Capstone II Week 1

So I am now starting the third class in a three part series on technology integration in education. As part of that class I am required to blog my thoughts and reflections. In fact the second class is what got me started on my blogging in the first place. Anyway, this weeks topic is Personal Learning Networks.


We started by checking out "Information R/evolution" created by Michael Weschon on how the internet has revolutionized information. The video was thought provoking in that it got me to think about how I approach the deluge of information available. Then it was on to Tags and an article by Andy Carvin called "It's All About the Tags". He discusses how easy it is to pull lots of information quickly using tags and the importance of using specific tags. That gets at an issue I have with using tags. They are only as effective as someones vocabulary. I struggle with how best to tag things that I come across. I wonder if practice will help me get better?


Finally, this part of the lesson presented some articles on RSS. I didn't realize that there were tools out there that would allow me to search on specific topics with in the blogosphere and hunt down topics with in my book marking tool. I will have to take advantage of those features in the future.

The next section was on reflection, a popular concept in the education world. Reflection is the idea that you think about situations and evaluate them. You look at what worked and what did not so you can improve in the future or you think about upcoming problems and how to attack them. In some ways I see reflection as an excuse in education not use hard data to evaluate our results and in other ways I know how valuable it is to think about how to handle situations. It certainly has a role in education.

I have seen reflection at work with students via the AVID program. Students participated in study groups once a week called tutorial. At the end of the session students had to reflect on the session and evaluate it to determine what went well and what did not go well. The same kind of idea could be instituted with students via an exit ticket or through an online discussion. I have also seen this idea put to use via Socratic Seminars where some students observe other students as they partake in a discussion.

I value reflection. It helps me be a better person.

Treat teachers with flexibility

Why does our public educational system strive for uniformity in dealing with teachers yet expect teachers to treat each student uniquely? Doesn't that create a disconnect? Here are two example of uniformity on the teachers side.

• Public school teachers are typically slotted into a pay scale based on tenure and educational level attained. Both of those measures have a weak correlation with student achievement, which makes me wonder why we base our pay systems on those concepts to begin with. You can be an amazing teacher who helps lots of students succeed or a mediocre teacher and you both get paid the same. The only exception to this rule comes in the form of Christmas gifts from students. The really good teacher might get a few extra Christmas gifts.

• Recently in the school division I work for the teaching load of middle school teachers was increased by an additional class to bring the number of minutes taught in line with what the high school teachers were teaching. What seems to be fair on the surface is anything but that. The high school teachers teach three 90 minute blocks with a total of usually no more than 90 students. The middle school teachers have five 45 minute classes for a total of about 120 students. While both high school and middle school teachers have one planning period per day, for the high school teachers the planning period is 90 minutes long while the middle school teachers have a planning that is 45 minutes long. So middle school teachers have to teach more students and prepare for those additional students with less time. All of it for the sake of uniformity.
  

Teaching is about more than Tests

There is a lot of talk about moving part or all of teacher evaluations towards a value added measurement system in the education world. These value added scores would be calculated using the state exams, which here in Virginia and in many other states are almost entirely multiple choice exams. I really hate that we evaluate the knowledge of students based on their ability to pick between the letters "A", "B", "C", "D".

My issue with evaluating teachers in this way is that it fails to take other factors into account.
Justin Baeder summed this idea up best today in his blog post called, Collecting the Wrong Data: Fundamental Attribution Error in Teaching Quality,

"We don't collect data on how many subjects someone teaches, how little prep time they have, how often we interrupt this prep time with meetings and bus duty, and the myriad other non-instructional responsibilities that characterize work in US schools. We analyze test scores and jump to conclusions in an effort to be data-driven, while ignoring perhaps the most important data of all: data on the contexts in which teaching and learning take place."

When the final determination is made on how to evaluate teachers, I hope they make sure to look at the whole package, test scores included.

Poverty is the real cause of bad schools?

Recently the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) released results of testing conducted among numerous countries. This has caused a lot of uproar from various political figures because the United States did poorly in comparison to other countries. Various people and organizations have poured over the results in an attempt to explain why countries like Finland and the city of Shanghai had better results than the United States.

Diane Ravitch, in her blog posting on Bridging Differences argues that one of the reasons the U.S. scores were lower than other countries is that we have a 20 percent child poverty rate here in the United States. She points to an assessment done by the National Association of Secondary School Principals that points out that when poverty is taken into account when looking at scores, the United States actually does better than any other poor country out there.

I feel pretty strongly that this idea has merit. It is very difficult to convince a student that math or reading is what they should be focusing on when they are not having their basic needs met. How can we expect students to care about history when they don't have enough to eat, are not getting the love they deserve, are worried about staying safe in their neighborhood, and nervous that mom's lost job means they will have to move, again. To me this is a failure of the community when these students struggle in school, not just a failure of teachers. Yet some where in the conversation this idea gets lost and blame ends up getting placed on teachers.

Poverty is not an excuse for teachers to do a bad job, but it certainly puts them in a more difficult and challenging position.

VA Plans to Ban Teachers from using Social Media

The Virginia Board of Education is proposing new guidelines that suggest that local school boards should ban teachers from interacting with students via social networks or personal cell phones. Specifically the proposed regulation says, "Teachers...may not use personal wireless communications devices to "text" students and are prohibited from interacting with students through online social-networking sites."

They also recommend that teachers be required to decline or disregard invitations from students to interact via texting or social-networking sites. I also found it interesting that the proposals specifically listed a ban on teachers knowingly engaging with students in online gaming.

The quick summary of the proposals can be found here and here is the link to the official proposal.

The proposal is just a component of a greater set of regulations on preventing sexual misconduct between teachers and students. While I agree that more should be done to protect students, these outright bans raise some interesting first amendment issues.

Personally, I am disappointed in the professionalism of those teachers who have done things that now warrant the issuing of a proposal like this one.

Where does one draw the line? I made a personal decision as a teacher not to friend any of my students until they were no longer my students. Yet those individuals are still students in the division that I work for. How would that fit in with these current regulations? What about a parent who works for the schools and has school aged children? Would they be prevented from connecting with friends of their child on social networking sites?

I know of teachers who have friended students on Facebook or played online video games with current students with no harm coming from either of those situations. While I would never do either of those actions because I believe it is unprofessional, I am not convinced those actions are so egregious that they need to be banned.

This is a tough one. Where do you stand?