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Tag: Curriculum (page 2 of 3)

The Instructional Technologist and Teacher Librarian: PD to the Classroom

January 16, 2012 / / 1 Comment

With the Blogosphere and Twitterverse filled with discussions about how to shift schools, focus on 21st-century skills, create and promote learning communities, provide PD, etc., it seems like an opportune time to revisit the roles of the instructional technologist and teacher librarian as leaders and change agents in our schools. We planned on making this a topic in an upcoming EdTech Co-op podcast, but a blog post leads me to share some ideas now.

Tim Holt’s recent post about the role of professional trainers and speakers hit a nerve for many folks and has led to many discussions about how to bring about change in our schools. My response is to put forth the instructional technologist and librarian as key leaders in schools who should follow up on professional development (PD) activities to facilitate the action steps to connect the learning from the PD to the learning in our classrooms. 

As for the considerable topic of shifting our schools, Jeff Utecht and I produced a podcast all about Shifting Our Schools. Please look at the show notes, as our guests brought many helpful ideas. Only the latest podcasts are still accessible via iTunes.

While Tim argues that the educational gurus should offer us the how-to’s on how to shift our schools, the pushback is that each school is different, and the road maps must be individualized. I agree with this and see that there are many ways to offer professional development for our learning communities. Still, the key is the follow-up after the PD, which is not the responsibility of PD providers. Whether one brings in educational trainers, sends staff off to conferences, runs book discussions, or has teachers take courses, the bottom line is that there are many choices and that each educator should be empowered to design and build their professional learning network as so many in the blogosphere promote.

It is then up to the school’s leadership to create the mechanism involving the use of time and support to empower the staff to develop the “how to” to take PD learning into the classrooms. Administrators provide this essential leadership, but the instructional technologist and teacher-librarian often are the doers, either working via the curriculum review process or collaborating individually or with groups of teachers who turn the PD into action.

Whether you call your school instructional technologist a technology integration specialist, educational technologist, learning coach, or whatever, it is crucial to realize what this well-skilled leader can do for your school. One can review the posts and articles by library leaders to paint the picture of the modern teacher librarian, or you could review the skill set and 21st-century vision of my wife, the library media specialist at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

To paint the picture of an instructional technologist, here is a MindMeister mind map I created several years ago for a conference in China where the participants helped build out the IT/ET job description, including experience and skill set for a 21st-century instructional technologist. Hopefully, it provides a discussion point on whether you have an instructional technologist or want to hire one but need a job description.

We will soon be discussing this topic further in the Edtech Co-op podcast.

Your Teaching and Learning Team

December 22, 2011 / / 0 Comments

How is your student support team organized? Who is on the team? Are you providing mainly pullout, pull-in, or build-in services? How is your professional development system connected to this team and its mission? There are many questions to ask when we step back and think about the best way to provide reinforcement, enrichment, and an overall differentiated learning environment for our students.

Over the past few years, I have focused on building a systematic approach to developing a curriculum. One aspect of this approach is forming a team approach to build out units of study that incorporate ICL integration, differentiation of instruction and assessment, meeting school-wide goals, etc. Efforts by our learning support team at Alexandria Country Day School and a recent article in the Davidson Journal (Davidson College in NC) reminded me that we should also look at systems supporting student learning outside the curriculum review process.

I remember the early 1990s at the American International School-Riyadh when we developed a student support system for the middle school. The team members included all the teachers, an administrator, the counselor, and the learning support teachers. We created the structure of common meeting times for the two teams at each grade level. One day a week, we discussed individual student learning needs, while on another day, the focus was on the curriculum. We used technology to record learning plans, goals, and results in the student information system. However, the librarian was absent in the meetings while the technology teacher visited to share his lessons and not so much as a collaborator in the curriculum process.

We were ahead of the curve in many ways but failed to make the connection between needing to bring more specialists on board for the curriculum and, just as importantly, for the learning support. The technology teachers and the librarians could have collaborated in both areas to make a difference for our students.

Returning to today, the article from the Davidson Journal explains how the college recently brought different groups of learning support teams together under one roof– the library. As so many of us write about, the library/media center/learning community should be at the center of one’s school/campus. It makes total sense to bring your technology specialists and your other learning support teachers into the library. It also makes sense to have your instructional technologist and teacher librarian as members of your learning support team when creating a curriculum review system and as partners in grade level/department meetings when creating learning support strategies.

An additional item to note is that this team is naturally skilled with “building in” learning support strategies to be added to the units in your curriculum mapping tool. By documenting strategies in your curriculum system to support struggling and students needing enrichment, you move away from the old “pullout” support model. 

I learned from Dr. Mary Landrum and my wife’s expertise as a GATE coordinator that the more we can collaborate with teachers to develop learning activities and assessments together, the more that they can pull learning strategies off “the shelf” of the curriculum tool to support students without calling for them to be pulled out of their classes. While Dr. Landrum teaches mainly about providing instruction for gifted students, her book Consultation in Gifted Education: Teachers Working Together to Serve Students provides a collaboration model that can be used to meet the whole spectrum of student needs.

And back to how your professional development program is run, one hopes for teacher involvement in choosing topics and the teaching and learning team adding their insights. This team’s engagement puts them in an excellent position to assess the instructional needs across the school. 

I am rambling here, but if you are interested in learning more about Davidson’s new program, I wrote a post for my school’s blog about the Davidson article and how our school was following the same model. Here is that post>

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Davidson College is known as a very academic liberal arts college that is dedicated to supporting the craft of teaching by its professors. Davidson’s professors do research and write articles and books, but their primary focus is on teaching. To support their efforts, as part of the strategic plan, Davidson opened its Center for Teacher and Learning (CTL) in the school library in August.

The connection to Alexandria Country Day School is that we also opened our Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) in August. What is striking in reading an article from the Fall 2011 Davidson Journal is how similar the two programs are. It demonstrates the forward-thinking and student-centered nature of our administrators and TLC staff when we mirror the program of a college such as Davidson.

Central to the work of our TLC team members is the focus on collaboration with the classroom teachers. This partnership, looking at how best to reach learning goals and meet individual student needs, drives how the TLC teachers help design instruction and provide one-to-one support for our students.

An additional part of this “collaboration team” approach to supporting teaching and learning is the involvement of our instructional technologist, teacher librarian, and director of technology. As part of the iPad pilot program, the fifth-grade teachers worked with our technology and library team members over the summer to review and adapt the fifth-grade curriculum to further support the students in attaining skills for the 21st century. The curriculum was further adapted to meet the information, media, and visual literacy standards supported by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and the technology literacies published as the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for students. Members of the TLC will join the collaboration team in January as they review the sixth-grade curriculum in preparation for next year and the continued roll “forward” of the iPad Pilot program.

The Davidson Journal article describes the same team effort of the Center for Teaching and Learning – “(the CTL)…brings together these centers- along with the instructional technologists and information literacy librarians- to help students take a comprehensive approach to strengthening academic skills. The CTL also advises faculty who want to experiment with new teaching tools and to discuss different approaches to teaching.”

Davidson College is in good company with its pioneering efforts. 🙂

 

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“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test.”

November 26, 2011 / / 0 Comments

These words describe the goal of the Finnish educational system, as stated by Pasi Stahlberg, who is in the Finnish Ministry of Education. Read more about how the Finnish educational system is so successful in a Smithsonian magazine article that details their techniques.

Another interesting read is Tom Friedman’s revelation that parents are indeed crucial in the education of our children. 🙂 He points to recent “studies” demonstrating that we need better parenting in partnership with the efforts taking place in our schools. I enjoyed the hundreds of comments offering further insights from the article.

 

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Parenting in Our Digital Age

April 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

family tech

I am a real believer in communicating to our school community about how our instructional technologists and librarians are providing the tools and various literacies (i.e., information, media, design, etc.) to help students attain the learning outcomes of the curriculum. Whether it be through blogs, weekly emails, media sites sharing student work or parent coffees, the members of one’s Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) team do need to provide the leadership to share with students, teachers, and parents how the ICL skills make a difference in student learning while also supporting parents as they decide how their children use technology in the home.

I bring up this point as our ICL team, the school counselor, and the middle school principal recently offered a parent coffee on parenting in our digital age. We gave a presentation back in the Fall, but it needed to be more of a shared discussion for our Spring presentation, especially parent-to-parent on Internet use, cell phones, texting, etc. While a part of the discussion should be about technology, parenting and the importance of good family communication should be at the center. 

We are fortunate to have an excellent counselor in Carla Belsher, who, from the start of the year, has provided the insights and resources to empower our parents to communicate better and partner with their children in making decisions about technology and social networking tools.

The coffee was well-attended, and as we hoped for, the parents provided excellent insights from their experiences. The discussion offered parents of younger students valuable real parenting experiences while giving our parents of older children several ideas on how they might work with technology use in their families.

In the Fall, we created a Web site listing multiple resources for parents to gather information. We shared our belief that creating a family technology use plan is one way to provide the structure and guidance for families to educate better and manage how everyone uses technology. The parent resources site also links to an online version of our Fall presentation. While cyberbullying is a topic of concern for our community that is also often in the press, our online presentation connects to the importance of teaching children about privacy and how it is a very different world today, with so many children having an online presence.

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Egypt+Constitution=Learning & Creating

February 14, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Egypt-image

How about designing a WebQuest where students using the ESPRAT+G approach to social studies role-play various stakeholders in Egyptian society to write their new constitution? This research and real-life problem-solving opportunity would have students gathering information about the economy, social connections, political realities, etc. while drawing on established democratic constitutions worldwide. An added twist would be to have one’s students contact students and adults in Egypt to learn of their hopes and natural world perspectives as they work to develop political parties and construct a system to create their new constitution.

Building on the power of the social networking tools that furthered the recent revolution, a second idea is to have the Egyptian people use the same collaborative and communication tools to help create their new government and constitution. While democracy can be messy at times, maybe this will be one time when the power of the people directly influences how their new society is formed.

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Teaching Resources for Texting and Social Networking

September 6, 2010 / / 1 Comment

LG Text

Working at a new school in a new country offers many learning opportunities. At Alexandria Country Day School, I am learning about our school community’s culture and the broader perspective of living in the USA after many years working internationally. As an educator and a parent, I am very interested in the world my students and two sons are dealing with in and out of school and on the Web.

Our middle school staff worked with Rosalind Wiseman last week to further develop our advisory program’s curriculum. While not working directly with technology, we discussed the effects of our students using technology through texting and other communication tools.

Rosalind has published several books on teens that offer ideas for educators and parents to develop strategies to help teenagers deal with their world. Rosalind also blogs and posts videos on her site. She doesn’t hold back and deals with issues head-on.

An added resource Rosaland shared with us is a series of YouTube videos that LG contracted actress Jane Lynch to do. The videos entertain and get the message across about how texting can affect our children and our families. It reinforces my belief that educators and parents must further teach the skill/habit/quality of being present with others.

For more information on technology and its effects on us, check out the New York Times series “Your Brain on Computers.”

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Socratic Seminar & Essential Questions (Instructional Strategy)

January 17, 2010 / / 0 Comments

We are completing a unit in my American Studies class on Reconstruction. The students are participating in a WebQuest called ReconstructionQuest. Besides the students playing their role from the WebQuest and giving a speech, they are participating in a Socratic Seminar on the unit’s essential questions.

Socratic Seminars usually center around students discussing their reading responses from the provided text, so I decided they would generate the text themselves. With four essential questions, the class formed four table teams where they spent 30 minutes discussing, answering, and recording their responses in a Word document. Each table was then assigned one specific question to review and prepare to share.

Depending on class size, We had one or two members from each table join the inner circle discussion. The assigned table team for question one has their response projected on the screen for everyone to read and react to. The other students sat in the outside circle, listening and raising their hands occasionally to join the inner circle discussion during breaks. Each table team sent a new student to the inner discussion circle as we moved through the questions.

It quickly became apparent that we would need a whole other class period as the students took the conversation in different directions, going deeper and deeper to build their understanding. It was incredibly gratifying to see students make connections in the learning to their lives, Morocco, and international current events. An excellent value added to this learning activity was the opportunity for students to model good listening skills while staying focused and on task.

Here are the essential questions we discussed:

•After conflict, how to find and keep the peace?

•How can conflict lead to change?

•How to bring about change…deliberately or quickly?

•What are the foundation components of a healthy society?

Learning & Leading Article Follow UP

December 12, 2008 / / 0 Comments

The editors of Learning and Leading with Technology are publishing an article my wife and I authored in their current issue 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 over the past few months offered questions for school leaders to consider as they develop their procedures for creating their curriculum review system.

We edited down the current L & L article from a procedure paper I wrote at the start of the process and added to it 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 takeaways from developing the procedures.

Curriculum Review Procedure Paper

How to Shift When the Adminstrators Are Not Onboard? SOS Episode 16

November 13, 2008 / / 0 Comments

I know I ramble, but time is short, and we have the podcast tonight. Here are some thoughts about 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 integrating 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 the table of outdated mission outcomes and opening up the discussion about what the community, including students, parents, and faculty, believes in and values. Start with the fundamental 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 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 give students the tools to be lifelong learners? Hopefully, one’s school will see the value of 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 to develop a curriculum, instruction, and assessments that will get one’s students to learn 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.

The main focus is on Stage 1 of McTigue and Wiggin’s UbD process for all the curriculum units. It all comes down to the enduring understanding we are teaching. Administrators must collaborate in the curriculum review process. The conversations and unpacking of the standards into the EUs are where we bring the administrators on board to constructivist, inquiry, student-centered learning. We have to be ready to have critical conversations asking administrators how we can 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 ever-changing world. If our administrators are charged with delivering the educational experience to reach the mission and habits for learning, get them to explain how we can do it in classrooms where the curriculum being taught needs to support the school’s 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 on board as we develop ways to use information literacy and technology to assess and teach the students.

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

Participants: How to Create a Collaborative and Systematic Process for Curriculum Development and Review

October 28, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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. As the first post on the big picture, these are questions for community members to work through before designing their system.

All Participants:

1) Who will 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 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 reviewing (e.g., facilitator, scribe, etc.)?

5) How far along is the curriculum in being differentiated to meet the 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?

8) 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 in this effort?

Administration:

10) What do you need from your building principal? What is their role in the process?

11) How can the Curriculum Director support you and the entire process?

12) Which other administrators must be involved in curriculum development? What are their roles in this process?

What other questions come to mind?

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