PBL Conference - Day 1 Reflection

After spending the day working at the Buck Institute Project Based Learning conference in Columbus, Ohio, I finally have a chance to reflect on what I've learned after the first day. And it's clear that I didn't know as much as I thought I did! Here are some initial thoughts:

1. Project based learning isn't as simple as presenting a project and expecting my students to create. The depth, rigor, and relevance of the projects is certainly something that requires extensive consideration.

2. Students need to buy into the process! Presenting the project to students is almost as important as the implementation of the project. If students aren't invested in the learning from the beginning, the end product will not be good!

3. Projects must be rooted in the common core standards. With the new standards on the horizon, teachers must look to them to help guide the creation of their projects.

4. Keep technology in mind! Students and teachers need to have access to technology throughout the entire process.

5. This is hard work! Thinking deeply about student learning is a hard process that requires us the think critically about what we really want our students to learn.

6. Above all, we must give our students opportunities to create; and we must assess them along the way.

At the end of the day, we spent some time beginning to create our own projects to implement in our classes and I must say that my group has a great idea. After some critical feedback from other teachers at the conference, I think we're ready to get to work tomorrow. I'll share that with you in my day 2 reflection! Stay tuned...

Digital Natives, Digital Leaders

While Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” is a decade old, his words still ring true today.  Those “digital natives” Prensky discusses in his article are now “digital ancestors” who have passed the torch to today’s natives.  And it is today’s natives that are driving change in politics, society, and education.  So what must school leaders do to evolve and manage the pressure to change for the future?

·         Be Transparent! – With social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, digital natives use these tools to stay connected but also to share information at lightning speed.  And with so much available at their fingertips, natives demand to know all the information.  As school leaders, we need to be able to use these resources and understand that the natives that are shaping our organizational structures demand to be in-the-know. 

·         Be a Practitioner! – While there are thousands of new apps that emerge each day, school leaders need to be aware of popular educational technology tools and know how to use them properly.  If teachers in a school district are utilizing Moodle, for example, it is the leader’s job to also understand Moodle.  If students in a school district are blogging, school leaders need to know how to blog.  Leaders can’t afford not to know.

·         Forget Top Down! – The digital immigrants are now at the top.  And while they handle important aspects of teaching and learning, school leaders like principals, curriculum directors, and department chairman need to be the driving force for change.  Leaders need to listen to teachers who use technology every day and make changes in their schools that reflect the needs of the natives. 

·         Be Available! – Leaders today need to join the natives and develop a professional learning community via Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc.  As the natives become parents and contribute to society, they demand to know how and what our school leaders think.  Provide students, teachers, and parents with your own thoughts via a Principal’s Blog or Weekly Newsletter via Facebook.  This will open the doors for parents, teachers and other educational leaders to share ideas for the improvement of our schools. 

·         Create Opportunity! – In the end, it is impossible for anyone to know everything about technology; when technology changes so quickly it seems outdated after a week anyway.  However, it is extremely important that educational leaders create opportunities for their staff to learn how to use new and exciting technology in their classrooms.  Without these opportunities, we may all remain immigrants. 

To read Marc Prensky’s work “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” and other new and classic works, visit www.marcprensky.com.

Walk Across Lakewood Project - 2011

Project based assessment and 21st century skills seem to go hand-in-hand.  Allowing students to collaborate, think critically, and be creative can yield some exciting results.  And in so many ways, the measure of learning from a project based assessment goes far beyond that of a standardized assessment. 

Lakewood High School ninth grade English/Language Arts students created projects that connected their understanding of Peter Jenkins' book A Walk Across America to thier understanding of the city in which they live.  The video below shows the culmination of six weeks of walking and writing about their town  They looked to Jenkins, Thoreau, Whitman and Frost for guidance, but in the end, found a voice of their own.

 

The Myths and Opportunities of Technology in the Classroom: Alan November

With a focus on teaching 21^st century skills using technology, Alan November explains why teachers and leaders need to have a clear understanding of the myths and opportunities associated with this important shift. The video below provides a very clear picture of what teaching 21^st century skills should look like and how teachers and leaders should empower their students to learn these skills of the future.  

Be The Change You Want To See!

The push for teaching 21st Century Skills in our classrooms has reached a new level.  National education leaders are ready and willing to offer suggestions for teaching creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication in the classroom, but I don't think many teachers know what this actually looks like. 

Below are several teachers in my own school who are pushing to reclaim the vision of our schools by using project based assessments that foster 21st century skills despite an overwhelming focus on standardizing our curriculum, assessments, and student assignments.

·    While building chairs may seem a bit odd for an English teacher, one teacher at LHS has taken the first quarter to teach creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking by immersing his students in the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson by asking his students to build chairs.  Providing some initial resources, Sean Wheeler asked his students to build real chairs that are both functional and useful but also individual.  If students ran across problems in the process, they had to seek out help from other students in the class.  If they procrastinated, they had to own up to their work.  (Visit www.teachinghumans.blogspot.com for more information on the project)

·    Another English teacher in my school has just completed a six-week project based assessment called The Walk Across Lakewood Project.  In this project, students were asked to make connections to their summer reading book and walk across their city to re-discover the people, places, families, and faces that make our town wonderful.  After six weeks, the students were to create a project that displayed their experience to the class.  Projects ranging from full-size trees to quilts to amazing multi-media videos have been met with great excitement.

These two teachers are pushing their students to think differently despite the pressure to show growth on standardized tests and other standardized growth measures.  It is these teachers who understand that these attempts to standardize education may be a quick fix but will not sustain the school in the long run. 

Teaching Teachers: Thoughts on Teacher Professional Development

As the push for increasing students' understanding and application of 21st century skills, teachers are discovering that they too need to be taught how to use some of the tools we are asking our students to use in our classrooms.  From Voice Thread to Google Docs, technology has opened the doors for our students to communicate with us.  But how do we as leaders prepare our teachers to use these tools?

Some ideas I've taken from from a recent professional development day at my high school:

•  Focus: Leaders provide a clear focus for professional development and emphasize the role professional development plays in the school and district.

•  Choice - Presenters, administrators, and principals stress the importance of teacher choice in professional development.  Using a seminar session format, teachers are able to sign up for sessions that focused on their individual needs for professional development.

•  Access: All teachers and students have access to the same tools.  While not every classroom has a class set of computers, in five years they will.  Prepare for access now!

•  Show and Tell...and Play: provide teachers with adequate time to play with the new tools they are learning.  The presenter's role switches to coach or facilitator to help the teachers apply what they've learned.

•  Don't Quit: provide teachers with opportunities to continue their learning and work with the new tools they've learned.  Follow up with teachers in teams, departments or staff meetings to gauge their comfort level with the new tools.

While the temptation is there to provide "sit and get" professional development in schools because there is so much information that leaders need to pass on to the staff, we must model that same behaviors we want to see in our students.  The above observations were specific to my own school, but I can see that this round of professional development was a real success. 

The Skills for Success in the 21st Century

Tony Wagner, a leading educational leader, speaker, and writer, discusses in the video below the essential skills every student should acquire in order to be successful in a global economy.  The skills Wagner discusses are those same skills that we, as teachers and leaders, are pushing our students to acquire in our classrooms.  And while the environment in our classrooms must change to foster these skills, Wagner also points out that the students must take ownership of their own abilities.