In Between Raindrops

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Sat, 04 Mar 2017 11:55:33 -0600

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Sat, 04 Mar 2017 11:54:36 -0600

Training Chefs or Training Cooks: Thoughts on Professional Development

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 04:34:38 -0600

What is the difference between a cook and a chef? The dictionary defines a cook as “a person who prepares and cooks food, especially as a job or in a specified way.” A chef on the other hand, is someone that is “the chief cook, especially in a restaurant or hotel, usually responsible for planning menus, ordering foodstuffs, overseeing food preparation, and supervising the kitchen staff.” When I think of a chef I think of someone like this:
I see a chef as someone that understands how the flavors of food interact. How an entire meal, each part of it, from the beginning to end, becomes an experience. Which wine goes with which food, how flavors mingle. Someone who is paid to think of an entire menu from appetizer to dessert.

When I think of chefs I think of words like creativity, unique, inventive.

When I think of cooks, I think more of a technician, someone who puts together food that someone else has already figured out. Think of a cook at a place like Applebee’s or Denny’s: They don’t create new foods, they simply put together the food in order that someone else, a chef, at some corporate headquarters put together.

When I think of a cook, I think of someone like this:

When I think of a cook, I think of words like mechanical, automatic, robotic.

I was thinking about the differences between a chef and cook the other day when we were in a meeting discussing professional development for teachers. The discussion focused on what would make our district’s professional development more meaningful. Should it be more focused? Should it be more in depth? Should we follow the guidelines of the Learning Forward , an organization I have spoken of in previous entries.

Maybe I was hungry. Maybe my blood sugar was low. But I couldn’t help think that no matter how good the professional development is, if we are not making educational chefs out of our teachers, if we are just asking them to be educational cooks, then no amount or quality of inservice is going to be worthwhile.

Professional development has to be structured n such a way that educators at all levels begin to be chefs: innovative, inventive, creative, unique. Teach the teachers to be that way, and you will get students that are that way.

If our expectation is that teachers will merely be technicians of teaching that they are mechanical, automatic, robotic then we will get mechanical, automatic, robotic students, something that is totally out of synch now with what we want from our 21st Century learners.

EdSurge recent reported on “How Teachers are Learning: Professional Development Remix. That report, which highlighted several important new PD tools that are available right now from free to paid is a nice summary of there PD learning cycle which includes:

Engaging: “These tools enable teachers to join groups, ask questions and share resources. Most tools that allow educators to engage also include a “Learn” component, such as webinars, online courses, and modules.”

Learning: “These are content-rich tools presented in a variety of ways including online courses, webinars or self-paced modules. Some of these tools also provide “Support” capabilities that help teachers implement skills and ideas.”

Supporting: “These tools help educators connect and share their practice with experienced mentors for feedback and coaching. Some tools in the “Support” category allow teachers to also “Engage” with their peers, as well as to “Measure” their learning.”

Measuring: “These tools are usually associated with some form of collecting data on a teacher’s practice. They provide some way to measure a teacher’s growth or progress in adopting new practices or acquiring new skills.”

Unfortunately, nowhere in that nicely done report do the authors look at whether or not the product teaches creativity, self thought, independent exploration, all the things needed to make a cook a chef.

Even the literature overlooks what I think is the obvious: To make PD effective, you have to make the learner a learner.

The 2010 Department of Education’s National Ed Tech Plan listed the top seven attributes of effective PD:

Relate to teachers’ content areas;
Be collaborative;
Be consistent with technology goals in the district;
Allow for active engagement with content;
Be tailored to different levels of teachers’ knowledge, skill, and interest;
Be sustained;
Include follow-up activities.

I suppose one could make the case that creativity could be squeezed into any of those seven, but lets face it: In a time crunch, no one is looking for creativity in PD.

So I want to throw down a challenge to all the professional development organizations and all the professional developers out there doing work this summer: Ask yourselves these questions before you present your PD:

Do teachers have the ability to create something in this PD that is not canned?
Can educators make the connection between the PD and what they teach? If so, how can they demonstrate that connection to you?
Can your PD be connected to other PD that they have received, ESPECIALLY if it was not done by you? Are they able to make connections?
Are the teachers in your sessions free to question you? Are you willing to take criticism?

Paula Scher once said “We can pick our teachers and we can pick our friends and we can pick the books we read and the music we listen to and the movies we see, etcetera. You are a mashup of what you let into your life.”

Teachers, in the classroom, are a mashup of all the PD and training they have received over the years. If we ignore the creative side, if we do not allow them to be creative during PD, then we squander a great opportunity for them to mash creativity into their lessons with there students. If we do not allow them to be chefs in our PD, they won’t allow their students to be chefs either. And we will continue to make generation and generation of cooks.

great!

Common Lit: Free literacy resources and progress tracking tools

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 21:41:03 -0600

Common Lit: Free literacy resources and progress tracking tools:

holtthink:

CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 5-12. Our resources are:
Flexible;
Research-Based;
Aligned to the Common Core State Standards;
Created by teachers, for teachers.

We believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why we are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever.
From Education World: “CommonLit, a first-of-its-kind literacy tool developed by a former teacher on a mission to provide equitable access of resources to all school districts, has announced new features designed to further help students of all abilities improve their reading skills.

As a whole, CommonLit offers users access to a digital library that contains “over 450 lessons that include authentic published works from National Public Radio, Science News for Students, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Digital Public Library of America, and more. Each lesson includes a standards-aligned question set, a discussion guide, linked to related multimedia, and a guide to engage parents and promote literacy development at home,” said the company in a statement.

CommonLit has received a lot of positive attention since its inception; in October, the Department of Education awarded it with a $3.89 million grant as part of an initiative to promote non-profits with innovative approaches to literacy.

Now, it’s building on that momentum by announcing a group of text sets based on a variety of historical periods. Each text set includes 5-20 individual lesson resources to connect students to topics relevant to the given time period. Examples of historical periods covered include Ancient Rome, Slavery in America and the Vietnam War.

True to all of the materials CommonLit offers, the text sets can be assigned to classes or individual students; students then answer questions based on the text and teachers are provided with data analytics based on student progress.“

Click on title to go to Common Lit

How to Assess Three-Dimensional Learning in the Classroom: Building Assessment Tasks that Work

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 21:40:07 -0600

How to Assess Three-Dimensional Learning in the Classroom: Building Assessment Tasks that Work:

holtthink:

How is assessing three-dimensional science learning different than past assessments of science learning? How can we design assessment tasks that elicit the core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) performance expectations?

There are very few existing examples of elementary and middle school assessments completely aligned to the NGSS. Instead, educators need to adapt their existing assessments.

This open educational resource provides an opportunity for educators to begin building or adapting three-dimensional formative assessments in a 60-70 minute professional development session. The module includes all of the resources that PD facilitators need to adapt and run the sessions—including slides, speaker notes, facilitator guide, and embedded resources.

The workshop aims to help participants identify assessment components that focus on individual practices, core ideas, or crosscutting concepts, and understand how, taken together, the components can support educators as they make inferences about students’ three-dimensional science learning. Through this workshop, participants will review tasks that aim for assessing performance expectations, discuss strengths of these tasks, and gain practice adapting them to better elicit three-dimensional science learning.

Link to Open Educational Resource Version (on OER Commons)
Link to PowerPoint File Version
Link to Facilitator’s Guide for this Resource

This resource is an open educational resource (OER) and can be freely shared, modified, and used. This resource is brought to you by the Advancing Coherent and Equitable Systems of Science Education (ACESSE, or “access”) project. It has been developed with guidance from science education experts from across 13 states to make it as broadly useful as possible. You can follow the work of the ACESSE project on Twitter.
Preferred citation: Stromholt, S., Van Horne, K., Bell, P., Penuel, W. R., Neill, T. & Shaw, S. (2017). How to Assess Three-Dimensional Learning in Your Classroom: Building Assessment Tasks that Work. [OER Professional Development Session from the ACESSE Project] Retrieved from http://stemteachingtools.org/p…

Positive Deviance: Can this approach be used in ED?

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 21:39:50 -0600

Positive Deviance: Can this approach be used in ED?:

holtthink:

I can across this Positive Deviance idea and checked out their website. I got to thinking that perhaps this approach can be used to institute positive change in how we do Professional Development. What do you think?

About PD
The Concept of Positive Deviance (PD) Think about this statement in terms of Professional Development–TBH
Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups (the positive deviants), whose uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers. These individuals or groups have access to exactly the same resources and face the same challenges and obstacles as their peers.
What is the Positive Deviance Approach?
The PD approach is a strength-based, problem-solving approach for behavior and social change. The approach enables the community to discover existing solutions to complex problems within the community.

The PD approach thus differs from traditional “needs based” or problem-solving approaches in that it does not focus primarily on identification of needs and the external inputs necessary to meet those needs or solve problems. A unique process invites the community to identify and optimize existing, sustainable solutions from within the community, which speeds up innovation.

Here is some more info about the PD approach:

A problem solving, asset-based approach grounded in the fact that communities have assets or resources they haven’t tapped. Led by the community or organization member themselves, the approach enables them to discover then to leverage uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies from within the community to solve a perceived problem that requires behavior and social change. The PD approach brings about sustainable behavioral and social change by identifying solutions already existing in the system.
PD Guiding Principles:
The basic components and ingredients that give the PD approach its name. Including:

Collective endeavor: Community or stakeholders’ ownership of the whole process,
Social proof : their discovery of existing solutions (uncommon behaviors & strategies via a PD Inquiry) among their peers-people just like them, by people or groups whose behaviors need to change
Networks driven: Use of existing and created new social capital (formal and informal networks),
Focus on practice: Development of activities and initiatives that encourage practice of PD inquiry findings
Collective involvement in the monitoring of the new activities to promote behavior change, and evaluation of the overall initiative to have sustainable impact on the problem.

PD Methodology: Five basic steps which serve as the backbone of the approach. The 5 D’s are:

Define the problem, its causes and common practices, and articulate desired outcome.
Determine presence of PDs,
Discover their uncommon but successful behaviors & strategies through PD inquiries,
Develop activities based on the inquiry findings
Discern (monitor and evaluate) the results.
The steps are iterative and a basic template to be adapted to the local or social context. In some cases the steps are repeated on an on-going basis throughout the project.

holtthink: The 9 Cs of Digital Literacy by Alice Chen...

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 21:39:02 -0600

holtthink:

The 9 Cs of Digital Literacy by Alice Chen @wondertechedu

Nice reproducible graphic. I can see this as a starter for a whole day PD.

Free eBook from SPIE: The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 21:38:47 -0600

Free eBook from SPIE: The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty:

holtthink:

From the link:

SPIE is making this freely available as an ebook. Click here to download the full PDF.

This book aims to provide scientists and engineers, and those interested in scientific issues, with a concise account of how the nature of scientific knowledge evolved from antiquity to a seemingly final form in the Twentieth Century that now strongly limits the knowledge that people would like to gain in the Twenty-first Century. Some might think that such issues are only of interest to specialists in epistemology (the theory of knowledge); however, today’s major scientific and engineering problems—in biology, medicine, environmental science, etc.—involve enormous complexity, and it is precisely this complexity that runs up against the limits of what is scientifically knowable. To understand the issue, one must appreciate the radical break with antiquity that occurred with the birth of modern science in the Seventeenth Century, the problems of knowledge and truth engendered by modern science, and the evolution of scientific thinking through the Twentieth Century.

The book concludes by considering the impact of scientific uncertainty on the translation of scientific knowledge into means to alter the course of Nature—that is, the effect of uncertainty in engineering. It proposes a course of action based on integrating existing partial knowledge with limited data to arrive at an optimal operation on some system, where optimality is conditioned on the uncertainty regarding the system. As for a new scientific epistemology in which valid knowledge can be defined, that awaits the bold efforts of fertile minds enriched with the mathematical, scientific, and philosophic education required for such a quest.

Big heart (image)

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 19:44:34 -0500

http://dlvr.it/1rYwxK

Digital | Lessons from a one-to-one iPad program

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:07:52 -0500

During the session, Carl Hooker, West Lake’s instructional technology director, explained how the school went about adopting a one-to-one iPad program for its 1600 students. He admitted that his teachers didn’t have enough time to be trained on how best to use the iPads, as they only got them a few weeks before the school year, and that some teachers have been slower to incorporate them into their lessons. “It’s hard for some because it’s giving up control of the classroom to the kids in a lot of ways,” Hooker says. Training at West Lake takes place at “Lunch Learns” and “Appy Hours,” where teachers can learn about one or two new apps at a time. They have set up a “Juice Bar,” where teachers and students with questions about or problems with their iPads can receive help. Hooker says one of the biggest challenges is not to use iPads simply as substitutes for analog notebooks and textbooks, as he said they often can be, but rather to use them for what he sees as their value in creating multimedia learning oppor… http://dlvr.it/1rXYkM

How I'm Using My iPad in a Classroom of 30 StudentSample

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 13:30:03 -0500

Mr. Guymon’s Classroom Follow Mr. Guymon Home Classroom Blog About Mr. Guymon Mr. Guymon’s EduBlog How I’m Using My iPad in a Classroom of 30 StudentSample 07/12/2012 0 Comments The versatility of an iPad for education is endless. I am no expert, nor even a veteran in curating apps for the classroom, but I am off to a great start for this next school year. Here is how I have discovered using an iPad in the classroom. No, I’m not referring to a 1:1 iPad scenario. I am talking about a 1:30 situation. Skype for the iPad is invaluable for connecting with classrooms around the world. Recently, I’ve learned about the Mystery Skype Project. MSP is a network of classrooms willing to invite other classes into their via Skype. The catch is that students are not told where the location of the visiting class is. Instead, students are put to the test of discovering where their visitors are from by asking “yes” or “no” questions and actively doing research and logical reasonin… http://dlvr.it/1rVbzJ

rkiker: RT @nmhs_principal: A Principal's Reflections: Exploring the Educational Value of Pinterest http://t.co/XLtehNvm #edtech #socialmedia

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:13:04 -0500

http://dlvr.it/1rPWPr

jphale72: What it Takes to Launch a Mobile Learning Program in Schools http://t.co/N8e4pgj0 via @zite #edtech #ipaded

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:13:03 -0500

http://dlvr.it/1rPWPL

heloukee: My #ussc12 prez blog post: How to (IT) support a Pedagogy of Chaos? http://t.co/NlvAFhlN #betterlatethannever

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:13:03 -0500

http://dlvr.it/1rPWNz

TCEA: More free iOS apps today: The Amazing Adventures of Eco Boy vol 1 (http://t.co/MNpVgQbb) and 2 (http://t.co/Oq5tK17h)

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:13:03 -0500

http://dlvr.it/1rPWN9

catspyjamasnz: RT @tvhs13: RT @courosa: My slides from today's presentation http://t.co/oQZoZQdz #pleconf #yam #fb

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:13:03 -0500

http://dlvr.it/1rPWMZ

tperran: Here is Kris Abel's guide of 100 websites offering the best activities for kids. http://t.co/b1lZN15B via @pinterest

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:13:02 -0500

http://dlvr.it/1rPWLg

Students Need Tools Where They Are @wmchamberlain

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 23:06:01 -0500

Students Need Tools Where They Are @wmchamberlain

http://dlvr.it/1rKSbj via G+

Gongs and Cymbals - Twitter Tinnitus

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:42:17 -0500

Gongs and Cymbals - Twitter Tinnitus

http://dlvr.it/1rJNz1 via G+

Incremental fascism, drop by drop: Galvanic bracelets that measure student engagement | Dailycens...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:06:18 -0500

Incremental fascism, drop by drop: Galvanic bracelets that measure student engagement | Dailycensored.com

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