will be our featured guest during this week’s Shifting Our Schools podcast. Kim has found a spot in the blogosphere as a leader for helping our students make the learning connections outside of the classroom. To learn more about networking for learning, definitely spend some time on her Always Learning blog. 

My wife Margaret reminds me of our previous SOS discussions where we spoke about making connections around concepts. With many of our schools using the Understanding by Design approach to curriculum design, our focus is on concepts in the form of essential understandings. Margaret points out that real critical thinking comes into play as students learn about the hierarchical nature of concepts and their connections to other ideas. From a teaching perspective, we can look at how to facilitate the process of students taking the steps to and gaining understanding of concepts. One big tool teachers have used for a long time is concept mapping. Inspiration and Cmap digitally provide the means to create and save mind maps on our computers while newer Web 2.0 tools like Bubbl and Mindmeister (among several) offer the additional benefit of collaboration.   

Another way to look at how to connect is with hardware and the Web. As a handheld user for many years, I became a reader of gadget blogs like Engadget and Brighthand hoping to one day find an article describing a tech company that was going to create a learning tool for the education market. This hybrid wifi-enabled computer, phone, camera, GPS, tablet device would come with a software package focused on the needs of students and educators. The reason for asking for such a Swiss knife handheld is that if students are to really be at the center of the learning process, they must have ubiquitous access to the Web as well as the means to gather data on spot, process and then publish it.

Are we there, yet? The business market has some very expensive connection tools that one wouldn’t probably feel comfortable giving to students to keep. We are getting closer with some of the products coming from HTC as well as Apple and even Asus with the EEE PC. The EEE is helping to drive the costs down. Battery life continues to be a problem for many handhelds while the Microsoft mobile operating system doesn’t come close to offering the smooth functionality of the Apple iPhone and iTouch platforms. 

Yet, the signs look very positive. I look forward to my sons having such a device when they ask a science, historical, etc. research question wherever we might be and they want to take a photo/video of something interesting and they simply want to know where we are and where we are going.

Kim Cofino continues to add to the discussion in the blogosphere on a variety of topics. She recently posted about Making the Shift Happen and I added made the following comment. Kim will be a guest on this week’s Shifting Our School Podcast: SOS. We will be discussing the EQ “How to connect?”. In a few weeks we will be looking at the big question of how to make the shift with Brent Loken of Hsinchu Internationa School as the featured guest.

Terrific insights here, Kim. Your points add to the growing discussion we have going at the Shifting Our Schools: SOS podcast as we work to answer our guiding question: “How to shift?”. We look forward to hearing from you in this week’s show.

The discussion on the podcast has brought up some other points that can be added to your work here. The process of shifting with its focus on the curriculum development process, guiding professional development around the formation of learning communities and the need for leadership must be validated by the appropriation of time during the school day to do the work to change how we do business in our schools.

Shifting cannot be set aside as an after school meeting activity.

As you point out the leadership must come from the administrative team to build the vision and the framework to make the shift. The SOS team would add that a trained instructional/educational technologist and library media specialist must be hired in each of the school’s divisions to drive the efforts in the curriculum and PD processes. We must have our point people to follow through and make the vision a reality in our classrooms.

As for the curriculum review process, it should also have the administrators onboard to the point of attending the meetings especially the end of unit reflection gatherings where everyone is held accountable when reviewing the common assessments. Your point of celebrating and publicizing successes comes into play very nicely during these meetings.

I would add that a big part of the paradigm shift is again making the time for ongoing discussions as school leaders “seek to understand” where individual staff members are when it comes to learning 2.0 instructional and assessment strategies. I have experienced that the process of understanding how to construct essential understandings/questions and learning what concept-based curriculum looks like takes time and understanding as we work with our adult learners. We don’t learn in the same way as our students.

As much as we think about how to shift, we also need to think about what the barriers are to moving our schools to become 21st century learning communities. Your 3 bullet points really hit home on this point and as other commenters are saying, need to be presented to our school administrators to start the discussion as we look to change the cultures of our schools and begin the process of shifting our schools.

After making the comment at Kim’s blog an additional thought came to mind. I would add another question to Kim’s 3 bullet points. My question is what are administrators doing to hire teachers with the skill set for constructivist, concept-focused instruction and assessments who are passionate about helping our students learn 21st century skills?