In defense of standing meetings

I'm guilty of reading a good deal of life-hacker style productivity writing at times when I probably should be doing something productive. Some of it has really helped, like the GTD approach of sending all my loose ends to collect in one system where I can routinely sort out and prioritize them. But I'm increasingly convinced that some of it doesn't have a place in a school building--or at least not in my building.

Last year, I took a job that dropped my teaching load down to one class. Meetings are a much bigger part of the new job: committee and task force meetings, one-on-one meetings with colleagues, meetings with parents, meetings with our senior administrators. Somewhere along the line I picked up a piece of advice against standing meetings, and I believed it. I suspect we've all spent our share of meetings wondering about the meeting's purpose. I told myself I wouldn't schedule standing meetings with my department: we'd meet when we have reason to meet. 

But there's more than one problem with this approach. On a very practical level, it ignores the reality that, while my schedule may be very flexible, others' still aren't. Most educators already are scheduled lock-tight into a rotation of class periods that leaves them precious little time to plan and grade, let alone take a breath or eat lunch. That puts us in conflict with another of my precepts: you make your priorities by scheduling them. If I'm not scheduling standing meetings, I'm not prioritizing my collaborative work with colleagues--nor am I signaling to them that I prioritize it and that they should too. 

The problem remains, then, how do we avoid needless standing meetings? I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while. What do you think?

My case against paperless schooling

This post originally appeared as a reply to a post on the NYCIST email chain for technologists working in independent schools in the Greater-NYC area.

As an English-teacher-turned-educational technologist, I'm still actively pushing back against the push to go "all digital." Here are a few of my reasons:

1. Research: I try to keep up on the cognitive research comparing retention and engagement on etexts versus paper, and my sense is that it's still favoring paper, though perhaps we're not sure why.
2. Anecdotal experience: This turns up in the research, but I'll call it anecdotal because it factors so heavily into my own experience reading extensively in both forms. When reading electronically, unless I'm reading .pdfs, which reproduce static, printed pages, I find it much harder to recall where in a given text a moment occurred. Search can help, but the point is about memory. There is a visual component to how we remember printed pages: we tend to remember where on the page text appeared, and we may even remember how far into the book it was (how thick the pages were on either side).
3. Industry woes: Though some digital platforms (e.g. Notability) have achieved "best of both worlds" annotation functionality, combining functions for freehand drawing/underlining/symbols with typing, the mess over copyright in the publishing industry means that most texts can only be accessed in highly limited e-reader apps like Kindle, which, for instance, can't do freehand annotation, and won't show your annotations and the text simultaneously.

Of course there are marvelous benefits to e-texts as well. Interactivity and dynamism can better illustrate certain concepts than mere static text. Searchable text is a dream, as is collecting all of my annotations in one place.

I used to envision an all-digital future. Now, with the advent of increasingly creative hybrids like the Rocketbook notebook, I’m not so sure. If there are unique advantages to both print and digital media, why should we have to limit ourselves to one or the other?

Connectivist Learning for All!

This post originally appeared on Klingspace on 8/11/2014:

Kudos to Leslie McBeth on her recent post, “Klingenstein Summer Institute as a Model for Networked Learning.” It came in the midst of a summer when I’ve been thinking intensely about networked learning--for adults, as I prepare faculty professional development, but also for students. It’s always nice to learn that someone else is thinking on the same issues! (I suppose that’s largely the point of networked learning!)

Two giants in this arena are George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Downes writes the newsletter Online Learning Daily, and if you’ve got some extra time on your hands, you can read his 612 pages of collected essays on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (no doubt he’s written much more in the two years since he published that collection). I highly recommend Siemens’ “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age,” as a primer on networked learning and its aptness for this information age. I recently tweeted out his Principles of Connectivism from that essay:

Together, Siemens and Downes are credited with inventing the MOOC, though CCK08 and the connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) they’ve taught since looked very little like today’s high production-value, often low connection-value exponential MOOC (xMOOC) offerings from providers like Coursera.

cMOOCs are Connectivism and networked learning fully realized. As they run, they leverage their scale to de-emphasize the instructor and highlight instead student-student interactions that ultimately build the lessons of the course. But because they run completely in the open, utilizing public social media platforms rather than in a closed Learning Management System, though the course may end, the class never really disbands. The network of learners remains, right in the same social media space(s) where it began, to continue learning on the course’s topic or new interests that find in common. 

From Hollands, F. and Tirthali, D. (2014). MOOCs: Expectations and Reality

What could these principles look like in a K-12 setting? Inspired by CCK08, Wendy Drexler provides a powerful vision in her video, “The Networked Student”:

One of the most exciting possibilities here is empowering students to engage in networked learning not only with other students, but with learners (and experts) of all ages. Furthermore, while students are still in school, a Connectivist approach practices them in the true habits of lifelong, self-directed learning.

Takeaways from #NEIT15 - Post 2 - On Defining Digital Literacy (and the need for vision in EdTech)

A couple weeks back at the New York State Association of Independent Schools' Education and Information Technology Conference (#NEIT15), I convened an unconference session on "Defining Digital Literacy" and attended another on "Digital Fluency & its Place in the Curriculum."  At both sessions, we agreed passionately on the importance of developing digital literacy in our students, and we talked specifically about what we already do toward those ends, but the nature of those ends and their scope were never clear. Since nearly a year ago when I accepted my new title, "Director of Digital Literacy and Innovation," I've been trying to wrap my head around this problem.

Why is defining digital literacy so difficult?

First, digital literacy feels like a moving target. Given the rapid pace of technological innovation, how could I possibly know what digital literacy will mean for our Pre-Kindergarteners when they graduate in 2028?

Confounding terms for Digital Literacy

Second and more importantly, we've put practice before vision. The agreed upon imperative to impart digital literacy has fueled a rush to teach it before we've understood it. Just look at the explosion of digital literacy curricula in schools from every sector, and the explosion of information from sources like CommonSense Media, Edutopia, and TeachThought on what those curricula should look like. Don't forget the explosion of confounding terms that researchers, journalists, and practitioners use to describe digital literacy or components of it: not only digital literacy, but also information literacy, media literacy, new media literacy, web literacy, digital citizenship, digital fluency, Internet Safety, and I'm sure others. Compare this abundance with how few frameworks of standards or competencies for digital literacy have taken hold.

With regard not only to defining digital literacy but also to effectively integrating technology into teaching and learning, putting practice before vision is endemic in educational technology. It is tempting to blame the booming educational technology industry for their part in wrapping old modalities in shiny new packaging and calling it transformative. It's perhaps more more to the point to blame cozy relationships between EdTech marketers, education conference organizers, and educational publishers (including bloggers). Honestly, how many app-slams and top-ten lists of educational apps you absolutely must try right this second! do we need?

Why is defining digital literacy so important?

Because in the end, the onus is on us above all, the EdTech leaders, to be critical consumers of educational technology and media. To make those evaluations, we need frameworks. SAMR is one. I believe that robust definitions of digital literacies are another.

I'm not alone. The New Media Consortium's (NMC's) 2015 Horizon Report on higher education identifies "improving digital literacy" as one of the six foremost challenges to educational innovation in the next five years. The authors contend that digital literacy breeds the agility we need to innovate. But they lament that "Lack of consensus on what comprises digital literacy is impeding many colleges and universities from formulating adequate policies and programs that address this
challenge" (24). "Compounding this issue," they write, "is the notion that digital literacy
encompasses skills that differ for educators and learners, as teaching with technology is inherently different from learning with it.

JISC's Seven Elements of Digital Literacies

Supporting digital literacy will require policies that both address digital fluency training in pre- and in-service teachers, along with the students they teach" (24).

Nonetheless, the NMC optimistically categorizes the challenge of improving digital as "solvable" (others are categorized as "difficult" or "wicked"). They point, for example, to promising initiatives from JISC in the UK, from Cornell University, and from the Massachusetts Department of Education.


I would add to NMC's recommendations the Web Literacy Map from Mozilla's WebMaker program:

Mozilla WebMaker's Web Literacy Map

This work is essential because vision is essential. Because vision inspires, lending intrinsic motivation to our imperatives, and vision bestows direction, framing our individual efforts on a collective path.

So how do I define digital literacy?

The framework below is heavily indebted to the work of Doug Belshaw, now the Web Literacy lead at WebMaker. 

In his book The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies, which distills his dissertation, Belshaw argues that definitions of digital literacy must be contextualized to a particular culture; it is impossible to define digital literacy for everyone (hence the teachers and students dilemma that NMC raised). He offers eight elements that he believes will be present in just about any definition of digital literacy--the cognitive, critical, confident, civic, cultural, communicative, constructive, and creative elements--but he deliberately leaves their definitions ambiguous, leaving that task for leaders to take up in our own contexts. 

With input from a great many supportive colleagues, I have arrived at the following, submitted now without further comment (except please, please to invite your comments!):

Time-Management: Planning Out Your "Ideal Week" of Course Activities

Vicki Davis wrote this week about a time-management technique that involves planning out your “ideal week”, plugging it into your calendar not as absolute commitments, but for easy reference, and using that reference to try to spend your time as best as you possibly can. 

I’ve operated this year on a system similar to Vicki’s, for class time as well as out-of-class time.

Let me start with a few disclaimers. Feel free to skip these if you’re basically just willing to cut me some slack:

1. (The don’t tell Grant Wiggins on me disclaimer): I don’t pretend for a second that your ideal week should look like mine! In fact, my ideal week has changed since I completed the exercise below, and it needs to continue to change. This post is about a time-management trick, not curriculum- and lesson-planning. Teachers really ought to plan how we spend class-time on a unit-by-unit basis, not once a year! I’m a deep believer in (often practitioner of, always aspirant to) backward design.  
2. (The rephrasing disclaimer #1 disclaimer): As Vicki suggests, the “ideal week” is not  an absolute. It mustn’t be! it’s a handy way of reminding myself to cover all my bases. 
3. (The alternate universe disclaimer): At my school we’re on an eight-day rotating block schedule (A-day through H-day), and actual days of the week (Monday-Friday) bear no relevance to our class schedule. So I’ll demonstrate an ideal rotation, not an ideal week. It’s just about confusing to us as it likely will be to you!
4. (The nerdy disclaimer): Hi, my name is Ted, and (especially for an English teacher) I’m addicted to spreadsheets. I use them for applications like this where they work but are pretty unnecessary. Forgive the nerdy madness that follows, and if the concept appeals to you, find a process to make it work for you.

STEP 1: Prioritizing time, and distinguishing class work from home work:

1. I broke out the major work of our course into categories, far left.
2. Then I asked, in an ideal week, what percent of our total minutes (class work and homework) would be spent on that category of work?
3. Of that percentage, what percent would be spent in class, and what percent would be spent at home?
4. Then using the available time in a single rotation, I translated those percentages into minutes of coursework and homework

STEP 2: Divvying out the minutes across an ideal rotation, considering:

1. Lengths of class periods and intervals between them
2. Spaced and interleaved practice (If you haven’t yet read Make it Stick, stop reading this and start reading that)
3. Regularity of assessment

STEP 3: Creating those ideal days as templates on Planboard (where I do most of my lesson planning)

Then how do I use it?

When planning a lesson on Planboard, I start with the template for that rotation day:

Occasionally, I’ll use this template as a bare-bones outline for my class, filling in my precise plans for each component. More often than not, I’ll fill in something slightly or completely different.

The point is, the template prompts me to cover my bases. I’m an English teacher: I live for classroom discussion. Left to my own devices (as I was in the first couple years of my career), I would do little else. With this little hack, I’m doing a whole lot better by my curriculum and my students.  

Takeaways from #NEIT15 - Post 1 - On Incredible Librarians and Tech Integrators

I spent the last three days at the New York State Association of Independent Schools' Education and Information Technology Conference (#NEIT15). I'm so thankful to the conference organizers for the thoughtful work they put into choosing keynotes, balancing them with unconference times, and, of course, sending us to the lovely Mohonk Mountain House!

In my next posts, I'll riff on takeaways from the conference. Here's the first:

Librarians and technology integrators are doing incredible work to inspire students and empower teachers. 

Positioned at a nexus between students, teachers, and administrators, they are the consummate collaborators, constantly envisioning and enacting possibilities for others' work.

One of our keynotes, Shannon McClintock Miller, embodied that role. From her post in the library at the Van Meter Community School, Miller helped to advance teachers' practices, to tap into students' passions, and to lead an effort to develop an innovative K-12 Digital Citizenship, Technology, and Library Science Curriculum for her whole district. All the while, by sharing out her practices, she has inspired countless others to leverage their positions similarly nationwide. Miller and so many conference attendees I met are models of connective, collaborative action, achieving more--seemingly, all at once--than I might ever think possible had I not seen it.

All this sounds great, right? But it does raise the following questions for me:

Whence comes this extraordinary energy, this incredible capacity for action, not just from Miller but from an entire corps of librarians and technology integrators? How can we unleash it where we haven't yet, and feed it where we have?

Also, are circumstances somehow mandating these superhuman performances? Are we supporting these professionals enough? Are we hiring enough of them? Where should we draw the lines between specialists' responsibilities and core teachers'? Should we be worried about burnout? 

Next up: On Defining Digital Literacy (and the need for vision in EdTech)

Facing Up to Structural Inequality: A Justification and a Reading List

This post originally appeared on Klingspace. Join the conversation there!

Lest we needed any more reminders of the importance of facing up in schools to controversies of equity and difference, MTV’s “Look Different” campaign recently released findings from a study “designed to understand and measure how young people are experiencing, affected by, and responding to issues associated with bias.” You might have read about it in this article from Slate, “Why Do Millennials Not Understand Racism?”

The study suggests millennials want to believe it’s possible at once to be both colorblind and attuned to differences of culture and experience. According to the study, “73% [of American millennials] believe never considering race would improve society,” while “81% believe embracing diversity and celebrating differences between the races would improve society.” Somewhere in those results, a large majority of respondents evidently don’t see how those statements conflict.

But I won’t engage here in the millennial bashing that, as Frank Bruni recently wrote, is uncomfortably in vogue in popular media of late. (By most definitions I’ve seen, I myself am a millennial.) Rather, I wish to remind myself and an audience of educators that our students’ misunderstandings are our responsibility.

The failure is ours. We’ve failed so far to teach that difference is about more than the holidays we celebrate and the ways our grandparents spice their food. We’ve failed so far to cast light on structural inequalities that persist despite our national progress over the past half century, despite our having elected a black president.

Inequality is not just “in the eyes of the beholder.” It is reality. It exists in the law, past and present. It exists in our schools, public and private. And it exists in the microaggressions that people of color encounter daily because yes, it exists in the eyes of those that levy those microagressions-- often (but not always) in entirely subconscious cultural biases learned from previous generations, from stereotyped depictions in popular media, and from each other.

Facing up to structural inequality can feel like perilous work in schools. We wonder, how can we expose it and not threaten civility in our own precious communities?

I don’t claim to have the answer. But for all the failures of our popular culture to address inequality courageously and civilly, some are managing both (see list at bottom). I rely on them to model the courage it takes to face up to inequality, and just as importantly, to remind me of inequalities of which I could otherwise go through life blissfully unaware. I have a long way to go in my own education about inequality and how to address it in schools, but I’m thankful for their influence.

For models, see Peggy McIntosh (and The National SEED Project), Jose Vilson, NPR’s Code Switch, and especially Ta-Nehesi Coates whose recent “Case for Reparations” could help restore some stunning omissions from typical high school American History curricula.

What would you add to this reading list?