I read this interesting article, which lists and explains 10 reasons why social media should be in schools. I found it on Twitter from a search of #edtech & #edchat. Anyway, here are my thoughts, point by point.
What are your thoughts?
Upfront disclaimer: Twitter is becoming my go-to source of inspiration, pedagogy, edtech, and PD-related thoughts & articles. Sure, that’s not a huge surprise to those of you who already realize its power, but for me – a 2-month user – it’s really the proverbial dawn of a new day. I had no PLN before October; I think I’m developing one now (hey! you might be part of it and not even know it!). I was feeling isolated and estranged in a profession that, sadly, seems to encourage mediocrity & calcification; I’m feeling fired up now.
Rodd Lucier‘s post on PD, utilizing Yoda and a legion of Stormtroopers, is a perfect example of the mighty potential of Twitter for ideas & inspiration. If you haven’t seen it, gone through the 118 slides of it, and considered the words on each, you owe it to yourself to do so.
If we really want to revolutionize education, we need a comprehensive approach: teaching prep, PD, pedagogy, technology, and curriculum. Lucier and his team identified so many of the problems with how and what PD is, and from this long, sad list distilled some simple, direct advice.
My takeaway? With how much time we spend talking up the value of scaffolding, support of students in the learning process, spiraling, content and instructional relevance, you’d think we’d realize that teachers are human beings, too, and many – if not all – of the same ‘best practices’ we hoot about for students ought to be used for (and on!) one another. We should expect our leadership to recognize this, when it comes to PD. I always tell my students, when writing expository or analytical pieces, to write as if the audience is “intelligent and yet uninformed as to the details of the topic.” How often are these the watchwords of PD? Yoda knows it’s not nearly enough.
Read it and share your thoughts here, or with me on Twitter.
Maybe this is old news to some, but it’s new to me. I watched this video summary of Dan Pink’s book Drive, the subject of which is human motivation. Pink goes against the grain in stating that the traditional understanding of what motivates us (carrot & stick, for example) is not entirely accurate, and in fact highly inaccurate in some situations. I have not yet read the entire book, and will write another post when I do finish it, but I in the meantime I wanted to offer some observations and pose some questions on this important topic.
How do we motivate students to do work, stay on task, and do their best? Those are three different things, of course. Thinking through the traditional model, what incentive structures do we create – intentionally or not – in our classrooms and related to the work we assign, and how do these shape the answers to those three questions? Can we do better?
As for us, as teachers, what incentive structures surround us? Does the traditional school model, with the relatively new add-on of high-stakes tests and extensive monitoring from outside the classroom and school, get the best out of us? What if the institutions and systems we’ve created and are now answerable to do not get the best out of us?
Watch the video and think about how you motivate your students, or seek to get students to motivate themselves, both to get started and to keep going. Think about your school leadership and how it impacts your work. What are you doing now, why, and what outcomes – again, intentional or not – are you creating?
If you choose to respond, which I hope you do, please be specific. Talk of means & methods, not desired outcomes.
Last week my seniors, in two American Government classes, completed a short group assignment in which they studied the actions of various presidents acting in different roles – commander in chief, chief executive, and so on – in order to build knowledge about how different presidents have acted and reacted under different circumstances. The work was packaged and posted on our class wiki, and is now being used as a resource for additional work about the presidency. The assignment, however, really doesn’t matter as much as the follow-up I had my students do.
Many students dread group work, collaborative education, whatever…they dread it because they fear that one or more members of their group will not do the work, and they’re concerned that this will impact their grade, or force them to do more than their fair share of the work. Some students don’t follow through because they don’t care…others because of sickness or outside issues…others due to a lack of skill or understanding relative to others in the group. Regardless, how many of you have students who hate working with others for some or all of those reasons?
I addressed this problem in this assignment in two ways, on during and one after. I made it very clear, on the front end, that since all work was to be done on our wiki, and that students need to log in to the system in order to post & edit, all student work would be tracked – that is, I can easily look at the page history and see exactly what each student contributed to their joint project. That took the burden of worry off some students, because they recognized that their work could be identified as theirs – check one.
On the due final date, I had students go to a survey I’d created on Google Docs, described in part by Tony Baker on his blog. In my survey I asked students to rate the other members of their group based on quality of work, quantity of work, work ethic, ease of working relationship, and whether or not they’d hire that student (if they had the power as a hiring manager). I created a simple scoring system that set each student as average, below average, or above average as compared against the rest of the group, and provided them space to write a few sentences describing the working experience.
Google Forms enabled me to build the survey quickly, and it created an easy-to-read spreadsheet for checking responses. I thought it was a nifty way to get students thinking about their work, and the work of others, from a different perspective, while providing me with an easy way to view their work – individually and as a group – from another perspective. I plan on using the student feedback to supplement my own when I meet with students individually to discuss their progress in the course.
How do you get your students thinking about their work contributions to groups?
