Lessons Learned

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?

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 will be tackling the big “How to shift?” essential question this week in the Shifting Our School podcast. Our previous shows with other EQs delved into discussions that also connected to this overriding theme to our podcast. So now it is time to put some thoughts together from practical experience.

Brent Loken, the Director of Curriculum and Innovation, at Hsinchu International School (HIS) will be our guest for the show. He will offer details about one approach to helping schools make the shift to focusing on the learning of 21st century skills, constructivist learning instructional strategies and the variety of interpretations of what School 2.0 can look like. Brent and the leadership team of Grant Ruskovich, Ken Willis, and Catherine Chen were able to take a top down, leadership driven approach working with the school board, parents, students and faculty to define what they wanted their school to be about. This “about” just happens to be a very shifted school.

As a instructional technologist working under more “normal” conditions where their are pockets of shifted teachers and often non-committed leadership towards shifting to School 2.0, I will share some of the practices that I found helpful to move a school I previously worked at to being more shifted. While I list these practices as helpful towards guiding a school to Learning 2.0 outcomes, they obviously are accepted strategies that are not new to our schools and can be used as common practice in how we generally manage organizations.

Administrative Leadership: I have to say it even though there are numerous reasons why administrators can find it difficult to make a commitment to all the change and transition that goes with shifting a school. We must have the administrators at the helm if we are to shift our schools. Our last SOS podcast for the school year in June will look into what barriers administrators face in bringing about change in their schools. As this is a huge topic on its own, I won’t comment further and ask that if anyone is reading this post to tune into our podcast with Brent Loken to hear one leader provide the vision and action steps that administrators can take to shift their schools.

Conversation-Listening-Designing-Action-ASSESSMENT: The process of deciding where a school community wants to go should start with conversations around the question “What is learning?”.  Additional questions are: What does it look like? What skills will our graduating students have? What will they need to be able to do to be global citizens in an unpredictable world? What is teaching? We can then use the UbD backwards process to develop our program plan, action steps and accountability protocols. This gets down to a very personal discussion with educators about their teaching philosophy.

Time is needed along with care and attentive listening as we grow our learning community and validate one another. 

Most of us as educators have been involved in strategic or other program building plans. We worked with parents, teachers, administrators and sometimes students to decide what our mission should be as well as what outcomes we want our students to attain from our schools. These development processes have documented procedures so one can easily find the “how to” steps. I would add that I cannot value enough the importance of listening, real attentive listening, which can lead to true understanding and help move the process along.

Planning comes into play along with action steps to put all the hard work into action in our classrooms. The part of the process that I find left out for numerous reasons is accountability. This is another huge topic that deserves a great deal of attention. I will just say here that  if a school is to shift to whatever goals it sets, one needs to take all that energy at the start of the development process through to the action and assessment stages as well. We must answer the question “Are we reaching our goals?” and then adapt accordingly.

Defining, Discussing and Understanding of School/Learning 2.0: This practice clearly ties into the planning process of where a school community wants to go with their programs. There are plenty of charts, posts and articles that contrast what and how we teach with a 20th century approach to the potential 21st century version. The Framework for 21st Century Skills Web site lists the skills and now with the Route 21 education section provide a terrific place to start the education and understanding effort with one’s school community. The next step is to begin the process of defining what Web 2.0 tools with their strange names do for the learning community without any expectations for learning or using them. Simply work to take away the lack of understanding. As an instructional technology program is developed around individual and team (i.e., elementary grade level teams, middle school teams & high school departments) needs, you can then design a differentiated learning program based on those individual and group adult learning needs in your school’s learning network.

Time: This is usually a top of the list issue at any organization. We often don’t build in the time or the procedures to follow through on our plans making the work that goes with shifting our schools an additional task added to overloaded teachers’ workloads.  Time must be structured for the activities that go into the shifting process taking away other items from teachers’ plates and giving them time during the school day to focus on the shifting. And it goes without saying that the shifting process needs a great deal of time as in years to go from the conversation to the designing to the implementation to the assessment phase.

Focus: I wrote about this in a recent post. We put in a lot of time writing our strategic plans, missions statements, etc. but then stray from them leaving less time and energy to do what we say we will. My experience with international schools is that they sometimes lose their way and their focus on how they should be using their time. Check out the post as this also connects to administrative leadership.

Less is More Especially with Depth:  If we stay focused on what we say we want to do, there will be less on everyones’ plates thus we will have a better chance of reaching our goals. Common sense. Don’t try to be everything to everyone as a school. Shifted schools are guided by the mantra “how does any new program or initiative connect to our strategic plan and mission?” This gets back to administrative leadership. “No” is not a four letter word! Our leaders connected to our community learning networks gather lots of information, dialogue and then can make decisions that keep our plates less full and our lives more balanced. We will talk in a future SOS podcast about why such a common sense idea gets dropped by many schools.

Trained Change Agents & Designers: Todays library media specialists and instructional technologists receive very specific course work in designing new programs and implementing them. They also gain skill sets from their graduate programs that support their being able to be 21st century learners just like we want our students to be. By their staying on top of the latest research and by continually learning from their PLNs, they have the knowledge and skills to be the on the ground leaders who help guide our schools through the change and transition process. Support and empower them to do what they are trained to do.

It might be uncomfortable for some schools to face but old style technology coordinators with their focus on hardware and networks have been replaced with today’s instructional/educational technologists who are teachers first, grounded in instructional theory working to bridge the technology to the teachers and students in the classrooms. We have technicians and network engineers to take care of the hardware and repair issues.

The library media specialists with their training and skill sets guide our teachers and students in the multiple literacies that our 21st century learners (students, teachers and administrators) must work with and master to be adaptable and flexible learners. They cannot be the 20th century librarian focused just on reading literacy and the building of book collections. They must be leaders and partners in designing and implementing curriculum.

By working as partners with teachers and administrators in the curriculum development process, these two instructional leaders work to support the designing of curriculum to reach the learning goals for our 21st century focused schools. To see how the teachers of the HKIS Upper Primary school designed their curriculum review process, select the following hyperlink to download a copy of an article reviewing their work. HKIS Upper Primary Curriculum Review Model

Education, Communication, Ownership and Celebration Procedures: Schools need to use all of their communication channels to the community to share progress, build ownership and  celebrate everyone’s efforts as the school works towards its goals. Once schools start making the move to School 2.0, they need to use ongoing parent workshops, community coffees, student forums, newsletters, blogs, etc. to build out the community learning network with the focus on the shifting process. The school needs to be flexible and adaptable with two-way communication from the community. Along the way, celebrate the successes and shine the light on your risk takers! So often those willing to stick their necks out to try new things, offer differing opinions, and make the shift are isolated and made to feel devalued. Put these leaders’ efforts on your school Web sites, write about them in newsletters, get their ideas published in journals. These leaders will really “own” the process and share their passion for it. Ownership means accountability and follow through. Celebrate your early adopters and they will stick around instead of looking for more shifted pastures.

Get the Right Crew Onboard:  This is a biggie that can be one of the biggest storms to work your voyage through. Going back to the conversations that start the process, everyone will need to decide if they can make the commitment to the shift once they fully understand what it is all about. Administrators will need to work with their Human Resource staff to plan over a few years to give folks the opportunity to seek employment at other schools. As uncomfortable as this can be, we must face that organizations change and that it is better for everyone to move on if we cannot support the mission of our school.

The Curriculum Development Process: Being systematic is central for bringing about change. We must build in protocols that support a system that scaffolds our efforts to move towards our goals. Sadly, for so many schools, the curriculum review process can be a struggle and an unsupported effort that gets a bad name. A dynamic, well-managed system becomes a natural professional learning community that can drive how we do business in our schools. See the previous link to the HKIS Upper Primary model for more information.

Work with Your Successes: Students are already learning in our classrooms whether we are School 1.0 or 2.0. We as teachers use well thought out instructional and assessment strategies. Back to the conversations that start the shifting process, we need to assess what we are already doing well by asking questions like:

Which strategies are working really well? Which ones guide our students to our school-wide learning goals? Which ones can easily be enhanced using 2.0 strategies?

We need to remind ourselves as Rick Pierce points out that change leads to the much longer transition period that then takes us to our goals. This transition is a continuum that we all move along at different rates of speed and comfort levels. So create a collaborative team including your instructional technologist, library media specialist, administrators, curriculum coordinator and other interested parties to design an ongoing adult learning program centered on personal learning networks that start within each individual’s comfort zone and experience. Then take small steps along the continuum towards using shifted classroom instructional strategies and assessments that support your school’s shifted goals.

A quick example is that concept maps along with other graphic organizers are being used in classrooms around the world. Teachers are comfortable with them. Students learn making connections using HOTS as they map out their learning. The next step for some might be a desktop digital tool like Inspiration or Cmap while others might be ready to jump to 2.0 and the collaborative power of Mindmeister or Bubbl with 24/7 access to their work. As time moves on the next step is telecollaborative work where students and teachers make connections outside the school still using concept maps but sharing them with learners in projects like The Flat Classroom. Just remember to start with your current successes and honor the innovative work that is already getting results as you design each teacher’s shifting experience.

Also, another obvious point, make your professional development program connect to your shifting school outcomes in an ongoing, structured learning community that periodically gives learning and connection time during the school day while avoiding the end of quarter one shot, one size fits all PD days. Adult learners deserve and need differentiated instruction, time to make meaning from their experiences as well as the opportunity to apply their new learning to really give them half a chance for success. And look to work with the professionals within your school who have attended conferences, read leading educational books, and are on top of the edublogosphere who will be with you everyday as opposed to the weekend visit of a consultant.

Yet, you might go the extra step adding the depth of an experienced consultant to partner with your on site shifted teachers by having him/her stay for weeks or months at a time. Both Hong Kong International School and Hsinchu International School are using this model.

Stick To Your Guns:  So much of what I am writing here is accepted, practical knowledge. If a school community does all of these listed strategies and more, they can feel confident in that they are inclusive, transparent, systematic and clearly focused in their shift. There will still be difficulties and uncomfortable feelings at times but that is what LEARNING is all about.

Everyone from the administrator at the helm to the crew and passengers must work together to stay the course showing the courage to stand by their planning and initial goals. It is this courage that sometimes fails especially when the dreaded “Well, the parents say …” and we as educators forget we are the professionals hired to do the job of teaching the students and running the school.

Final Note:  As stated at the start, my experience is from working at a non-shifted school without a school-wide initiative or committed leadership to make the shift. We dug in and did out best as a group of educators working within the system. Brent Loken and Grant Ruskovich took a very different tack with their work at the helm of HIS. Download the SOS podcast later in the week to hear of their efforts.

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 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?

Kim Cofino is the 21st Century Learning Specialist at the International School of Bangkok. She recently posted the standards/outcomes of what the 21st century literacy and technology outcomes are for the school. I shared at her site that they are very clear and easily understandable for the school community to process and then act upon. As change agents, one of our main tasks is to explain why we need to make changes. Well-written and sometimes obvious explanations to us ICL leaders are not so obvious to the community. The ISB team did a nice job.

The next step is to communicate the new ICL outcomes to the community. This will involve buy in and involvement by the administrators as well as real support from the teachers. This education phase first for teachers then to students and parents is very important. They then become supporters as your innovator teachers try new instructional strategies and assessments that lead their students to the ICL understandings.

As I look at look around the Web at international school sites, I am find more and more mention of “21st Century Skills”, “information literacy” and “technology skills” in mission statements and skill sets for potential hires. Having sat in committee meetings wordsmithing statements with all the buzzwords, I can say that we often leave out the most important steps of then communicating and then creating the mechanisms to move us into action mode. The way to move the 21st Century ICL skills into the classroom is through the curriculum development process.

This becomes much easier after the communication has taken place and members of the community really understand the value of good design in presentations, the importance of reflection in all aspects of student learning but especially in their information sources, the place of bias in information coming in and going out, etc. Again, check out the list the ISB team put together or see the HKIS ICL Standards & Benchmarks.

One thing to note about the HKIS ICL standards is that they are the same as the school’s academic student learning results. This makes sense in that shouldn’t the skills for 21st century learning naturally be what all our teachers are building a portion of their lessons around? Much of our teaching involves skills and we want to be teaching about ones in the present century, correct?

On a side note, Kim has a very interesting job title. Looking back at my previous posts on job titles, I like the one she is using. However, as I just mentioned that ICL standards should really be a part of the school’s student learning outcomes, is there a need to designate a learning support teacher working towards those outcomes with “21st century” or “technologist” as part of the job title? Well, as I concluded in my post, we need to use those terms for the time being until ICL becomes totally integrated into a school’s learning systems. One day folks like Kim and myself might just be called “learning specialists” collaborating to design curriculum that is differentiated and focused on reaching the school’s academic student learning outcomes which naturally contain the ICL outcomes.

I was planning to make this post about a possible new name for those of us in instructional/educational technology stressing how we are teaching partners focused on student learning. The job title would be “learning specialist”. Well, after speaking to three different people, I am reminded that “learning specialist” often is connected to resource teachers so it doesn’t quite work.

All three individuals pointed out that while the instructional technologist can help design lessons that don’t always involve technology, we really are the leaders in our schools for using it. One reason I was thinking about removing the term “technology” from the title is that it carries so much baggage for many educators. We know the fear factor many feel concerning using technology in general but there is also the “tech guy” connotation that goes with it as well. Being the “tech guy” often means the fixer/technician as opposed to the fellow teacher and learning specialist.

One of the ways I start each school year is to meet with teachers in grade level teams to refresh their memories as to what my role is and to introduce the technicians that support the school network and AV. This has definitely worked along with monthly Tech Update information sharing about curriculum, instruction, information literacy and technology infusion. Now that I finally starting blogging, I will use this information conduit sharing lessons learned and best practices to further demonstrate my position in the community as a teacher, learning specialist and technology/information literacy leader.

Lots, I think. I have always felt that we communicate a great deal about what we do by using a job title that describes at least a portion of our skill set. When I was at UVA studying instructional technology, members of our cohort met several times to discuss how we should title the position a few of us were working towards in K-12 schools. Most members of the group were getting their doctorates to work in higher education but many of them would be teaching pre-service teachers and grad students that would be getting instructional/educational technology degrees. A few members eventually wrote an article about this somewhat new job role with the title of “Technology Integration Specialist”. You can check out the article yourself.

I lead a discussion at the recent Learning 2.0 conference on the role of the technology integration specialist or instructional/educational technologist in our schools. Our task was to develop a job description. It was clear from the over 30 attendees that this person is clearly an educational leader within our schools and in no way a technician. I bring up this point as some schools still use the term “technology coordinator” even when the individual is truly an educational technologist leaving all of the technical concerns of running the network and repairing the hardware to the technicians.

I researched the technology coordinator title while in graduate school where I discovered that schools were making the break from hiring in school technicians who also tried to work with teachers and students when possible. Administrators were realizing that they needed trained teachers working to bridge the gap between classroom instruction and the new technologies coming on the scene. The research showed that these the technology coordinators usually did not hold graduate degrees in instructional/educational technology or instruction/curriculum. They often were individuals who enjoyed working with computers and networks who could step in to help schools especially during the 1990’s when so many funds were going into connecting American public schools to the Internet. Someone needed to manage the networks and expanded computer labs.
I will post more on why this title “technology coordinator” sends the wrong information while also sharing my thinking that we instructional technologists might be better named “learning or instructional specialist”. One thing to think about is how often it is an easy out for teachers to say they are uncomfortable with technology so they hold back from trying new ways of teaching that have nothing to do with technology. More to come…