And thus was born #spedchat.

Please join us on Twitter on Tuesday, 31 August at 8:30pm Eastern.  We hope to make this a regular weekly event for educators (of all disciplines, not just special ed teachers), parents, students, and all other interested parties to discuss issues pertinent to special education.

We follow in the tradition of similar Twitter hashtag-based chats such as #EdChat (general education discussion), #SSchat (Social Studies), #BlackEd (education issues pertinent to the Black community), and #Engchat (English education).  To participate, all you need to do is log in to Twitter and search for the #spedchat hashtag using Twitter’s search engine or a client such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.  This search will show all the tweets with the #spedchat hashtag; from there, all you need to do to participate is include the #spedchat hashtag in your comment (see the example of my tweet above).

What will we discuss on Tuesday?  The potential topics are:

• How can parent-teacher relations be improved?
• What do grades mean in special education?
• Is inclusion working for general and special education students?
• How do we get general education teachers to understand? (the current leader in the voting)
• How have school budget cuts affected special education?

You can vote for your favorite topic here; the poll closes around 1:30pm Eastern the day of the chat.

Please join us on Tuesday for what promises to be a lively discussion.  Of course, big thanks to Deven Black for organizing and developing the #spedchat concept.

***

There’s this song by Ben Folds that brings me to tears whenever I hear it. “Still Fighting It” is essentially a love song to his son, and the line that hits a little too close to home for me is, “You’re so much like me… I’m sorry.”

I’m not shy about tooting my own horn when it comes to my strengths, and I’m always proud when I think I see them in my son.  His love of books and puzzles, his problem-solving skills, his fairly early grasp of phonics – I’m proud to have helped laid the groundwork for this sort of thing, both through nature and nurture.  Like any 3-year-old, of course, he has his moments – the temper tantrums, the irrationality, the occasional laser-like focus on certain elements to the exclusion of everything and everyone else around him – and we roll with the punches.  I try to keep my cool and engage in all that positive behavior support that I learned about in grad school (and really, that many teachers learn simply from years of experience dealing with people). But there are some times when it’s even harder than usual to maintain that detachment – when I see him grunt or tic, when I see him whine incessantly about nothing, and when I see him terrified of the most benign things (e.g., soap bubbles). Those times, I feel like it’s 1980 and I’m looking at a 3-year-old version of myself.

Let me be clear: I know these things are perfectly normal behaviors for 3-year-olds to display, which is why I regard my emotional response to them as problematic.  I’m not sure if it’s more a sense of self-loathing or overprotection that makes me feel this way; moreover, I’m not sure which is worse.  Maybe it’s the uncertainty of it all – for example, I had a variety of physical tics (including grunting and twitching) when I was young; and truth be told, I have never managed to completely kick them (I’ve just become an expert at masking them).  When I see my son grunt for no apparent reason, it scares me.  I start to question myself – is he going to have to endure the teasing that I had to because of this?  Is this my fault?  Is he learning by watching me, or is this genetic?  What have I done? And I just go down the rabbit hole of anxiety and neuroses typically reserved for brand-new parents of infants.

I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t impact how I react to these behaviors.  Yes, I’ll typically react more harshly when I see these than when he does something that wasn’t problematic for me as a kid. Intellectually, I know that’s no good, but I’m so emotionally scarred by invested in what I believe people’s reactions to those behaviors will be that I sometimes find it hard to treat the situation with the cool head and clinical perspective that befits someone in my profession.

Looking up the road for my son sometimes feels like looking back down my own well-trod path.  In looking into his future, my greatest fear is that I’ll see the same pitfalls and traps I went through being painfully socially awkward and withdrawn for much of adolescence, and the resultant bullying and teasing (or should that cause-effect relationship work the other way around?).  I’m not here to say my childhood was significantly worse than anyone else’s (hell, I probably got off easy compared to what could have been), but to look at the larger significance of my concerns, I guess I kind of want him to learn from my mistakes before he gets a chance to make them himself.  Not too unreasonable, right?

Makes me wonder if I’m more concerned about protecting him from having to experience them, or protecting myself from having to watch him experience them.

At any rate, I was recently asked for some “getting started” advice by a teacher who wants to begin blogging.  I considered my own blogging behavior over the last three years, and while I never codified a particular set of rules to follow, these are some basic guidelines I have followed (in no particular order):

1. The anonymity question: A question to consider is whether to remain anonymous or not.  Some people prefer to start anonymously and then reveal their identity as they get more comfortable with the idea of being online outside the familiar confines of Facebook.  I’ve said before that I feel transparency is the best way to go, but everyone’s got a different take on the matter.  Keeping in mind what Ben Franklin and Will Shakespeare (among others) said about keeping secrets, if you do decide to blog anonymously, you probably shouldn’t mention the blog on your Facebook page or associate it with any of your online presences.  You really can’t half-step here; you’re either 100% anonymous or you’re not.
2. Don’t name names: For better or for worse, I have shied away from referring to individuals referenced in my posts by name, even those that are entirely complimentary in nature.  The only exceptions I’ve made to this are when linking to blog posts or making reference to other folks who are active and already visible online.  It may not be an entirely rational distinction to make, but it seemed logical to me – unless someone has already put him/herself out there, don’t put him/her in the public eye without their permission (and this should go without saying, but it goes triple for students).  In a similar vein…
3. Write about observations, lessons, projects, but omit personally identifying details: I’ve written about all of these, explained what I did, what my kids did, my reflections on how things turned out, but I’ve never said anything like, “One student/group really disappointed me” – it wouldn’t be hard to deduce who you’re talking about (or who someone thinks you’re talking about) if a parent or colleague came across this.  Whether you’re writing about student issues, workplace issues, or whatever else, it is possible to be critical while being tactful.
4. If you say it, stand behind it: This may vary based on how open you plan to be about your identity, but a good rule of thumb is not to put anything online you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying at school, in a faculty meeting, or any other public forum (which is exactly what a blog is, albeit not a physical one).  I feel that everything on my blog is 100% appropriate for public consumption; I don’t feel I have violated any colleague or student’s privacy, nor have I said anything to call my professionalism into question.  This isn’t to say that everything you write has to be academic in tone, or even even-tempered.  Just remember that there is no universal “Delete” key, and once you put it out there, it’s out there, for better or worse.
5. Write on other blogs besides your own: If you’re looking to encourage folks to comment on your blog, my best recommendation is to start commenting on the blogs of others, and leave a link to your blog in the “website” field.  I’ve found that to be the best measure for driving traffic to your blog, and I’ve noticed that all the lulls and upswings in commenter activity on my blog have correlated pretty strongly with the lulls and upswings in my commenting habits (and yes, I know my own commenting is currently in “lull” mode).
6. Take ownership/write a disclaimer: Some people may see this as a “CYA” move, which I suppose it is, but I also see it as taking ownership of your writing.  You’re saying, “These are my thoughts and opinions, and I represent nobody but myself”.  I have mine on my “About” page; it’s just a few sentences that state my background and purpose in blogging, links to the Creative Commons license under which I publish my work, and that the views expressed on this blog do not reflect those of my employer or colleagues.
7. Pace yourself: When I started I was banging out 5-6 blog posts a week, which was great, but after a while I started to burn out, run out of ideas, and then I’d have multiple weeks-long dry spells.  Then I’d feel guilty about not posting, which would make it harder for me to come up with something to write about.  At the end of 2008 (after about a year and a half of blogging), I set a goal for the coming year to write 3-4 blog posts per month, and by the end of 2009, I averaged 3/month, writing at least once per month.  Now I’ve scaled that goal back to 2-3/month, and at this point in 2010 (including this first post of August) I’m averaging 2.1 a month and writing every month.  That’s just me, though; you may decide you just want to write when inspiration hits and don’t mind long gaps between posts, in which case disregard everything I just wrote.

Surely these are not hard & fast rules to blog by; some of the education bloggers I read & respect do the exact opposite of these guidelines, and it works well for them.  I guess that – much like with teaching – you have to experiment a bit until you find what feels right for you, and then stick with that.

So this is what has worked for me.  Please share what’s worked for you in the comments.

While undoubtedly many of today’s posts will focus on why and how administrators and supervisors should embrace technology (and don’t get me wrong; I believe they should), I think we first need to differentiate between “administrator” and “leader”.  I hope this doesn’t contribute too much to the “us v. them” mentality to which Gerald alludes in this comment (a valid point, and a problematic issue in any field, to be sure), but I believe it’s important to note that not all administrators (supervisors, headmasters, etc.) are leaders.  Surely, the specific attributes that best describe a leader will vary from person to person, but at the very least, I see that word as describing behavior, not a job title.

Conversely, not all leaders are administrators.  At the risk of sounding nostalgic, there was a very strong grass-roots movement among some of the teachers at my old school to evaluate technology and incorporate it into classroom activities.  A few years prior, in the late 1990s, the then-superintendent sort of put us on the map with regard to technology, but the curricular implementation seemed rather confined to this one project (although it was still pretty cool).  Still, perhaps even more importantly, the series of tubes infrastructure was in place, and steadily improving, from ISDN lines to Wi-Fi blanketing the 72-acre campus.  A few years after that project came to an end, this guy some of you might have heard of took advantage of all those empty Internets tubes and became one of the first to incorporate this easily-accessible technology that would come to be widely known as “Web 2.0″ into his classes.  A few years after that, I started investigating the utility of wikis with my English students.  Right around that time, several of my colleagues began using Skype with their World Language students and podcasting in their Social Studies classes.

The beauty of this is that it was not a formal, sanctioned movement, or a directive from on high; rather, some of us just started exploring options and becoming self-taught “experts” in our own rights in certain areas – Will was our blogging guru, I was the wiki guy, Jon and Ray were the people to talk to about Skype, and so on.  When we finally did come together, some of our supervisors and administrators had the foresight and humility to say, “You guys have really gotten this figured out, or are at least on your way, and we absolutely see the value in it – can you help bring this stuff to your colleagues?”  From there, that small core of five or six teachers started running after-school and summer workshops for our colleagues.  Eventually, the core group grew, as did our interests, tools of focus, and – perhaps most importantly – the number of teachers we were able to reach and help identify technological companions for their specific needs.  It was a beautiful, very organic development, thanks mainly to a) teachers who were not afraid to assume leadership roles in relation to their colleagues, and b) administrators who demonstrated true leadership by acknowledging the strengths of their faculty in areas that were largely foreign to them (the administrators) and trusting them to lead.

It should be noted that this approach of “bottom-up” leadership (as opposed to “top-down”) was implemented in many other areas with regard to technology as well.  A core group of teachers volunteered to be the first to be assigned tablet PCs at our school.  Once feedback was collected from this pilot group and the decision was made to roll them out schoolwide, the original cohort ran most of the subsequent training sessions (after all, they were far better suited to speak to the tablet’s impact and utility in the classroom than any administrator).  It’s also interesting to note that in this rollout, faculty & staff were not required to take one if they did not want one (I’ll just leave this there for you to opine upon in the comments…).  The same approach was taken some years later when the school decided to pilot a 1:1 student netbook program.  Teachers, who occupy one of the lower places in the traditional linear hierarchy of school authority, demonstrated multiple times their ability to be leaders in their school community.  This was not only supported, but celebrated and encouraged, by school administrators.

One lesson I’ve learned in the three years or so I’ve been active in online education communities is that there’s a tremendous amount of ego destruction that has to take place in order to really learn and improve one’s professional practice (at least, there was in my case).  Just as the teacher can never presume to be the smartest person in the classroom, the administrator cannot presume to be the best-informed on every single topic.  Mary Beth addressed this quite well in her post “6 Reasons I Surround Myself with People Smarter Than I Am”, and comments by Chris and Deven on that post pretty solidly address the implications for those of us in administrative positions.

I imagine there is a tremendous amount of pressure on school administrators to always have “the right answer” and know exactly what to do in all situations.  That goes with the territory, I suppose, but please remember that you also have an entire faculty of intelligent, dedicated professionals who work with you (you did hire intelligent & dedicated professionals, right?), and whose strengths and knowledge you can draw upon and foster, especially in the realm of educational technology.  Chances are there is a group of teachers in your school who have been tinkering and experimenting just as my colleagues and I did years ago.  Putting your ego aside and drawing upon these resources right under your nose can only benefit the students you serve, and provides a golden opportunity for you to be a leader in deed as well as by title.

At times like these, I debated internally as to whether I should share my personal opinions on the topic.  On one hand, I certainly didn’t want to influence the discussion and have students “side” with me for brownie points.  On the other hand, I felt hypocritical asking my students to share their opinions so freely without doing so myself.  I decided years ago that I would share my personal feelings on this (and other) topics in the course of discussion, but I frequently reminded the students that these were just my opinions, and not fact, and would frequently tell my students, “I could very well be wrong about this – I would love to hear what you think.”  I think that modeling openness without proselytizing went a long way toward fostering an environment of sharing.  Sometimes, students would even actively seek my opinion – during one debate about the appropriateness of discussing same-sex families in elementary school curriculum, a student asked me, “Mr. B., how would you feel about Dylan [my son] learning about this in elementary school?”  I feel that to deflect the question would have been disingenuous, so I answered honestly: “Yes, I think it’s important that he learn about the various types of families that exist today – not just same-sex and opposite-sex, but nuclear, extended, single-parent, and others.  How many of you come from families that you feel have been underrepresented in the books you’ve read or stuff you’ve studied?”  Without forcing my view on them as the “right” one, I answered honestly, and was able to draw some parallels between a family structure that was unfamiliar to most of my students (same-sex parents) to some that were more familiar.

For a unit of study that focused on a group defined by sexual orientation, I think quite a few of our students were surprised that we spent very little time discussing sex itself.  My response to that was always the same: to do so would be to reduce an entire group of human beings to one personality characteristic.

I preferred crafting the discussion as not a sex issue, but one of human and civil rights (i.e., state-sponsored discrimination against gays, violence and harassment against people who are, or are believed to be, gay, selective enforcement of sodomy laws, issues surrounding rights of marriage).  You might think that talking about sodomy laws in particular would trigger the “ick” response, especially since I used to start that lesson with a request for the definition of sodomy!  After the initial giggles and awkward glances, the class was usually able to cobble together an appropriate definition.  My purpose here was not to shock, but rather to compartmentalize.  As soon as we established a commonly agreed-upon definition, I would ask, “Can gay people perform these acts? Can straight people perform these acts?”  Once we established that yes, both gay and straight people can perform these acts, we could put the sex issue aside and go for the meatier stuff: “In what ways, if any, should these two groups be treated differently under the law?”  Students were then able to think about the legality of enforcing laws with one group of people and not others.  Usually, at least a handful of students would also take the class in the direction of the legislation of sex acts between two consenting adults, and how feasible they are to enforce, as well as their constitutionality.  Again, more often than not, my students could see the social injustice issues a bit more clearly once we effectively removed the so-called “ick factor” that so many people get hung up on.

I was astounded, yet gratified, when students would tell me, “You know, I never thought about gay people as just people before taking this class.” One of the activities that I felt had an enormous impact was when we invited Sharon and Barbara from our local chapter of PFLAG (Parents & Friends of Lesbians and Gays) [ed.: Just realized now that PFLAG actually stands for Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays.  I apologize for the error.] to come speak about their own experiences with their gay and lesbian children.  I always used to smile when they’d say, “Our kids are not drag queens and leather daddies, although that’s usually what you see on TV when you see gay people.  My son is a college student.  Her daughter is a doctor.  They’re regular people, just like everyone in this room.”  Hearing these concrete examples helped our students to see beyond the stereotypes and, as my students said, see gay people as just people.  Once that stigma of “otherness” was removed, or at least reduced, real discussion about human rights and civil rights could take place.

More often than not, by the end of the unit, my students reported feeling much more sensitive to, and better informed about, GLBTQ issues and how they related to their own lives, even if they did not identify as GLBTQ.  In addition to the “they’re just people” comments, the biggest payoff for me was that my students were given access to facts and realistic portrayals of GLBTQ people that did not fall within their very narrow cultural frame of reference.  Regardless of how (or even if) their opinions about GLBTQ issues changed, I was more interested in seeing my students base their opinions on factual information, rather than misinformation.

At the end of the course, long after we had completed this unit and moved on through others, our students were asked to break into small groups, research a topic pertaining to any one of the groups we’d studied, and design a 45-60 minute lesson to be taught to elementary or middle-school age children.  Invariably, at least one or two groups would ask to design a lesson on GLBTQ issues.  As much as my co-teacher and I would have loved to do this, it was not possible.  When we presented our cooperating teachers with the list of groups our students might cover in their classes during our pre-project planning, we were specifically and repeatedly requested to not have students teach on GLBTQ issues.  We reluctantly agreed, but I always made a point of telling the class exactly why the GLBTQ unit was off-limits.

It is easy to discriminate against any group of people perceived to be significantly different from you because as the differences become more significant, there is more room for judgment to come into play: the way those people do x, y, and z is gross/immoral/disgusting/wrong/not in line with what I believe to be right.  From there, even passively turning a blind eye to injustices inflicted by others is easier than fighting for equality.  However, when any marginalized group is humanized, rather than demonized, the differences begin to seem less important than the underlying similarities we all share as human beings.  People are less likely to discriminate or commit acts of violence against those they deem to be “like us.” Keeping GLBTQ issues visible in the public school curriculum is important not only to the students in those classes, but to the country as a whole, for when we decrease homophobic words and actions (along with racist, sexist, and other discriminatory acts), the greater society can only benefit.

As with “Alleviating Shakes-fear”, this story will be published here in two parts.  Any differences between this version and the final published version are attributable to the editing process, and all names used herein are pseudonyms.

The Ick Factor

Toward the end of the 1990s, when colleagues at one of my former schools approached high-level administrators regarding a request from students to start a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) club, the response they got was concise and impossible to misconstrue: “Over my dead body.”  The process to start an extra-curricular club was pretty straightforward, and while clubs had come and gone over the past 40 years due to varying degrees of interest, none of the faculty involved could remember ever hearing of a potential club being told, “You may not exist.”  Essentially, a group of kids was being told,“You do not have the same rights as every other student in this high school” by adults who supposedly had their best educational and social-emotional interests at heart.

If you were a gay student at that time, the shortsighted decision of an administrator might not even appear on your radar amidst the daily verbal barrage of your classmates calling each other “faggot” and referring to everything they didn’t like as “gay.”  And whether or not a club was sanctioned by the school couldn’t possibly mean much to those actively targeted, and in turn bullied, because of their homosexuality, real or perceived.  That being said, eventually the school’s GSA did get approval and remains active a decade after its inception.  Fortunately, the aforementioned administrator did not have to die for this to happen, but his choice of idiom was fairly apt: multiple studies report that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, & questioning (GLBTQ) youth attempt suicide at rates of anywhere from double to quadruple those of their heterosexual peers.  In less severe, but no less significant, terms, GLBTQ people have historically been marginalized, underrepresented, and misrepresented in ways that have made it very easy for people to discriminate against them.

One arena in which GLBTQ people have been most severely underrepresented has been the American school system.  Whether due to disapproval, ignorance, or fear of controversy, the contributions and achievements of GLBTQ individuals have rarely been celebrated or identified as being part of the GLBTQ community.  Representation is important for a number of reasons, especially in schools.  For one, the simple act of acknowledging the existence of GLBTQ people throughout history provides some sense of perspective to people who are too young to realize that being gay is neither new nor a fad.  In addition, there are the caricatures portrayed in the media—the butch, sleeveless-flannel-wearing lesbian and the overly effeminate, impeccably dressed gay man—that can be addressed in school, thus broadening the perceptions of our students.

GSA clubs play a role in this effort, but there is still a lack of visibility, curriculum-wise, in the schools.  I feel privileged that I was able to bring some of these issues to my students for discussion and analysis when I taught a class called Multicultural Studies.  It was an elective course, open to juniors and seniors, and team-taught by an English teacher (me) and a Social Studies teacher.  Over the course of 18 weeks, we examined different ethnic, religious, and social groups within the United States and learned about many different facets of the groups, from historical issues to current events, and how they operate within and contribute to the greater fabric of American society.  One unit of the course focused specifically on issues pertinent to GLBTQ people.

The material covered in this unit varied from year to year, but topics included same-sex marriage (as well as many of the related legal issues), the presence of GLBTQ people throughout American history (for which I recommend the excellent documentary Out of the Past), issues faced by GLBTQ youth and the roles and functions of GSAs.  We also spent time each year discussing the students’ opinions on the appropriateness and necessity of covering different GLBTQ-related issues in a class like ours.

The course was reliant on discussion, but our GLBTQ Studies unit always seemed even more discussion-driven than the others, due in large part to our students’ desire to have an open and honest dialogue about a topic that, for many of them seemed like another world.  In fact, we used to begin by asking the students why they thought this unit appeared in the course curriculum at all.  Responses typically focused around the usual broad themes: reduce prejudice and discriminatory acts, and trying to understand “where they’re coming from.”  When pressed, however, most of our students had difficulty articulating more specific reasons.  It was usually the students who had gay relatives (or, in some cases, identified as gay themselves) who were able to give more insightful, nuanced answers:

“My uncle has been with his partner for ten years, and they want to have a family, but they’re not allowed to adopt.”
“A friend of our family is gay, but he doesn’t act all flamboyant like Jack on Will & Grace.  He’s just a normal guy.”
“What people don’t get is that we’re just like everyone else in most regards, but we’re seen as these crazy things, and that’s really frustrating!”

During these discussions, my co-teachers and I welcomed any and all questions, even the ones that tended to put us on the spot a bit (e.g., “Why do we have to learn about homosexuality?  Why don’t we do a unit on heterosexuality?”).  Thankfully, those types of questions were few and far between, and most were of a more thoughtful nature.  Since this was an elective course, the students who chose to take it tended to be more sensitive to those issues, even if they didn’t know exactly what they were.  But even among this group of students that skewed toward progressive and open-minded, issues surrounding homosexuality were still a bit more taboo and uncomfortable for many of them to deal with.

In the midst of a research and discussion activity about same-sex marriage laws, one student seemed unusually anxious.  Part of this activity was to designate different areas of the room as representing different opinions, and we asked our students to physically relocate based on their views on what the legal status of same-sex marriage should be.  As most of the students made their way toward the position areas that supported marriage, this student sat still, then reluctantly headed over to one of the “against” areas.

My co-teacher and I began polling the class to find out what reasons the students had for their chosen positions.  When I came to Anna, she immediately jumped on the defensive: “I like gay people! I don’t have anything against them, really! I have friends who are gay!”  As I tried to draw her back to the topic at hand, Anna almost seemed on the verge of tears when she said, “I – I think they should have all the legal rights we talked about, but you just can’t call it marriage, because it’s not.”

My memory of Anna is that she was very progressive overall, and certainly open to considering multiple perspectives on many of the topics we covered in the course.  On this day, however, she drew her own personal line, almost apologetically, as if her “liberal cred” was at risk.  Compared to the general student body, this belief would be considered very progressive (or heretical, depending on who you ask), but in this group, Anna was definitely in the minority; most students in her class came out in favor of full marriage benefits, including the name, for same-sex couples.

As I expected in the ensuing discussion, her classmates asked, “Why would you give them all the rights, but not the name?” and, in this instance, the difference came down to Anna’s personal definition of marriage: “It’s between a man and a woman. If it’s between two men or between two women, it’s something else.”  When pressed for the obvious (“Well, if it’s not marriage, then what is it?”), she answered, “A civil union. A domestic partnership. I… I don’t know…”.  When Anna trailed off at the end, it almost sounded to me like she was struggling with her own definition of marriage.  It may have been an uncomfortable moment for her, but I believe that she was challenged to really think hard about what she believed, and perhaps consider the validity of a viewpoint that contradicted her own.  At any rate, the hugs and friendly shoulder rubs between Anna and the classmates with whom she disagreed reassured her (and me) that there were no hard feelings, and that they were following our class rule of disagreeing without being disagreeable.

As a teacher, I was pleased to see Anna stand up for what she believed in, despite being among the minority in the class.  In this course, rather than simply present facts for memorization and regurgitation, one of our goals was to get kids to think critically about the subject matter and to hash out their thoughts, opinions, and questions with their classmates.  We strove to create a place where students could not only learn about GLBTQ issues (and to these students, almost everything was new information), but, more importantly, discuss them with peers in a non-judgmental, safe environment.

It is important to note that not all discussions came down to taking a “pro-gay” or an “anti-gay” stance. My students seemed to respond most passionately when we talked about issues facing GLBTQ teens, because these were more tangible to them. Our class learned about Harvey Milk High School and the Walt Whitman School, two schools set up specifically to serve the needs of GLBTQ students who are unable to attend their home school due to harassment or violence. After reading about the populations these schools serve, most students seemed pretty on-board with the idea:

“This totally makes sense. There’s no reason gay kids should have to drop out of school just because of bullies.”
“I think it’s great that these kids have a place to go where they’re safe and they can continue their educations in peace.”

The mob mentality would usually take over at that point, with everyone chiming in about how great it was that these schools existed. If we were lucky, though, we’d have at least one or two students who were a bit more savvy about the implications:

“Wait, wait, wait… You’re telling me these kids can’t go to their own schools – where they live – because their principals won’t do anything about the bullying?”
“Why isn’t the school being held accountable for dealing with the harassment instead of pretty much making these kids choose to go somewhere else?”
“This sounds an awful lot like ‘separate but equal’ to me…”

These were the kinds of discussions I relished. In these instances more than any other, I think even my more homophobic students stopped seeing gay people or gay kids and just started seeing kids.  Teenagers have a pretty acute sense of social justice, and even my most conservative students would never say that bullying and harassment are acceptable.  I always felt these were more constructive discussions to have because we weren’t hung up on “gay is OK” and “no it’s not”, but rather, here’s an issue we can all agree is a problem: what is the fairest way to achieve some kind of resolution?

(to be continued)

• Shakespeare wrote intellectual “high drama.”
• The Renaissance was a wonderful time to be alive!
• Shakespeare was highly educated and wrote specifically for kings, queens, and nobility.
• We can learn more about Shakespeare by studying his plays.
• The issues Shakespeare wrote about have no bearing on my world.

I explained to the class that these statements represented some commonly held misconceptions about Shakespeare and Elizabethan England, and that today we were going to symbolically destroy these beliefs that even the very highly educated and refined members of this class may even hold themselves.  Volunteers would come to the board to read one statement out loud, pop the balloon, and then read aloud the folded-up refutation that I had placed inside the balloon before inflating it.

The initial response was blank stares and silence from the class.  Uh-oh.  Had I completely lost the plot?  Was this too babyish for my high school sophomores?  After what seemed like an eternity of silence (which was roughly equivalent to three seconds realtime), an explosion of “ooh, me!” and “can I go first?” and “Mr. B, can I get a shot?” and other general commotion overwhelmed me.  When I heard one of my much less motivated students say to himself (unironically), “Wow, that’s really creative”, I knew it – they were hooked!

Five students got to (not “had to”!) go to the front of the room, pop a balloon, and explain to their classmates about the hygienic pitfalls of living in England during Shakespeare’s time, the universality of Shakespeare’s themes, and the rather straight lines one can draw between Shakespeare’s plays and some modern horror movies.  Afterwards, I gave every student in the class their very own red balloon, into which I instructed them to channel every bad feeling and negative association they ever had with William Shakespeare.  Then, on the count of three, we all popped our balloons in a cathartic release of negative energy.

Of course, a hook without substance is nothing but a cheap gimmick, and to follow a start like that with anything less than both barrels blazing would have been a heartbreaking waste of momentum.  We then did some work with Shakespeare’s language and physical movement, just getting familiar with the vocabulary and cadence and simply getting the words into and out of our mouths, much like a baseball player takes a few practice swings before stepping up to bat.  A little bit of acting, some discussion about stage directions, unfamiliar syntax, and using context clues to determine meaning, and before I knew it they were arguing over who got to be the witches first in 1.1.

In subsequent years, I added Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night to the list of Shakespearean plays I would explore with my high school students.  While the specific assignments and activities varied by play, I found that by following a few guiding principles, I was able to make Shakespeare a relatively painless (possibly even enjoyable!) experience for my students.

While we all had a great time popping balloons and making a commotion, at the heart of that activity was an attempt to help the students get to the content in an unconventional way.  Along that line, I’ve found that having a healthily irreverent attitude towards Shakespeare can go a long way toward defusing some of the anxiety, intimidation, and subsequent resistance students demonstrate when confronted with this seemingly foreign writing.  Where others might put Shakespeare up on a pedestal, I always aimed to take him down off the pedestal and have some fun with him.  Making jokes and poking fun at odd phrasings or situations had my students laughing with me, and we were all in the Shakespeare boat together, which made for a dynamic well-suited to open-mindedness and learning.  If you haven’t seen The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), do so – it’s a perfect example of irreverence toward Shakespeare by people who clearly love him.

Physical movement is imperative to any study of Shakespeare.  I cringe when I think of all the time I wasted as a young teacher having students sit in their chairs, reading the play aloud.  Having my students get up and move around with the text made them think not just about what is being said, but how that translates into physical action, and why.  Whenever I asked students to block scenes, I would always challenge them to defend their blocking – why should Juliet stand here instead of here?  Why did Ophelia give the crowflowers to her instead of him?  Acting out the same scene in different ways can also lead to high-level discussion about character motivation and major themes in the context of a director deciding how to play a scene.  For example, I used to split my sophomore classes in half and ask one group to act out the banquet scene from Macbeth twice: once with an actor playing the ghost of Banquo, and once with no one playing Banquo.  We then discussed how both the audience and Macbeth’s dinner guests are impacted by a directorial decision to have Macbeth scream at an actor in ghost makeup versus having him scream at an empty chair. These all helped the students gain a more multi-dimensional understanding of the play – not just what’s happening, but why, and what could (or could not) happen as a result.

Also in a performance vein, I strongly suggest watching movies with your students.  More accurately, I suggest watching clips of movies.  I don’t believe I ever showed a complete film start-to-finish during any study of Shakespeare.  I used clips of scenes to reinforce basic comprehension or to make a point as needed, but my primary focus was to use film as a text for analysis and discussion.  One of my favorite film-based activities was to show three different versions of the same scene in Hamlet and have my students discuss whether they felt Mel Gibson, Campbell Scott, or Ethan Hawke had the most accurate take on the great Dane, and why (they are three very different portrayals).  We also examined how each film treats the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia and discussed the major points of contrast and what impact that has on the audience’s perspective.  Studying how closely different versions of a scene (such as Titania’s seduction of Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) adhere to the text can lead very easily to discussions of how the tone of a scene (and the subsequent impact on the play) can be altered by omitting a single line or set of lines, or by re-arranging the events of a scene.

Speaking of lines, editing Shakespeare’s text is a fantastic exercise in critical reading.  I often gave small groups of students a scene and instructed them to edit out ten (or twenty, or thirty) percent of the lines.  To do this effectively, they had to work together to distinguish what was essential to the scene and what was not, as well as what might be important to keep for later in the play.  As I’ve never been one to ask my students to do something I wouldn’t do or haven’t done myself, I first did this at TSI 2002, and I can honestly say that it is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever been asked to do with a Shakespeare play.  Try it yourself before you assign it to your students; you’ll see what I mean.

Regardless of the teaching strategies you try, above all, please: have fun.  If you dread teaching Shakespeare, your students will dread learning Shakespeare.  If you display your genuine enthusiasm, however, and can maintain a light-hearted attitude, even the most reluctant learners can be brought along for the ride.

The title is pretty self-explanatory, so if you’re inclined to read about such things, please pick yourself up a copy and check out what stories these fine educators have to share (no, I don’t get royalties for copies sold!).  For my contribution to this collection, to be published here in two parts, I drew upon my experiences exploring the works of William Shakespeare with high school students.

What follows is taken from the last version I submitted to the editor.  With the exception of any links I added for online publication, any disparity between what appears here and what appears in the book are due to the in-house editing process (and probably improved the piece immeasurably, so thank you, editors!).

Alleviating Shakes-fear

Of all the difficulties I struggled with as a new teacher, one of the most Herculean tasks I faced was not classroom management or dealing with difficult parents: it was getting my students interested in Shakespeare.  In retrospect, I guess I should have been able to identify with them a bit more; after all, even as an Honors student and self-professed English geek, it wasn’t until I got to the very end of high school that I even began to appreciate his works, and then not until the end of my undergraduate program that I really started to feel like I could engage the texts on a level deeper than what my Cliff’s Notes were telling me.  The summer after I graduated college, I was recruited by my Shakespeare professor to play the role of Young Siward in Macbeth.  My prior acting experience had been limited to a few high school musicals, so this was a great first Shakespearean role: I got to say four or five lines, have a short swordfight with Macbeth, and then die (my being “of woman born” my chief liability on the battlefield).

This opportunity led to others within the theater company.  Over the next few years, I would play increasingly larger roles in 1 Henry IV, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  About midway through this succession of roles, I landed my first full-time position as an English teacher.  By that time, I was a bona fide Shakespeare nut and ready to bring my love of the Bard to the unsuspecting tenth-graders with whom I’d be covering Macbeth that fall.

I think it’s safe to say that my first time around teaching Shakespeare to high school students didn’t go exactly as planned.  For some odd reason, they weren’t as excited to be reading The Scottish Play as I was, and I was actually met with resistance when I told them how great the play was!  I struggled through the play with them as best I could as a new teacher, and I think I speak for students and teacher alike that we were all quite relieved when it was over.  My first attempt at teaching Shakespeare was, as Will S. himself might have said, a hot mess.

As any teacher does, I picked up little tips and tricks my second and third time around with the play, and each time got a little less painful (which is what I was gunning for, really).  I was doing passably well with the text once we got rolling, but I was still lacking that hook that was going to grab my kids from the outset.  I felt it was taking too long to get the kids interested and invested in what was happening (although “by Act 3” was much better than my first attempt, which was “not at all”).  Fortunately for me (and my students), all I would need is a push in the right direction, and it was about to come.

In the summer of 2002, I was one of twenty-six teachers from around the US selected to participate in the Teaching Shakespeare Institute (TSI) in Washington, DC.  The TSI is held at the Folger Shakespeare Library every other summer, and allows teachers access to the Folger facilities and faculty, as well as to distinguished American Shakespearean scholars, to collaborate on creating exciting and engaging materials for teaching the works of Shakespeare.  To expound upon the litany of praise and respect I have for the people involved in the TSI is beyond the scope of this essay, but I mention the creative focus of the Institute because this is what jump-started me toward thinking differently about teaching Shakespeare.  Ironically enough, however, the “hook” I’d been looking for for years came to me in the least likely place: a lecture hall.

During one of our introductory lectures, Dr. Robert Watson of UCLA was making a point about the contrast between the romanticized storybook version of the Renaissance period that we often hear about versus the often horrible truths about pestilence, disease, and general hard living to which the majority of Renaissance England was subject.  I remember him using a variation on the phrase, “I hate to burst your bubble”, and as I was taking a short break from studiously and furiously taking notes, I started doodling a popping balloon. I then began to think about Dr. Watson’s point about preconceived notions in the context of teaching Shakespeare, and it occurred to me that so many students fight learning about Shakespeare because they have already convinced themselves it’s going to be awful (this may not be news for many of you, but I was still a new teacher, so I was taking all the revelations I could get).

Over the course of the Institute, I worked alongside some incredible teachers, actors, playwrights, and scholars, all of whom helped me come to a better understanding of how to approach Shakespeare with my students; for this, I am indebted to them.  When I returned to my classroom in New Jersey the following fall, I took all of that with me, but remained guided by that initial little flash I had in the lecture hall: start strong.  Do not let them convince themselves that they can’t do this.  Do not let them beat themselves before they even start. Don’t even give them half a chance.

My tenth-grade English class started our study of Macbeth right around Halloween that year, appropriately enough.  This time, rather than try any of my previous opening activities (much of which resulted in the students complaining about how hard “this Old English stuff” was), I had decided that I was going to burst my students’ bubbles – or rather, they were going to burst their own.

(to be continued!)

I like the cut of it.

Y’see, Kevin and I each received the exact same email, he about a month before I.  You can read the exact transcript at the linked post above (aside from some minor syntactical differences in the first paragraph, the content is identical), but the gist is that he and I are “power Twitter users”, and we’re being invited to leverage our power-user-hood to (wait for it) make money on teh Internets by incorporating advertisements into our regularly scheduled programming Tweets.

My jib-admiring stems from Kevin’s explanation of why he finds this distasteful, which very closely mirrors my own thinking.  I get flak for my advocacy of Twitter as a networking tool for educators, but I’ve found it to be a fantastic way to make connections in the nearly three years I’ve actively used the service.  The tool itself, however, is secondary at best in importance to the people who live in my computer on the other end of all those other Twitter accounts who share ideas, information, opinions, and resources.  Twitter and services like it have the potential to help people make connections that:

• overcome geographical boundaries
• overcome many issues of ability and disability
• are established on the basis of trust and transparency

Of course, this doesn’t apply if you use Twitter to auto-follow everyone in a hashtag search plus your favorite celebrities, but it does appear to apply to a large number of educators who use Twitter as a part-social, part-professional online water cooler.  Everyone uses Twitter differently: personally, I like to cast a wide net, and I try to follow back every individual (not company) who follows me, as long as we seem to have some mutual interests.  Obviously, I don’t have a tight working relationship with all 1100-some-odd people I follow, but I do take in a lot of what comes across my feed (and I appreciate it all), and I engage in discussions and relationships with a smaller cross-section of that number.  Of the people with whom I have established relationships, I would hate to a) spam them with ads, and b) have them think I’m spamming them when I’m recommending a product or service I legitimately enjoy or find useful.

In the post linked above, Kevin O’Keefe says, “If I like a restaurant, I’ll share word of it with people who trust me.  The restaurant needn’t pay me.”  At just about every professional development workshop I’ve given, I have always been self-conscious enough about my own authenticity that I have disclaimed any professional relationships with the services I demonstrate (e.g., Wikispaces, TodaysMeet, Google Apps) other than as a very satisfied end-user.  To me, it’s important that I not be seen as a shill because, rightly or wrongly, the question of who is paying my paycheck can very easily distract from more important questions, like “How can we use this to improve teaching” and “How might my students benefit from this?”

I’m not against anyone getting paid for what they do, especially if they do it well, and I understand that businesses have to advertise.  I just really don’t like the pseudo-social approach that this company wants to take – it feels sneaky to me.  I admit that may be an unfair characterization, but that’s how it feels in my gut, and I don’t want to be a part of it.  If I were to punctuate all my IRL conversations with frequent pitches for Amway or Avon (“You sure you don’t need any more bisque?  We’re having a sale this month, and–hey, where are you going?”), I’d quite rightly be ostracized by colleagues, friends, and family.  Similarly, I’d rather keep Twitter a space for me to communicate freely with other educators.  Whether I am discussing personal, professional, weighty, or silly topics, the content is original and genuine – it’s all me, for better or for worse.  I have gained and given trust in establishing ties with these folks, and I’ve gained much, not only in terms of professional knowledge and resources, but I’d also like to think I’ve established some good personal relationships and friendships via the medium, as well.  I would hate to taint that by feeding my friends and acquaintances ads every so often, even if they are ads I can hand-pick, as stated in the email.

I’ve managed pretty well for myself for three years without the burden of sponsorship – I think I’ll keep it that way.

Conduct county/state PD workshops: Sort of.  I applied, but ultimately was not chosen, to run some county-level PD workshops this year.  I was, however, asked to run two sessions at the New Jersey Education Association’s Technology Integration Conferences this spring.  Prior obligations prevented me from attending both, but I was able to make it to Trenton a few weeks ago to speak with a group of teachers about Google Sites.  I’m told it went well.   And in that vein…

Present at NJEA 2009: Yes!  Every November, the New Jersey Education Association hosts its annual convention in Atlantic City over two days.  Last summer, I submitted two proposals for the convention’s “High Tech Hall”, hedging my bets that one would be accepted and the other, not.  To my surprise, not only were both accepted (meaning I was “on stage” for eight straight hours the first day of the convention!), but I was also asked to come back the second day to do a one-hour workshop on wikis in the classroom.  It was a phenomenal experience (I wrote about it here and here), and I’ve already submitted more proposals for Convention 2010.

Attend two psychology conferences: Achievement unlocked!  I attended a presentation in King of Prussia, PA in September on Asperger Syndrome and the New Jersey Association of School Psychologists Winter Conference in Jamesburg, NJ in December.  While I mostly write here about educational technology, I am still a school psychologist for several hours out of the week, and I find far fewer online PD resources in this arena than I do for general ed classroom teachers.  One notable exception to this is the National Association of School Psychologists, who has an entire hub of online resources, including RSS feeds of info, blogs, and online webinars and presentations for which I can receive continuing education credit hours towards my national school psychologist re-certification (thanks, NASP!).  Beyond them, however, I haven’t found much (but am open to suggestions if you have any!).

In a related vein, I also had the privilege of attending a talk by renowned education law guru Perry Zirkel, who came to my school to address an audience of special education teachers and Child Study Team members from Hunterdon County.  An unexpected PD bonus, to be sure!

Get an iPhone: (OK, so they can’t all be lofty goals.) I’d lusted over the iPhone since the day it came out, but in the weeks leading up to my current contract expiring, Sprint introduced a new Android phone, the HTC Hero.  I ended up sticking with Sprint and purchasing the Hero shortly after it came out – the Android market is easily competitive with the iPhone App Store, and my monthly payment is still significantly less than what it would be with AT&T.  I love my Android phone, and can’t see myself going back now.  I didn’t technically achieve this goal, but I’m quite satisfied with how it turned out nonetheless.

Get published: Yes and no.  At the time of goal-setting, I had envisioned writing an article and having it published in an academic journal.  That hasn’t happened YET (but watch this space in the next year), but I am proud to announce that I will have two short stories published in upcoming anthologies by Kaplan Publishing.  The Teachable Moment is available from June 1, 2010, and includes my story “Alleviating Shakes-Fear”, about my experiences teaching Shakespeare’s works to high school students.  My second story, “The Ick Factor”, will appear in One Size Does Not Fit All (available from June 29, 2010), and presents my feelings on the importance of a visible GLBT presence in school curriculum.  As noted in the agreement I signed with Kaplan, I retain the copyright to my stories, and will be publishing them here as well over the next month or so.

Attend EduCon: Did it.  I only live an hour’s train ride away from Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy, so now that I’m done with grad school (for now) and my kids aren’t babies any more, I really had nothing preventing me from going.  I had wanted to attend since the first EduCon in 2008, but circumstances were such that I wasn’t able to make it until the 2010 event this past January.  I only attended one of the three days, and you can read my thoughts on my time there here.  Deven Black and I also recorded an episode of EdTechClassroom with Karen Chichester & Burt Lo in which we discussed our respective experiences at SLA (check it out here!).

There are two other goals on that list of a more personal nature that I can’t go into here, but I will say that one is in process and the other one has been intentionally deferred until next summer.

These certainly aren’t the only things I’ve done in the past year, but these were the major goals I wanted to make absolutely sure I hit (or at least made progress on) since last summer.  Would I have achieved them had I not recorded them and periodically referred to the mindmap?  Perhaps; it’s impossible to say, really.  All I know is I did write them down and I did achieve almost all of them… and yes, I’ve already started looking at my list of 2010-2011 goals and working hard to make those dreams realities, too.

We’re always setting short- and long-term goals for our students, but are you doing it for yourself?  We all have ideas of what we’d like to do, but have you taken the time to think 6-12 months into the future, put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard!), and make those intentions a little more concrete?  Perhaps most importantly (and terrifying), are you sharing those goals with anyone else?