Educational Insanity

I’ve been pondering the next few weeks and have come to realize that my computer and I will be having a lot less face time than we have over the last few months. Tomorrow afternoon, I leave for NY for various personal and professional reasons. Then, I come back to VA for Memorial Day weekend, after which I depart for West Virginia where I’ll be visiting 15 schools in 4 days (”naturalistic” data collection for statewide study). So, there will be lots of time on the road, lots of time talking f-2-f; in other words, not a lot of time in front of the computer…not a lot of time engaged with my personal/professional learning environment (PLE).

I’m certain this is a good thing as I’ve necessarily been a little withdrawn from the “non-virtual” world for a while now; the end of the semester does that to me. But, I have to admit that I have lots of anxiety. What happens when my networked learning opportunities are less frequent? How am I going to keep up with my tweets, feeds, e-mails, etc.? So, yes, I’ve grown very attached to my PLE. And that leads me to my point…

I’m a voracious learner…and I’m very proud of it. In fact, I’m so narcissistic that I’m willing to say that I think we ought to make nurturing the love of learning the centerpiece of 21st century education. In my opinion, we (the royal we?) write/speak a lot about the technological tools, and even how it’s not about the tools, it’s about the opportunities the tools give us. We write/speak about skills such as digital and information literacy as a 21st century skill.

For me, though, it starts with 21st century dispositions. As we look towards School 2.0 or Classroom 2.0, first and foremost, we need leaders, teachers, and students who are willing and eager learners…voracious learners.

Photo Credit: Aaron Schmidt

The Wordpress.com training wheels are off!

Feel free to let me know what you think of the new look.

Thanks.

[Prelude: Now that I live in Virginia, I MUST get to know Andy Roterham. He's a powerful insider in many educational policy circles, and he's been edublogging longer than anyone I know. His post today pointed me to the article about which I write below, so here's a tip-o-the-hat to Mr. Eduwonk]

You may be well aware of Clayton Christenson’s theory of disruptive innovations. It has received a LOT of attention in the last couple of years (deservedly so, IMHO) and quite a few researchers/commentators have tried to apply the theory to the institution of public schooling. Well, now Christenson himself has…in a pretty big way. THIS article appears to be a preview for an upcoming book called, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

I have two thoughts before I ask for discussion via comments. First, I always tell my students to “consider the source” when reading “stuff” on the Internet. This article happens to appear in Education Next, the education journal of the Hoover Institution, a notably conservative think tank based at Stanford University. The mission statement of the Hoover Institution speaks to limited government (”Ours is a system where the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves”) so it should come as no surprise that his vision hints at privatization of education.

Second, as much as I respect Christenson’s work, I’m not sure how “disruptive” his ideas are. Consider the following:

Is this much different than, for example, the MIT Opencourseware project? I think what Chrisentson writes about will transform learning, but will it, as the title of the article states, transform our schools? It certainly hasn’t yet…

Everything is Miscellaneous

Originally uploaded by Travelin’ Librarian

Today is the deadline to submit my annual review. August 20 is my deadline for submitting my tenure portfolio. I will write about how I’ve played the game and published in peer-reviewed journals and done service by sitting and chairing various committees…blah, blah, blah. But, I also intend to make the case that the time I’ve spent this year blogging, twittering, networking, etc. should “count” for tenure consideration. Ernest Boyer wrote about the “Scholarship of Application” (and, BTW, Western Carolina University formally adopted Boyer’s ideas into their tenure criteria last year). Others, including Richard Lerner, have written about “Outreach Scholarship.” These ideas certainly blur the distinction between the academic holy trinity (teaching, research, service).

Well, Boyer, Lerner et al. never contemplated the read/write Web or RSS or online social networking. So the question I’m pondering is how might we conceptualize the role of higher education faculty where everything is miscellaneous and everybody is coming?

I’d appreciate any help you can offer as I ponder…

On occasion, I find myself itching to compose a post for this blog relating to some aspect of my work. Often, I end up stopping myself because…well…umm…because I’m scared. You see, I’m an untenured professor in a world (academia) that largely doesn’t get this whole blogging thing. It is (I’m afraid to say) still a fairly traditional space where hierarchies and bureaucracies abound. The politics of higher education are not a whole lot different than the politics of P-12 education. So, I’m extremely cautious so as to not speak badly of anyone or to write anything that might get back to anyone important.

So, I was particularly interested in Vicki “CoolCatTeacher” Davis‘ comment on Gary Stager’s blog. She wrote, “Classroom teachers in the public school system who blog are on a ’short leash’ if any and do not truly experience freedom of speech, as you could well imagine.”

Then, Will Richardson posted today about a similar topic. According to Will, “…the New York City Department of Education has laid down the law about employees referencing their blogs in their e-mail signatures…the city is providing disclaimer language for anyone in the department who blogs and who comments on other’s blog.”

As you might imagine, this is all very troubling to me. I have academic freedom and so do K-12 educators. There are laws about that. I even JUST presented a paper about free speech rights of K-12 educators. Here’s the legal standard in a nutshell: First, is our expression (blogging is certainly a form of expression) a matter of public concern? In almost all cases, the answer to this is yes (if not, there are no First Amendment protections for purely private speech). In the Gary Stager case, writing about Reading First would be a matter of public concern. The second step in the analysis is the “disruption” test. Does the individual’s interest in expressing him/herself outweigh the disruption caused to the school environment? In other words, did the expression interfere with teaching, destroy morale, create lots of negative chatter, etc? Negative publicity has been deemed to be NOT disruption in at least one instance.

So, I think I need to reflect a bit and find my voice again. And, I hope the teachers Vicki commented about can find theirs as well. They and I have rights.

Last night, my doctoral students presented their findings from a semester-long research project. Early in the semester, the students developed a Web-based survey that consisted of items from the following six previously validated scales:

1. Perceptions of School Climate (Johnson, Stevens & Zvoch, 2007)
2. Collegial Trust (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 2003)
3. Commitment to Teaching (Ware & Kitsantis, 2007)
4. Attitudes toward Professional Development (TAP) (Torff, Sessions & Byrnes, 2005)
5. Teacher Self-Efficacy (Woolfolk & Hoy, 1990)
6. Teacher-Directed Student Use of Computers (Bebell, Russell & O’Dwyer, 2004)

There were also a bunch of demographic items. The students asked their teaching colleagues to complete the survey. Ultimately, they got nearly 700 completed surveys from teachers in five school divisions. Each of the five teams of four students chose two of the scales to examine; they analyzed the degree to which the attitude scales were correlated and looked for differences in each of the two scales by various teacher characteristics.

The results were very interesting. Among the major conclusions I drew from the presentations:

• High school teachers have worse attitudes than their elementary- and middle-school counterparts.
• Male teachers feel slightly less efficacious than their female counterparts.
• Teacher perceptions of school climate are strongly, positively (statistically significantly) correlated with both commitment to teaching and collegial trust.

Most of the findings confirm what we know from the existing literature. But, looking at these different teacher attitudes measures together in one study is pretty unusual. None of the student groups chose to analyze the “teacher-directed student use of comptuers” scale. I now have the data and can see if those scores are related to the teacher attitude measures and/or individual teacher characteristics. That should be interesting. For now, take a look at the following graphic which shows how the scales correlate with each other (all correlations are statistically significant; p<.05); obviously not all of the combinations were tested. Any thoughts?

The link below is to a video of a segment from a Bob Costas show that aired last night. If you’ve come to my blog and know what I tend to write about, even if you’re not a sports fan, you’ll be riveted by this video. It’s worth spending the full 18 minutes watching it (although you could probably skip Braylon Edwards’ comments; poor guy got caught between Lincoln and Douglas). The video speaks to SO many issues, that it’s hard to know where to start with my reflections. First, the link:

[NOTE: Before you click on the link, please know that there is language in the segment that may not be suitable for your workplace (depends on where you work, I suppose) and is probably not suitable for the ears of children]

VIDEO

Now my thoughts:

• I really enjoyed reading Friday Night Lights. It’s the only Buzz Bissinger book I’ve ever read. And, his credibility as a sportswriter/journalist is fairly impeccable. But, OMG…what a crumudgeon! He doesn’t get it; not one bit. He could be every old school administrator, every old academic, every old [insert education professional here].
• I think Will Leitch was caught off guard. Had he known what Bissinger’s take was going to be, I’m sure he’d have been better prepared to eloquently argue the place of and relevance of the blogosphere.
• It’s hilarious that Costas was the moderator. He’s an admitted traditionalist. He railed against the wildcard system for baseball playoffs and was dead wrong (IMHO). This was like having E.D. Hirsch moderate a debate between John Dewey and Edward Thorndike.

I was going to write more; lots more. But, I think I’ll let the video speak for itself…

Two caveats first: One, I may have unconsciously or even consciously included “unschooling” in the title because I suspect that will draw traffic. I’m guessing the unschooling types are abundant in the blogosphere (see e.g. http://anunschoolinglife.blogspot.com/).  And, my narcissistic need for attention is now well-documented.  Second, I feel like I’m sticking my neck out here a bit. Be gentle; please.

I’ve ALWAYS been a staunch advocate of public schools. They served me well. But, at the moment, I’m in a bad place with the institution of public schooling. Much of my current state has to do with pondering my son’s pending entrance into the world of formal “schooling” when we enroll him in preschool in the fall. I feel really good about the place we’ll be sending him come September, but I can’t help think about what happens 2.5 years from now (how’s that for thinking ahead?). If my wife and I are so focused on doing what we think is “best” for our child, how can I justify “exposing” my child to an institution that:

• conceptualizes learning as a solo flight
• tinkers towards modernity, but still remains woefully incapable of supporting the development of 21st century skills and dispositions
• is complicit in systematic, if not intentional, segregation by race between and within schools
• consistently sorts children according to unchallenged constructions of “ability”

I could go on, but I’ll stop there.

I’m not ready (yet?) to fully embrace “unschooling” and I’m not sure I have the will or the emotional fortitude to implement the ideas behind that “movement.” I’ve read some stuff by John Taylor Gatto and other unschooling advocates; it all strikes me as simultaneously compelling and ridiculous. I do, however, feel a need to learn more (what else is new?).

I have 2.5 years to reconcile my concerns with the institution of public schooling and my core values as a learner and a parent. Dear readers, I’d be forever indebted should you wish to help me through that reconciliation process.

John Hendron points us to an article about work that his former Superintendent, Dr. Frank Morgan, is doing in Kershaw County, SC. Speaking about the use of podcasting, Dr. Morgan is quoted as saying, “I’ve just found it powerful…We live in a different world now, so we have to use multiple means to communicate with people.”

I have two things to say in reply. First, we need more superintendents like Dr. Morgan. Second, if you read to the end of the article, Hendron mentions that in his county (which happens to be one exit West of where I live) teachers are contractually obligated to blog. I think I’m starting to like living in a union-free Commonwealth.

On Thursday and Friday of this week, I was at the Education Law Conference held by the Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute at VCU (my U.).  It was a really well run conference.  On Friday, I live blogged the session on Religion in Schools.  It was my first attempt at live blogging.  You can see the replay at the link below.

LIVE BLOG