Re-Siever

It’s that time again.

Folks (like me) make sweeping resolutions about the things they will change in their lives. I will lose 10 lbs! we say. I will be more organized! We want to be better than we are, so it’s a hopeful act. Well, despite good intentions most of my resolutions don’t last much past February.

This year, though, I think I have a resolution that I can keep. Because I know I can. It used to be a habit. This year I am going to be on time, meaning before time. I am never atrociously late for work events, I just arrive as things are starting, as the meeting is called to order. I get in few minutes after a hair appointment should begin. Worst of all, I tell my family I will be home at 5:00 and I don’t come in the door until closer to 6:00.

My mother is always early. Because she doesn’t drive, she depends on others to give her lifts, and she never wants to keep people waiting. I have an imprinted memory of her leaning out the back door, looking down the driveway, ready to jump out and trot off with someone.  For her, being late is discourteous because you are really saying your time is more valuable than another’s. A neighbour’s saying, “on time is late” really says the same thing. Arriving before “on time” gives you time to meet, greet, and honour the people you are spending time with. I need to re-remember that.

I know this, but have forgotten it. I have dropped the habit of punctuality that was part of my bones for my early years. So time for a change. I am going to show those I know (family, colleagues, and the businesses I frequent) that I value them enough to be on time.

Image: In Search of Lost Time by Bogenfreund

Tags: resolution, time

Sometimes you just gotta believe.

The givens:

I have decided my action research question will focus on the circumstances and beliefs that lead to student engagement in learning. I really want to use blogging or digital storytelling as the lens through which to explore engagement. I also want to build my own skills in integrating technology so I can help my colleagues do the same.

The challenge:

At this point we are struggling for lab time. We have 500 + students with one 30 person lab. My students may not get enough time for these tech-intensive tasks. We may get a new lab sometime in the spring.

The fall-back position:

I could go to plan B (which was my plan A): investigate the effectiveness of action (drama) strategies such as hot-seating, role plays, and mantle of the expert in promoting student engagement in the content areas. I have been knocked out by Jeffrey Wilhelm’s excellent book Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension. I know his techniques grab and engage kids.

But…

I really get excited by using technology to create, communicate, and collaborate. I just don’t want irregular or limited access to the lab to frustrate my students or me to the point of giving up on technology.

So…

I started blogging with my students anyway. I was able to do a lot of the teaching part in class (yeah, laptop + data projector!), so the students could really use lab time for writing.

And then!

I got a call on Friday: we are going to have a 30-laptop cart in three weeks! I am not sure what kind yet (Dells? Asus EEE?) but they are wireless and have long battery life. I know there will be a steep learing curve, but I am game. It will double our access opportunities, which means I have a green light for the action research.

The moral of the story: Just do it.

Image by carbonated under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: "action research", blogging, digital storytelling, Jeffrey Wilhelm, laptops

I was just looking.

Used to be, I would browse the bulletin boards of my school at the end of the day to get a sense of what other teachers and students were doing. This teaching gig is pretty lonely, so I’d prowl for inspiration. I’d see the products of teaching and learning, beautifully displayed, and I would try to infer the process behind them. I suppose other teachers (and administrators, and parents, and kids) have done this, too. There is a lot of imagination required to figure out the teaching behind the results–and I know I wasn’t always right about what really went on.

Now I’m looking elsewhere.

Personal learning networks have changed all that. Teachers are opening their classrooms to each other and the world. I have learned so very much from others. Case in point: via Twitter, I began reading Diane Cordell’s blog. She shared a fabulous beginning-of-the-year activity to get her students thinking about class rules using images from Flickr as visual prompts. She wrote about the process, shared the links and the finalized SlideShare. The activity got her kids thinking both divergently and convergently about how a classroom can work as a community. I needed to do that, too.

So, I stole her idea.

It’s a good thing.

I used some of the same images, close to the same process, and like Diane, I’ll be sharing it with parents. The ideas the students came up with weren’t always what I expected, as was the case in Diane’s class.

OK, it’s not technically stealing if it is offered to you. I could say I was inspired by her, or motivated by her creativity, or piggybacked on her strategy, but stealing does sound a bit more…subversive. And in a way this sharing across the distances is still revolutionary. She’s in up-state New York, and I am on the west coast of Canada. I won’t ever get to see her bulletin boards. But I won’t need to. With blogs, wikis, SlideShare, Twitter, the Classroom 2.0 Ning, and a host of other networking tools, I have other ways to find inspiration from colleagues I’ve never met in person.

Here’e what my students and I came up with:

Now go ahead, steal this, please. I’ll steal from you if you steal from me.

Image: Peek a Boo by John A Ryan Creative Commons

Tags: agreements, Diane Cordell, Flickr, SlideShare, thinking, visual learning

Three more sleeps until school starts. Four until the students arrive, actually. I am feeling a bit jumpy, but still ready to bounce into a new year.

Teacher Beliefs

I have been reading a lot about student engagement and motivation as I prepare for my master’s degree action research, and the school year generally. I keep re-sifting the  research, and many interesting ideas are getting stuck in the sieve. My attention is being drawn to the idea of teacher beliefs. Two big ideas: a teacher’s sense of efficacy–my confidence about how effective my teaching will be to bring about student achievement, and a teacher’s expectations–my beliefs about my students’ ability to learn.

Our Identity, Our Mission

Here’s inspiration for a good beginning:

Each student’s heart must be caught up in the passion and enjoyment of learning and reading. This attitude is a mindset that must be nurtured daily. Time for this cultivating of spirit is set into every day’s lesson plans. It is imperative that I teach each student that they can learn, regardless of whatever they believe hinders them…Teaching students to know they can learn requires that I couple an academic sense of identity with a sense of mission. This begins the first moment I meet my pupils. (A. Isennagle in At-Risk Students: Portraits, Policies, Programs, and Practices, 1993 pp. 373-74)

Intention

Bud Hunt wrote An Open Letter to Teachers reminding us of the essentials; it’s going up on the wall in my classroom this week. It’s rich and full of encouragement–please read it. Here’s the part that gets stuck in my throat:

I wish you well. I ask you to be brave and humble and kind and tenacious and wise and caring and gentle and fierce. We so need you to do well… Do good stuff.

That’s what I hope for my students too, because we so need them to do well. And I hope–I intend–that my expectations and efficacy will show that I believe to the core that they will.

Tags: beliefs, Bud Hunt, engagement

Now, if you could be a fly on the wall of any one teacher blogger, in whose class would you land and why?

I often find myself wishing there was a way to watch people in action with their students. You get a sense of what they are about through their posts: über-organized, creative, resourceful, kind, funny, engaging, reflective, generous, approachable–or not. But wouldn’t it be neat to observe for a day? What would you learn? Some of your assumptions would be confirmed, but there’d be surprises, too.

Given the chance, I’d perch on the wall of Clarence Fisher’s class in Snow Lake, Manitoba. I’d rub my little forelegs together with glee. I’d be somewhat familiar with what goes on in his room, because Clarence is quite transparent about his practice. His podcasts from the K-12 online conference and his ustream presentations say a lot about what he believes about his students and what they can do. His recent pictures of his classroom (taken in that surreal time before the students arrive) had me (and Brian Crosby) wanting to channel him. I will, and am going to post pics of my work, too.

Clarence teaches roughly the same age group as I do, and he’s a generalist teacher, as I am, so I think I’d recognize many of his strategies, but I’d learn a bundle. I want to see how the learning is orchestrated. He talks about being a network administrator for his kids–helping them grow their personal learning networks. Does that promote student efficacy and engagement? Bet it does.

What I’d likely see:

• hive-like activity: not all doing the same thing at the same time, but a sense of purpose none the less
• students showing respect for each other’s opinions, but still willing to challenge them
• peer mentoring and coaching, students teaching the teacher
• students comfortable with thinking, willing to take risks
• students engaged with content as amplifiers not mirrors, as David Warlick describes

Clarence’s first unit on Global Lives sounds like a great hook, and he’s injected rich and relevant content and activities for his students to chew on. I’d love to be a kid in that class–forget being a teacher.

It is tempting to whine, I’ll admit. I have one computer in my room, so I can’t reproduce the circumstances (1 to 1.5) Clarence has. I’m 1 to 30. But, I now have a data projector + iwb and internet access in my classroom which is a universe more than I had four months ago, so I’ll go with that, and work for more.

So thanks for inspiration, Clarence. Thanks for modeling and sharing. Have a great year.

And fellow voyeurs: where would you like to be a fly on the wall?

Image: Green Bottle Fly by jpctalbot Creative Commons license

Tags: Brian Crosby, Clarence Fisher, David Warlick, teaching