Mark Hines EdTech Blog

The Morning Session was with Knowledge Works foundation who shared their future of education roadmap to the year 2020. This is definitely worth the time to visit and very provocative stuff. Essentially, we explored each of their six forces that they see pushing education in either a positive or negative direction. For each one of these, we had a chance to stop and reflect about the implications as well as examples of these. You can look at my notes or go to their website to get more detail, but the six forces are altered bodies, amplified organizations, platform for resilience, new civil discourse, maker economy, pattern recognition

they have lots of resources on their website that links to examples of this
http://www.futureofed.org/

the afternoon session was a meeting of the special interest groups on technology coordinators sponsored by ISTE. the session was led by Max Frazier who started by talking about the role of the technology coordinator and the challenges it presents.

His slides are posted in my repository as well as my notes. A couple of key things that came out of the session, there is a desire for the group to continue this conversation beyond this meeting today, there’s a recognition that the current economy will cause all of us to rethink some of our core assumptions about providing technology service and campus, and there was a sense of lack of control over budget and policy Center off dictated by other areas of campus — school boards, principals, public initiatives.

my document repository here

NECC Summary

This document is the summary report for this year’s conference. Thinking about what’s most readable, I decided to do a little differently. I’ll summarize all five days in a paragraph or two here, and then if you wish you can look for the detailed notes, which are more “bullet style” but have specific tools and links as well as as many comments as I could cram in while I was typing with my laptop and tweeting. Caveat emptor!
After note — for the sake of readability, I broken down each post by day — that way the documents won’t be too far apart from the information that refers to them.

Saturday June 27

The morning was a session with Robert Craven from Orange County Florida with the title “Construction Paper for the 21st Century: Google and Free Tools”. great session with really good planning and resources listed. We spent a good part of the time using tools in Google — particular Google docs. For example we made a survey, and then were able to take it and collect data — including on mobile devices like my iPhone.
We spend time using the collaborative features, and talked about the way these can be used in the classroom.
We spent the second half of the session talking about other free and open tools he has a wonderful list of these on his website but a few of the ones in particular that he drew attention to were thinkature, Voicethread (probably the cool thing here that I learned was how easy it was to post a voice comment using a cell phone — this was very cool!), and more.
http://sites.google.com/site/digitalroberto/Home
One of the things you’ll find on his site, are screen cast videos of many of the tasks needed to accomplish the activities. This resource is a great one and I appreciate the work Robert took the This time to build a useful library for interested teachers.

The afternoon session was with Vicki Davis with the title “cell phones for classrooms, calendars, and life management”.
The best part of the session was our first hour or so was spent talking more about philosophy and policy — everything from legal precedent for students that do inappropriate things, to a conversation with the group attending about their current school philosophy and where we need to go. She showed us a video that the George Lucas foundation made about her and her students here:
http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-teachers-vicki-davis

nice idea — she had us role-play a few true court cases (student pulls down teachers pants, films and posts on you tube) it gave us a chance to get to know each other, weigh in on our thinking, and be active about this material. Nice modeling of her work.

great resource to help with policy — book by lisa guerin “smart policies for workplace technologies” definitely worth giving to help consider some of these devices and how we can correctly articulate expectations to staff students and parents.

She then spent time developing a theoretical model for the types of activities that cell phones can support, and the point at which they become viable either because enough students have them, the cost is no longer prohibitive, and they take the place of another device more powerfully.

one of the cool things that we did at the end was take a list of cell phone technologies and use their mobile devices in small groups, then show them to the rest of the participants. For instance, myself and my partner Adam took pictures on our mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry) and e-mailed it to our Ning site. this works as well with video! The power of this can’t be missed stated — students in the fields, could be taking pictures and posting directly from their phones to a community learning site to build a database of images, documentation.

in the “you heard it here first” category, she mentioned that one of the new trends we’ll should be looking at is QR codes. These have the ability to embed information that mobile devices can scan and playback. She feels (correctly so I believe) that we are going to see these become embedded in many objects soon.

She keeps an excellent set of resources here:
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

Her website for the presentation is:
http://celled.wikispaces.com/

I did grab the text version of the back channel and posted with this blog as well.

all the notes are located
http://sites.google.com/site/necc2009test/documents-from-necc2009
or here

Reflection on Malcolm Gladwell keynote at NECC 2009

one of the key ideas that Gladwell explored in his keynote was the significant evidence that both supports the idea of perseverance over talent and its implications for education. There is a very nice summary of his keynote here:
http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/06/28/face-to-face-with-malcolm-gladwell-at-necc-2009/

at one point, he talks about the success of KIPP schools (http://kipp.org) and their formula for success being more contact time, therefore more “time in the trenches”. If you look at the MET school, their idea of rigour comes not from curriculum that is hammered into kids, but from rich authentic projects that develop rigour.

In particular, Dennis Littky quotes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi … rigour is “the opportunity for young people to experience intense concentration in any activity that requires skill and discipline, regardless of content”

the key idea here, is that two very different schools accomplish the same goal by lengthy hands-on hard cognitive work on the part of learners. In one school that is driven by the teachers, and the other is driven by the direction of a student who is passionate about a topic they have chosen. For our HAIS/HCF schools of the future initiative, we have left the approach that each school takes to themselves. Transformation for each institution will be different, and the good news is that Gladwell’s tenet would seem to imply (and I agree) that the paths that each school takes can be different as long as rigour is a significant part of student work on a day-to-day basis.
He said himself during his keynote that it is probably not so much what schools do as it is how they do it.

interesting stuff…

These are my notes form the sessions I attended today:

Charting a Course For the future of education

Sunday Morning 830 am - 1130 am

Doug Levin - national boards of (NASB) and Dave Moore from knowledgeworks and the foundation

came from cable in the classroom - planning for strategy for futures of ed

created a roadmap - 2020 map for future of education

website: http://www.futureofed.org/
This is a really deep website has lots of resources that support their future trends and give him some votes of data and examples as well as interesting scenarios and pieces to reflect on

we started with a question to group - what will school be like in 2020?
we talked about a range of issues/thoughts

what will drive change?

they have developed six forces that they have identified as shapers of the future of education.
In order: altered bodies,, platforms for resilience, a new civil discourse, the maker economy, pattern recognition

the bottom line is that each of these developments will affect in some way how schools can or must change.

marks thoughts - which of will succeed in leading our schools to change in ways that will help children into their future?

gotta think about clay’s book about disruptive innovation - how will this affect school’s development? All of these forces have disruptive majors in them — some positive, some negative

#1 altered bodies

thought of the day - if you could take a drug that would improve your intellectual performance without side effect would you?

this brings up an issue I think about - dichotomy - there will be 2 societies - those that have gets…will some technologies level the playing field or increase the divide? clearly given our past history, many of the technologies and forces we are talking about will act as dividers, not unifier’s. This is a shame, but reality.

do we teach kids ways of focusing - things like mediattion/focus strategies?
We know there is lots of research (stress/cortisol levels for instance) and yet we do very little in a formal way to help students understand how to create the best conditions psychologically and physically for learning — this is a shame.

interesting observation (me) - he mentioned harvard study about coping mechanism - mark’s thought - prayer is one example of this - the power of church may be drawing on this …
community of schools (think MET) - if stronger connections, better dealing with stress
As we move from elementary to middle to high school, we typically move further and further away from community, and this seems a shame as that sense of community that supports the stress on them During the day students deal with.

#2 amplified orgs
clay shirky - ted lecture - groabnies example
he used a TED video about Josh Grobin and how a community formed both around supporting his career, and a nonprofit to raise money for needy causes. Technology was an enabler that allowed these groups to form.

in our sotf - how to take our amplified organization and make it do more…
is rapid beta testing in ed going to be possible

one of the big ideas - if we can change the isolation of teaching through these amplified networks - then education might be transformed - internet access is pretty ubiquitous, so the ability for teachers to connect pretty much anywhere has become a nonissue

we really need to redefine rigor - need to memorize littky’s definition of this…all of us need to take on the domains we can change and take ownership of them…

littky - “ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - rigour is “the opportunity for young people to experience intense concentration in any activity that requires skill and discipline, regardless of content

#3 platforms for resilience
showed a video of Jamais Cascio talking about autoimmune responses in education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIBMaoiboZ4&feature=player_embedded

we had a bit of a discussion here about schools reaction to banning devices to limit what students can do. The subject came up about the analogy of schools being devoid of tools that students feel comfortable with and therefore becoming less relevant.
discussion around internet access and the reaction little relevance to a world where kids will have their own always on access in the next few years

need to blog on: if most students soon will have data access through their own devices and schools can’t filter, how will schools react
research - grunwald and associates - gap between admin and student perception of tech use and appropriate use. Whereas administrators look at worst-case scenario, the self reporting by teenagers indicated much lower levels of inappropriate technology use than adults assume.

#4 new civil discourse
example of melboune wiki - the city of Melbourne has created a wiki for city planning that allows all members of its community, even from outside their community, to help in urban planning.
and curriwiki - what happens when a community can build knowledge
involvement of parents in school another example — we have a true opportunity here to use technology to create transparency that hasn’t existed in schools before.

#5 Maker economy
see notes - instructables, etc
He gave examples here — plenty on their website — of services and trends that indicate moving away from mass merchandising, and tailoring to individual design, localize products, and green technologies

#6 pattern recognition
how to sift, filter
this is reminiscent of shirky’s filter failure comment on web20 conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI

how to make meaning of data
is web 3.0 going to help? mark’s a comment here — the promise and potential of Web 3.0 (symantic) is one of the future trends of the think is a powerfully understood well enough yet. As meta-data and personal information merge in the cloud, the common experience of the web will be a personalized pattern experience that will take into account our preferences, tendencies, and needs. This won’t address all the problems with making meaning, but it should help.

the future is
local
digital
personalized
stressed
vibrant
collaborative

Arthur Levin oped in edweek feb 20 2009 - the change of schools and learning… Although Arthur has been a fairly conservative voice in education, Dave’s point was that this piece even from a conservative voice indicated both the recognition and need for schools to do more than they are old mission of preparing standardized assembly line workers.

SIGTC - The 21St Tech Leader

Sunday afternoon 1-4pm
(mark left at 3 pm)
background context - ms tech person, moved to writing book for tc fr dissertation

goal - past work
goal - he is an incrementalist

video of doug skinner - day in the life of a tech coordinator (for google teacher academy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5x_GylPdIU

21st tech coordinator - leader in the middle

refers to David Morusund - his 87 book on tech go To coord is the first

dm: need for long term commitment… tough to look at volatile tech
pd
budget
curriculum analysis
transitional period - think long haul (reminiscent of Jukes Digital Diet)

research - even though we look typically at yr1&2 , the substantive work happens into yr 3&4 and beyond…
interesting point here — one of the things in our schools of the future grant was a recognition that the transformation process for schools is a multiyear effort to need support from more than just the first year or two and he agrees with this.

things mark needs to work into his sphere of influence: phones, data, security..others?

slide of Edward De Bono - hats worn by execs

frazier - same idea 0- hats worn by tech coord

teaching & learning
desktop support
administrative computing
network issues
budgeting and planning

new themes for 21st century tech leaders
digital citizenship
convergence
connectivity
data

the data crunch is a reality - how do you manage the amount we deal with

his question - either you need to be a transformational leader (take the early adopters and move on) or a progress leader - incremental change…

here’s a big question (my dissertation)_ what style of leadership will schools use and what success?
give the early adopters resources and go, or support incremental change as an institution… I believe most of us support both of these groups — I suspect how we decide where we put our energies is our higher yield activity. Here’s the big question — if we use the Moretti rule we know that 20% of our effort would give us 80% of our yield - which group is our high-heeled group?

two questions
what is the most pressing issue for us?

what advice to a friend about to become a tech coord?

topics that came up - cell phones, funding and control, data management (forced externally) - getting things to talk to each other (ex email - the way people share information)
amplifying of issues over the internet (cyber bullying, posting inappropriate)
not always control over own money, access to real time data that teacher can use,
gap between admin lack of tech use and need for better understanding, filtering issues…infrastructure and budget during crunch times

digital media - old school texts trying to bring new media

organizational structure and impact on edtech and security concerns (filter, etc)

what does success really mean? target/scapegoat of decisions.

interesting issue

worked on this for the robert craven session I attended this am

here is an embedded voicethread form the workshop:

So today, after getting situated in the hotel it was about 2:30 PM and I decided to take a walk through the city post to get situated, find the convention center, get lunch and see a few sites. Inspired by the splendid table on NPR, I looked up Jane and Michael Stern’s food finds and chose Ben’s chili bowl which is about half a mile from Howard University. From there I walked through sites like the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Smithsonian air and space Museum, the Capitol building and then walked back. I knew it’d been a long hike, and Google mapped it. To my surprise the distance with even greater than expected — 8.7 miles:

View Larger Map

At the Honolulu Board of realtors meeting on June 5, we had the chance to hear Payton Dobbs, who leads Googles effort in e-commerce. he shared seven key ideas emerging for anyone involved in thinking about technology overlays with their development. There is nothing here that is terribly groundbreaking, but what is significant is someone as high up in Google really identifying the importance of these things — they are all relevant to our mission education and are worth taking to heart:

mobile Internet will explode — gave lots of relevant examples of how cell phones and smart phones are becoming the primary way by which people use and learn with the Internet. Good example — Apple iPhone 60% of the phone use is for not making phone calls. Lots of other examples of 3G growth, preponderance of mobile phones in populated areas like India, China, Japan, etc. Japanese teens spend two hours a day on their mobile phones — not talking. Examples of people authoring books entirely in the cell phone.

Maps are a key interface — again, give examples of how tools like Google Earth have changed the way people view the world. This is not a huge surprise to me (Mark) since my interest in tools like GIS have been around for a decade. What is interesting to me, is that we’ve skipped over GIFs as a tool and gone straight to rich intuitive tools like maps on the iPhone, Google Earth on the Internet to understand the world. A good example of this is the number of students we see in the Weinberg Tech Plaza that spend part of the day using Google Earth to look for surf spots, find their friends, and take tours of places they have not been. The new features in iPhoto for geo-tagging are another example of this becoming more prevalent.
The divide between the web and desktops will this appear. This is essentially the argument for cloud computing and there is no doubt that we are seeing the emergence of tools like smart phones and networks. He made the case that within a few years most people will ask that their data to be in the cloud, so they have access to contacts, documents, information matter where they are. Is the fact that our teachers cannot access their files from home another example of how we are disconnected from this movement?
Everything will connect — previously inanimate objects will now be connected. He gave us his example the significance of RFID as a technology. The fact that devices will become smart enough to know what they are how they are connected to other objects around them is an example of the way technology drives innovation. If our refrigerator knows that milk is spoiling, if our car knows conditions are unsafe, if objects in the supermarket know our likes and dislikes, it will greatly change the way you interact with the objects around us — and how they will interact with us!
The web will be more personal and social — his observation was that people were less and less distinguishing between online and face-to-face interaction. We are already seeing this with the school age generation who see talking to and using tools like text, avatars, as real conversation and relationship. Another example of this is using online interfaces for medical advice — something which used to be the purview of the doctor’s office has become a much more online experience and moving more that way. He advocated for all businesses (and schools?) To have a social area of this site to build a community that will bring conversation, creation, and commitment to those focused around that organization.
Internet will be the primary platform for media — we see lots of examples of this recently with releases of Hulu, YouTube, and Flickr, Picasa, etc. For me, personally, this begs the question of platform independence — when we are reaching the point that media including tools like Voicethread now, and potential video editing sites are just n the horizon, is the fact that right now the Macintosh is the weapon of choice for media development for most schools, a long-term reality for a short-term phenomena?
Going green is here to stay — he gave lots of examples of Google’s own efforts to be green — solar generation test projects that are fully online, electric car hybrids being developed, and just the nature of the need for us to all live within their means that the earth gives us. I think the example of Hawaii preparatory Academy’s new energy lab as a model in this venue — I am excited for what it will mean when it will become a model for schools to consider how to best utilize the resources around them.

he finished with the quote below — recognizing that for many in businesses and schools that these changes will not be easy or comfortable. They are however, the reality we are looking into and we disregard any of these to our own peril.
. Catherine the great -
“there is a great wind blowing and will either cause imagination or a headache “

discuss…

this is the second part of my visit to the Metropolitan school in Providence Rhode Island.
The earlier notes are published in the blog under part one…

lunch with some of the teachers
a tour by Alicia
some sitdown time with some of the students
in participation in a student exhibition as part of their judging panel
– I’ll try to get this post tomorrow

Nancy brought me to one of the building lunchroom’s — I should explain that there are four main buildings on campus and Senate each of the four corners of the property beaches labeled liberty, justice, unity when I can’t remember the fourth of a speech building holds something on the order of eight advisories — two for each grade level.
So I have lunch in one of these buildings with some teachers. we talked about the challenge of the environment — some of the teachers were advisers, a few were LTIs which I think students with learning something integrators — in a sense they’re specialists that help shepherd the process and actress resources for students and advisers. one of the teachers I spoke to, Dennis, was very willing to share the challenge is that his experience has — he had been a traditional teacher in Florida — green biology was his degree work, and he had been teaching Marine science, biology, and environmental science in Florida.
He came up to Rhode Island he was looking for a new environment to teach — and so had to transition to this new paradigm. We talked a bit about the challenge and he was very positive about the adjustment and in going from teaching a single subject, to being a generalist in his advisory role. (This was his second year at the school). The agreed with many of the things that Nancy had told me about the need for organization, the chaos of day-to-day learning (it’s messy), and the truly wonderful pleasure of seeing every student in your advisory being engaged in real work.
If I remember more, I’ll add here about my lunch conversations… I didn’t take notes here because I was eating and talking at the same time
after lunch, I joined the tour with a group of about 15 students from Keene State College in New Hampshire — liberal arts majors they look so young, they look like the students!
The tour was led by a senior — Alicia and we looked at the different buildings and campus including the media Center and the wellness Center. she was another example of a great, highly engaged students. Her brother goes to a more traditional school and I asked her about how that difference plays out and she admitted theft there are days of very different.
One of the interesting parts of the tour, was the media Center which is pretty much managed by a single individual — Brian Mills — he is a daunting task of managing performance space, and their media Center which includes a studio, editing equipment, audio equipment, etc. He clearly has a lot of work — even though he doesn’t have an advisory he works long days and nights to maintain all the resources needed (will see an example of that at the two o’clock exhibition that we attended)

after the tour we were able to sit down with two students — hope and allysa so that we could ask them about their experiences at school. Hope was a senior who had spent the last three years at the New England aquarium working as a exhibit guide, a behind the scenes exhibit curator, and in the medical area working with animals. Her goal was veterinary science. I think she also may have been interested in marine biology as a secondary topic.
Alyssa was new to the school (three months) — she had spent the last couple of years volunteering at a therapeutic writing center — this was before she came to the school. The reason her parents applied her, was the opportunity for her to more fully be involved in the writing Center is a part of her curriculum — and it was clear she was highly motivated by her commitment and her love of working at the center. She admitted that they had become so dependent on her during her internship at if she wanted to switch to a different internship he would probably affect their program adversely. If one of the questions we asked him the students was anything that they would like to see that the program doesn’t have, and a couple of students venture that they’d like a little more rigor in their mathematics and science. I remember in talking to Dennis about Clay Christensen and it struck me that the possibility of using well-designed online learning modules might well fill in some of this gap that falls outside of their internship and advisory experiences in school
what was striking about all the students that we spoke to was their sense of commitment, ownership,

I next attended an exhibition of work from an 11th grade student (Angie). there were about 20 people in the room that she presented her work to and she had about 1 1/2 hours to do this. The group included students, other teachers, her parents, and some members from the community including her mentor. Essentially, at the end of each stage of learning, the students present an exhibition — this was her third quarter exhibition of learning. And this was the highlight of her work
so the highlights of exhibitions — how did the student meet the goals in their learning plan?
How could a student go deeper?
We were give in a form to comment on the quality of the presentation on evidence of learning
there were five A’s that we were asked to comment on:
authenticity
active learning
academic rigor
adult relationships
assessment

for her learning plan, she started by talking about her 75 page autobiography that is due for all students when they graduate. At this point, she has 30 pages completed to date (keep in mind this is due for her in a year and a half.)
She she did a facing history Project and she talked about how she had worked at speaking at a conference regional CES (? This is what my notes say the conference was called) with her mentor, who is a college professor.
In working with her mentor, she worked with teacher development programs, and looked at how she created a product for looking at under served children in the community
for quantitative reasoning she did comparisons of To student teacher is then look numerically at why one was a better candidate than another
for reading she gave examples of some of the books she had read the power of ideas, one person at a time learning goals,

There was a lot of conversation about how they prepare students for college. In particular, they made a point of talking about how they worked on creating a great profile that was more in lines that colleges want to see. Essentially they wanted to get this right.

Back to Angie -in her mentorship she worked with the principal read the evaluations, talk to students, use the observation tools for teacher professional growth. She looked at their reflections, their notes, is very powerful — she was able to see how people write in improving what they do.
Her goal is to do more administrative professional development for teachers after college.
Then, she showed us her project-the video archive of exhibition work from the MET
the purpose was to help newer teachers see what a good quality project looks like. Also, it’s possible to use in class with incoming students and with professional development to help both students and teachers develop a more refined sense of what an exhibition should look like. (Mark’s note to himself — got to read Alfie Cohen’s work on homework)
for her video project need to see the artifacts in the documents to understand what’s happening.
to accomplish this project, she taught herself Final Cut Pro in the use of all the equipment (cameras, microphones, audio interface, etc.) — impressive! She also had to spend many hours entity, as she did to camera shots to show both with the student is doing and a larger view of how the audience plays a role in the exhibition.
All in all a wonderful example of powerful and directed exhibition of quality work that wrapped around self designed and implemented projects that are real and effective.

I have also posted some pdf of school documents here:

Summary of my visit to Francis Parker Essential school in Devins, Mass
April 7, 2009

My point of contact was Rebecca Kane
when we first met, she explained some of the general philosophy of the school:
juniors and seniors spend 60 hours getting back to school (school service project work)
they also are required to do senior seminar at Spanish is their fifth class
they spend time in the community
their schedule has three divisions: 7-8, 9-10, 11-12. These are called division one, two, three
there is an academic Dean who works on the schedule for the kids — the academic Dean works extensively with Division III students this is where they have their senior project
students need a portfolio for graduation and need to fill this.
For their transcripts for college, they still don’t put grade point averages or grades — it is all narrative
their experience has been that colleges now have “traditional” and “nontraditional” piles
for the Division III class the students spend an hour six times a day
for the Division I and II classes, students spend two hours in interdisciplinary classes three times per day
it talked about gateways into division two research projects
learning habits and learning how to learn and creating independent work is if the goal here
not a focus on facts, but knowing how to apply knowledge is a universal conversation on campus
I observed a Division III class on Shakespeare with Josie
why do they allow this? It allows students to fill up their portfolios with more individualized/teacher choice courses, and also to get exposure to a more college like disciplinary experience.
The students were talking in the class about abject jealousy (MacBeth)
Josie’s class felt more like a seminar — 13 students in a roundtable format with heavily dogeared and annotated text of Shakespeare talking about themes within the text and the readings.
Marks note-what are teacher and student roles here? students are the ones who are requested to create, express, interpret the work
student makes a comment about a blog when students mentioned that weapon is a broadsword and not a dagger — it is clear the students have spent much outside of time working on building their knowledge for this conversation
students asking questions appears about rationale choices they’ve made in their descriptions
interesting point: for the hour that I observed percent of student talking 85% percent the teacher talking 15% in the process of 20 minutes each student has at least a few minutes to share and demonstrate their understanding in their ideas about the current reading - all students are engaged and involved - leaning forward
interesting: sign on the board — post your ideas on the blog!
yet still, paper here (text, original media, readers, etc.)

next I visited a division to math/science class
this class was a little more traditional, and the teacher mentioned that they do something called in class content assessment (ICCA). in other words they do in class testing — although they do not post grades for the work students do externally. In this particular class that I observed, the science part were talking about simple machines, and the math were measuring heights using tools that they would later develop in the semester to look at scale
today’s lesson was really the “hook”-the teachers were
the activity was to find how tall objects were given some simple guidelines about measurement (cannot directly measure, must come up with a strategy, must be able to explain your method to class reasonably)
a few things I saw — students were allowed to bring in food and gum into the class and seemed respectful of this — clean up after themselves, etc.
it did seem that in the math and science integrated class the activities were much more teacher led, not student driven. There was on the other hand, a built-in expectation that students were going to try things potentially fail and compare what methods worked and what didn’t. The teacher did not give specific instructions on how to do the activities at hand.
The two advisers go between the groups discussing the methods to see what they did.
Students were given a challenge I asked a student as we are walking down the hall what do you think of this process of learning? His answer: “hard as hell!”
Talked to Nathan (teacher) about the school planning conditions for this I talked to both teachers about planning time and how they hand off curricula etc. They stressed how important the long planning time was to develop coherence in their curricula
class conversations on the differing ways they measured interesting process to draw how the students what they know and what they need to know to solve the problem better
Later, I was allowed to talk to a student — Paul I had met him earlier in the Shakespeare class
I found him confident, he was an artist who would’ve looked ordinary in our campus in the theater department.
The senior project he chose was on tribal mystics
some of the things that he observed he feels ready to learn anywhere and anyhow — not worried about what he might’ve missed in a universal curriculum, as he feels prepared to move forward
wishes they’d spent more money on arts, as that is not one of the main focuses of the school
he said from his experience 50% of the work they do on campus’s revision and reflection that this is part of their process and everything they do
he felt the feedback is part of their process that is significant — he has friends in college and in other schools and are frustrated by work that they submit and then they never get an opportunity to receive feedback on the status — a frustrating thought
College for the students at his school he feels that they don’t have problems because being an independent learner is something that they’ve been asked to do since they came to the school
I had lunch with one of the teachers-Laura she was a Division I well-being teacher and Nathan who I observed in the division to math class we talked a bit about the advisories, and how they are so powerful. It is often like our homeroom structure at mid-Pacific, where the students are with the teacher for the four years at the school meet with them every day at the beginning for 10 minutes and at the end for 10 minutes and once a week for an hour to do an extended activity. It was noticeable, that their culture for their homeroom students was much more involved than ours — they related stories of taking their students out to field trips, planning home visits where the cost or did arts and crafts, much more of a family feeling that I found most of our homes. Not sure if this is cultural and they just managed to convert what can be a mundane process into something much more social, but it was powerful to see that this really works for them
the essential structure of their school is in the documents that I have PDF, but in a nutshell:
grade 7 and eight — students attend a two-hour math science integrated lesson (22 students to team teachers), students then attended a two-hour social studies and language arts integrated lesson (the same structure), there is lunch, and then they have a two-hour Spanish and health and well-being integrated class
notice here, there is no differentiated groupings — all students take the exact same classes it is homogeneous — and purposely so
Grades nine and 10 — same as above
grades 11 and 12 - students now have six one-hour blocks in the same schedule, or they can take a more “elective” experience — Shakespeare, AP biology, etc.
moving from division to division is based on presentation of work — an exhibition
these are called gateways and they literally are what allow students to move from one to the other
one of the lines about their assessment — “students can gateway from one division to the next through successful completion of a Gateway portfolio. Students Gateway one domain at a time. It is entirely possible for students to be in different divisions for different domains.”
So what’s my general impressions of the school?
Still an amazing environment that is student centered, as easily identifiable rigor, relevance, and relationship. This is a school that most teachers would feel more comfortable in, as they still saw a traditional relationship and schedule, content, and day. What is very different are some notable things:
a teacher’s typical day is a two-hour block of team teaching 24 kids, another two hour block team teaching 24 kids, and a two-hour block for planning and curriculum development. This is a tremendous difference from our current way of working with teachers, students, and scheduled
the catch is what you need to give up in order to accomplish this — all students take the same contents for the first four years, there is only one language, there are no “specials” — art, theater, religion, technology…these things are all embedded in the 3 domains vast are defined in division one and two.
Highly recommend you take a look at the school documents in PDF format - they are posted on the following link
http://mpifuturefacing.wetpaint.com/page/Francis+Parker+Essential+School

Summary of my visit to the MET school in Providence Rhode Island
April 6, 2009

http://www.themetschool.org/

I started my day meeting with Dennis Littky. You can find lots of good information about him here: http://www.bigpicture.org/dennis/

For professional development, they do a variety of activities. They have an April conference which lasts three days and has educators from around the United States. They are willing to send people to us to share their knowledge - and Dennis requires that students travel as well, as they have important information that must be art of the sharing
They will also set up special experiences on site: for example they have special program they have set up for Dutch principals — they send 50 for a week to try and implement new changes their country
he also has a whole new plan with his “big picture company” too not just deploy out their expertise to K-12 schools across the country, but he believes he needs to also change colleges and therefore it is planning on opening a new college based on this model called Outward Bound.
He made a point of saying that although high Tech high does wonderful things, their audience is very different. He is proud that 70% of his population are free school lunch, normally 88% of the students drop out in traditional schools, but he has almost 100% graduation rate as well is than 86% college graduation rate. By contrast, he explained that at Rhode Island College (RIC), only 8% of African-American students that enter as freshmen graduate — and this is the students they selected! Another example: only 9% of all community college students in Rhode Island graduate.
He was curious about my area of interest with educational technology and we talked a bit about the role of using technology including things like social tools to support learning. He commented that one of his goals is to hire a person, perhaps out of MIT, who would help teachers and students look at technology as emergent tools.

He also talked a bit about conversations with clay Christensen, in particular his disagreement with him about “disrupting class”. Dennis does not believe that online learning will be as disruptive force in education as clay does.

one of the people I need to get in touch with his Jill Olson — both Dennis and Nancy mentioned her as a point of contact for their big picture schools Project.

So what is the model that Dennis has implemented here at the MET?
Essentially, students spend two days a week in the community working with a mentor doing real work that they have chosen. The school has hundreds of mentor programs that students can choose from, so whether they’re interested in education, law, engineering, science, whatever they can find a project to work within.
(of course, it’s interesting that this comes up in time for me when I’m very interested in apprenticeship learning as a powerful vehicle — for both students and teachers. The notion that Dennis has that we first started with students interest get them working and excited about something that may choose — ownership! — then when they are working with a their advisors, they are much more open and motivated to succeed)
the other three days, they spend on campus in groups of 15 called advisories. One adult advisor starts with the students at ninth-grade meets with them over the course of their four years at the school. The adviser with the support of other specials and volunteers helps develop and shape the learning experience for students so that they work on the five core learning objectives and are part of the math student experience:
– empirical reasoning ( thinking like a scientist)
– analytical reasoning (thinking like a mathematician)
— oral communication (effective writing and oral communication)
–social reasoning? (Thinking like a historian/anthropologist/sociologist)
– personal qualities (habits of mind and personal character)
Dennis was frank, funny, quick minded, confident and most importantly dead on about both the problems in education and his approach to redesigning schools.

After leaving, I met with Nancy his co-director of the school and we spoke for an hour about my questions.
she explained that new teachers and new students have a two-week summer orientation schedule when they go over from the ground up for philosophy and structure of an education at the school. I was very interested in how they do professional development and she explains that there are variety of meetings that happen weekly and monthly for the different parts of the school — advisers, specials, support staff, etc. Advisers meet weekly to go over best practice they also have weekly staff meetings to business of the school. They have regular grade level meetings monthly. They also have monthly staff development where they look at the schools learning plan and continue to work with it. They also have a topic of professional interest — for instance this month was intervention — and meets on this topic as well. For instance they would look at student data and look through different lenses and it to see how to improve their understanding of what students are producing and how best to judge it.

Two weeks before school starts all staff meet for professional development to reconnect, and get ready for the new school year.
The importance of mentoring new advisors is critical. that trend of advisers go out with anonymous advisors to look at depth how they work with mentors in the community
Nancy also talked about how they support veteran teachers and they work on a variety of models for this including shadowing other veterans, visiting other schools, and going up to businesses to reinvigorate their thinking about how mentors work in the community. Nancy mentioned that she will be going to the match school in Boston to look at how they do math tutoring which they find to be an innovative program. So all of their staff consider (sharpening the song) a critical part of their job.
Example, she has four rookies this year at ninth-grade — so they receive specialized training in the summer to help them get ready. Even for the veteran and advisers that are going back to ninth-grade, they take time to reflect on what works and what needs to improve etc.
For Nancy I talked about bringing new teachers on board the question came up about where their experience for teachers in traditional schools was a strength or hindrance and she did mention that they look for the ability for individuals to unlearn what they know so that they can succeed at the school. She did mention that some of their best people have come from nontraditional jobs, but because of the state requirement for certification for teachers, more and more of their hiring teachers and less likely to hire professionals from other fields because of the certification problem. One thing she did mention, was they look for generalists — she mentioned that elementary teachers are generalists by nature and therefore already understand this. They do consider putting different content matter experts in buildings for example, math, science and language arts and his cohort advisors.
I asked about retention of teachers — she said that that has not been a problem, as much as the percolation up of advisers into more administrative roles. For instance there are 12 12th grade advisers in this year, next year two are going into new roles at the school and two were going outside of the school to other jobs (some in the partner schools).
She also talked about how after one or two cycles of advising, some advisers begin to experiment with different models within their organization — a specific example was a teacher who is interested in combining ninth and 11th grade students together (something like 7/9 graders and 8/11 graders) to see how the multiage nature of this would drive student work.
I asked a question about evaluating advisor performance, and she mentioned criteria like maintaining relationships with mentors in their organizations, observation of the way they work their advisories, the important skill of organization and coach-ability. She spent some time talking about how important both organization and multitasking is for advisers. She also talked about the importance of helping people understand the importance of organizations, their commitment to this program, and how to make sure they feel attended to through this process.
Dennis and Nancy are moving forward with expanding this model, both throughout the state of Rhode Island, and nationwide. They formed a group called “the big picture schools” — right now 65 schools are involved. She mentioned Jill Olson is someone who could get names of other contacts within the schools, as they try and refer request for visits to these outside schools that may be closer to the original request these.
Although not all the schools adopt all of the practice of the original MET school, the basic criteria are there — still out two days a week to work in the community, still believing that you plan learning “one student at a time”
advisers are expected to go out at least once a month to make sure that the student work at a mentor site is progressing well.
They have a position — internship coordinator — who mentors the internship, planned celebrations, sends cards, gift certificates
there is also a partnership person who reaches out to organizations to develop mentors — there is also a database person that tracks mentors and make sure that they stay in the flow
mentors find the experience powerful for their organizations, and the vast majority come back for more students after one set of graduate

that’s all for this post — it’s still more to come:
lunch with some of the teachers
a tour by Alicia
some sitdown time with some of the students
in participation in a student exhibition as part of their judging panel
– I’ll try to get this post tomorrow