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Richard | January 23, 2012
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Is Innovation in Your DNA?

The Innovator’s DNA (Christensen, Dyer, and Gregersen) offers an uncommon combination of pop corporate storytelling and research study results. Lessons learned from their analysis of innovative leadership practices may be applied to education settings.

In contrast to their own title, the authors find identify seven critical discovery skills that can be developed. They are not unchangeable qualities of innovators.

  1. Association
  2. Questioning
  3. Observing
  4. Experimenting
  5. Networking
  6. Challenging the Status Quo
  7. Risk Taking

Networking particularly offers new potential in an information age. Active participation in electronic networks increases one’s connectedness to professionals in other institutions, leading to more powerful professional development opportunities, school visits, and personal connections.

Interestingly, the authors find immersion in a foreign culture to be a common trait about innovative CEOs. Living in another country increased leaders’ abilities to connect disparate ideas and imagine new possibilities.

Associating—or the ability to make surprising connections across areas of knowledge, industries, even geographies—is an often-taken-for-granted skill among the innovators we studied. … Conceptually, as innovators increase the number of building-block ideas, they substantially increase the number of ways they might combine ideas to create something surprisingly new.

Christensen et al find that creativity is not a fixed trait. Rather, one can develop it through practice. In addition, behaviors precede changes in attitude. Frequently engaging in discovery skills leads to conceptual change. This is one model for how a leader can develop a culture of innovation in one’s school.

In independent school discussions, creativity and innovation are sometimes mentioned in the same breath. This may lead to a focus on the arts as the principal source of instruction for creativity in the school. The authors find that creativity alone does not necessarily lead to innovation. Innovative leaders desire to change the status quo and take strategic risks put creative ideas into practice. Schools should therefore see innovation as a school-wide initiative, perhaps led by an interdisciplinary team but certainly not based in just one discipline.

Why do institutions resist change? The authors fault the “status quo bias, the tendency to prefer an existing state of affairs to alternative ones.” Innovative leaders shun the status quo, whereas delivery-oriented leaders focus on execution and risk aversion. Certainly this is true in most schools, where administrators, teachers, parents, and students find comfort in long-held models of what education should look like.

In schools, aversion to failure may also have to do with the costs of mistakes. Failed classroom experiments affects kids’ learning. However, I would personally rather model bold experimentation and occasionally hit the jackpot with a transformative learning activity than consistently organize good but uninspiring lessons.

Though most of the book’s analysis applies equally well to education as to business, the book’s treatment of education itself leaves much to be desired. One paragraph alone describes The Met’s internship-based program, one of my favorite examples of reimagining school. Sir Ken Robinson earns a mention.

Category: No category, Strategic Planning, Teaching and Learning | Tags:
Richard | January 12, 2012
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Resident Teaching Program Director

Our friends at Hillbrook School (Los Gatos, CA) are launching a Center for Teaching Excellence. Check out this position announcement for one aspect of the program. If you are interested in internship programs, teacher development, and a part-time job, this may be for you!

Independent schools are increasingly focusing on beginning teacher training programs. Also check out the Catlin Gabel/Lewis and Clark teacher intern program and the Progressive Education Lab (Calhoun School and others).

CTE Resident Teacher Program Director Part-time position – .5 FTE

Hillbrook School seeks an experienced educator with expertise in teacher training and mentoring to serve as the founding Resident Teacher Program Director for the school’s newly created Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). The CTE, including the Resident Teacher Program, will be launched in Fall 2012. The Resident Teacher Program Director will be one of two leaders in the CTE and will report to the Head of School. Hillbrook is a co-educational, non-sectarian independent day school serving 315 students in grades JK-8.
The Resident Teacher Program Director will work closely with the Head of School, the Lower and Middle School Division Heads, and the faculty CTE Committee to implement a state-of-the-art teacher-training program for an inaugural cohort of four residents. The residents, who will be selected in Spring 2012, will be part of a two-year program in which they work closely with a different master teacher each year. The goal is to bring a second cohort of four residents to campus in 2013-2014 and to eventually grow the program to have 10-12 residents on campus.
Responsibilities will include coordinating schedules for residents and mentors, providing training and a cohesive course of study for residents, providing weekly support and coaching for residents, and providing regular support and training for mentors. In addition, the Director will be expected to seek out and nurture partnerships with local universities and educational organizations, such as Breakthrough Silicon Valley, and to work closely with the Director of Special Programs to ensure that conference and speaker programming supports the growth and training of the faculty.
The successful candidate must be an experienced leader with strong classroom experience and a clear understanding of teacher training and development. The candidate must have an entrepreneurial spirit and wholeheartedly embrace the mission of the school. In particular, the successful candidates should have:
• A masters degree or equivalent
• Experience with JK-8 curriculum development and pedagogies
• Extensive teaching experience at the JK-8 level
• Experience with teacher training and coaching, and an understanding of the important role of teacher leadership in schools
• Experience collaborating on the development of new programs
• A commitment to and experience with professional development for adults
• Strong speaking, writing, and organizational skills
• Outstanding interpersonal skills
• A collaborative yet clear and decisive leadership style
• An active sense of humor
Interested candidates are encouraged to visit the website to learn more about the school’s mission, program, and strategic vision (www.hillbrook.org).
All interested candidates are invited to send their resumes along with a cover letter and a statement of educational philosophy to:
Christine Thorpe
Assistant to the Head of School
300 Marchmont Drive
Los Gatos, CA 95032
cthorpe@hillbrook.org
408 356-6116

Category: Innovation, No category, Teaching and Learning | Tags: ,
Richard | January 11, 2012
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edCampPDX Sat Feb 4 at Catlin Gabel

We are hosting the third iteration of edCampPDX, an unconference-style gathering of educators from public, private, and parochial schools to discuss all manner of forward-thinking education topics. Participants propose and choose the sessions.

free professional development | focus on teaching and learning| forward-thinking discussions |educators from all types of schools, grade levels, and subjects | highly participatory | wide range of topics

Info and registration: http://edcamppdx.wikispaces.com/HOME

Category: No category, Professional Development, Teaching and Learning | Tags:
Richard | December 5, 2011
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Lessons Learned from Cognitive Psychology

What does it mean for a school to use the “latest brain research” to inform teaching? I recently read Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Despite the provocative title, the book spends little time exploring unmotivated or unhappy students. Instead, Daniel Willingham explains how an understanding of memory, expertise, and intelligence contradicts some popular opinions about education.

Are repetitive drills dull and unhelpful? Willingham explains that repetition builds automaticity, which in turn serves as a foundation for higher-order thinking skills.

Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge (although they become much less so when we become quite experienced …).The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.

In other words, students need to hold a certain amount of information in working memory in order to synthesize and analyze. This contradicts the popular claim that memorizing facts is unnecessary now that we have the Wikipedia.

Speaking of Wikipedia, the online encycopedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, sides with Willingham.

To claim that the Internet allows us to learn less, or that it makes memorizing less important, is to belie any profound grasp of the nature of knowledge.

If public intellectuals can say, without being laughed at and roundly condemned, that the Internet makes learning (“memorizing”) facts unnecessary because facts can always be looked up, then I fear that we have come to a very low point in our intellectual culture.

Willingham drives a stake through learning styles, finding no evidence that an individual can be primarily a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner. NPR made a story of this in August of this year.

Why doesn’t Anne learn better when the presentation is auditory, given that she’s an auditory learner? Because auditory information is not what’s being tested! Auditory information would be the particular sound of the voice on the tape.What’s being tested is the meaning of the words. Anne’s edge in auditory memory doesn’t help her in situations where meaning is important.

Although NPR pitched this as a death knell for learning profiles, Willingham does support the teaching of material through a variety of methods, to allow students to use different mental processes to understand meaning and to “start fresh and refocus his or her mental energies.”

Willingham offers little for teachers to help students who don’t like school. Use metaphor, so that students use existing memories to acquire new knowledge. Organize content that is neither too hard nor too easy for each student. These answers will not likely satisfy the practicing teacher. Surely, we can do more for uninspired students.

Like metaphor, story has the potential to tap strong mental pathways when used as a teaching method. The story format of setting the scene, presenting a problem, and working toward a conclusion is familiar and engaging. This may be why the superb lecture remain a powerful teaching technique, and students adore some traditional teachers and abhor others.

Willingham also takes aim at the idea of teaching students to think like experts with a statement that is likely to rankle progressive educators.

Expert scientists did not think like experts-in-training when they started out. They thought like novices. In truth, no one thinks like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training.

[Experts] have representations of problems and situations in their long-term memories, and those representations are abstract.

Willingham concludes that schools should focus on basic skills and automaticity, so that students build a strong foundation for the subsequent development of expertise.

Willingham’s advice is easy enough to accept. Focus on foundational knowledge and skills. Set high standards. Develop and employ pedagogical content knowledge. I would expect all good teachers to do these. However, the most effective teachers go far beyond these basic techniques. Foundational knowledge can include traditionally omitted content areas that have increased relevance for students today, such as economics, statistics, and psychology. Instruction for higher-order thinking skills can indeed begin in school if properly organized and developed. In fact, some higher-order thinking skills such as creativity are abundant in the early years of schooling but weaken due to deemphasis in school.

Willingham buys into a binary view of education that is all too common in the popular press. Educational styles are not limited to traditional and progressive. Experienced teachers understand that foundational knowledge is essential to build reasoning skills. Then sophisticated teachers also develop authentic contexts for learning that have evident meaning for students. They organize instruction for higher-order thinking without compromising foundational knowledge and skills. Willingham’s analysis should not imply a “back to basics” approach, at the risk of decontextualizing instruction and further alienating disengaged students.

Category: No category, Teaching and Learning | Tags:
Richard | November 28, 2011
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Lessons Learned from Progressive Education

The progressive-traditional education debate makes for provocative discussion, but in reality effective educators blend different educational theories to reach their students. Actual students in actual classrooms are not reduced to a single theory of education to the exclusion of others. Here is the first of at least two blog posts that describe aspects of different education models I have found valuable in my work in education.

Progressive education emphasizes student experience, construction of knowledge, thinking about learning, and the development of lifelong learning. Progressive educators worry that too many students have lost interest in the conventional curriculum, particularly at the high school level. Schools can design more engaging, effective programs that appeal to all learners.

I first started teaching directly after college in a teacher intern program at an independent boarding school. I taught two sections of ninth grade Biology and met daily with an experienced teacher mentor. I was pretty unprepared to teach but did my best to convey and assess the content. When I walked past the classroom next door, I was often captivated by the discussions in Bill Z.’s ecology class. Students developed questions about the campus pond and then designed independent research projects to answer those questions. Class time was spent at the pond, over lab equipment, or in group discussion. Students were highly engaged, defying the stereotype of the non-AP kid. I wondered whether I could make my classes this engaging.

I took my next teaching job in Botswana. The curriculum there was not progressive, tied to the U.K. O-level and A-level programs. However, the school itself was imbued with a strong social justice orientation, founded on non-racial principles during the height of apartheid South Africa. After school activities commenced at 2pm, and students were required to pursue sports, service, and clubs equally. I have not yet since seen a school with such a comprehensive commitment to community service. Global citizenship and cultural competency have since featured prominently among my educational values.

The Stanford University School of Education provided me with access to the study of experiential education, educational equity and school change theory. Nine months of intensive study with experienced professors and student peers helped me develop a comprehensive internal framework for my view of education. I wanted to design educational environments to enhance student experience, assess learning, and prepare students for a democratic society.

I took my next position at a San Francisco public charter school that had opened only the year before. Coming on board in the school’s second year was a real adventure in painting, lab construction, curriculum development, and building new information systems. Growing a school from one grade level to four required a ton of work and many long days. It also provided an opportunity to found a school on new assumptions about students and learning. I have never experienced a stronger commitment to success for all students, experimentation with teaching methods, and heterogeneous student groups. These principles of educational equity became permanently ingrained in my educational philosophy.

Becoming a technology director helped me further explore progressive educational methods using technology tools. I came to see so much potential for electronic tools to connect learners and prepare students to fully participate in a democratic society. Schools that feature students as content creators and teachers as facilitators came to feel so possible, if not likely. Expansive electronic information sources, online discussion forums, multimedia publishing, communication networks could be used to support full student participation and experiential learning.

My current school embraces the term “progressive” in both public-facing materials and internal discussions. We highlight so many examples of active student exploration of knowledge, reflection about one’s own learning, interdisciplinary study, 21st century themes, and school as community. Global education, urban studies, outdoor education, and sustainability all have a place in the curriculum and often dedicated staff. The school also has a tremendous arts program, truly an equal to the other departments and a statement about the vital importance of instruction for arts literacy, creativity, and discipline.

Progressive education has played a significant role in my education history, but it is not the only relevant theory of practice. In the next post, I will explore cognitive psychology and its effects on my conception of learning theory.

 

Category: Innovation, No category, School change, Teaching and Learning | Tags: ,
Richard | November 16, 2011
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Underage Students on Google and Facebook

Google is cracking down on underage accounts. Young students who accurately reported their age when creating a GMail account are finding themselves shut out without warning. The account closure is swift and complete. With a parent’s help, a child can reactivate an account. At this point, child and parent face a choice: comply with Google’s action to shut down the account or falsify the child’s age in the account and keep it open. I suspect that many will choose the latter.

Students who have their account within a Google Apps domain are better off. The Apps domain administrator creates accounts, does not report user age, and bears responsibility to ensure the privacy of student information. Google expects schools to secure parent consent for under-13 use of Google Apps. At a minimum, Google stores each student’s name and email address, but of course the account will also include content that the student has uploaded in the course of their work.

Google Apps domains are not just limited to schools. Any domain owner can set up a free Google Apps domain, though these are limited to 10 user accounts, and advertisements are displayed. Buying a domain and setting up free Google Apps allows a family to take greater control of the services and comply with parent consent requirements. Low-cost web hosts make it easy to buy a domain name for the family and use GMail.

What about Google+? Google has just added Plus to Apps, but only for higher-education institutions.

Google provides a form to request access but state that this is not for elementary and secondary schools.

Facebook requires users to report their age when setting up a new account.

Many students falsify their age, often with the support of their parents. Both children and parents want to gain access to the social networking platform in order to keep in touch with each other, relatives, and friends. Companies routinely do not create a way for parents to provide consent for a child to create an account, and in turn for the company to collect information about the child. Facebook also does not provide the option for a school to to administer student accounts with parent consent. I also wonder what lesson students are learning from their parents’ encouragement to falsify their age.

 

Category: No category, Software/web | Tags: , ,
Richard | October 28, 2011
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Global Online Academy

Catlin Gabel is one of ten schools that has founded the Global Online Academy, a new not-for-profit school. Teachers from member schools teach fully online courses that are available to member school students. Students take these courses for different reasons, for example to access subject matter not otherwise available in our program and to take a language class despite an off-site, afternoon dance commitment.

GOA aims to preserve the unique qualities of independent school education: small class sizes, close teacher-student relationship, an inquiry focus for instruction, and a challenging curriculum. So far, courses are living up to expectations. The teacher-student relationship is particularly rich in the online format. Most of the teachers hold a weekly Skype chat session with each student. This quite possibly creates more one-on-one attention than a student receives in a face-to-face class. On the other hand, students report having a harder time building relationships with other students, given the absence of common time together.

One of our own faculty members is a founding teacher in the Global Online Academy. His course, urban studies, immediately became comparative urban studies when it went online. Previously, students studied the city of Portland and collaboratively designed an urban improvement project for a specific neighborhood. Now, each student designs an independent urban improvement project for her city. The huge added benefit: students get to represent their own city in comparisons among the members of the class!

It has been exciting to participate in preparatory meetings and the launching of this new consortium. I cannot recall in my career ever witnessing such a close, creative collaboration among ten independent schools. Our schools are notoriously independent, yet we created a new, joint teaching and learning structure together. From our school’s point of view, we represent GOA course work as a full transcript course, because we helped to shape the program. We do not represent in this manner courses that students take through other online schools.

Will GOA grow to the point that most Catlin Gabel students take an online course, or will it remain a small niche option for specific circumstances? Each semester that passes will bring a new opportunity to monitor the popularity and effectiveness of this form of schooling.

Photo source: iStockPhoto

Category: No category, Online learning, Teaching and Learning | Tags: , ,
Richard | October 20, 2011
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Learning Through Accreditation

The accreditation process serves as valuable professional development for both the members of the visiting team and the faculty and staff of the school itself. I recently returned from a school accreditation visit in Seattle. I read the school’s thoughtful, 200-page self-study, visited classes, interviewed teachers, discussed observations, and co-wrote the visiting team report with 10 colleagues from different schools. Within three days, I had gained a pretty detailed understanding of the internal workings of a school. How else can one do that?

Certain school traits are nearly universal. High schools generally follow a liberal arts curriculum. The teacher-student relationship is highly valued. At the same time, no two schools are identical. Schools have different measures of success, and they use different methods to get there. Understanding many different schools helps one learn that there is no “one best system” (Tyack). Staff who work in a single school for many years run the risk of concluding that their model of a successful school is better than others.

One school may have a laptop program and a Smart Board in every classroom. Others may rely on laptop carts, tablets, or few computers at all. One school may consider athletics a premier program, another school puts it on the same level as community service, outdoor programs, and global trips. Schools differ in the lengths of their terms, administrative positions, block schedules, academic departments, advisory structures, and so on. How the program is executed is more important than the configuration of these structural components alone.

Accreditation also provides one of the few formal accountability measures of an independent school. Of course, independent schools are ultimately accountable to their families, who can express satisfaction or displeasure with their feet. A board of trustees also provides high-level accountability in the form of school governance. Accreditation is more comprehensive and direct in its observations than any other method. While losing one’s accredited status is unlikely, the school formally presents its program to an external body for review and gains an opportunity to reflect in a manner that may inform future decisions.

This year, our school is writing its own self-study, and next fall we will host a visiting team. We have begun our process of validating the mission and explaining how we organize the program to embody the mission every day. This winter, our IT Team and Co-curricular Innovation Council groups will write two sections of the self-study, summarizing key program aspects and identifying opportunities for improvement. We should emerge from this work with a more coherent sense of who we are and specific strategic directions for the future.

Image source: iStockPhoto

Category: No category, Professional Development, Strategic Planning | Tags: , , ,
Richard | October 18, 2011
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A Paradox of Plenty

Interviewing a teacher candidate last year, I asked how she felt about collaborating with me to integrate my technology periods with her classroom periods. She replied, “It would be fine. I have been teaching technology to my students all year.” Of course. Not all schools are lucky enough to have a technology specialist provide students with dedicated instructional time. It is quite usual for homeroom teachers to both teach technology skills to students and determine how to use new technologies to support instruction.

Specialist instructors are a hallmark of independent schools. Tuition payments supply generous budgets, funding teaching positions in the arts, technology, and co-curricular programs: instrumental music, vocal music, painting and drawing, drama, ceramics, film, graphic design, animation, technology, library, outdoor education, global education, urban studies, community service, diversity studies, and more. Students experience a wide array of course work in many disciplines, enriching their education and broadening their horizons.

Schools with many specialist classes must work especially hard to achieve program coherence. Homeroom and specialist teachers must form strong grade level teams so that students experience a reasonable degree of consistency in purpose, values, instruction, and assessment, or else risk confusing students with contradictory expectations and rules. Teachers must regularly exchange information about students, so that each teacher understands the whole view of each child. Administrators must take care to maintain equal emphasis among programs, as specialist teachers work hard to develop events, seek community recognition, and justify their positions.

Specialist courses can only be good for students, right? Not necessarily. Providing students with such a number of classes and teachers can shortchange the development of core skills and fragment the student experience. The demands of scheduling specialist classes reduces homeroom instructional time for younger students and encourages older students to carry a heavy course load. Passing periods fragment the weekly schedule, as students travel from one building or classroom to another.

Most importantly, teachers in all disciplines must teach reading, writing, math, and higher-order thinking skills. If they do not, then students in the best-funded schools will receive less instruction in these foundational skills than their public school counterparts.

The school that does these things can create the ultimate instructional program, rich in a full range of intellectual pursuits while also intently focused on the child’s development of essential skills and habits of lifelong learning.

Category: No category, Teaching and Learning | Tags: ,
Richard | October 3, 2011
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Director of Technology and Learning Innovation

I have changed my title to “director of technology and learning innovation.” Tech staff members are sometimes seen as just working with computers. My new title is intended to make it apparent to the school community that I also work on projects that involve technology tangentially or not at all. These have included leading global trips, revising curriculum mapping standards, and modeling collaboration fourth and fifth grade, among others.

What is in a title? An accurate job title helps clarify one’s role in the institution, especially to new employees, parents, and people outside of the school. While I generally abhor long titles, I felt that I had expanded sufficiently beyond a traditional technology director role to warrant the change.

I particularly want to emphasize learning innovation when presenting myself in order to strengthen partnerships with my many colleagues at school who are currently working hard to investigate and adopt new models of teaching and learning. I hope that this will lead to greater collaboration with colleagues on learning innovation projects throughout the school.

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