Lessons Learned

I know I ramble but time is short and we have the podcast tonight. Here are some thoughts about the process of getting administrators onboard as we shift our schools…

Jeff has been running workshops on reviewing one’s school mission and I have been writing about how to integrate one’s mission and school-wide learning outcomes into everything you do in your school. So the first step is to work with one’s learning community to hire Jeff to come in and shake things up clearing off the table of outdated mission outcomes and opening up the discussion to what the community including students, parents and faculty believe in and value. Start with the basic questions of “what is learning and understanding?” and “What do our students need to learn?” and “How can we prepare them to be citizens skilled to handle a very changing world?”. I also like the idea of writing mission outcomes in the form of actions/skills/habits that are enduring and applicable to various situations. To say we want students to be “lifelong learners”, how about instead talking about the habits/skills of being critical thinkers and problem solvers that gives students the tools to be lifelong learners.  Hopefully one’s school will see the value of the the learning 2.0 constructs that folks are writing about and discussing in the edublogosphere to make them central to their vision statements.

Once the mission/vision is developed and action plans are created to integrate it into the school’s culture, the next step is develop curriculum, instruction and assessments that will get one’s students to learn the critical thinking, problem solving, cooperative and collaborative learning skills that are hopefully in the mission outcomes that also includes an inquiry driven approach to learning that engages the students in discussions and learning with individuals outside the school walls.

Really focus is on Stage 1 of McTigue and Wiggin’s UbD process for all the curriculum units. It all comes down to what the enduring understandings we are teaching to. Administrators must collaborate in the curriculum review process. The conversations and unpacking of the standards into the EUs is where we bring the administrators on board to constructivist, inquiry, student-centered learning. We have to be ready to have the critical conversations asking administrators how we are to reach our schools’ mission statements dedicated to teaching students critical thinking, problem solving and cooperative learning skills so that they can be global, information savvy citizens ready to adapt to the every changing world. If our administrators are charged to deliver the educational experience to reach the mission and habits for learning, get them to explain how we can do it in classrooms that where the curriculum being taught doesn’t support the schools’ new mission statement. As we move to Stage 2 to develop the assessments and Stage 3 to create the learning activities, the administrator in the curriculum meetings should start coming onboard as we come up with ways to use information literacy and technology to assess and teach the students.

So how does all of this happen without the administrator being on board? It doesn’t. The hope is that by going through this process that the reluctant or simply not getting the picture administrator buys into the process to support the mission that was created by the community. We also must take items off our adminstrators’ plates to allow them to be the instructional leaders in our schools. Less is more especially when it comes to empowering administrators to focus their time on decisions that support learning.

This is the fourth post about how to develop a curriculum review system in one’s school. It deals with answering questions about who participates in the curriculum development process. Just as the first post on the big picture, these are questions for members of the community to work through before they begin designing their system.

All Participants:

1) Who will really own the entire curriculum process moving it from the start to the finish in the classroom?
2) Who will own and guide the professional learning community being formed via this process?

Classroom Teachers, Support Teachers (ESL, Instructional Technologist, Librarian, Learning Resource, GATE, etc.) and Elective/Arts Teachers:

3) How ready are teams/departments to divide up the units to be developed/reviewed by one or two grade level, team or department members but not by the whole group?
4) What specific roles should they fulfill in the reviewing process (e.g., facilitator, scribe, etc.)?
5) How far along is the curriculum in being differentiated to meet learning needs of all the students?
6) Which teachers are needed to help design the content, process and products for those different needs?
7) Who can help integrate the technology and information & communication literacies?
How interdisciplinary are your units?
9) What steps do you want to take to make them more interdisciplinary? How can the curriculum process help you do this? Who needs to lead out in this effort?

Administration:

10) What do you need from your building principal? What is his/her role in the process?
11) How can the Curriculum Director support you and the entire process?
12) Which other administrators need to be involved in the curriculum development process? What are their roles in this process?

What other questions come to mind?

We really have three essential questions for this show:

• How to infuse information literacy skills across the curriculum?
• Where does the use of technology fit into the information literacy picture?
• How does a modern library media specialist fit into the shifting process?

The possible answers to these questions start with the library media specialist trained in using digital information tools as well as generative technologies for student sharing of their research. This individual is a leader in his/her school working with the instructional technologist as designers and collaborators in the curriculum review process to embed the various information & communication literacy (ICL) skills throughout the curriculum.

Everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. We work with early adopter teachers, students, interested parents, and administrators to build a learning community open to new ideas and practices. We don’t start with overwhelmed teachers or those not so comfortable with change. We return to collaborate with them individually honoring their contributions while working to adapt their practices when possible.

Working organically, we nurture our risk takers and spread their ideas by publically celebrating best practice instructional strategies and assessments. As is written all over the edublogosphere, we must do everything possible to bring the administrators on board to provide the leadership and modeling of the instructional strategies that lead to the skill and concept-based learning our students need.

A key location to start the shifting process is the meeting rooms where our curriculum reviews take place. This is followed up by team and department meetings where lessons are finalized for the classroom. We will talk a great deal more about his next week with our SOS guest Margaret Carpenter.

Margaret will go into detail about the “who” of the shifting equation. Two key leaders are your instructional technologist and library media specialist. They can be a big part of being in lots of places to make the shift happen.

Image Source

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. I am now doing a series of posts about our learning community’s ideas about each value. We are now discussing one value per month and looking at ways to follow through in making the value even more a part of our culture at HIS.

• One room school house
• Where are we in our interdisciplinary efforts?
• Learning how to collaborate, learning to work and play together. Teach cooperative learning skills as part of 21st century skill set.
• How do we build a truly democratic school?
• What role does the Student Representative Council play in our community decision-making?
• How effective is group work in our classrooms? Which kinds of group projects more effective?
• Which Web 2.0 tools meet our collaboration needs?
• While we have the structure and culture for collaboration, how well are we doing?, How can we measure our efforts?
• How to expand the collaboration to our immediate and world community?
• Role of administration in all aspects of collaboration?
• Our culture supports mixing of seniors with younger students.
• Continue to develop older students as peer leaders with attentive listening and group facilitation skills
• What structures do we have and need to support collaboration in our community? How to build further partnerships?
• How to engage parents in the culture of our school?

What a mouthful for a post title.

I have spent my years as an instructional technologist working through the curriculum development and review process to help shift my schools towards becoming what we call School 2.0. We were able to construct a workable system at my last school that really made a difference in how and what we taught in our classrooms.

We are now developing a curriculum development system at my current school that will involve working with our school culture and unique needs. Hsinchu International School is very different than the very large school I worked at before. We will be using a series of questions around specific categories to help us through this creation process. The questions come from a workshop I developed to help guide school communities to either refine their current curriculum review system or to start a new one. I will be sharing these categories and questions in a series of posts.

This is the first one and it covers the big picture when school wide leaders come together to start the conversation.

1) What would be an effective way to manage school-wide subject area meetings to review the standards/benchmarks for scope/sequencing (i.e., facilitation, time of year, one or several meetings by division, etc.)?

2) How do discussions take place about the big picture and developing ownership of the curriculum?

3) Who overseas this process of creating this process?

4) Who will be the leaders in each division to support this effort and gain support for it?

5) Who would be involved in curriculum development in each division? What would be their roles? Is there a place for students and/or parents at some point in the curriculum review process?

6) How would you ensure follow through on action items (to do’s) as you create your curriculum development system?

7) What big picture topics (i.e., each school year’s goals, student learning results, differentiation, etc.) would you want to integrate into your curriculum other than alignment of standards and benchmarks?

What are your priorities in either refining your current curriculum review system (or in starting one from scratch)? In other words, how much can you take on and still be effective in this process?

9) What ultimately do you want your curriculum to do?

10) How will you provide your participants the time and coaching to learn the skills needed to develop curriculum?

11) How will you get “buy in” from your participants to be curriculum designers?

12) How will you get buy in from all of your educators to actively use the curriculum?

13) How do you share the curriculum? To whom?

14) What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

Image Source: Adopted from Johneric Advento’s revised version of Margaret Carpenter’s original diagram

Our Shifting Our Schools podcast as well as Jeff’s and my blogs along with countless other podcasts and blogs share ways to help educators make the shift from traditional style, teacher-directed classrooms to what we call the Learning or School 2.0 model. This “shift” with all its edublogger advocates is all about the change process which we know is quite difficult to manage and is not happening very quickly.

While I enjoy discussing the big picture and the big ideas, my practice as an instructional technologist is on the practical, in the classroom instruction and assessment strategies that help transform classrooms into 21st century learning communities.

My belief for bringing about this transformation is that schools must develop a curriculum and collaborative systematic model that becomes the mechanism for shifting our classrooms and our schools to the School 2.0 model. Sadly curriculum development carries an uncomfortable connotation for many educators. The reality is that the curriculum should be the driving force that guides so much of what we do to affect the learning for our students. If handled well, curriculum development as a part of an engaged and thriving learning community, can be an exciting process that shifts and transforms our schools. Obvious information but sadly we often put little thought into how we develop or follow through with our curriculum.

We often spoke about this on our SOS podcast with one show centered on the work of the International School Bangkok’s team of technology resource coordinators and literacy specialist. The ISB team constructed a curriculum development model and recently Kim Cofino created a collaboration flow chart that together nicely presents a model for other schools to review and possibly adopt and individualize to meet their needs.

Back to the practical… Kim will be presenting at the Learning 2.008 conference next week about the importance of curriculum and collaboration in bringing about the shift in our schools. After watching Kim’s slide show for her presentation, I remembered a workshop that I started to put together for another conference. It dealt with how a school learning community begins the process of designing their own curriculum and collaboration system. As I am not able to attend the Learning 2.008 conference, it makes sense to get the components for my workshop out there as a practical way to help support Kim’s and others’ efforts. Each school is different and whether one looks at the ISB model or the one we created at HKIS, the process for developing the model needs to start by engaging all the stakeholders in the discussion.

My next several posts will share the questions that teachers and administrators can use to start their discussion as they work to develop their own systematic way to review curriculum that integrates the instructional strategies, content, assessments and 21st century learning skills that will shift their schools to the Learning 2.0 model.

We just started our two weeks of time set aside to build our learning community at Hsinchu International School (HIS). On Monday morning each staff member shared photographs that represented their lives outside of school. The new educators really connected with the returning teachers as they talked about photos of family, travel, hobbies and interests. We also enjoyed learning new things about returning members of our community. It was nice not feeling rushed and having to go and DO SOMETHING.

Our seniors came in for the afternoon to meet the new staff and to answer questions. It was something to hear them talk about our student learning outcomes, student Choice period, internships, community service, our tight school community, deeper learning, expeditions, etc. They really understand what our school is about.

Tuesday morning we enjoyed a discussion about change and the transition that follows it.  Rick Pierce of Rising Sun Consultants lead the discussion from Pennsylvania via Skype video. A big take away for me was that our school leaders took the time to validate the changes our new and returning staff are going (and will go) through. Rick reminds us that it is the transition after the change that we really need to be aware of and be ready to discuss within our community. He summed it up in saying:

“Research and experience has taught me that the first steps in dealing with transition is to bring it out in the open, acknowledge its impact and work deliberately at addressing any barriers which hinder your smooth journey through the change/transition process.  The two most important ingredients in dealing with change and transition are information and involvement.”

Our principal, Brent Loken, had everyone do a little homework reading Alfie Cohen’s article entitled Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But also Hard to Find. We listed on flip charts the 8 values Alfie writes about as being essential to be a progressive school. Everyone was asked to take time to respond to specifically to each value by writing on each flip chart a reflection, a question or an example of the value from their experience. We then broke into pairs with a returning and new teacher choosing one value to discuss. They then shared ideas and worked to rank how HIS is doing on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being most progressive.

Each team then presented to the whole group their reflections and where they ranked our school. We will now look to set aside time each month to revisit one value at a time, review the gaps and look at potential action steps to take in getting us closer to 10 for each value. Our new educators really brought many new ideas and perspectives to the discussion. I am looking forward to digging down deeper with everyone as we further discuss these values and our efforts to support them at Hsinchu International School.

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.