Mark Hofer, Steve Whitaker and Michael Kelly will join us on tonight’s SOS Podcast where we will be discussing this question of teacher preparation. It should be an excellent discussion as all three taught pre-service teachers at the University of Virginia. Mark now teaches at the College of William and Mary.
To answer this question I think of what we do with our colleagues in our schools to help them shift their teaching practices to more Classroom 2.0 practices. We have covered many topics in the podcast that support shifting individuals and schools but two in particular jump out at me when working with new teachers.
Risk Taking- I wrote about this in my previous post. We ended up needing to postpone that podcast discussion with John Mikton. It is now scheduled for April 30th. When working with university students, I am thinking one can start with the practices they already use in their lives for communication and learning. In most cases this will involve tapping into their everyday life experience of using cell phones, social networking tools, information literacy, etc. while guiding them to see that that already have learning networks in their lives.
Professional Learning Networks- So much to being a shifted teacher is about being a lifelong learner connected to one’s physical and digital learning networks. We again draw on the pre-service teachers’ natural proclivity to use technology to help them set up their RSS reader and to start connecting to the blogs, wikis, etc. that support shifted practices and new learning while offering examples of risk taking activities by educators from around the world.
The teaching of information, visual and design literacies across the curriculum is a task many of us are undertaking. One interesting possibility to teach all three together would be to look at the world financial crisis by having our students research the validity of the numbers being shared in the media, challenge them to visually represent the data and to then task them to communicate the information in a well-designed presentation. The folks at Flowing Data offer several examples of such an effort in their 27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis post. While one cannot be sure about the validity of the numbers presented in the 27 infographics, they do offer a wonderful opportunity to engage students to think about data, cause & effect and the power of visuals to get a message across.
There are so many other topics and available tools that can be used to have our students produce similar learning products for our classrooms. It makes so much sense to use these literacies (and technology literacy by having students create their own graphics) to help reach our course learning outcomes.
As you review some of the 27 examples, what are some ideas that come to mind for your classroom?
The editors of Learning and Leading with Technology are publishing in their current issue an article my wife and I authored entitled “All Aboard! Integrating Technology Through Curriculum Review”. It draws upon work at the Hong Kong International School Upper Primary between 2001-2005 to create a systematic way to review curriculum while integrating information and communication literacies (ICL).
Several of my posts the past few months offered questions for school leaders to think about as they develop their procedures for creating their own curriculum review system.
We edited down the current L & L article from a procedure paper that I wrote at the start of the process and added to as we improved the system over the years. Here is a link to that original paper which offers many “how to’s” and shares many of our take aways from developing the procedures.
Curriculum Review Procedure Paper
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.
I recently listened to the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast #110 which focused on teaching students good presentation skills. Joyce Valenza pointed to their efforts to get students to think about their message and the importance of using images over text whether one uses Powerpoint/Keynote, video, PhotoStory, etc.
This reminded me of an exercise that our 7th grade students did this past year. They were prompted to choose an emotion to then use images and music to express. They could use any digital delivery tool as the focus would be on the message and the audience understanding the depicted emotion. The students used GarageBand to create their own music and ArtRage to draw the final slide that named the emotion.
It was a starter assignment to get the students thinking about how to improve the design of their presentations and to prepare them for upcoming projects where they would take their persuasive, position and autobiographical essays and create image and musically rich interpretations of each.
With almost all of the 7th graders being ESL learners, this was an especially important music and visual literacy learning opportunity. Take a look at an abbreviated version of a student’s video on sadness.
Note: Also posted at U Tech Tips
