After six and a half years in the classroom, I have spent three and a half years on special assignment, first as a coach for the Classrooms for the Future grant, then as a learning coordinator for technology integration and several content areas, and now as a K-12 coach for technology. I have always planned to return to the classroom and teach English and Creative Writing again someday, so I look at the past three and a half years as some of the best, most intensive, non-stop professional development any teacher could ever hope to obtain. I often think of how I will apply to my students everything I have learned from seminars, conferences, courses, and most of all, from teaching over 700 of my colleagues in training sessions for our district. Like many educators know, the best learning occurs when one learns something in order to teach it. I have probably developed during my time out of the classroom tenfold my learning as an undergrad English major and a grad student in English and education. The only time period in my life where I have learned a comparable amount would have to be my time in the classroom, getting that experiential learning that comes from actually being on the job, particularly in the first three years or so. But even the learning from that time period pales in comparison with the learning from these most recent months, when my full-time job has been to research solutions to problems with technology and education, and help teachers and students overcome them.
While conducting a training session yesterday, I shared a particular software and its accompanying hardware with a group of 18 colleagues. It was something new to our district, and I had only used it myself a handful of times. I told the participants in the session that, while I was confident I could do a good job of instructing the session and guiding them to the answers they sought, I was not an expert in this particular area. Instead, I shared what I had learned and figured out, and then we worked together to figure out how to do the many things that individual teachers wanted to learn. We used a wiki page to synthesize our knowlege, and every participant spent a lot of time using the software and hardware to create lessons they would use in their own classrooms. After the session, several participants told me they got a lot out of watching me work through problems we encountered with the new technology, and they enjoyed being able to participate in figuring it out.
I've had this experience several times before in my life:
I was able to make a big impact when I coached a 7th grade baseball team because I struggled myself as a baseball player. I was never a star at any level, but always able to work my way up to competing at the next level, eventually pitching in college. My own hard work and the adversity I faced in baseball was always fresh in mind for me when coaching others.
On the flip side, I do not feel as skilled when it comes to instructing a beginner at skiing, because this is a sport that came naturally to me, so I didn't have to be as cognizant of my own learning, and probably am not able to be as meta-cognative with my methods as I attempt to teach others.
In the English classroom, I was a great mentor for my students in areas of organization, planning, presentation, and other skills I had to teach myself as a learner. In these areas where I was not naturally gifted, I was a far better guide for my students.
I see myself as much weaker, however, when it comes to instructing grammar, sentence structure, and writing, which were all innate skills I don't remember ever having to apply much work to learn myself.
It has been a huge advantage to me as a technology coach to have NOT been a "tech-savvy" person by nature. I learned first from my students, and then from researching questions as I needed to answer them, applied to real-world situations (like teaching a program or website, etc., to a colleague in need).
Similarly, as a teacher, I noticed that my lessons went much better the 2nd or 3rd time through teaching them than they did the 6th or 7th time. I was actually more effective earlier on with teaching a topic or skill than I was after more practice. I think this is because the first attempt was a "warm-up," but the next few really enabled me to demonstrate my thought processes as a learner along with my students. By the time I was an "expert" in a topic, I was already forgetting what it was like to be a first-time learner, and my delivery actually suffered the more I learned.
So how will I use this as a tech coach? As a teacher? As a ski club advisor? With fellow musicians in my "other" job? With my own children? I have to find ways to allow for discovery to take place by learners right when they need it, and directly focused on how they will apply it.
Teachers, do not fear using a new technology (or several simultaneously) with your students before you have mastered it yourself. Instead, master your craft of teaching, managing the classroom, and focusing on the final skills you want your students to master, and be comfortable in your lack of expertise with the tools your students may use to develop those skills.
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Scott Swindells
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions
About a week ago, a colleague told me that March 22nd would be a day of EduSolidarity, when all educators who blog or tweet were encouraged to write a piece entitled "Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions."
Having heard more negative talk in the past several weeks about teachers' unions, as well as about teachers in general, than I have ever heard prior, I was excited that the 22nd would fall on a Tuesday, when I publish my weekly reflections on technology, education and life, in Tuesdays with Swindy.
I am thankful for my union for fighting the battles my fellow teachers and I would not fight for ourselves. When we are asked to cover an extra period, give up lunch, prep, or time before or after school, or make any personal sacrifice for the good of our students, most of us don't think twice before doing it. We volunteer our time when we feel it will help our students. It is why we went in to teaching in the first place, to make a difference. So when a school board or district administration makes a decision that causes us to make sacrifices, most of us are very compliant. It is the union that looks at each of these cases and steps in when the sacrifices we would make would cause more of a nagtive impact over the long run, such as taking away our ability to make the greatest impact on all of our students. Chris Lehman spoke to this point today when he wrote: "Teachers unions make sure that individual teachers don’t have to (choose to give up their rights for the greater good) every day. They remind administrators that there are limits. And they remind administrators that for teachers do be able to do this job, day in and day out, year after year, teachers need to be taken care of as well."
A frequent criticism of unions is that they fight for rights that many others in the workforce gave up long ago. As if the great equalizer is to bring us all down, rather than bring back up those who have less in terms of health care and pension or retirement benefits. I am grateful that our union fights for us in these areas, because I believe that we would lose our best and brightest teachers if pensions, healthcare benefits, and set pay scales were taken away.
There are certainly many reasons that the average teaching career is less than five years. The job can be difficult and thankless. But I think a lot of it has to do with money. Many new teachers are right out of college or grad school, not married, and without children, but five years into the job, you'll find many have married and are starting to have families. People with a lot of education and advanced degrees start to notice that their friends with similar educations in other fields make a lot more money than we do. Maybe it was OK to make these sacrifices when it was just one person, but when one's family is involved, new priorities emerge, and many teachers leave for better-paying job opportunities.
My colleagues are among the most educated people I know, holding advanced degrees in their content areas as well as in education and specialized degrees. They are lifelong learners who are constantly taking courses to better themselves as professionals. They are smart people, who choose to teach to make a difference to benefit the future, not because they are the proverbial "those who can't." They certainly CAN, and if teachers continue to lose benefits, I worry they will leave the profession at even more alarming rates.
Teachers do some of the most important jobs in the world, and are not compensated for their work anywhere near their value to society. So many of us would do it for free if we were able. A compassionate group of hard-working, dedicated, enthusiastic, optimistic and somewhat idealistic people is an easy group to exploit... and our unions and their collective bargaining rights help protect us from having to choose between our students and our own families.
For these reasons, I stand today in solidarity with teachers in Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, and everywhere else who are fighting for the right to have unions with collective bargaining powers.
That's all from me. I'll be back next week with some more thoughts on tech integration in the classroom. I'll leave you with a little of what others are writing today...
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Click Click Click Click...
Today was a Tuesday filled with CPS response pads and the accompanying software from eInstruction.
Earlier this year, our district purchased CPS classroom sets of the CPS Pulse for every building, and now that coaches and many tech assistants have attended a training, the word is out about the excellent potential for classroom use to teach lessons, quiz students, gather student performance data, and engage in instant formative assessment.
Like many other districts, we've taken to calling these devices "clickers," but it's really a misnomer. They don't make any clicking sound! The buttons are made of rubber and the response pads are actually quite silent in operation.
The noise in our district seems to be teachers and administrators clamoring to get their hands -- or their students' hands -- on the devices ASAP. And why not? CPS keeps students interested and engaged in class, allowing even the most reserved students to actively participate and interact with lessons, "answering every question with confidence," as the eInstruction site states.
My day began with trips to two elementary schools to work with individual teachers who were getting started with the response pads. It continued with the scheduling of a co-taught lesson for next week with a teacher who has been working with me over the past few weeks to create lessons and quizes in the ExamView software. Next came the word that the AICs could offer two flex sessions in the upcoming month for teachers who want to learn how to use the software and "clickers." After communicating with Principals at three other elementary schools, we began planning an agenda for a morning faculty meeting presentation and two day-long drop-in-style trainings on site for teachers who would like to get trained during their lunch, prep, or special periods.
I don't need to write too much about everything CPS can do. Millions of students are using them, the data they can generate can be as robust or simple as the individual instructors choose, and the eInstruction website does an excellent job of covering the attributes, specs, and instructions for use. What I do see is the great potential these can have on student learning when used well, and the negative potential for being just another device used "for technology's sake" if we don't consider a few things.
1) A postive: it is very easy for teachers to hand out their paper-based assessments to students and have them take the existing test or quiz using the clickers. A negative: it is very easy for teachers to hand out their paper-based assessments to students and have them take the existing test or quiz using the clickers!
2) A great positive: teachers can get instant reports on the topics, questions and skills in which their students excell or lag behind. A potential drawback: standardized tests are not flawless, and we can't always create flawless tests ourselves. We are already in an public school environment that is so heavily based on testing data that real instructional time, or class time to develop the higher order thinking skills in New Bloom's Taxonomy, is already scare and at a premium. If our use of the response pads in class is as popular as I believe it will be, how we choose to use this tool could put us at a crossroads between developing real 21st century skills, and just piling on to the existing dross with more empty assessments.
3) Wow: all students can answer at once, or students can go at their own pace following a lesson created in the software, displayed in another electronic presentation, or given to them on paper. And teachers can review the data this generates in a variety of different forms, mining several criteria (name, age, gender, economic status, skill, topic, standard, etc.) collected in one lesson or over time. All of this is relatively easy to set up and use, and students really enjoy it! Now: let's make sure we don't all fall in line with "death by 4-stem multiple choice" questions! In addition to multiple choice, multiple answers, yes-no, ranking, and true-false questions, the clickers allow students to enter text responses (no QWERTY keypad or T9, and I'm sorry to say that Droid or iPhone users will feel like they just fell back to their 2002 phones, but students CAN text their answers in complete sentences). Teachers can vary the type of questions and answers... but can we ask the right questions?
Imagine posting just one question at the start of class, asking students to rate their level of understanding with the material, and having them check in periodically to gauge their progress. (Thanks, Jason, for this idea!) Teachers would be provided with visual, numeric, or percentage-based statistics that tell them when their students need some extra time, when something needs to be re-taught, and when they are ready to move forward.
What if students or student groups created some of the assessments and simultaneously showed what they know and what they value about a topic?
What if students entered text to backchannel throughout a lecture?
Please use these great tools for your students' benefit, but please think outside the box (well, it's really more of a zippered cloth case) in doing so.
An AIC will be here to help whenever you're ready!
:)
Earlier this year, our district purchased CPS classroom sets of the CPS Pulse for every building, and now that coaches and many tech assistants have attended a training, the word is out about the excellent potential for classroom use to teach lessons, quiz students, gather student performance data, and engage in instant formative assessment.
Like many other districts, we've taken to calling these devices "clickers," but it's really a misnomer. They don't make any clicking sound! The buttons are made of rubber and the response pads are actually quite silent in operation.
The noise in our district seems to be teachers and administrators clamoring to get their hands -- or their students' hands -- on the devices ASAP. And why not? CPS keeps students interested and engaged in class, allowing even the most reserved students to actively participate and interact with lessons, "answering every question with confidence," as the eInstruction site states.
My day began with trips to two elementary schools to work with individual teachers who were getting started with the response pads. It continued with the scheduling of a co-taught lesson for next week with a teacher who has been working with me over the past few weeks to create lessons and quizes in the ExamView software. Next came the word that the AICs could offer two flex sessions in the upcoming month for teachers who want to learn how to use the software and "clickers." After communicating with Principals at three other elementary schools, we began planning an agenda for a morning faculty meeting presentation and two day-long drop-in-style trainings on site for teachers who would like to get trained during their lunch, prep, or special periods.
I don't need to write too much about everything CPS can do. Millions of students are using them, the data they can generate can be as robust or simple as the individual instructors choose, and the eInstruction website does an excellent job of covering the attributes, specs, and instructions for use. What I do see is the great potential these can have on student learning when used well, and the negative potential for being just another device used "for technology's sake" if we don't consider a few things.
1) A postive: it is very easy for teachers to hand out their paper-based assessments to students and have them take the existing test or quiz using the clickers. A negative: it is very easy for teachers to hand out their paper-based assessments to students and have them take the existing test or quiz using the clickers!
2) A great positive: teachers can get instant reports on the topics, questions and skills in which their students excell or lag behind. A potential drawback: standardized tests are not flawless, and we can't always create flawless tests ourselves. We are already in an public school environment that is so heavily based on testing data that real instructional time, or class time to develop the higher order thinking skills in New Bloom's Taxonomy, is already scare and at a premium. If our use of the response pads in class is as popular as I believe it will be, how we choose to use this tool could put us at a crossroads between developing real 21st century skills, and just piling on to the existing dross with more empty assessments.
3) Wow: all students can answer at once, or students can go at their own pace following a lesson created in the software, displayed in another electronic presentation, or given to them on paper. And teachers can review the data this generates in a variety of different forms, mining several criteria (name, age, gender, economic status, skill, topic, standard, etc.) collected in one lesson or over time. All of this is relatively easy to set up and use, and students really enjoy it! Now: let's make sure we don't all fall in line with "death by 4-stem multiple choice" questions! In addition to multiple choice, multiple answers, yes-no, ranking, and true-false questions, the clickers allow students to enter text responses (no QWERTY keypad or T9, and I'm sorry to say that Droid or iPhone users will feel like they just fell back to their 2002 phones, but students CAN text their answers in complete sentences). Teachers can vary the type of questions and answers... but can we ask the right questions?
Imagine posting just one question at the start of class, asking students to rate their level of understanding with the material, and having them check in periodically to gauge their progress. (Thanks, Jason, for this idea!) Teachers would be provided with visual, numeric, or percentage-based statistics that tell them when their students need some extra time, when something needs to be re-taught, and when they are ready to move forward.
What if students or student groups created some of the assessments and simultaneously showed what they know and what they value about a topic?
What if students entered text to backchannel throughout a lecture?
Please use these great tools for your students' benefit, but please think outside the box (well, it's really more of a zippered cloth case) in doing so.
An AIC will be here to help whenever you're ready!
:)
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Student Video Awards
Hello, all.
It was good to get some feedback on last week's post about putting together an event to showcase the best student-made videos for classes in our district this year. We got some good suggestions for how to pull this off, and it was nice to see that a few readers drop by this blog!
Unfortunately, several of you told me you had a problem replying to the post, so I'll have to check the settings. Here are some of the best suggestions emailed to me this week:
1) You should open it up to videos from previous years' classes, submitted by students who are still in the district.
2) You should model it after the SAG awards!
3) I'd like to see separate entries for Elementary, Middle, and High School.
4) Hi Scott – your blog won’t let me reply, so I thought I’d email my thoughts. As you know, I LOVE this idea! I think we could easily have categories of “Best animated” (if that is done), Best Stop Motion, Best Live-Action, Best Thematic Depiction? Ummm…I would defer to you techies to determine what pieces of technology are widest used and most creatively used (“Most creative use of (insert type of technology )”.
I would think that you could invite teachers to nominate their students’ creations, and you guys could narrow it down to the top 5. Then, the teachers who submitted would become the academy (even if their students’ work wasn’t picked). You could do it via age group, too, if you wanted to include some of the elem or middle school classes that are using you guys.
I love this! I think we need to really mirror the Oscars here, one of my favorite shows! (Yes, I dress up on Oscar night – in our family, the person who picks the most correct winners gets an Oscar. We mail it to each other each year. Then we tape an acceptance speech! We are dorks!)
Thanks for the text and email replies! I think we will certainly have to look at separate categories (probably even separate events, due to the different buildings) for different grade levels. It would be great if we could find an evening to host one awards show this spring to include everyone at once, though.
We've also started getting some ideas for how to set up the voting. We will probably need to post a link to each video from a central wiki or web page, then include a form for voting in each category on that site.
We really won't know exactly how that would look until we start to collect some nominations. Teachers, this is where we need you. Please contact us via the help request on our website or email an AIC and send us a few nominations for the best student-made videos you have received in class projects.
Thanks & see you next Tuesday.
It was good to get some feedback on last week's post about putting together an event to showcase the best student-made videos for classes in our district this year. We got some good suggestions for how to pull this off, and it was nice to see that a few readers drop by this blog!
Unfortunately, several of you told me you had a problem replying to the post, so I'll have to check the settings. Here are some of the best suggestions emailed to me this week:
1) You should open it up to videos from previous years' classes, submitted by students who are still in the district.
2) You should model it after the SAG awards!
3) I'd like to see separate entries for Elementary, Middle, and High School.
4) Hi Scott – your blog won’t let me reply, so I thought I’d email my thoughts. As you know, I LOVE this idea! I think we could easily have categories of “Best animated” (if that is done), Best Stop Motion, Best Live-Action, Best Thematic Depiction? Ummm…I would defer to you techies to determine what pieces of technology are widest used and most creatively used (“Most creative use of (insert type of technology )”.
I would think that you could invite teachers to nominate their students’ creations, and you guys could narrow it down to the top 5. Then, the teachers who submitted would become the academy (even if their students’ work wasn’t picked). You could do it via age group, too, if you wanted to include some of the elem or middle school classes that are using you guys.
I love this! I think we need to really mirror the Oscars here, one of my favorite shows! (Yes, I dress up on Oscar night – in our family, the person who picks the most correct winners gets an Oscar. We mail it to each other each year. Then we tape an acceptance speech! We are dorks!)
Thanks for the text and email replies! I think we will certainly have to look at separate categories (probably even separate events, due to the different buildings) for different grade levels. It would be great if we could find an evening to host one awards show this spring to include everyone at once, though.
We've also started getting some ideas for how to set up the voting. We will probably need to post a link to each video from a central wiki or web page, then include a form for voting in each category on that site.
We really won't know exactly how that would look until we start to collect some nominations. Teachers, this is where we need you. Please contact us via the help request on our website or email an AIC and send us a few nominations for the best student-made videos you have received in class projects.
Thanks & see you next Tuesday.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Please Help Us Turn a Great Idea Into Action
Hello everyone, and happy Tuesday... with Swindy.
My colleague, Wendy McKenzie, came up with an idea yesterday that made me instantly excited, then a little bit anxious about how much work it will take to do it right, but I knew right away that this is something we HAVE to pull off.
The idea is for the Academic Integration Coaches to put on an event, similar to the Vocab Bowl the 11th grade English teachers run at the high school every year, for the best student-made videos. It would be like the Academy Awards for the best videos our district's students have made for class projects throughout the school year.
My mind immediately went to the event itself - I pictured the auditorium with low lighting, students dressed nicely, a logo on the giant screen interupted by clips of the nominated videos, orchestra music (probably pre-recorded) that would signal the end of acceptance speeches, envelopes... the whole production.
We have tons of talented students in our district that would certainly work hard to pull this off.
But the toughest tasks to do right would be the first steps in the process:
Please post a reply below and help us answer these questions. What are your ideas and thoughts for bringing an idea for an event like this to fruition?
Thank you!
My colleague, Wendy McKenzie, came up with an idea yesterday that made me instantly excited, then a little bit anxious about how much work it will take to do it right, but I knew right away that this is something we HAVE to pull off.
The idea is for the Academic Integration Coaches to put on an event, similar to the Vocab Bowl the 11th grade English teachers run at the high school every year, for the best student-made videos. It would be like the Academy Awards for the best videos our district's students have made for class projects throughout the school year.
My mind immediately went to the event itself - I pictured the auditorium with low lighting, students dressed nicely, a logo on the giant screen interupted by clips of the nominated videos, orchestra music (probably pre-recorded) that would signal the end of acceptance speeches, envelopes... the whole production.
We have tons of talented students in our district that would certainly work hard to pull this off.
But the toughest tasks to do right would be the first steps in the process:
- How do we collect all the best student videos?
- Who comprises the "Academy"? Who votes?
- What website could host all the videos so that academy of students and faculty could vote?
- It would have to be a seecure and private site in order to post the videos of students.
- Could the voting be done multiple times by anyone who logs in, or can we set up a survey or poll that only allows one vote per user?
- (This is the fun one, in my opinion) -- What categories should have nominees?
Please post a reply below and help us answer these questions. What are your ideas and thoughts for bringing an idea for an event like this to fruition?
Thank you!
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