"We Just Want to Be Comfortable"

I went to the St. Louis EdSurge Summit at Ritenour High School Saturday afternoon. The event featured dozens of #edtech startups with tables sharing their product and passions, and a terrific keynote to end the day from Google Education czar +Jaime Casap, but what impacted me most was the student panel hosted in the auditorium after lunch.

The second question +Chris McGee posed to the group was, "If you had unlimited funds to set up your ideal learning space, what would you include?"

Accounting for my typing speed on an iPad, here are their responses:

• A desk with matching pencils and notebooks, picking where you sit, no desks in rows or columns 
• Students feeling comfortable, couches EVERYWHERE, because everyone loves couches, it's just uncomfortable sitting up in a desk - I can focus better on a couch
• ATMOSPHERE, as inviting as possible, simplicity and complexity in a way to get things done
• We DONT fall asleep on the sofas, it's not just the classroom, it's the teacher too, if we're in a cozy classroom the way we think and work will change
• Availability of being able to choose our tools for what we want
• PAPERLESS CLASSROOMS
• Students interacting with teachers when districts are hiring new teachers
• I think I focus on my work better when I'm working on a computer or tablet
• LIGHTING is a big part of atmosphere for relaxing 
• I can stay more organized with the laptops instead of using my binder.

Do you put as much thought into the layout of your room as you do the color on the walls, the alignment of your posters, or the security of your teacher desk?

I have a couch that I salvaged out of the "surplus: send to plant" storage area 2 summers ago that I put toward the back corner of my room in what I named the "collaboration corner." It's a decent space. I have a rug we were done with at home, a coffee table that I salvaged from somewhere else, and a few clipboards to write on. The only problem with the collaboration corner is that it's in the back corner. I don't feel like I can manage the students there when I'm at the front of the room at the SMARTboard (which is something else to consider anyway; should I be up there enough for it to feel like a problem?) or speaking at a student's desk in the front. So what happens? The collaboration corner hasn't hosted very much collaboration the past year and a few months.

So what's the plan? I'm gonna double down on the commitment to the collaboration corner and move the couch toward the front of the room.

Do you ever feel this way about the things those students shared? You want to believe what they're saying, that they're totally committed to those statements and that in the environment they described they would all be creative, productive little problem solving machines, but your experience with that starts to psych you out.

My hope is that moving the couch out of the back corner will separate the kids seeking the couch to hide out from the kids who just want to get in a spot where they can hunker down and work. The funny thing is, I thrive in the same environment with the same level of trust. I've convinced my curriculum coordinator to let me and a colleague go work at Panera Bread Co. this week on a website for the district rather than sitting at the table in his office. I'll sit there and drink somewhere between 6 - 9 cups of coffee, spread out my things, jam to some music, and crank through that work.

Here's where my put couch on Monday. You've got a week, kids. Show me what you've got.

#MOEDCHAT Blog Challenge #3 - The Importance of Student Collaboration

Rather than trying to write and convince that giving students opportunities to collaborate was critical to team building, problem solving, and soft skills (or the like), I decided to this week use the research tool embedded in Google Documents (bonus points for following this tutorial to learn how you can, too) and see what 5 others had concluded:

1. When teaming up for web searching, students find information faster and make fewer errors in judging relevance of search results.

Lazonder, Ard W. "Do two heads search better than one? Effects of student collaboration on web search behaviour and search outcomes." British Journal of Educational Technology 36.3 (2005): 465-475.

2. Student collaboration is critical in any constructivist approach.

This literature review from 1996 is so basic its genius. We have so many layers of technology available to us now that its easy to lose sight of the real power behind their utility.

“Online communication presumes that students can communicate, that is, that they

can meaningfully participate in conversations. In order to do that, they need to be able

to interpret messages, consider appropriate responses, and construct coherent replies.

Many students are not able to engage in cogent and coherent discourse. Why? Because,

most students have rarely been asked to contribute their opinions about topics. They

have been too busy memorizing what the teachers tell them.”

Jonassen, David H. Computers in the classroom: Mindtools for critical thinking. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1996.

3. The ways we structure student collaborations is not be be careless. 1 + 1 may equal -3 in some cases with the wrong pairings.

Peer collaboration is a critical component to reaching learners in their “zone of proximal development” by taking advantage of pairings with “more competent peers,” but this paper investigates groupings in which the more competent peer’s opinions did not prevail, so both students actually regressed.

Tudge, Jonathan. "Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development, and peer collaboration: Implications for classroom practice." (1992).

4. Students who collaborate in study groups keep up better with material, have more opportunities to verbally practice the language of academic discourse, and garnered and gave feedback through critique and conversation of reading materials.
When students cram, even in groups, they may share some of the work load, but they lose out of the social, collaborative growth they could gain from discussing the content.

Lazar, Althier M. "Who is studying in groups and why? Peer collaboration outside the classroom." College teaching 43.2 (1995): 61-65.

5. The “cognitive surplus” or extra design and intelligent energy we contribute in our free-time make large-scale, global projects possible.
+Clay Shirky is betting on the idea changing the world as information is democratized and everyone has access to information no single person could accumulate, curate, or disseminate.

What does that mean for students? When students are collaborating and sharing, that “one kid” who decides to do a little extra research because they were curious benefits the whole group's expanded understanding.

#MOEDCHAT Blog Challenge #1 - I love being an educator because...

...of all the different experiences I have as a part of my job!

We try on different jobs and authentic experiences in attempts to prepare our students for the same. One trick to engaging your students is to pour yourself into your content to find your own passion for it. Like the method actor smoking a pack a day to play a lung cancer patient, diving into the same inquiry you desire for your students will enable you to know where you can look forward to pulling out particular students' interests in tour lesson for the day.

I spent 5 hours at the Ameren Corporation's headquarters on Tuesday shadowing different engineers and accountants, soaking up anything I could about the nature of their job and stealing (j/k, totally respectfully asking if I could have or take pictures of) whatever artifacts I could. It was a VIP treatment a randomly selected Ameren customer could probably not enjoy, but because of a STEM project based learning program I'm a part of right now, they opened their doors to us.

I've spent the last two days working with two of my co-teachers attempting to communicate to them the various ways I saw statistical graphs and analysis applied and we've worked together attempting to repackage that experience in a meaningful, approachable way for our future 9th graders. My co-workers weren't at Ameren with me, so I spent much of Wednesday showing artifacts and play-acting to bring them into my world. Co-teaching or PLC tip: If you cannot communicate your passion for a project or reason for pedagogical choice, you're going to have a hard time building consensus in the group, which means you won't get anything meaningful done. 

Your students don't expect you to necessarily have the same knowledge base as a best selling author, biomedical research physician, electrical engineer, or civil-rights historian, but they do have a right to fair expectation that you might teach with a similar passion as one. I'm guilty of not making nearly the attempt I could to bring in guest speakers, but having one for every standard is obviously impractical, so your students are relying on you to let them know why "insert-content-here" is worth committing their interest to.

...of the intangible value I place on knowing that being excellent at my job is important for more than increasing trading prices for public shares.

If that actually is your job, please don't feel like I'm getting judgey-mcjudgerson on you for it. That essentially was one of the tasks for one of the men I met at Ameren on Tuesday, and I found his passion for crunching statistical data to squeeze out trends infectious. He actually reminded me a lot of my father-in-law in the way that half of the work he did was not even his job, per we, but it was work he initiated to go the extra mile to add value to what he offered the organization because he had time left over after his regular work. That work he does investigating ways to lower the standard deviation of department expenditures to increas budget efficiency, and tracking customer satisfaction against a sample of Ameren's peers is important to a lot of people, I'm sure, but the exponential value a teacher can add to the world has a greater potential for good that appeals to me. 

That Ameren "continuous improvement analyst" didn't know how to do what he did with stats without an educator mentoring him through his postgraduate studies on his way to a PhD in Statistics. Somebody call Ashton Kutcher, is that a butterfly effect?

There's a question on the Gallup teacher insight survey that asks you to rate your agreement with this statement: "Teaching is the most important of all professions." I tend to get TOO meta on these surveys and overthink them, which means I factor way too many value-adding variables into this question, and I don't really come to a conclusion. Even in the last 10 minutes, I've convinced myself to both ends of that spectrum. I can get value and satisfaction out do ANY job if I do what I do to the glory of God. If your job sucks the life out of you, it probably means you're not contributing any passion to it. So, if any job can fulfill you with intangibles and an opportunity to please God, then teaching wouldn't necessarily be most important. No job would be. At the same time, as I thought about Ashton Kutcher as his Butterfly Effect, I remembered that any valuable learning needs some element of mentors hop or facilitating which means before you go and do any other work for God, a teacher was there to show you how.

...of the toys I get to play with that I generally would probably not have access to.

Many, many classrooms had interactive whiteboards and touchscreens before national news media began finding new ways to color election maps with them in 2010.

The iPad I've been using the past two and a half years was on loan to me from my district with the expectation that I would become an expert and investigate all the ways our students could use them in the future (or even if, perhaps, they were actually a poor choice to us with my students)

...of the things I have learned about for my job that I probably wouldn't know otherwise (and that make me a better friend/citizen/parent/husband)

how to talk to kids when you've let them down

how to talk to kids after they've disappointed YOU

why the way you respond in conflict is important because it doesn't go away (at least until the end of the semester.) :)

letting people know you're willing to listen to their concerns builds trust

sharing your life with people invites them to share with you

you cannot wait for the other person to ask to be forgiven - how you choose to respond should not be contingent upon their "worth" of it.

...of the number of people you can meet and small-talk with in public. 

For better or worse, everyone has an opinion about the teaching profession. And in a sense, it is unique among jobs in that everyone has spent years of their lives in direct observance of the profession, and that there are elements of the profession most of the general public practices. You may not be a "certified teacher," but you've probably tutored a friend or family member in at least one particular skill. That being said, you meet someone in public and reveal your secret identity as a teacher, you automatically have a common experience with someone beyond your burrito. 

During my jury-duty lunch break last week in Clayton at Chipotle, a gentleman on his 60s randomly started up a conversation with me while we were on line, and we ended up sharing the better part of 45 minutes together talking education. Being a teacher is like owning a Honda.

Source

Google Apps for Education: The Secret is Sharing

As we get further into our second year as a Google Apps for Education district, (and Google continues to refine their product), I see the advantage of using Google for all of my office needs over MS Office is the integration of most of my online life that Google affords me.

We do not have the Office 365 tools that level the playing field, so anytime my ultimate goal is to share, collaborate, or publish to the web, I open up a web browser, not my Microsoft Office task wizard.

The presentation below very briefly reviews most of the Google Apps products that we have enabled for our district, and the bulk of the slides are filled with common teacher scenarios that can be served more efficiently or effective by a Google Apps product.

Other Google Apps Resources

Google Apps for Ed - a weekly digest of links, blogs, video and tweets with Google Apps tips and tricks)
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Troubleshooting Tool
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Help Center - step by step instructions for many tasks
Using Google Docs with your Students - Training Module