Random thoughts of an ed admin lifer

I have been wrestling with the issue of whether it is appropriate to include “behaviour” as part of a student’s mark.  It is common practice for teachers to award students marks for good behaviour or to deduct marks for poor behaviour.  This is done as an attempt to motivate students to do things right, like coming to class with the appropriate items, having homework done and arriving on time.  Sometimes if is very cut and dry:  Students will receive two free lates, after that, one percentage point will be deducted from the student’s final grade each subsequent late.  Sometimes it is a bit wishy-washy:  Students will receive a mark out of 10 on their classroom participation and cooperation.  Whether the practice is to reward desirable or penalize undesirable behaviour, it impacts the student’s final grade in the course.  I agree that a student’s grade should reflect how well they know the concepts, targets, objectives, learning outcomes (or whatever else they are called) of the class.  I also understand that some courses have a larger emphasis on the affective domain, physical education comes immediately to mind, and consequently it is somehow more appropriate to include this domain as part of a student’s grade.  Certainly it is not less important for a math student to come to class prepared and participate in the lesson than a phys. ed. student.  So how do we properly assess behaviour?  Do we separate the two components completely?  Can they be completely separated?  Isn’t it important for the end users of the grades–the gate keepers to post-secondary education—to know the affective characteristics of a student, as well as their level of academic achievement?  What about the “soft skills” so sought after by employers, shouldn’t a student’s marks communicate something about their capabilities in those areas?  I know, more questions than answers . . . what are your thoughts?

Back to the power of vision . . . I know that leadership vision and the articulation of this vision is important in all organizations, including schools and school divisions.  I also know that often the leader’s vision differs from others in an organization.  A two part question for teachers:  1.  What is your vision?  And 2.  Do you share your vision with your students?

 P.S.  My vision:  School - a place where we help kids learn.   (simple, maybe - but really think about it . . .)

One theme that continues to resurface at this conference is the importance of leadership vision in the learning organization.  My question is how do you go about articulating this vision so others get on board? What about succession planning so the vision doesn’t die when the leader moves on?  Ideas . . .?

Wed. July 18, 2007

Prairie South School Division’s Technology Learning Consultant Dean Shareski presented at the BLC07 conference in Boston. Dean’s Session was called “Beyond the Wow Factor with Google Earth” and focused on using the amazing mapping software applications that are available for free on the web.

It was comical when Dean introduced himself as being from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and asked if anyone knew where Moose Jaw is located . . . and then proceeded to show us where he lives on Google Earth – not just location of Moose Jaw, but also his house and the location of his office at Lindale School!
Click here for Dean’s wiki about the session.

BLC07 – Building Learning Communities

Presented by November Learning

I arrived in Boston on Saturday night. Spent some time in old downtown Boston on Sunday afternoon – Boston is huge. Walked around and soaked in some history and was able to enjoy a refreshment at the bar that inspired Cheers!

Pre-Conference Sessions:

THE MET

On Monday I traveled to Providence, to spend the day at the MET School. This was a very interesting day. The MET, part of the Big Picture schools system, utilizes a project based learning approach for each of its students. My first impression was that the campus was very impressive – 4 separate schools that share a media lab, library, fitness and health centre. However, like all schools, it is not the bricks and mortar that make the school. The program relies heavily on the interpersonal relationships developed within the small advisory groups. An advisory is comprised of one teacher and 15 to 18 students. The advisor meets with the students at the start of each day and is responsible for overseeing and facilitating the students’ learning plans. The students stay with the same advisor for each of their four years of high school. As the students progress, they learn how to seek out an internship mentor and eventually end up spending Tuesdays and Thursdays away from the school at their LTI – Learning Through Internship. The resulting authentic learning is relevant and engaging and often makes a real world impact. The focus is not necessarily on the learning about the career associated with the internship, but rather the learning that occurs through the internship. This appeared to be an excellent sort of alternative high school arrangement – particularly for disinterested learners. One example of a project that a student was involved in was the Big Picture Soda Company. This company now produces and markets their soda in New England. Two things concerned me – one was the low student teacher ratio – 15:1 is pretty rich and the mathematics achievement/exposure via this mode appeared to be weak. All in all though, an intriguing school!

A Web of Connections: Using Blogs, Wikis, RSS and Other Cool Tools to Connect and Learn

The Tuesday morning session was presented by Will Richardson. Will is a forward thinking educator who is now making a full time job out of helping others make sense of the social networking technologies of Web 2.0. The session basically focused on the importance of using RSS feeds to subscribe to and stay up to date with web content, organizing bookmarks through Delicious and starting a blog and developing a social computing network.

Will’s session demonstrated how educators need understanding and vision about what the future looks like for our students and what our education system needs to do to prepare the kids for that.

A few of the gems I took away:

The power of technology used to be that it allow us to produce reams of information, now it allow us to easily connect and collaborate with people from all over the world.

Karl Fisch’s slide show – Did You Know? has been downloaded over 7 million times!

Social computer networking is changing the face of many different areas. Examples include:

Politics – Obama’s blog has generated millions of dollars $5 at a time! There will be a CNN You Tube Presidential Candidate Debate. Each of the candidates has a My Space site.

Music – some artists are giving away their music, rather than producing cd’s. They then analyze where the fans who have downloaded their music are located and then go there to play a concert.

Rather than prohibit technology, we as educators, need to leverage it in our work with kids. We need to teach the students how to use things like my space – both safely and responsibly.

Students need to be taught to read and write in hypertext environments.

Teachers/educators need to use the Web 2.0 for themselves first – to understand the power of these tools as learning opportunities – once they have a personal understanding of the social networking tools, they can then utilize it in their practice.

Fanfiction.net is a site where people can write the next chapter of the book or a sequel to a book. Majority of contributors are adolescents who are doing this on their own, away from school!

Overall, this was an inspiring session. I was left feeling both motivated and overwhelmed by the work that needs to be done if we are truly going to prepare our students for their futures.

One of the things that I enjoy most about being an administrator is the regular professional dialogue that I am able to have with other educators.  Typically these conversations are impromptu interactions that spring up in the hall or staff room and sometimes they are more formal in nature and evolve because I have introduced a concept during a staff meeting.  Each situation has its own drawbacks.  Often after an enlightening dialogue with a colleague I am left wishing that others could have benefited from being a part of the conversation.  When discussing a topic at a staff meeting, not everyone is willing to engage.  Sometimes the conversation can be dominated by one or two individuals and others are reluctant to express a contrary opinion for fear of rocking the boat or taking up too much time in the agenda. 

Enter the blog! This is a great place to have a professional dialogue because it allows everyone to weigh in.  They needn’t be present at the moment of the conversation.  They can chew on the idea and formulate a response without feeling as though they are on the spot.  People from the far reaching corners of the blogosphere can chime in and offer their unique perspectives.

I’ve tried to Promote Professional Digital Dialogue (P2D2 J) with our staff in a number of ways.  I began by introducing ideas in our weekly “Monday Memo” and inviting people to respond to my blog.  This met with limited success.  Interestingly enough, some staff members feelt too self conscious to write responses – fear of ridicule, I suppose.  I can relate to the self conscious feelings as I am frequently compelled to re-phrase ideas in a way that I hope will not offend, but also promote introspection.  I made another attempt by copying an article and distributing it to the staff prior to one of our PLC days.  I then discuss the article with their group and post a summary of their poignant points on my blog. . . . again – limited success.

So, next school year, I am going to keep at it and try to further develop the digital dialogue on staff.  I would really like to help people get out of the mind set that blogging is too time consuming (in fact, some scuttlebutt about the staffroom criticized those who had made posts for not having enough important things to do!)  I cannot think of a better way to facilitate imbedded professional development than through a reflective practitioner model.  Just think of the professional learning and ensuing dialogue that could take place if every staff member took 15 minutes or so a week to think deeply about an issue and then added their own perspective to a post pertinent to our profession!

This fall, we implemented a program called Structured Support. Structured Support is designed to help students who require additional time or assistance in order to complete their assignments. Students who do not complete assignments on time are scheduled into Structured Support by their classroom teacher. Structured Support is scheduled for the hour before school and for the lunch hour.

This program is not punitive; the student can decide to attend Structured Support or to get the work done on their own. The goal is to get them to finish their work by the next session of the class. We have staffed this program as part of four teachers’ assignments. Other benefits: Students who have missed exams are able to write them during Structured Support, rather than during regular class time. As well, students who wish a quiet place to work or get help, before school or at noon, may choose to attend Structured Support.

Once a student is assigned to Structured Support and still do not complete their work, they begin a process that increases the number of people involved, thus creating accountability to more adults. If a student, who is scheduled into Structured Support, misses their session and does not complete the outstanding assignment prior to their next class the classroom teacher reassigns the student to structured support and discusses the opportunity missed by the student. If the assignment still does not get finished, the classroom teacher sends the student to office for a meeting with principle or vice principal, who facilitate a phone call home. If this does not work, the principal or vice principal arrange a meeting with the classroom teacher, student and parent. After all this, if the student still refuses to do the work, they are assigned to in-school suspension until the work is complete. This program is not designed to be disciplinary in nature, but rather our attempt to eliminate zero’s by creating a school culture where it is no longer acceptable to choose not to hand in work and “take a zero.” To date, we have only had a couple of parent meetings and have not had any in-school suspensions.

In order to facilitate record keeping, we designed a spreadsheet that was kept on a drive on our network to which only teachers had access rights. The teachers could open the spreadsheet and assign students to Structured Support. The teacher in charge of Structured Support could then open the spreadsheet and see who they should be expecting. They would then mark their attendance and read a brief not about the assignment to be completed. The student would then work on the assignment and the Structured Support teacher would support them in their efforts. During the next session of the class, the classroom teacher would check to see if the assignment was complete and would then indicate this in the spreadsheet.

This process wasn’t perfect – of the 1862 instances of students who were assigned to Structured Support, no record of attendance was kept for 534. Furthermore, there was no record of completion status for 539 of the instances. However, for the approximately 1300 instances for which we have attendance and completion data, some interesting trends are evident:

In light of the data, we have decided to forgo the morning session and only hold Structured Support at noon next year. Furthermore, in light of the completion rate of students who chose to attend structured support - 86% vs. that of those who chose not to – 26%. We are going to have to take a stronger stand on encouraging students to attend. I am hesitant to make attendance mandatory as that connotation will really change the spirit of the program from being one of support to one of punishment. One final observation: from the beginning of September to the end of May, we had 957 students accept the second opportunity to complete assignments who may have otherwise decided to “take a zero” . . . on average, that is 5 more completed assignments per day!

I am interested in knowing if the impact of the program has been noticeable to the classroom teachers. . .

Okay, I won’t beat the High School Manifesto dead horse anymore :)!

My New Horse: Assessment

Yesterday I was doing some work with the division’s assessment committee. One of the articles, by Ken O’Conner, made a point that made me go hmmm. The scenario goes like this . . . a student says, “I have to get a B on the final to pass this course.” But does that make sense? If a final examination is truly comprehensive and the students’ scores accurately reflect what they have learned, should a B level of performance on the final translate to a D for the course grade?

I agree that a student should be able to improve their mark by performing well on a final exam. The part that I am unsure about is what does this mean for classes that have a major component of their grade that comes from a major assignment - like a research essay for example? Maybe that begs the question–need there be a final exam in such an instance?

In the previous post I mentioned that the final task of our High School Change Meeting was to develop a list of 10 guiding principles for the high schools in our district - i.e. what do students need to know by the end of grade 12? Our groups were able to generate many different ideas about what should be included on the list. We never got as far as narrowing down the list to 10 principles. Can you help us out . . .what are the top one or two principles (on the list or not) that you believe need to be considered as we help our high schools evolve? Don’t be shy! Any and all input is valuable!!

On April 25th, a group of educators from Parairie South SD #210 got together to discuss the topic of High School Change. The conversation centered around several articles found in the April 2007 edition of Educational Leadership - The Prepared Graduate. We did a jigsaw type activity and shared the poignant parts of the article we had each read. I could identify the following themes from the dialogue: 1.) Education needs to be engaging and relevant; 2.) Assessment needs to be authentic and varied; 3.) We need to prepare students to be “Global Citizens”; 4.) Emotional and social components are as important as academics; & 5.) Learning opportunities need to be flexible ie. programs need to fit students’ requirements, not vice-versa. Toward the end of the afternoon, we were asked to break into groups and develop 10 guiding principles for High Schools in our division - a High School Manifesto so to speak. We had a great discussion within our groups, however there was little consensus as to what needed to go on the list - not so much due to disagreement, but rather the wide variety of what could go on the list. My question for the blogoshpere is this: If you were charged with the responsibility of developing a High School Manifesto, what would you include? I invite any nuggets of wisdom you can contribute!