Time Has Flewn

How did it get so late so soon?

It’s night before its afternoon.

December is here before its June.

My goodness, how the time has flewn.

How did it get so late so soon?

--Dr. Seuss

I just turned my calendar from October to November.  I’m not sure I can answer Dr. Seuss’s question.  Just how did it get so late so soon?  Each time I flip the calendar to another month I am reminded of how quickly time passes and feel a quickening sense of urgency at all that needs to be accomplished before the start of next school year.  Perhaps I am premature in my worries, but with the passing of each month, I can’t help but think of 3,000 students walking through the new doors of HSHS, each carrying some kind of technology and expecting to put it to use.

Picture from Zealousgood

 As you all know, next year your students will be coming into your classrooms with some kind of computer or tablet.  With a "Bring Your Own Device" program like we will have at HSHS, not all students will have access to the same software or app, so part of our struggle will be creating high probability lesson that engage students with technology in ways that are accessible across multiple platforms.

Picture from Nextdigit

What you may not know is that a group of our teachers have been part of the Technology Leadership Certification program through the Central Indiana Educational Cooperative.  Members of the TLC cohort have been meeting for the several months and working on ways to improve student engagement and learning through the use of technology.  Some teachers are working directly on technology applications and others are building Understanding by Design Units that specifically incorporate technology as part of the instruction and/or assessment.

For those of you not in the TLC cohort now is still a good time to start thinking about what 1:1 will look like in your classroom, and one way to do so is to look at what your peers are creating.

Projects and Assignments:

• Canterbury Tales using Pinterest to create a personal pilgrimage
• Using Blogger to collaborate on a book review which incorporates images, multimedia, and videos
• Teach compositional strategies and principles and elements of art by having students create a superhero or villain
• Students design and implement a digital survey from start to finish as part of an AP Statistics course
• Create “Teach-a-Tip” tutorials using screencasts for student and teacher use
• Students use Google Presentations and share their product about French holidays
• Continue to wage the “War Against Mediocrity” by having students identify a problem, research, blog, and solve the problem
• Create a Google+ Community for all English 12 students to post and share information, rate books, and discuss reading recommendations
• Use Google Docs, Google Forms, Socrative and/or Kahoot to create a simulation of the European Union, where students vote as to which countries should be allowed to join
• Students research and create a German character, decide what gifts might be appropriate for the character, and share using Anime, Voki, ThingLink, or other online resources
• English 11 students create a ThingLink for themselves to include in college applications

Full UbD Units

• The Progressive Unit that includes authentic assessments and the website Newsela
• Students learn the Elements of the Periodic Table using Google Docs and other digital resources
• A unit on Energy which includes a windmill design challenge and possible Skype interviews with residents living near windmills
• A unit on Cells that requires students to use Google Slides, complete a viewing log, and review using Kahoot

Did any of these ideas resonate with you?  Could you steal any of these concepts or adapt them to your own purposes?  If so, you have numerous in-house experts ready to help.  Just ask!

As the good doctor reminds us, time does fly when you’re having fun.  We must be having a blast!

I hope your week is outstanding.  Keep fighting the good fight, HSE.

Phil

A Culture of Coverage

Questions start the thinking process, and answers often end it.—Warren Berger

Last Thursday we spent time experiencing close reading of a Doug Reeves article on effective grading practice.  For close reading to be used well takes time and preparation.  Students need to read, reread, discuss, and struggle with important questions.  The picture below serves as a visual reminder of our work last week.

Close reading does take time, and some of the discussion I heard last Thursday reminded me of keynote speaker I heard several years ago.  Tony Wagner works for Harvard’s Innovation Lab and is a former schoolteacher.  He gets out into classrooms often, and he reported that he often hears message from teachers similar to this: “We don’t have time for student questions because that will take away from the number of answers I have to cover.”  Teachers aren’t happy with this, Wagner said.  He referenced one California teacher who stated, “I have so many state standards I have to teach concept-wise, it takes away from what I find most valuable—which is to have students inquire about the world.”

At one point in his address, Wagner said, “Somehow, we’ve defined the goal of schooling as enabling you to have more ‘right answers’ than the person next to you.  And we penalize incorrect answers.  And we do this at a pace—especially now, in this highly focused test-prep universe—where we don’t have time for extraneous questions.”  Does this sound familiar?

Many of you in the classrooms of HSE likely feel this same pressure to “cover material.”  Time is limited, so we speed through content without delving as deeply as we want and without letting or even requiring our students to ask and answer important questions.  Warren Berger, the author of A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, points out that giving time for students to ask questions can be difficult and even threatening to teachers:

Questions challenge authority and disrupt the established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently.  To encourage or even allow questioning is to cede power—not something that is done lightly in hierarchical companies or in government organizations, or even in classrooms, where a teacher must be willing to give up control to allow for more questioning.

Are we willing to give up some of our time asking questions to allow students to do the inquiring?  Is it possible for us to find a better balance between coverage and depth, by taking the time to read, discuss, and think deeply? 

A Place to Start: Close Reading and Questioning Strategies

We just spent time looking at close reading, and I see this class activity as a great place to start creating better balance.  In close reading, a highly engaging text covers key content and is read purposefully and carefully to uncover rich layers of meaning.  Students discuss and answer strategic questions about the text.  The results include both coverage and depth of understanding.

In daily discussions, you might also consider using questioning strategies to delve deeper—and to have some fun.  See what you think of these approaches.

·         Repeatedly ask “Why?” of your students and get them to ask you the same question:  When students give you an answer, follow up with another “Why?”  After they answer, repeat “Why?” again.  Watch what happens when you repeat the question.  Robert Burton, a neurologist writes about our “certainty epidemic,” the tendency of people (and students are people) to question less than they should.  Show students how to use this important word and teach students to use it often.  You may have to prompt them often.

·         Hold a discussion where only questions can be asked: The goal is to ask questions as answers to questions.  The discussion doesn’t have to be long, but Warren Berger claims this activity is “fundamentally subversive, disruptive, and playful.”  See what kind of questions your students will ask—and how a follow up responses can be both an answer and a question.  You may be surprised, and you will be fascinated to watch the brains at work as they try to phrase questions rather than statements. 

·         Use exit tickets that require students to ask questions:  If you are using exit tickets anyway, try having them write down an important question they still have or a question that they think is the most important one for them to answer from the day’s lesson.  It will give you feedback, and it gets students to think in terms of asking key questions.

Albert Einstein once said, “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”  That is a bit cynical, but I do believe we can contribute to this miracle.  Will these activities end the “culture of coverage” and revolutionize formal education?  Nope.  But they are ways to let students see that we value the questions more than the answers.  Oprah Winfrey was right when she said, “Ask the right questions, and the answers will always reveal themselves.”  It certainly worked out well for her!

 Why will you have a good week, HSE? 

Phil

The Rest of the Story

On Friday morning, Matt was in a classroom, so I took over the morning pledge.  During the moment of silence, you may have noticed the ticking of the clock that hangs on my office wall.  Several students did, and during the passing period joked with me about it and asked what made the noise.

Paul Harvey, a fixture on the radio of my youth and longtime newsman, had a distinctive staccato presentation.  His radio program I remember most was called “The Rest of the Story.”  My guess is that if you ever heard his show, you would remember him as well.  What follows is the rest of the story about the strange ticking noise coming from my office.

As you can see, in a total juxtaposition of eras, I have an old hand-wind Regulator clock on my wall just to the right of the computer screen.  As I’m writing these words, I catch the movement of the pendulum out of the corner of my eye and hear the ticking of its inner workings when I stop to listen.  If I don’t pause intentionally to listen, the passing of time still ticks away, but it does so outside of my conscious hearing.  

This clock comes with a key, and on Monday mornings, like clockwork—sorry, I couldn’t help myself—I wind both the main spring and the chimes.  At five minutes before the hour, some internal mechanism trips with a clunking noise that only those in my office can hear, but people walking by at the top of the hour can hear its chimes mark the passing of another sixty minutes. 

From Free_Picture.co

This clock is significant in my life, and it has a long and varied history in educational settings.  In the late 60s or early 70s, my parents took a trip north using byways more than highways.  They wandered through the Badlands of South Dakota and on up into North Dakota.  Even with the Wall Drug billboards, the old Burma Shave signs, and the stark beauty of the region, their drive through the Dakotas became monotonous.  So when they came upon a country auction in the middle of nowhere, they pulled over to see what they could see.

The auction was taking place at a recently closed one-room schoolhouse that had reached the end of its usefulness to the local farm community.  As we can relate so well in Fishers, time moves on and bigger and newer will inevitably replace rural traditions. 

In the midst of the items being auctioned that day, was the Regulator that hangs in my office.  My dad placed the highest bid, took the clock to our home in Kansas, and had it repaired by a local jeweler.  In my junior high and high school years this clock hung in our living room.  In the 80s, it moved with my parents to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and then sat in storage for the years they lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Eventually, they moved from Northern Ireland to Northern Indiana, taking the clock with them.

When I left the classroom and first became a high school administrator, my parents let me return the clock to its roots in a very different schoolhouse from that of its origins.  For over a decade it hung in my office at Goshen High School, and it was one of the first items I put up at Hamilton Southeastern.  Here it will stay until it is time for both of us to move on. 

I tell you this story because of my hallway conversation with students Friday morning and because of a quiet moment in my office earlier in the week.  Both events started me thinking about the clock, about education, and about the passing of time. 

Last week felt like an especially busy one, both in school and after school.  I was transitioning between tasks and trying desperately to check more items off my To Do list.  I have found that at times it pays to do less before doing more, so I stopped and sat and did nothing for at least a minute, with only the ticking of the clock and its faint echoes disturbing the silence of my office.  During this time, I glanced up to check the time and found myself looking closely at the old Regulator. 

From Free_Pictures.co

I saw again the dings in the wood, the fading gold paint on the glass, and the slightly yellowed face with the bold Roman numerals. I couldn’t help but wonder about who bought the clock originally and placed it on the walls of the schoolhouse in North Dakota, perhaps as many as a hundred years ago.  Who were the kids who sat in the one-room school?  What did they think, do, and become?  How did what they learned play out in their lives and the lives of their children?  Those students and their teachers all had hopes and dreams, and I wondered about where those might have taken them.  Perhaps their children or grandchildren or great grandchildren live around us or even walk the halls of Hamilton Southeastern.  We all know of stranger coincidences than that.

Hamilton Southeastern is very different than a one-room schoolhouse in North Dakota.  Much has changed, yet much stays the same.  We do our best to prepare students for what is to come, but the reality is that we have no idea what our world will look like a hundred years from now, fifty years from now, or even twenty years from now. This was certainly the case for those students in North Dakota as well.  Could those children who listened to my clock tick off the passing seconds long ago possibly have imagined a school like Hamilton Southeastern or the world in which we live?  And yet here we are, living in this world and educating the next generation.

So today, HSE, I am feeling a bit nostalgic and a bit optimistic.  The clock that you hear during announcements has seen lots of changes in the world of education.  Time is passing, but the results of our efforts and those of educators who came before us endure.  When you hear the ticking of the Regulator over the intercom, perhaps you, like me, will find comfort from the sound of the past and hold tight to the conviction that we are sending echoes of hope into the future. 

From The Atlantic

Paul Harvey, pictured above, once said, “In times like these, it helps to remember that there have always been times like these.”  And then I’m sure he signed off, as always, by saying, “And now you know the rest of the story.  This is Paul Harvey…. Good day!”

I agree with Mr. Harvey.  It is a good day…to be a Royal.  

Phil

Ready or Not....

Downtown Indy

Several weeks ago HSE administrators drove to the IUPUI campus and met with an interesting group of higher education people on their home turf in downtown Indy.  HSE and IUPUI are developing connections and exploring options of how we can help each other.  This kind of relationship-building is happening with other colleges and universities as well, but the IUPUI people were especially warm, welcoming, and excited about the possibilities.

Their Executive Vice Chancellor said something right at the beginning of our meeting that has stuck with me.  I’m paraphrasing here, but he said something similar to this: “We are getting students who have all the necessary content knowledge.  They know the material, but they don’t always know what to do with the knowledge or how to handle the unfamiliar demands, freedoms, and choices of college life.” 

As secondary educators (and sometimes as parents) we recognize the Vice Chancellor has a point.  We do a remarkably good job of preparing students for the academic side of college life, but we also know that not all students are ready to handle life outside of the classroom.

Southern California

This week I ran across a blog entry, “Another Take on ‘College and Career Ready,’” by John Warner, author and professor of Composition 101 at the University of Southern California.  In this blog, he takes issue with the use and overuse of the term College and Career Ready.  Warner makes the argument that success at the university does not call merely for mastery of content; rather he cites the following traits as most important to success in college—and in life:

•  Curiosity: Students with this trait “will learn things simply because they want to know.”
•  Self-Regulation: Warner points out that many students are not used to managing their own time and freedom and their inexperience causes problems.
• Passion: “It doesn’t matter what the passion is, and it need not be academic.”  They need to care about something in order to care about school.
• Empathy: Students must be able to see from another’s point of view.  Part of the learning process is gaining a new perspective.
• Courage and Skepticism: Warner argues that student must be willing to ask tough questions, “stick their noses into a discussion,” and believe they can contribute.

The good folks at IUPUI would, I think, agree with John Warner.  College and Career Ready is more than simply academic content.

Fishers, Indiana

We are in the process of opening the College and Career Academy at HSE.  I know we are equipping our students with the content knowledge they will need at the next level of education and in careers, but I also believe we must continue our work of teaching the traits listed by John Warner and desired by our colleagues on campuses and in the workplace. 

We do this kind of teaching when we require critical thinking, incorporate inquiry learning and engaging performance tasks, ask and have students answer essential questions, and require students to apply their knowledge and skills in new and different ways. 

We must avoid the trap of thinking that College and Career Ready is all about content knowledge.  Without question, the content knowledge is essential, but by itself may not be enough to prepare our students.

Panamanian Jazz

I ran across these words of wisdom from Ruben Blades, a Panamanian jazz singer and songwriter, and perhaps not someone you might expect to be quoted in this memo:

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

Admittedly, Blades had other topics in mind than being College and Career Ready.  His words, however, resonate, both in his music and on this topic.  We must give our students the opportunities and support to develop the character traits listed above by John Warner.  All the knowledge in the world does little good if it can’t be put to use in positive ways.

Ready or not, the week is coming, and students soon will be walking through your doors.  I hope it is filled with curiosity, courage, questioning, passion, and empathy.  That, HSE, would be a very good week.

Phil

A Question, a Shark, and a Scream in the Dark

Halloween came early for me this year.  I was dressed in my assistant principal costume and attending a professional development session in Central Office.  Dr. Schauna Findley was leading our work, and she put up a series of questions labeled “2015-2016 Possible Prototypes.”  These are exemplar questions of the type likely to be on our new school accountability tests.

You saw these several weeks ago in a presentation Matt gave during our PD time:

Even though you saw these last week, that doesn't make them any less scary.  Think of Jaws.  The music starts.  The tension builds.  You know the great white shark is going to attack, but that doesn't lessen the tension.  In fact, it increases it.  Or think of walking through a haunted house.  You know someone is going to jump out and scream.  The anticipation and wait is just as scary as the actual event. 

These kinds of questions are coming.  We don’t know exactly when or how they will appear, but they are “out there” waiting for us in the dark.

Close Reading: The Text and the Prompt

Let me tell you why I’m a bit frightened.  These questions have a whole different look and very different instructions.  Our students have taken so many tests in their school careers that they think they know exactly what is being asked and don’t need to read carefully.

When our students come to questions like these, what will they assume they are being asked to do? What are they actually being asked to do?

Try it for yourself.  Go back up and take a quick look at question #1.  Without reading the prompt carefully, what do you assume you are supposed to do in order to answer this question?  Now complete a careful reading of the same question prompt below with just a few words highlighted.  I marked words which refer to numbers in red in order to help with close reading.

The article shows that understanding plant DNA offers many advantages to plant growers and scientists. To complete the chart below, first select the two statements from the left column that are advantages of understanding plant DNA.

Then, drag and drop one quotation from the list of possible supporting evidence into the “Supporting Evidence” column to provide textual support for each advantage you selected. You will not use all of the statements from the box titled “Possible Supporting Evidence.”

The students are not asked to fill in each box with supporting evidence.  Rather, they are to pick the correct two answers and provide supporting evidence for only those two.  Be honest.  How many of your students will take the time to read the prompt carefully? 

Cue the Music from Jaws

How about number 2?  Here is the prompt:

Choose two quotations, one from each letter, that provide evidence for the claim made by both Abigail and John Adams.  Drag each quotation into the appropriate box.

That seems straight forward.  Now do a close reading.  Do you know what a “claim” is?  (Do all of our students?)  Look carefully at the boxes.  Did you catch on first glance that the top box is for John Adams and the bottom is for Abigail?   Notice that the quotations are listed with Abigail’s letter on the left-hand column.  Would students likely drag quotations to the wrong boxes?  Would you?  Are you hearing the music from Jaws yet, or are feeling the tension of waiting for the first scream?

My point is twofold.  First, these new tests are going to have different formats than what our students are used to.  Besides “drag and drop,” students are going to have multiple choice questions with six to ten options.  Students may have to choose one, two, or more correct answers and then justify their choices.  They are going to have to use close reading skills for understanding the text and for understanding the prompt.

Secondly, we don’t need to panic--yet.  Just like walking through a haunted house at Halloween or watching a scary movie, we can prepare ourselves—and our students—for the unexpected.  We can shine a light in the dark corners, and we can listen to the music being played to help them know when, to paraphrase Ray Bradbury, “something frightening this way comes.” 

In the coming weeks I want to take a look at what action steps we can take—and are taking—in order to make sure our students get the treat rather than the trick when they take the new Graduation Qualifying Exams and the Revised SAT.

Welcome to October, HSE.  I hope your week is frighteningly wonderful.

Phil