The Importance of Professional Development

In a class I'm currently taking, we were asked to develop a one-minute elevator pitch for professional development. Here's what I came up with:

Google started in 1996, the iPhone came out in 2007. The world is changing faster than ever before. Kids these days is something every older generation says about youth but the gap between what kids these days are like and what kids were like when I was a boy is greater than ever before. In order to make sure teachers are best equipped to meet the learning needs of kids today, funds must be committed to keep teachers current in order to ensure our kids are best prepared to be successful contributors to our economy and our society. The future of our country depends on well-educated kids and that doesn't happen without high quality, relevant, regular professional development for teachers.

What do you think? What would your elevator pitch be?

Using TED to Establish a Culture of Learning

Simply put TED.com is an amazingly accessible and portable option for personalized learning from the best and brightest the world has to offer. As a school leader, the TED options for learning and growing as a leader are seemingly endless. Not only do you have access to lectures from some of the biggest names in education, politics, and social justice but TED also offers additional resources to engage that take you beyond the well-known TED talk. These resources include reading lists from those big names who deliver the lectures, a TED radio hour on NPR with interviews with the lecturers about their talks, and a lively and surprisingly insightful comments board that accompanies each TED talk video. TED.com is a prime example of how technology can be leveraged to rapidly share ideas around the globe. TED could be used in a school setting as a sort of book study or the basis for discussion between staff members, students, or in a heterogeneous group of staff, administration, students, and the community. Additionally, TED presents many talks about research and experiences that have discovered with conclusions that fall into the "things are not always what they seem" category that encourages critical and divergent thinking both of which are useful to continuously develop as a school leader. Perhaps the most important aspect of TED is that it allows a school leader to model the importance of being a lifelong learner. Whether you're interested in economics of crime, shattering paradigms of what is possible in glass blowing, or how many paper towels can be saved by flicking your hands thirteen times after washing them, TED has something for you and it has something for your students. All of these things can be easily accessed anywhere you can access the internet through TED's website or app.

Edutopia as Personalized Professional Development

One of the most important qualities of being a school leader is being a resource for staff, students, and parents about the latest and greatest trends, practices, and ideas in education. Sorting through academic research papers is time-consuming and, depending upon the author(s), quite a tedious exercise. Edutopia is a website that manages to find a balance between academic discourse and plainly-worded presentation of the latest in educational research and effective pedagogy. This resource is a bookmark must for any school leader. Not only does it provide engaging, accessible opinion pieces and summaries but it organizes these resources by topic and grade level. In addition, it also has an extensive video collection where you can listen to experts discuss ideas and where you can see videos of different practices in action in an actual classroom setting. One of my favorite aspects of this website is their tendency to summarize ideas or practices in lists. For example: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/year-one-with-3d-printer-vicki-davis - This provides a list of seventeen tips when implementing a 3d printer into a classroom for the first time. These sorts of lists are quick and easy to get through and allows readers to mentally check off things as they progress through the list. One other very powerful feature is the comments section and discussion boards. In these areas other teachers and school leaders post their reactions to articles and videos. This website offers a great deal of easily navigable quality resources that could be utilized by a school leader to provide support for developing teachers. As is true of classroom teachers today, principals, directors of instruction, and curriculum directors don't necessarily have to have all the answers when it comes to student and teacher learning and growth. Instead, they simply need to know how to help the learner find the personalized answers and support that will allow them to realize maximum growth. Edutopia presents a powerful tool for school leaders to do just that. 

Twitter in Education

Do you know the feeling you get after a really great professional development session? You know, that feeling of a fire deep inside of you that makes you want to go to your classroom and do something! Well, Twitter is not that. But, I'm sure you also know that same feeling a week after a really great PD session. That feeling of let-down that is the result of other staff members not sharing in your excitement or problems in implementing your new, grand ideas. Twitter can help with that feeling of let-down. To continue the fire metaphor, I like to equate the post-PD fire to a great conflagration; it cannot be stopped except with the passage of time because eventually, it will burn itself out because it runs out of fuel. Twitter adds fuel to that fire. Twitter keeps that fire going and going and going.

If you are in education and you are not on Twitter, you are doing yourself a disservice of Brobdingnagian proportions. Twitter is being leveraged by educators across the country and around the world to develop professional learning networks (PLNs) to support each other through sharing of ideas, materials, answers to questions, and stories. Twitter is the great flattener in education. No longer do you have to wait for a conference to interact with the gurus and rock stars of education today. Got a question for Rick Wormelli? Tweet it. Thomas Guskey? Tweet it. Most of the time, these and other big names in education will respond to your tweet. Want to criticize Arne Duncan? Tweet it with the hashtag #edchat and literally tens of thousands of educators everywhere will see it. Need help coming up with ideas for a psychology project on the brain or do you want feedback on your lesson plan? Tweet it with the hashtag #psychat. Even if you don't want to actively post tweets, you can still leverage Twitter to keep that fire burning year round. By simply following the right people, signing on during Twitter chats that interest you, and following the right hashtags, you will be exposed to an overwhelming number of ideas and resources. The learning curve for understanding how to navigate the Twitterverse is fairly easy for digital natives and entirely manageable for digital immigrants. Even if it takes you a week of fifteen or twenty minute sessions to familiarize yourself with the literacy and navigation skills necessary for easily accessing all that Twitter has to offer, that investment of time will pay back tremendous dividends!

As a school leader, Twitter presents tremendous opportunity. Twitter can be used as a sort of support group for new administrators. Twitter can be used as a place to learn from experienced administrators by simply "following" them on Twitter. Many, many, many accomplished principals, superintendents, and other administrators are on Twitter such as Eric Sheninger, former Scholastic principal of the year; George Couros, rockstar principal from Alberta, Canada; Myron Dueck, principal and author of Grading Smarter, Not Harder; Todd Whitaker, principal and author of Shifting the Monkey; and Joe Sanfelippo, superintendent at Fall Creek School District in Wisconsin who is the model for leveraging social media to create a brand identify for a district, #GoCrickets. This is just a sampling of the many great minds and leaders who share their experiences and ideas on Twitter every single day. Twitter can also be used by school leaders in a way that Joe Sanfelippo does: He is constantly sharing all the great things that happen in his school district on Twitter with pictures and videos under the hashtag #GoCrickets. As a result, he creates a sense of ambient intimacy and connectedness within the community which results in very positive attitudes about the school, the teachers, and the administration. 

This is a sample of my Tweetdeck which is a platform for organizing Twitter. Across the top of this image are the categories and below them are the tweets that have been posted under those categories. The categories include #psychat, for teachers of psychology; #iolahs, for teachers at Iola-Scandinavia High School; #1to1techat, for all things related to one-to-one technology programs; #wischat, for teachers in Wisconsin; #SBLchat for all things related to standards based learning; and #ptchat, where ideas about improving the parent-teacher relationship are posted. These are just six of my nearly twenty different columns for different topics that I follow.

Educator Effectiveness...not so bad?

SLO and Educator Effectiveness are two buzzwords that have been added to the educational lexicon in Wisconsin. If you aren't familiar with the current state of education in Wisconsin, we are experiencing great change in many different ways: Conversations about changes to how schools are funded; a media fueled perception that there is a battle over adopting the Common Core State Standards (when in fact the state school board association voted to move forward with implementing the common core); and the rocky implementation of a statewide educator effectiveness program; among many, many other changes.

In any state's education system there are countless buzzwords and acronyms that can make a conversation between two teachers sound like they're speaking in a foreign tongue: RtI, EEN, IEP, TREK, ESL, ELL, these are just a few! The latest acronym to be added to this conversation in Wisconsin is SLO or Student Learning Objective. This is part of the Educator Effectiveness initiative that will be used to assess if students are actually learning and if teachers are actually doing their jobs of educating. For the sake of brevity, I'm not going to get into the fact that there are so many things teachers do to impact kids that cannot be measured or even observed. However, there are things that can be measured that, if teachers are effective educators, we should be able to chart, observe, and analyze growth and gains among students. Do I like completing the volumes of forms required for this new initiative?- Nope. Do I think that the many, many hours I have spent and will spend completing these forms could be better spent preparing awesome lessons for my classes?- Oh boy, do I!!! Does the entire process frustrate me and increase stress levels?- Heck yes!!

Even though this process is stressful, time consuming, and frustrating, after some reflection, I've come to realize that there might be some merit to it. I was asked recently if I thought this process was making me a better teacher. My gut reaction was: "Absolutely not!!!" But then, I stepped back to examine what I have done so far and how it has forced me to take a good hard look at what I do in my classroom. Further conversation with my principal led to even greater reflection on the process and I have come to realize that the complaints I had and those I heard from many of my colleagues sound very familiar...

During a pre-formal observation conference with my principal, I came to the realization that the complaints I had and those I heard from other teachers are extremely similar to the complaints we hear from our students. Here are the three most common complaints:

1. I don't understand what I'm supposed to do!!! No one told me exactly what we are supposed to do!!! If I get this wrong, it's not my fault!!!- When a student unloads like this in class, my response includes parts of the following: "Did you listen to the directions? Did you read the directions carefully? They are right there on the assignment. I explained them when I handed out the assignment and I asked if anyone had any questions. Did you ask a question to gain clarification? Did you try to find the answer in another source? The directions are also posted on the class calendar and I clarified a few things in an email after class." Regardless of the students answers to these inquiries, I always follow it up with this: "When you got frustrated or needed help, did you come find me? Or, if it was outside of the school day, did you email me?" The answer to this is overwhelmingly "No." I have heard this same basic complaints about the Educator Effectiveness process and the same response could be used: There are extensive resources available through the DPI, WEAC, and from people in our own buildings. Did you read them? Did you ask questions? Or, did you just throw your hands in the air and give up? We certainly would not want our students to do the latter, so why should we?
2. What is the point of doing this? This is sooooo stupid? I will never use this ever again!!!- Sometimes you have to do things that you might not enjoy doing and you might not understand why you should do it but you have to do it anyway. This is the lesson educators have tried to impart on students throughout history. Kids, especially teens, think they know what is best for them when it comes to, well, pretty much everything. But, we as teachers, with our superior knowledge, experience, and extensive training have a much better idea of what is best. Might this same lesson be applied to how we approach Educator Effectiveness? The realization I have come to is that someone (actually a whole group of someones) with far higher levels of education and a vastly superior understanding of the education system developed this program of Educator Effectiveness. I would hope that they wouldn't engage in creating this program if they did not find any value in it just as good teachers don't engage students in lessons that don't actually serve a purpose.
3. Why do I have to write about what I learned??? I already did the assignment!!! What's the point???- We ask students to not only think, but also think about their thinking and also reflect on their learning. We expect kids to be reflective and thoughtful about their learning so they can grow and continue to improve as students. So, why do we get up in arms when asked to reflect upon the things we do as teachers? I attended Viterbo University and it was there that I had the value of being a reflective practitioner pounded into my brain: Did the lesson work? Yes? Why? How do I know? Did the kids actually learn? Prove it. Every teacher should be able to prove that their students learned: The Educator Effectiveness program makes you prove it.

Im still not sure what my final position will be on the Educator Effectiveness program but I do know these three things: The process is making me think about what I plan to do in my classroom; it's making me reflect on what I have done in my classroom; and it is definitely not a perfect way to determine who is and is not a good teacher. 

What are your thoughts on or experiences with Educator Effectiveness? Share them in the comments below!