Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Habits of Mind (page 1 of 2)

A Wave Is Building Against Screen Time

February 5, 2018 / / 0 Comments

As I move back into counseling, I am reading a great deal and gathering information from the research and the growing number of concerned voices. Parents, educators, and business leaders are a few of the groups voicing their concerns about technology use by our children and by adults. The following are a few articles, books, and sites that document this wave of concern. What jumps out at me is how schools are implementing plans to teach the habits of mind and character traits that can help students make healthy and productive choices around technology use.

On a related issue, there is also a wave building on the influence of technology companies in our society and our personal lives. A case in point is to stop and think about the encroachment of corporations into our homes to listen and record data 24/7. Think back a few years to ask if you would have allowed these devices into your home. It is a slow process as technology services and loss of privacy encroach into our lives.

On Point Radio> Show title: Can you balance screen time and family time? An author shares insights from her new book on parenting in the digital age.

The 1A Radio Show> Show title: #Distracted: Are Smartphones In Schools A Good Idea? A student, teacher, and head of school share insights about cell phone usage in schools.

Washington Post article> This simple solution to smartphone addiction is now used in over 600 U.S. schools.

Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition To Fight What They Built> Good article with a link to the Center for Humane Technology created by the coalition.

Screen Schooled– Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber> This book hammers the use of technology in schools. I read the book and will write a post on it, as the authors do an excellent job pointing to research and classroom experiences. What needs to be added to their reporting is how their school system provides personnel, training, and other resources to help guide their students to use technology and information resources in meaningful ways.

Wait Until 8th> Parents came together in a Texas town to pledge to give their children smartphones in 8th grade. The resources section lists helpful articles and books.

Common Sense Media> This well-known resource for parents and educators provides many strategies to help readers develop plans around using technology.

Parenting in the Digital Age> A slideshow listing guidelines that a counselor and I put together years ago for parenting workshops. The advice is still sound. The slides are all text going against good design, as we posted them to our website for parents to access. Many nice photos would not have informed parents as well as the text did. 🙂

 

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Shifting Our Schools (SOS) Podcast Returns

January 13, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Before the Ed Tech Co-Op podcast with Mark Hofer and Jeff Utecht, I did the Shifting Our Schools podcast with Jeff. We planned and lined up our guests in late 2007 to record our first show in 2008. We covered many topics with the common theme of managing the shift in schools to what we called School 2.0. The show ended in 2009.

The new 2.0 version of the SOS podcast has Jeff as the host, with Kim Cofino, Chrissy Hellyer, and me as co-hosts, who will join Jeff from time to time. The show’s theme will be the same, but a wider variety of topics will be covered. I look forward to discussions around character, life skills, and personal growth guidance programs.

As a counselor and wellness coach, I return to international education in July at the Saigon South International School. I plan to record shows of practical case studies of lessons leading students to deeper learning and insights as I help to further develop their PEARL wellness program (personal, emotional, and relational learning).

So look to subscribe to the Shifting Our Schools podcast!

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Counseling Job Description (Counseling – IT Partnership)

December 12, 2017 / / 0 Comments

As I wrote previously, I am very interested to learn how guidance counselors are involved in helping students and their parents better deal with living in our digital world. The counselor and instructional technologist roles overlap beyond the digital citizenship curriculum schools offer, especially for digital wellness. Looking at the school counselor’s role, I wonder what a forward-looking counselor job description looks like.

We work to help students develop Habits of Mind, dispositions, a growing internal locus of control (self-regulation), agency, mindsets, and character strengths. Thus, it is more important than ever to prepare them to handle and utilize technology’s many ways to enhance learning. A part of this process is instilling the mantra that technology should not control us; we should control it.

How do we design learning experiences where students can apply their habits and strengths in their lives? As an instructional designer and counselor, I design learning activities to make the habits, dispositions, and character strengths “sticky” for kids so they become a part of their lives. Counselors help to lead the way in this personal growth process, especially when incorporating wellness as an overarching theme. With smartphones and social networking making their way into younger and younger hands, our counselors have their hands full.

My current position teaching 5th-grade social studies puts me back into student services team (SST) meetings. As I observed how the process works at my current school, I was reminded of my job description as a counselor in international schools many years ago. My role now is as a teacher instead of a counselor/SST coordinator.

In recording the following listing of responsibilities from my experiences, I am adding my take on how technology can support the roles and responsibilities, looking to a more forward-thinking and whole student-body approach to community wellness.

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Individual and Group Counseling: Supporting students individually in counseling sessions and groups is at the center of guidance counseling. Tech Take: Much as I do with my Web Resources for Learning site- Student Section, I can see developing a similar one for students to access information on wellness, (digital) citizenship, third culture kids, and topics specific to one’s international student population. One might call it the “Web Resources for Life” site. 🙂

SST Coordinator and Grade Level Team Member: The principal at my current school manages the SST. In my time overseas, I led the meetings for various reasons, one being that the principal often had unexpected events preventing them from attending the meetings. My job also focused on student advocacy, while the principal had many other responsibilities. I worked to be seen as a member of the grade-level team, which supports the team approach to help students grow physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially. Also included in our meetings were the specials teachers and the learning support teacher(s). Tech Take: Having a sound student information system with an easy-to-use interface that can be adapted to the school’s needs is critical in building student profiles, documenting support strategies, parent meetings, assessment of interventions, etc. Constructing a structure and system that guides the process to include timely reviews and accountability check-ins for students, teachers, and parents is vital.

Guidance Curriculum and Lessons and Staff PD: Counselors should provide services and advocacy for all students. This sounds so obvious, but as we know, the tendency is to focus on students struggling, whether it be academically, socially, or behaviorally. A strong wellness-focused guidance curriculum using the tenets of Positive Psychology integrated into the regular curriculum taught by teachers with some co-teaching with counselors is one way to ensure all students benefit from the program. A part of this process is providing teachers with resources and the latest news on child development. It is also essential to assess the wellness status of the “student body” and individual students. Tech Take: Teaching life, study, wellness, etc. skills via online learning modules can lead to blended and personalized learning opportunities for students. Students thus have control over the place, pace, and path of their learning. Using a blog, Twitter, and Instagram to share news along with examples of guidance and fully integrated lessons and initiatives gives staff and parents a choice over how they wish to stay connected and expand their understanding of topics affecting our children. Using a survey creator, one can design a wellness survey for students and staff. Younger students would need an analog approach. The survey data could then be used in instructional technology fashion by designing a wellness program based on the school community’s needs.

The building of a Web Resources for Life listing of topics and resources fits nicely with empowering students to be self-directed and independent learners. One of my passions is helping students develop what I call their Personal Learning Systems (PLS). I am in the first stages of creating a PLS course that can be taught face-to-face, blended, and adapted to be taught virtually. I can create other courses to be taught after school through after-school activities or virtually. Creating a web resources site for teachers and parents around child development, recent news, and research is another way to build understanding and provide strategies to support our students. Running Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) learning sessions with partner staff members is another way to provide professional learning opportunities. The TTTs can be developed as online learning modules to offer a more personalized approach to PD.

Advisory Facilitator: A team approach to advisory development and implementation is crucial to the counselor’s job. Tech Take: In creating advisory programs, one of my goals was to work with teachers to assess our students’ needs to set learning goals. We then developed the lessons so that teachers had a standard curriculum and didn’t find themselves asking, “what will I do in advisory today?”. Google Docs or posting lessons on the learning management system (LMS) makes this sharing process easy and allows teachers to post their reflections and insights after lessons are taught.

Family Support: A counselor’s job is to coordinate people and facilitate processes. We work with teachers, learning support specialists, and administrators to design and implement student learning plans. Parents are a huge part of this partnership. We work with families to provide structures and strategies to assist their children in the home. We provide information and resources around wellness, learning, parenting in the digital age, etc. Tech Take: As mentioned, using social networking tools to get news and helpful hints to the community is another part of the counselor’s communication and teaching toolkit. Just as we create web resources for students and teachers, we do the same for parents. As an instructional technologist partnering with counselors, I do this from parenting in the digital age angle, but we can do much more. Companies like Eduro Learning offer parenting courses around various topics for parents who want more than resources from organizations like Common Sense Media. Counselors can give face-to-face presentations and mini-courses while providing them online for parents who cannot attend.

Crisis Team and Plan Development: Helping create and manage a crisis management plan came into play in several of my international schools. Revisiting the plan and doing practice runs are critical to the process. Tech Take: Posting the plan to the LMS along with supporting videos (e.g., information and procedures for students, staff, and parents) is another way to make the plan easily accessible but also visible. I smile, thinking back to the hand-washing video that the nurse and I created during SARS in Hong Kong. 🙂 A big part of running our virtual school at Hong Kong International School (HKIS) during SARS was about keeping our community virtually connected (article).

Administrative Team: I was a part of the administrative team in my schools, helping with planning, program development, staff support, and other topics around student and staff support. Helping teaching teams with their health and internal communication was another part of my job.

Admissions: If we had an admissions facilitator or if it was me, my role was to review student records and provide insights to help with the admissions process. Once students entered the school, I placed them in classes and introduced them to our new student orientation program. Tech Take: Leverage the heck out of the student information system, streamlining the information sharing and admissions decision-making process.

New Student Orientation: Start of the year orientation day for new students was developed with the help of and led by current students. Each new student was assigned a buddy for the coming year. For new students during the school year, we had mini-orientation after-school sessions led by the student orientation core team—students connected to their buddies during an orientation day and continued the engagement throughout the year. At one school, we provided online orientation materials and a WebQuest orientation and study skills module integrated into regular classes. Tech Take: I can see one’s student orientation team putting together welcome and “life as a — grade student” videos to be posted on the orientation website.

Staff Orientation: Counselors partner with other staff members to design and create an orientation site for new staff. We did this at one international school as it is essential to help incoming staff transition to the school and country. Orientation and onboarding needs continue through the year; we provided ongoing check-ins with new staff members to better understand the school culture. It is also important to provide support around dealing with loss and change, especially in validating the various identities new staff members bring with them. Tech Take: Creating an orientation website is the obvious way to go, but in our day of social networking, one could also use Facebook, Instagram, etc., to communicate with images and videos about one’s school and country. This could be an extension for ES and MS teaching teams and HS departments to add their sections to the website. Here is an example of what our tech department did at one of my schools.

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The following topics were outside my job description, but they did come up to some extent. They are prominent today, especially with the nature of technology in our lives and the increased academic pressure on students seeking admission to college and university.

Wellness: See previous entry of Guidance Curriculum and Lessons and Staff PD for information. Wellness, including finding balance in one’s life, is a big part of the guidance curriculum and counseling program. I am separating it because it is so crucial in our information-overloaded world to find ways to help our students, staff, and parents strengthen their well-being. It is exciting to see public schools in my area include wellness through mindfulness as part of their mission. And wellness is for all the community, including the parents. As an international counselor, I did a lot of counseling staff and parents dealing with the ups and downs of being in a new school (teachers) and country. I can work with interested staff to develop a mindfulness program if one isn’t already in place in my next school. Tech Take: It could be a good idea for counselors to build a learning portal for the greater community that includes information on wellness, including digital wellness. An extension activity for interested students is to have them help produce videos, slideshows, etc., to curate within the portal.

Student Personal Learning Plans: Back to the theme that counselors provide services for all students, I believe all students should have a “personal learning plan.” I remember reading about schools having individualized education plans (IEPs) for all students. While educators construct IEPs, I am thinking of personalizing the process by putting students in charge of their plans. Working with students to be the designer and implementer of their learning plan entirely puts ownership into their hands. The plan goes beyond the learning in school, with the students setting goals for “life learning” and creating action steps to reach them. Dispositions, character strengths, life skills, and related life-learning aspects of the child’s life go far beyond academic learning in school.

Tech Take: With our goal of students learning how to learn and direct their learning, I see digital portfolios as the mechanism for creating and ongoing management of one’s learning plan. Portfolios set up with students setting goals around all aspects of their lives, including developing their personal learning system, further put students in charge of their learning. Documenting their learning through reflection sections for each inserted learning product with scaffolded reflection questions supports the process. Students sharing a journal/blog with teachers and parents to offer a more ongoing formative self-reflective assessment process keeps the focus on learning, not just the finished products. While there are commercial products like SeeSaw, schools could also use Google Apps or other free tools.

Life Coaching: I have written and shared on podcasts about the technological shift from tech tool support to learning support for instructional coaches for technology. I have advocated for renaming and rebranding the job title from tech integrator, tech coordinator, and tech person to titles such as innovation integrator, learning coach, and tech and learning coach. This shift has been taking place for several years.

The term “coaching” is used a great deal today regarding how some people hire coaches for guidance in different areas of their lives (e.g., personal finance, fitness, etc.). Guidance counselors have always been life “coaches.” We are members of a team that is passionate about helping our students grow physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially. It may be time to drop the title of guidance counselor and replace it with life or wellness coach. 🙂

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Phones in Schools (Counseling – IT Partnership)

November 30, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Joshua Johnson led a very informative discussion on his NPR 1A show about cell phones in schools. His panel included a 9th grader, a teacher, a principal, and a physician. They cover many topics worth your time to listen to the podcast version of the show. One interesting line from the principal dealt with two considerable efforts in most schools- expanding technology use and helping students experience deeper learning. She noted that it is challenging to do both with the tendency of technology to distract from focusing in depth on topics, thus impeding students from making lateral and deeper connections. And as the doctor noted, effective multi-tasking is a myth.

The high school teacher, Matt Miles, co-authored with Joe Clement the book Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber.

This brings me to the theme of the overlapping worlds of technology and counseling as I explore how schools guide students to be in charge of their devices instead of the devices controlling the users.

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Guidance Counselor – Instructional Technologist Partnership (Introduction)

October 15, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I participated in and followed early 1:1 initiatives going back to Henrico County in VA and the Maine Learning and Technology Initiative, both taking place in the early 2000s. Henrico did their rollout in high school, while Maine started theirs in middle school. Many lessons from both, with Maine setting the gold standard on deliberately planning and implementing programs to support teachers in adapting their instruction to be enhanced by technology.

In recent years we have had the addition of smartphones into students’ hands, adding even more connectivity into their lives. International schools, especially those in Asia, were also starting 1:1 programs. In time, elementary schools also began the rollout of devices. This trend continues in the US today, with public and independent schools catching the wave.

My blogging and podcasting have been on personal computing devices’ positive collaborative, creative, and connective nature. I offer this simple review of where we were; my concerns about students and their access to devices have been growing, especially with our younger students. While schools develop acceptable use policies, have 1:1 introduction parent nights, and offer digital citizenship lessons, I am concerned that we have much more to do to prepare students to make healthy and responsible technological choices.

What jumps out at me daily is the same picture we see with adults. The picture is of the hunched-over individual viewing a screen, whether sitting alone, walking, or sitting with a group. Much is written about the adverse social and emotional effects upon children and adults regarding technology use, especially around social networks, and what is lost when we are not present in typical social learning situations. Distraction, anxiety, isolation, lack of impulse control, etc., are a few of the byproducts of our digital age.

We now have a generation in their 20s whose experience is of always being connected. Jean Twenge covers this topic in-depth with her book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–And What That Means for the Rest of Us. I can see parents and educators reading this book to understand better how technology influences our younger generations. The next step for families and educators is to develop family and school technology and life plans that start with the family’s and school’s mission and values. Action plans can then be created and implemented.

There is also the discussion of how smartphones are diminishing our mental capacities. On his On Point radio show, Tom Ashbrook discussed this topic in a recent episode. We know that personal learning devices can do so much to assist us as learners. How do we help students see the devices as tools they effectively use without the technology controlling the user? One approach is to help students develop their learning system to empower and skill them to use technology positively and positively.

Helping students learn the skills to work with information, create and communicate is at the core of what we instructional technologists and librarians do. Hopefully, this blog and the Ed Tech Co-Op podcast have provided educators with ideas, especially in helping students with what we call Information and Communication Literacies (ICL). What I still need to cover, though, is how to help students in their social and emotional development, especially as we put devices in their hands.

As I am also a guidance counselor, though it has been many years since I wore that hat, I have a few ideas that are probably already in the blogosphere. But as I am considering returning to counseling, my instructional technology skills overlap significantly with what I am guessing counselors are teaching and providing support in their schools. Thus, I will write a series of posts to help me construct a plan for approaching the possibility of a return to guidance counseling.

I have been thinking a great deal about how we are preparing students and helping their parents handle our connected and digital world. I will research what elementary and middle school guidance counselors in my local public school district do in their teaching of students and outreach to parents.

I suspect one big topic centers around social networking as well as cyberbullying. While we instructional technologists develop and teach digital citizenship skills, what does the guidance curriculum look like in elementary and middle school? It is a mistake to think that the technology coach/teacher needs the training, time, or responsibility to be the only leader in developing and teaching curricula to assist students as they learn to make technological decisions. This is especially the case in their social and emotional growth and development. With this point in mind, as I have written before, we might look to drop the digital from “digital citizenship” or go further with the broader term of “life skills” development. Citizenship today incorporates blended face-to-face and virtual connections, but it only covers some aspects of how technology affects our students.

Teaching life skills is an integral part of a guidance counselor’s mission. Now with technology so intertwined into students’ lives, counselors and instructional technologists are partnering to create a shared life skills curriculum for themselves and the teaching staff to teach. Advisory time can provide the structure for teachers, counselors, and instructional technologists to teach a life skills curriculum.

Being overly connected to one’s phone and computer affects the amount of time for exercise, getting outdoors, and sometimes making smart eating and sleeping choices. And if we are genuinely looking at the whole child and their physical, intellectual, emotional, and social growth and development (PIES), we need to expand our instructional team. In that case, we should consider expanding the collaboration to include the PE and Health teachers.

So be on the lookout for posts as I start a new series designated as “Counseling-IT Partnership.”

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Preparing Students for Personalized Learning, Effective Technology Use and Advisory

June 11, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Personalized learning is the current buzzword for self-directed learning. I am using it to title this post asking how we are preparing students to have more control over their learning time, place, content, creation, and communication, especially when using technology.

Jeff and I spoke many times on the Shifting Our Schools (SOS) podcast about the process of “schooling” that can, on occasion, lessen the curiosity, joy, and natural inclination to learn from our students, especially as they move from elementary through middle school. The elementary model of learning stations and teachers facilitating small table groups sometimes morphs into rows of passive receivers of information as students move on from ES. Passivity grows, and less personalization occurs as the attitude of “just tell me what is on the test” is sometimes the norm for the full range of students, including those in the high-pressure pathway to IB and AP courses.

Now with a shift towards “student-centered learning” and advances in web-based instructional tools and modular learning along with inquiry and project-based learning being more prevalent, what are ways schools starting in elementary expand on their life skills curriculum to help students learn the Habits of Mind and gain the needed dispositions so that they can direct their learning, especially when using technology and multiple information sources? The shift is wonderful. Let’s make sure our students are in the groove to handle it. 🙂

And as we see more and more high school hybrid programs of students designing some of their classes (see podcast interviews 1 and 2 with Sophia Pink) to include taking classes online and at the community college. In that case, students need the personal responsibility, know-how, drive, and skill set to manage their learning experiences.

So thinking with the end in mind, I am guessing that there are elementary and middle schools where instructional technologists, librarians, classroom teachers, and other interested educators are partnering with the guidance counselor to construct and teach a curriculum that incorporates ICL, citizenship, life skills and various dispositions that help grow our students into being further self-directed and skilled in managing their learning especially when it comes to interacting with technology and digital information sources. 

Growth in self-management (regulation) is central to students’ natural development. Technology used effectively can enhance learning and become a tool for distraction while also becoming a barrier to students interacting face to face. Giving them a device without helping them understand and learn how it can affect their lives negatively and positively is unacceptable. And I am talking much more than digital citizenship here.

I see many students before school, at lunch, and during breaks with their faces glued to devices instead of being present with one another. An additional thought for this program development is that some schools are bringing parents into the development process and offering parenting classes in the digital age to carry the curriculum into home life.

I see the counselor leading out in the development of this curriculum. We must remember that instructional technologists and librarians help students learn how to use technology and information sources. The counselor partners with teachers to provide learning opportunities for social, emotional, and general life skills growth.

Besides a robust guidance program of counselors as teachers in the classroom, another avenue to structure and implement this curriculum is through advisory/morning meetings. Advisory from ES through HS can be an excellent home base for students and a learning place with carefully articulated lessons guiding students to command their learning journey.

I won’t go further here, but a lot comes to mind regarding components in what might be called a “personalized life learning curriculum” or some variation. Just as teachers start the year with discussions around expectations, rules, and goals, this curriculum should incorporate lessons on class and whole school culture wrapped around core beliefs laid out in a mission statement. This process of pulling from the Habits of Mind, various dispositions, mindsets, character strengths, and other life skill collections is a part of my belief that we should help students construct their personal learning system by the time they leave elementary school. And the more that the personalized life learning curriculum is entirely constructed and on the “digital shelf” for teachers to pull from, the better.

One last thought. If schools are looking at historical personalized learning models, read Audrey Watter’s post on The Histories of Personalized Learning. Seeing her point out that Montessori has always been about personalized learning is nice. It definitely can be a model to apply. I plan to write a few posts about one local Middle School Montessori team of teachers using an Information and Communication Literacies (ICL)approach to support their program.

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Habits

Pre-service Teacher Preparation

May 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

 

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We celebrated the recording of our 50th Ed Tech Co-Op episode, talking about pre-service teacher education. Pre-service teacher education has been in the news lately, prompting prominent bloggers to share their respective views, emphasizing the skill sets our future teachers need.

Look at the Mindshift post on changes to teacher prep programs and Scott McLeod’s post on what teachers graduating from teacher prep programs should be able to do. 

From time to time, we talk about pre-service teacher education, with Mark sharing what he is seeing at William and Mary. The 50th show hopefully can add to the ongoing discussion about how we prepare our future educators.

Here are some rough notes that I put together before the show. We covered many of them but not all.

 

Notes for pre-service teacher podcast:

While I think we need to teach the instructional skills and methods needed to be a teacher, I think we need to approach our pre-service teachers much like we do our K-12 students. We want them to be independent and skilled at knowing how to learn, adapt, and design in a hopefully ever-changing educational landscape.

We want our young and second-career teachers to have the ICL skills that we want them to help develop in their students. If a new teacher has her ICL toolkit well constructed, she can adapt, develop and move towards the shifted practices we want in our schools. This also involves being flexible, wanting to constantly grow and learn, desiring collaboration, being willing to take risks, etc.

We also want the pre-service educators to think of learning goals for lessons/units in terms of concepts first supported by skills and content. The skills and content help one’s students gain an understanding of the concepts. The dissonance is that, in many cases, the new teachers will see standards and standardized tests that mainly focus on the content knowledge. The trick is helping the pre-service teachers learn how to design lessons that use the content to get to the concepts. This will take care of the testing while also developing the students as thinkers learning about ideas while making connections in their learning.

Another skill is how to design student-centered constructivist learning activities that are also scaffolded enough to really work. This takes time, lots of experience, and knowing what each group of students can and cannot handle. The design process needs a great deal of creativity and imagination.

It is essential to develop the mindset and skills to work as a designer engaging creativity while being willing to take risks. We also need to help future teachers become TPACKers with the knowledge that building a team of TPACKers, including the learning support specialists, is better. Mark and Judy’s recent TPACK paper covered how collaboration helps one TPACK. Thus it makes sense to train teachers to reach out to one another to connect to the distributed expertise in one’s building and in one’s PLN.

We also need to help pre-service teachers understand that they cannot design their units all at once and must use their research skills to find what others have already done. There are many repositories of lessons, units, and whole course curricula. We need to help future teachers live by the 80% rule to get a good chunk of new lessons created, but with the knowledge that it isn’t worth trying to get them totally complete. One learns so much in teaching them that the extra 20% isn’t worth the time and effort. Learn what works and doesn’t for next year’s iteration and improvement.

Help new educators start with sound analog teaching and assessment strategies to develop their “learning activities types (LAT)” matrices. They can then look to technology to replace, amplify or transform (RAT model) their solid pedagogy. And, of course, we should help our new teachers build their PLN and PLCs, if possible, to not have to reinvent lessons and to keep the personal learning going beyond school-provided PD opportunities.

Educators should have the skills and hopeful desire to teach in a blended virtual learning environment driven by student and teacher questions, with students needing to be independent and active– not passive. Suppose we will give our students more ownership and control over their learning. In that case, we need teachers willing to use WebQuests, learning management systems, social media tools, etc., to give students avenues to personalize their learning.

Yet, if we expect our students to be independent and active learners, we must help them develop the disposition to make intelligent choices when using Web-connected devices. We keep spending lots of money putting Internet-connected devices in front of students without doing the work of preparing them to be disciplined, focused, and dedicated to using the devices for learning and not being off task. We love constructivist individual and group learning, but our students must use the tools effectively while employing dispositions that guide them to be independent and active learners. This is another area where a strong ICL program needs to be in place, especially in our elementary skills.

The Shifting Process: Skilling Students for Personalized Learning

February 26, 2012 / / 2 Comments

We talk about moving our schools to places where students are immersed in constructivist learning expeditions that give them much more control over their learning. We want open-ended projects driven by students asking questions while being connected to their personal learning networks to find answers. Student interest and passion drive learning.

As someone who helps design the project-based curricula at my schools, I have been bringing up how we are “skilling” our students to participate in these learning journeys. I do this because I think it is a disservice to our students to not fully develop their “learning toolkits” or personal learning systems to be prepared for the student-centered learning we discuss. While so much of elementary school is about teaching our students how to learn concurrently, we sometimes need to discreetly focus on all the skills and dispositions needed to be self-directed learners expected to work and think divergently. 

As Daniel Pink points out, providing autonomy and the pathway to attain mastery are powerful motivating forces. However, many motivated students must gain organizational skills and habits of mind to successfully participate in self-directed and collaborative learning projects, especially when working with technology. To see one’s personal learning system device as a tool for learning and productivity often takes work for adults and teenagers. So what do we do about this?

At one of my previous schools, we put a learning skills plan together for new students starting at our school. We wanted to prepare our students for a new type of learning and introduce them to the culture of our international school and our 1:1 laptop program. As we were in Taiwan, where many of the local students had only experienced passive learning in teacher-directed classrooms, it was quite a challenge for them to begin the process of learning how to become self-directed, engaged, and “efficient” learners, especially with the distractibility of having a laptop.

Besides several ongoing community-building activities to further the new students’ understanding of an open learning community, we used the 7th-grade Humanities class to teach the social studies topic of culture in our school’s culture. The unit also included the teaching of the organizational and learning skills needed to help build out each student’s learning toolkit/personal learning system, which included knowing where to go online to find text and video tutorials, which widgets to have on the laptop (e.g., calculator, dictionary), which software to use for which purpose (technology literacy), which online tools to help with recording research and bibliographies, etc.

I was prompted to write this post by Will Richardson’s recent ASCD article on personal learning networks and my current school’s effort to help students become more active and independent learners. We are piloting the use of iPads in our 5th-grade classrooms. The iPads are helping the teachers give students more access to information and creative tools to make meaning and to create projects to communicate their understanding. We are moving our students on the continuum of dependent to independent learners, and a big part of the process is helping them be more organized, efficient, and intelligent in how they use their time on iPads. I hope we will help our students learn how to set up their iPads with specific apps and bookmarks to online resources that further empower them as independent learners, knowing which tools to access to meet their varied learning needs.

Do read Will’s article in its entirety. Still, one paragraph covers the shifting process, looking at what we teach and how we are preparing our students to be learners prepared to go deep to find proper understanding.

“That rethinking revolves around a fundamental question: When we have an easy connection to the people and resources we need to learn whatever and whenever we want, what fundamental changes need to happen in schools to provide students with the skills and experiences they need to do this type of learning well? Or, to put it more succinctly, are we preparing students to learn without us? How can we shift curriculum and pedagogy to more effectively help students form and answer their own questions, develop patience with uncertainty and ambiguity, appreciate and learn from failure, and develop the ability to go deeply into the subjects about which they have a passion to learn?”

 

Bill Moyers, Social Studies and Current Events

February 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bill Moyers is back producing a new TV show and podcast. The first episodes focus on the major American banks and their role in the 2008 financial collapse. Moyers speaks with various guests as he explains what happened and how we need to take steps to prevent a bank collapse from happening again.

I enjoyed the shows, but they also made me think about how important it is to share them with students. So much has happened since 2008 with new populist movements, and now elections are very much in the news. Much of the political discussion is about wealth, power, and government. One could not ask for more of a teachable moment for a social studies teacher.

Our social studies classes should have a current events component that provides connections to the big ideas of how government, wealth, power, and business are so connected. Our US history and government classes should definitely be filled with discussions where students use their information literacy skills to unpack news articles, campaign ads, and the gibberish of cable news shows.

The most recent Moyers and Company show is on why liberals and conservatives see the world so differently. Moyers interviews Professor Jonathan Haidt of UVA, who offers his theory on this topic. Haidt’s ideas reminded me of the life skill/disposition we teach our two sons. My wife and I push them to seek to understand opposing viewpoints and to see from the perspective of others. Haidt’s theory helps one gain perspective by using a framework of specific foundations of morality that societies and their cultures develop from. One can gain understanding and perspective by using the lens of these foundations to view how liberals and conservatives approach the topics discussed in the current election.

I have a couple of ideas for an ongoing social studies class project that would involve students role-playing liberal, moderate, and conservative perspectives in dealing with upcoming events in the news. It could be challenge-based as each group would respond from their perspective to news events chosen by the teacher. They would also need to communicate with the other groups using Haidt’s construct. By demonstrating their effort to understand where the other two groups are coming from, the students, in time, should find common ground.

I think Mark and I could do a future episode of the Edtech podcast where we develop this idea into a unit of study with a final project where the groups agree on the role of government in the US. One of the learning outcomes would be to help students discover how democracy can truly work, especially when its participants gather information from various perspectives while using Haidt’s framework to understand why each of us thinks the way we do.

Here are links to Professor Haidt’s site, his TED talk, blog, and survey— if you would like to participate in his research.

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Gadgets, the Brain and Families

June 8, 2010 / / 0 Comments

gadget

As educators, we blog about best practices in using technology and information for learning. We discuss the lives of our students outside of school and how they are connected and seemingly always “On” when it comes to their social networks—the New York Times just published an article entitled “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying the Mental Price” that looks at some of the adverse effects of our always being connected. The author, Matt Richtel, combines research and a running narrative of one family’s gadget-filled lifestyle.

One focus of my work in the upcoming school year will be to work with students, staff, and parents to discuss using technology to support their values and reach their goals. We will examine what actions are needed to optimize technology and information gathering. We will also look at what steps need to be taken to lessen the influence of technology so that goals for family time, good communication, community involvement, etc. can be met. I also hope to discuss running a “screen-free week,” just as Jeff Utecht has in his schools.

I will work with elementary and middle school students to develop their information, technology, and media literacies. One of the big habits of mind that goes with all these skills is to focus intensely to gain understanding. Helping students to think about how they are using technology and information effectively and efficiently has to be a primary goal for any technology and information integration program.

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