18 September 2009

IEPs for Everyone?


Well, not quite, but the NJ Dept of Ed will be piloting what it calls Personalized Student Learning Plans in 16 schools (14 traditional middle & high – including a former employer of mine, Northern Burlington Regional High School – a charter school, and a vocational school) starting in the 2009-2010 school year.  The pilot program is scheduled to run through the end of the 2010-2011 school year.

From the above link:

PSLPs are one facet of Governor Corzine’s and DOE’s effort to transform secondary education to better prepare students for the workforce and college. The plans utilize adult mentors, including parents, teachers and counselors, to help students recognize and achieve their education goals.

“It is imperative that we increase the rigor of our high schools to better prepare children for work and college, but it is equally important to help students get a better grasp on where they are headed,” said Commissioner Davy. “The interest we received from schools wanting to take part in this pilot shows that this initiative has the potential to have a tremendous effect on the quality of each and every child’s education and future.”

During the two-year pilot, PSLPs will be studied to determine how to best use the plans to help students focus on their individual personal, academic and career development needs and goals.

Also this:

“PSLPs offer students a framework for setting goals and mapping out their future,” said Commissioner Davy. “They are like global positioning systems for students’ futures. Like GPS, the plans will be able to offer a clear path to their goals but also will be able to change course if students want to go in a different direction at some point in their academic careers.”

The learning plan formats developed by the pilot districts will include at least the following three areas of development: personal, academic and career. In addition to goal setting, examples of activities that students may engage in while creating and carrying out the plans include:

  • Personal Development: survey learning styles; inventory personality and interests.
  • Academic Development: select courses for graduation as they relate to interests and skills; discern individual student learning opportunities (internships, and service or independent learning); utilize support services and referrals as needed.
  • Career Development: Survey career interests and skills; Engage in career awareness and exploration to heighten understanding of opportunities available and generate interest (6th grade); Carry out career planning and preparation activities while developing academic knowledge and skill readiness (9th grade).

Evidently, 20 states plus the District of Columbia already have similar plans in place.  Does anyone have any experience with PSLPs?  How have they been received by students, parents, and faculty/staff?  Any advice for the NJ teachers piloting the program this year?  I would also love to hear about the experiences of the folks who are actually implementing these programs this year in NJ.

A final, hopefully not-too-cynical question: is it significant that there are only three teachers on the 33-member PSLP Advisory Committee (link to PDF)?  Should teachers have greater representation, or does a little under 10% of the committee sound about right?

Related: News story from today’s NJ Star-Ledger.

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14 September 2009

How I Spent My Summer Vacation


This summer was a lot of things for me and my family, but “relaxing” was not one of them.  With a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old (who’s going on 16) to keep entertained, it felt like the summer was a blur of museum visits, amusement park rides, movies, and trips to my ancestral homeland (the Jersey Shore).

Fortunately, amidst all the running around, I was able to engage in two professional development activities that gave me great cause for optimism about the state of social media and technology in education.  The first was speaking with a group of educators at my former place of employment, Hunterdon Central Regional High School.  Will Richardson wrote fairly extensively about it here, but the Cliff’s Notes version is that a group of 20-25 teachers from across disciplines will be piloting a 1:1 netbook program with about 300 students this year.  Doubtless, HCRHS is an affluent district, but unlike many others with more money than sense, they really front-loaded their teacher’s training this summer with discussion and reflection on constructivist teaching and the role that personal computers can play in that.  In other words, it wasn’t “tech tech tech”, it was “teach well with tech”.

I was particularly happy to see two new educational bloggers emerge from this cohort, library media specialist Heather Hersey and English teacher Cathy Stutzman.  I’m really looking forward to reading their public reflections and learning from them, and I’d be lying if I said that watching all this from the outside didn’t make me just the teensiest bit envious that I won’t be a part of some potentially great things at Central.

Another event I was honored to be a part of was Patrick Woessner‘s panel discussion entitled Digital Citizenship & Social Media in the Classroom and Life (click for link to mp3 archive of our chat).  I joined Chris Betcher, Matt Montagne, and Kevin Jarrett via TinyChat for a group videoconference with teachers at Patrick’s school on topics such as Internet filters, use of social media tools with elementary students, and all manner of other neat stuff.  To be talking about a topic about which I’m passionate to a captive audience was thrilling enough, but to do so while bouncing ideas off these guys (and building off their own thoughts) was really a privilege, and I hope it signifies good things to come at this school in St. Louis.

I guess what ties what’s happening at these two schools in New Jersey and Missouri all together for me is this feeling that something is changing in education that is coming from the ground up.   These changes are not coming as a result of administrative directives; in fact, just the opposite is usually true – the movement is coming from teachers who are realizing where the next big shift in education could come from, and how we can harness that for the benefit of our students.  They are becoming school leaders through action and example, not simply by virtue of a degree, certificate, or job title.  It also underscores for me my belief that while the technology enables us to do some really cool stuff, the oft-cited “21st Century Skills” are as much, if not more, about the human connections we help to create, both inside and outside our classrooms and schools as they are about the technological tools we use to foster communication.  Students, much like potential customers or clients, are tired of being spoken to/at – that doesn’t fly anymore.  They want to be part of a conversation, and the teachers at HCRHS and MICDS are, directly and indirectly, fostering conversations about learning as well as about content, which is neither new nor revolutionary – it’s just not done enough.

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15 August 2009

Does Gender Matter?


This post comes to you by way of a discussion my wife (a high school special education teacher) and I were having the other day about school administration and leadership styles.

I am about to start the 10th year of my career in education (not counting long- & short-term subbing positions). In that time, I have only worked in two high schools – one in which females comprise the majority of administrators (including the principal & superintendent), and one in which male administrators are the majority (again, including the principal & superintendent).

Off the top of my head, I initially thought that each of these gender majorities was overwhelming (I was thinking 90/10), but I decided to fact-check myself.  Sure enough, each school’s majority gender is only a majority by a small margin (60/40 or so, maybe less).

I have noticed differences in the leadership styles between the two schools, but I had chalked it up to different communities, different school cultures, different personalities, etc.  My wife was the first to point out the gender differences in the administrative teams, and I’m wondering if she’s on to something.  This piece from Inside Higher Ed (May 2007) posits that the differences between male and female leadership styles in education are becoming less pronounced (based on a study of community college administrators), but I wonder if that can be generalized to the K-12 sector.

A related issue that is probably worth thinking about here is the overall underrepresentation of women, particularly women of color, in leadership positions in American secondary education (Wrushen & Sherman, 2008).  I wonder how many of you in secondary or higher ed have worked with primarily female administrative teams – am I in a distinct minority group of educators in that regard?

Do you feel that the gender makeup of your administrative team influences leadership styles?  Do faculty & staff members tend to respond differently to administrators of different genders?  Or are we in a post-racialgender America, where leadership style is independent of gender?

Citation: Wrushen, B.R., & Sherman, W.H. (2008). Women secondary school principals: multicultural voices from the field. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 21, 457-469.  Retrieved August 15, 2009, from the Academic Search Premier database.

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12 July 2009

Leadership Day 2009


Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant asks the educational blogging community to write about effective (or ineffective) school technology leadership today.  School leadership in general has been on my mind the last few months, and will undoubtedly find its way to this blog sooner rather than later, but to address Dr. McLeod’s focus on school technology, I thought I’d give a shout-out to a former supervisor of mine who I feel deserves much credit for his willingness to support my explorations with educational technology, and could serve as a model to other supervisors whose teachers would like their students to collaborate and publish online.

Mr. X was the third supervisor I’d worked under as an English teacher at my former school, but the first under whom I started working with wikis, podcasts, etc. with my students.  Whenever I have spoken about these experiences, formally or informally, I make it a point to credit Mr. X as integral to whatever degree of success my students experienced via these projects, not because he had any hand in implementing them with me, but because he did four things that I think any supervisor would do well to emulate:

1. He asked questions. I don’t discount how fortunate I was to have a supervisor who, not knowing terribly much about a wiki, was willing to say, “I’m interested; tell me more about it and why this could be beneficial to learning.”  He very easily could have shut me down without a discussion, but instead, he took time out of his exceedingly busy schedule to spend many sessions with me, not only learning about whatever project I initially proposed, but also to follow up with me, observe my classes, and speak to my students.  He was also available to me as a sounding board; quite a few times, I visited him to say, “I have this great idea for a project; here’s where I think I want to go with it and how I’d like to do it, but I just can’t figure out x or y.”  Again, it would have been easy for him to take that as a sign of ‘weakness’ or unpreparedness on my part and shut down the project, but instead he saw it for what it was: one colleague who doesn’t have all the answers reaching out to another to help him create the best possible learning situation for his students.  He was willing to engage in discussion about teaching and learning (and give suggestions!) in a medium that was new to him, for which I give him much credit.

2. He supported me outside of his office, by which I mean that when word of my tech-based projects floated up the administrative ladder, he was willing to stand behind me and support my students online projects all the way up to the district superintendent (who, it must be said, also ended up being very supportive and appreciative of my efforts).  Again, it would have been easy to tell me “You’re on your own”, but he had the professional integrity to stand with me as I tried what some might have considered unorthodox or unusual – certainly new for that school at that time.

3. He looked at the big picture. When I approached him about replacing one of my research papers in my curriculum with a wiki-based collaborative project, one of the first questions he asked (see #1) was about the skills each assignment aimed to teach or hone.  When he was sufficiently satisfied that there was extensive overlap in skills between the research paper and wiki project, as well as considered the additional benefits I thought the wiki project brought he greenlit the change.  As much as I hate the cliche, he was willing to think outside the box and consider an unusual request that others might have dismissed out of hand.

4. He trusted me as a professional. This is no small feat.  In an era where Internet filters and draconian usage policies imply that teachers cannot be trusted to go outside their school network’s walled garden, Mr. X not only supported my decision to do so, but also to take my students with me.  I don’t believe he would have supported me so fervently if he didn’t trust that I knew what I was doing (or at least had a pretty good idea, with one or two contingency plans, just in case!).  This has less to do with technology, in my opinion, and more to do with good leadership in general.  I have always felt that good leaders don’t try to be experts in every area; rather, they identify the people around them who are strong in certain areas and look to them for advice to supplement their own strengths.  Mr. X is an incredibly knowledgable teacher with many years of experience, but in this one small arena, I was more knowledgable, and he trusted me enough to let me lead the way into heretofore uncharted territory.

Overall, the administrative attitude towards technology in my old school was very positive and progressive.  I’ve said many times that we had the most liberal filtering software of any district I’ve heard of, and there was (and, I believe, still is) a strong “teachers teaching teachers” professional development model.  That said, there still existed among the faculty the fear, ignorance, and apathy that comprises much of the opposition to educational technology and Internet-based projects.  I don’t know how differently things would have turned out if this hadn’t been the atmosphere in which Mr. X and I worked, but I think this goes to show that support for educational technology must be systemic and built-in in order for it to benefit teachers’ professional practice and, ultimately, their students.

The last thought with which I’d like to leave you, especially if you are in a position of educational leadership, is to be willing to break from convention when considering implementation of educational technology.  The paranoid and alarmist responses I’ve most often heard coming from parents and administrators seem to be the result of considering the worst-case scenario.  I would ask all of you who are in a position to support educational technology to ask yourself not, “what’s the worst that can happen”, but rather, “what’s the best that can happen?”  Chances are that reality will lie somewhere in between the extremes.

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