Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Okay so Wordle has been the rage in the bloggosphere of late, and many are making tag clouds for their Delicious Accounts. I can’t because I hate to admit this, but my delicious account is a mess, one that I seriously need to take the time and clean up. Why? I have tags that only have meaning to me. My tags would not mean anything to anyone else. Like what? Well like dates for when I need something–it is a tag. See what I men? Meaningless to anyone but me.

So I was missing out on the Wordle fun! This morning I took time to check out Wordle, and wow the possibilities. I discovered that Wordle will make a cloud out of any writing. I made a cloud (above) of my June archive in my blog. My hot topics are school, blog, learning library, media, teachers, & students. I’m pleased to see I focus more on “learning,” but disappointed that the word “teacher” and “student” still seem to be prominent words in m vernacular. I had a goal not too long ago to try and replace those two words synonymously with “learner.” Well at least I can see the effort is there.

I can definitely see the possibilities of this in the classroom, particularly a classroom where writing is emphasized. It will help writers see what words are used in abundance (or overused). I can just imagine the word “like” hugely displayed in most middle-schooler’s writing. I can also imagine a lot of txt-talk there as well. I am looking forward to sharing this with the learners who lead in the classroom at my school.

What can you do in just fifteen minutes?

• Write a “to do” list
• Fold a load of clothes
• Start supper
• Take a short nap
• Read a Newspaper
• Take the dog out for a walk

Now obviously this list could go on and on, and I don’t mean to belittle any of the tasks that I list above, as I frequently do any and all of the items I have listed daily.

This weekend I listened to the EdTech Posse podcast, and one f the reoccurring statements said was that many things just take fifteen minutes. What were they talking about? Professional Learning. In today’s world of connectivity, there is no legitimate excuse that teachers do not know about many of the newest applications, be it web 2.0 applications, open source software, or picture/video editors. There are MANY opportunities on the web to provide one’s self with self directed professional development, and much of it in just fifteen minutes a day.

So, where does one start? I recommend you begin with a reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader. Some people like PageFlakes too, though I haven’t experienced using it before.

Then collect a few blogs and a couple of podcasts. Start small, after all this is just supposed to take fifteen minutes. I would subscribe to the following:

Dean Shareski’s Ideas and Thoughts

Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed

Wesley Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Liz B Davis’ The Power of Educational Technology

Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog

Seek out some local flavor too, like those in your district or state. I found many local ones by serching the words blog+South Carolina+education+technology (and even + library). Then add them by subscribing with your reader. Your reader becomes a one stop shop for professional learning.

BEST, these blogs DO NOT focus necessarily on the technology, but rather the learning and keeping it engaging for our students. Talk about think out of the box kind of people!

How?

Look for a bookmarklet that reads “subscribe here,” or just copy the URL in the “add” feature of your reader. Then select the choice that has rss at or near the end. Look to see if the blog also offers a subscription to comments. Shareski and Richardson both have healthy comments feeds.

Then visit your reader once a day, and spend about fifteen minutes learning, learning, learning. Soon you’ll realize just exactly what you can get from all this, and then begin thinking “how can I tap my students into this?” And that’s a whole new post for some other day.

Read this helpful piece too:
InfoTech Column
Due Dec. 20, 2006
Information Outlook, Feb. 2007 Issue
15 Minutes a Day: A Personal Learning Management Strategy
By Stephen Abram

Attribution:

Image: ‘FifteenMinutes‘
www.flickr.com/photos/94272988@N00/100273292

While I had hoped the class I virtually participated in for a backchannel discussion on the chapter on meaning would focus on meaningful learning, I guess that was a lofty hope. Only teachers can truly make that connection, I suppose. This was the last chapter of Karl Fisch’s school project where the students in English classes read Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind and then invited guests from Karl’s network were able to join in the back channel via a blog and commenting.

The students focused on deep conversations about life and the meaning of life. I was not disappointed though.  The students opened the door to a witnessing about religious beliefs, and the conversation was allowed to happen, both in the inner circle and the backchannel where Vicki Davis and I were.  I was a wee bit nervous about clearly stating my beliefs, but you know, when the Lord opens the door, you have no choice.  Both Vicki and I shared our beliefs and how everything in life happens for  reason, even if it is not clear to us at the time that things happen.  I left the conversation thinking, WOW we are able to be witnesses to God’s love to a class–a public school class.  Mind you there were still some students who questioned whether there is a higher authority in life, and if life has meaning at all. It was a truly interesting conversation.  I hope you get a chance to read the discussion. (The picture above shows how I participated-I am in a studio at school. Vicki Davis I believe is at her desk in her classroom.  Although we are only 471 mils apart, and she was south of me in Camilla, Georgia, the temperature was significantly cooler and more unstable where she was than me. She reported a terrible thunderstorm going on during the class, and cooler weather. I, meanwhile had rain and temps in the upper 60s.  Notice she has on a turtleneck. I was wearing a short sleeved school shirt. I had FireFox open with several tabs including the MeBeam site with the class video, my video, and Vicki’s video, as well as Skype so I could privately talk to Vicki, and the a whole new window of the comments feed for the class, so I could follow along and see the video at the same time. I wish I could have enlarged the video of the class, but I didn’t see that as an option on MeBeam.)

Karl has been providing some reflection on the project as it goes, and you can find it on his blog. I’m really anxious to hear the final thoughts now that the book discussion has concluded.

What do the pictures on this post tell us about these students’ engagement? Can you tell who is “into” the lesson, and who is not? Sometimes engagement is painfully obvious, and other times it isn’t.

Can anyone tell I had a LOT of staff development in recent years on this?? As a staff we were encouraged to have our students assess their own level of engagement to use on our own as a way to assess our “work.” We literally took time at the end of a class to get feedback (mostly anonymous) from our students. A popular one I used was small stickies and a chart with the Levels–and as kids left they put their sticky on their level. Students were encouraged to make other comments on the sticky, and encouraged to put their name on it too, which was strictly optional. There was no punishment, as I explained all the time I’m trying to fine tune a lesson, and their feedback is important to me.

I haven’t used this at all this year–shame on me–but I think I will get it back out. This was a great way to let me know I was creating lessons and activities that either worked or didn’t work.

Descriptions of Each of the 5 Levels of Engagement

There are five levels of engagement that students might go in and out of during a lesson. The more compelling the lesson is and the work associated with it the higher the likelihood that students will stay engaged. There are other reasons why students will stick with a lesson and work assigned or abandon it. Dr. Schlechty has defined all five levels of engagement

Engagement – High attention and high commitment —Authentic, willing and purposeful attention and true commitment to the demands of quality work. Student engagement should be the central concern of all teachers so that student achievement will increase. The core business of teaching is to create challenging, engaging, and satisfying work for every student, every day; therefore, staff engagement is seen as attention and commitment to designing such work. Students who are engaged learn at high levels, retain what they learn, and can transfer what they learn to new contexts.

Strategic Compliance – High attention but low commitment. There is learning occurring but the reason for the work is not the reason the students do the work. When strategically compliant, the students substitute their own goals - such as grades, class rank, college acceptance, parental approval - for the goals of the work. Students who are strategically compliant learn at high levels but have only a superficial grasp of what they have learned, so they do not retain what they learn for very long and usually cannot transfer what they learn from one context to another.

Ritual Compliance – Low attention and low commitment. The work has very little meaning to students, but they will do just enough to get by. The ritually compliant students do the minimum amount of work in order to avoid confrontation and negative consequences. There are no substitute goals for them. Students who are ritually compliant learn only at low levels and do not retain what they learn, so seldom can these students transfer what they learn from one context to another.

Retreatism – No attention and no commitment. The students who are retreating are disengaged from current classroom activities and goals. They may feel unable to do what is being asked, may be thinking about other things, and/or may be emotionally withdrawn from the action of the classroom. Students who are in retreat do not participate as they see no relevance to the work and, therefore, learn little or nothing from the task or activity assigned.

Rebellion – Diverted attention. Negative learning occurs as rebellious students abandon the learning we offer them and replace it with their own agenda. These students learn little or nothing from the task or activity assigned. They may even bring others along in their diversion as they encourage others to rebel or they provide too much of a distraction.

Levels of Engagement

Students who are engaged:

• Learn at high levels and have a profound grasp of what they learn
• Retain what they learn
• Transfer what they learn to new contexts

Students who are strategically compliant:

• Learn at high levels but have a superficial grasp of what they learn
• Do not retain what they learn
• Usually cannot transfer what they learn from one context to another
• Substitute their own goals for learning (getting good grades, college acceptance, etc)

Students who are ritually compliant:

• Learn only at low levels and have a superficial grasp of what they learn
• Do not retain what they learn
• Seldom can transfer what they learn from one context to another
• Learn because they want to avoid negative consequences

Students who are in retreatism:

• Do not participate and therefore learn little or nothing from the task or activity assigned
• Find no relevance in the assigned activity or task.

Students who are in rebellion:

• Find no relevance in the assigned activity or task.
• Sometimes learn a great deal from what they elect to do (though rarely that which was expected)
• Develop poor work habits and sometimes develop negative attitudes toward intellectual tasks and formal education
• Often disrupt others from learning.

Attribution:

Image: ‘Bacha3‘
www.flickr.com/photos/51035751904@N01/4191055

Image: ‘untitled‘
www.flickr.com/photos/86603835@N00/1435154217

Image: ‘Ratinder‘
www.flickr.com/photos/30083883@N00/404731585

“The business of schools is to design, create, and invent high-quality, intellectually demanding schoolwork that students find engaging.”
- Phillip C. Schlechty

The key to school success is to be found in identifying or creating engaging schoolwork for students.
- Phillip C. Schlechty

The Working on the Work (WOW) framework is an outline for improving student performance by improving the quality of schoolwork.
- Phillip C. Schelecty

These are some quotes I have used before when talking to teachers about student work. I am once again trying to make teachers understand that having a class sit in rows and face the front for a 90 minute block is just not conducive to learning for all our students. My curriculum coordinator and I are trying ti find engaging lessons that we can document for future staff developments, and here is an interview we conducted Friday. We asked these students 3 questions:

• Describe the assignment your class is working on.
• How is it related to your class subject matter (in this case 7th grade Social Studies)?
• How would you rate this assignment on a scale of 1 -10? Why?

I am surprised at how well the students in this group answered. They spoke the TRUTH! The assignment was to create a VoiceThread about a Revolution. The teacher for this class had collaborated with me in the library to plan this project, and even completed most of it in the library. He is pleased as punch about the results, as I am too. But I want to focus on what an engaging lesson looks like. Here are the design qualities of an engaging assignment:

• Content and Substance: Educators, in collaboration with the community, identify the essential learnings and skills that students must master.
• Organization of Knowledge: Content is organized so that access to the material is clear and relatively easy for all students.
• Product Focus: Engaging work almost always focuses on a product or performance of value to students.
• Clear and Compelling Product Standards: The Standards for assessing the products or the performances are clear and important to students.
• Protection from Adverse Consequences for Initial Failures: Students receive feedback on their work and have opportunities to reach the standard throughout the process.
• Affirmation of Performance: Student products are observed by persons other than the teacher.
• Affiliation: The design of the work requires cooperative action among students and adults.
• Novelty and Variety: The work is varied in methods and format so that students use a variety of skills, media, and modes of analysis.
• Choice: Students are provided with choice in the ways of doing the work and the methods of presentation.
• Authenticity: The work has significance and is related to consequences in the present lives of students.

In no way do I think the assignment we collaborated on exhibited all these characteristics, but a good many of them were visible, even to the students who so innocently expressed as much in the video clip I shared. Comments (not all from the tape) that reaffirm to me that the kids felt it was an engaging lesson:

“We got to choose our own topic.”

“We didn’t just use a book to learn about Revolutions.”

“We made…a powerpoint with pictures to tell about a Revolution.”

“Oh I need to redo that b/c I sound dumb!”

“We learned that a revolution is not just about conflict, but about change.”

“My VoiceThread showed how the skateboard changed over time.”

For there to be learning, a lesson has to be engaging. I am happy to say I think this one accomplished its mission.

We asked some students Friday; trying to insert video here:

Download Video: Posted by cnelson at TeacherTube.com.