Lessons Learned

Transition and change can be a large part of one’s life as an international educator. Taking the first step to leave one’s home country to live and teach in another country leads to many more steps of transition. International schools vary in how fast paced they are and how much change is going on at any one time. But change is often a common theme with new teachers and administrators coming and going bringing new ideas and energy to their schools.

I bring up this topic of transition and change because my wife and I made the decision that after many years in Asia, we wanted to make our next move to a small school either in north Africa or Europe. Morocco had been on our radar so we made the leap to Casablanca American School this past August.

It has not been an easy transition to a developing nation especially balancing the needs of our two middle school sons with our new jobs, housing, transportation, etc. efforts. I am teaching IB history for the first time which offers a pretty steep learning curve especially coming from a very constructivist, technology integrated curriculum at my last school.

Thankfully we are settled in now and finding ourselves in a very close and supportive teaching community. The wonders of Morocco are now accessible as we get to enjoy incredible travel and cultural opportunities.

I mention these topics because they are what Jeff and I will be talking about in the first three episodes of the Shifting Our Schools podcast as we kick off our third season. We will continue to have guests who bring their expertise to the essential questions that drive our discussions. We also hope to expand the conversation by having listeners call in.

Here is the schedule hopefully starting at 8:00 PM Bangkok time for each episode:

Episode 28: November 18

EQ> From Morocco to Bangkok: How goes it?

Episode 29: December 2

EQ> How can the IB curriculum be shifted?

Episode 30: December 16

EQ> How to recruit to be an international educator?

In a blog post that I wrote about international recruiting, one of the big questions for readers who contacted me was about taking their children overseas not only to new countries but new schools. I plan to share our family experiences in the November 18th show and hope to have listeners call in to share their insights. With IB being so new to me, we definitely will need listeners from IB schools to add to the conversation about their experiences. As it is the start of recruiting season, we hope to provide some insights for those new to international teaching and maybe to veterans who have not recruited in some time.

We have several ideas for our shows in 2010 but welcome listener questions and guest requests. Please let us know what you are thinking.

I am realizing that I pretty much took the paperless nature of my previous 1:1 school for granted. A couple recent experiences really drove home another reason why going 1:1 in our schools makes a lot of sense.

Ever try to buy all the papers, pencils, binders, etc. your child needs for school during Ramadan? Ever move your family half way around the world to find box after box of student tests, papers, journals, mind maps, etc. in your shipment when you have no storage space in your new home? International educators can smile at our family’s situation but it gets to the universal point of families buying school supplies wherever they live.

Having spent a good part of Saturday at the very crowded market where families were shopping in mass to get home to break their fasts, we felt a bit of stress working through the various teacher requests for school supplies. Adding in the mass of papers, worksheets, notebooks and binders our sons had from their previous school, I scratched my head realizing just how simple things had been at my 1:1 laptop school in Taiwan.

There was only one item on my school supply list as students prepared for the new school year-  a laptop. At the end of the year, instead of notebooks, papers and binders, our students had Google Docs for their papers, Moodle instead of agendas for their homework assignments, blogs for their reflections and writing, Mindmeister for their research notes and electronic portfolios with projects and reflections about their learning. The students left the school in June with the one learning tool that they they had entered with. Simple.

Jeff and I concluded our second year of podcasting about shifting schools to the School/Learning 2.0 model. We would like to thank all of our guests who shared their insights and practical ideas to help students, teachers, administrators and parents work together in the shifting process.

You can listen to shows directly from the SOS Podcast page or subscribe through iTunes.

Here are the Essential Questions we discussed this past year:

How to shift when the administrators are not on board?
What prevents administrators from shifting?
What are some shifted practices in our schools?
How to recruit shifted teachers?
Once shifted, where do we go next?
How to make the shift systemic and sustainable in our schools?
Which comes first, shifted practices or 1:1 laptop program?
How to move students from being dependent to independent learners?
How are we preparing pre-service teachers to be shifted educators?
How to measure how shifted your school is?
How to do a school tech makeover on the cheap?
How can we help teachers take more risks in their teaching and learning?

The TPACK approach of connecting technology, pedagogy and content to use the power of their convergence is being covered in the May issue of Learning & Leading with Technology. Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler, the authors of the article, also share a wiki site that provides further information on the framework.

Judi Harris and Mark Hofer of the College of William & Mary will soon have articles also published in L & L on the TPACK theme. They recently took the theory and moved into the practical by creating their Learning Activities Type wiki. There you can find examples of regular instructional practices and assessments matched up with various supportive technologies categorized by ones that lead to convergent learning and ones that offer ways for students to show their divergent thinking.

Another resource for learning about TPACK is a podcast by the GenTech boys. Check it out.

Image Source

The spread of the H1N1 virus reminded me of our running a virtual school in Hong Kong during the outbreak of SARS in 2003 when all the schools were closed. Our elementary team of teachers came together to create a program focusing on what we called the “3 C’s of Communication, Community and Content (Interactive & Collaborative)”. We quickly realized that continuing the learning became secondary to the creation of a network that provided our students and their families the social and emotional connections that they so needed during their very isolated days.

I wrote an article entitled “Surviving Crisis Mode” in Learning & Leading with Technology that documented our many weeks of virtual school while outlining the follow up efforts to prepare for the future possibility of school closure. It hopefully can provide some insights to readers thinking about creating and implementing a virtual school plan.

One important positive from the experience was that our school leaders, teachers and parents were much more open to the shift in instructional an assessment practices that our small team of early adopters had previously been pushing for.

For other ideas on how to prepare for the possibility of school closure, check out Britt Watwood and Stephanie Sandifer’s recent posts.

Image Source ISTE

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.

John Mikton will join Jeff and myself to talk about this question on the Shifting Our Schools podcast taking place tonight. To start answering this question, I think the obvious starting point is with our teachers individually to ask them what needs to happen to help them try new ideas in their teaching and learning. I don’t see large workshops or sending folks to conferences as the starting point to help build a culture of risk taking. Large scale PD efforts can provide models of shifted practices and get folks excited to try new things but it still comes back to each teacher in his/her classroom. I think it says so much to talk to teachers a few weeks after returning from a conference to see how things are going in trying some of the practices they saw at the conference. Many times they haven’t acted on their excitement due to barriers in their schools.

We know the list of barriers that often affect teachers in many ways not just in not taking risks (i.e., not enough time, too much to cover in the curriculum, assigned tasks that don’t support student learning, parent expectations, etc.). Experience tells me that by talking with individual teachers, finding practices they are confident in using in their classrooms and then asking what they see as interesting in other classrooms or in their professional reading, we as learning specialists (instructional technologists, librarians, learning support, GATE facilitators, curriculum coordinators, etc.) can then help them take small first steps to try new things starting within their area of comfort.

One theme that runs through many of our podcasts about shifting practices and schools is leadership. While learning specialists can make a huge difference in supporting teachers and learning in the classroom, it is our administrators who can really help push the shift by modeling risk taking setting a tone for the school that trying new ideas is expected. By communicating to the larger community through a variety of communication avenues (e.g., blogs, email, Twitter, various presentations tools in parent meetings, etc.), the administrator takes risks with new technology while inviting parents to understand and expect risk taking as part of the school culture. Celebration of teachers and students taking risks should be central to the shift in culture. While much of the focus will be on successful risk taking, we cannot forget to highlight the times when the results didn’t quite work out and learning took place.

If we work with individuals while having the community as a whole assess the nature of our current school culture, we can gather the information needed to create an action plan to build a climate that supports risk taking. While this process might take some time, if we start right away having our learning specialists work with teachers to share their opinions about barriers and needed actions for support while having our administrators lead by example, we can start helping educators take more risks in their teaching.

This is the fifth post about how to develop a curriculum review system in one’s school. It deals with where your school stands in using a curriculum mapping tool to support the curriculum review 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. These series of posts support an article my wife Margaret and I have coming out in the December/January 2008 Learning and Leading with Technology magazine.

1) How does your school currently document and later archive your curriculum?

2) How do you organize your units as in timeline, size, importance, etc.?

3) If you have an online curriculum mapping tool, what are its strengths and weaknesses? What barriers are there to using it?

4) If you don’t have a mapping tool, what are the barriers for your school in either purchasing or creating one?

5) How does or doesn’t this tool connect to what is happening in the classrooms?

6) How does it connect to your online course management tool?

7) What does the template for all of your units look like?

How is your unit planning template functional in guiding input to then lead to output/action?

9) How does it support your school’s teaching and learning beliefs (i.e., mission statement, strategic plan)?

What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

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.

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.