UDUTU and "Green Beer"

This weekend I am rubbing noses with UDUTU amidst St. Patrick's Day weekend! As St. Patrick's Day falls on a Sunday -- not your typical "drinking" day, as Monday follows Sunday -- it seems it will be a three-day celebration. In retrospect, it arguably started last weekend, as one town held its St. Patrick's Day parade and many patrons in the establishment I work in on weekends were garbed in green. For me, however, the holiday means I'm saddled with an added day of work -- this Sunday, a day normally allocated to my grad work! A separate distraction this week has been finding out the new evaluation criteria for, get this, Language Arts and mathematics teachers, that will be tied to student performance and growth, a topic bandied about for some time. I received a link to this post, which, mind you, is SATIRE, about a teacher suing parents for the poor performance of their child. And I just had to smile as I reflected back to the simpler days of time in college reading Swift's "A Modest Proposal," another jewel of satire whose meaning, alas, was widely missed by the readers of his day. (It takes place in Ireland, so it's an Irish theme this week's post.) Hopefully, these changes taking place in evaluation reform will be far more bark than bite! In my last post, I mentioned the poem "A Birth" by James Dickey, and I find now that I am trying to turn the vision of my e-Learning topic and storyboard into an actual module, the meaning of the poem is all-too-fitting. To paraphrase the poem, the narrator creates a pasture, only to find a horse in it. The idea, I think, is that an idea comes to mind; however, the initial idea morphs into something else, something more complex and unique. Further, he cannot control the horse, the fence posts fail to hold. Such suggests how the creative process is limited by the realities of the world. A parent creates new life in the birth of a child, and yet, that child is a life unique and independent of the parent - or author- who created it. Back to UDUTU - I find that many of the ideas I have envisioned may be impractical or even impossible to execute, so my new philosophy is to work through UDUTU as one does a riptide: let it take you out and away and wherever it will, and, all the while, keep your head above water, swim parallel to the shore (your desired learning outcome), and make it safely back to shore whatever way you can. Let the journey begin!

Dancing with UDUTU

I think I've finally figured out the pattern to the MAITS program. Almost always, we're challenged to learn about a new concept and, at the same time, tackle that by learning a new tool, too -- often the means of reporting or sharing our learning. This week's challenge: to create a pre-storyboard for our e-Learning module, which, in my case, centers around the use of an apostrophe to form the possessive. Using Gagne's nine events, we are to call upon our ID skills and lay out a blueprint for our module. In this case, I'll be dancing with UDUTU, yet another unfamiliar tool, a partner I haven't danced with yet. The challenge of creating this storyboard is that I'm not altogether sure if what I envision myself creating is actually "do-able." In other words, I'm left guessing a bit whether the interaction I see happening is going to be implementable. I sure hope so. After listening to Amy mention "Capstone" time and again this past year and whatever, I haven't really had a vision of what that could be. But, warned again by Amy that we better like it and be invested in it, this project -- and the idea that I could use e-Learning as the teaching and learning vehicle for grammar -- is very appealing. It certainly meets some of the key criteria for e-Learning -- self-paced, independent, individualized, and so on. If I can create engaging modules for students to learn certain grammar concepts, then that is one less thing to take up valuable class time...of which there is so little as it is. For this project, I'm counting heavily on the prefix "pre" in storyboard, as I've learned there are a few walls to encounter and work over, through, around, whatever, to get to the final product. That said, I'm gearing up for the challenge. Here's a link to a challenging poem by James Dickey titled "A Birth." The poem's about creating a story is like creating a life -- how it takes on its own identity and begins to control itself, like a parent of a child. Anyhow, this project reminds me of that. And if I can find a way to use e-Learning to teach my students what they can learn on their own, it will free up my time to do what would be far too difficult for them on their own, things like reading, interpreting, and discussing poems like "A Birth." Enjoy creating!

Buzzing about Socrative!

Yesterday marked the first day I used Socrative in class. I'm sure several of you may have used or are using it frequently in class, but, for whatever reasons, this was my first step into the waters of using BYOD in class. I put together several multiple-choice questions together on the short story "Contents of the Dead Man's Pockets"d and had students partner to complete the quiz at their own pace. As Liz Calderwood has used Socrative with our students already, they came in all set to go, only asking for the room number to access the material. If I could sum up the response in three words: Everybody love it! The students were on task, active, and able to interact and collaborate on the material. The application allows the teacher to monitor each group's progress and provides results that are easily downloaded. What I found, however, was that more students were attentive to and engaged in our discussion of the questions after they had completed them on Socrative and the deeper discussions we had about the story that resulted. Socrative offers a variety of options as well that include test formats to polls to short written responses. I see endless ways of dovetailing this interactive application into my classroom teaching to engage my students, increase their collaboration and participation, and monitor the progress of their learning. I also continue to use Edmodo as our learning hub, and partnering up with social studies -- where the students are learning about the Bill of Rights and the Amendments -- we have applied several of these in mini-research topics in English. For example, we explored the topic of flag burning as an expression of free speech, then continued with listening to the Dixie Chicks' song "Not Ready to Make Nice," after which the students learned the story behind the song online. Many of the students expressed their surprise and interest in this kind of research. Now we are considering the Establishment Clause, known better as the separation of church and state, and the controversy of the words "under God" in the "Pledge of Allegiance." Enthusiasm was tepid intinitially until I had them follow a recitation of the pledge in which I replaced "under God" with "under Allah." That fired up quite a bit of interest, to say the least. Now I have the students preparing for an in-class debate next week. I have posted several balanced links to resources on Edmodo, one of those being Pro/Con.org , which offers links to resources to BOTH sides of several controversial issues such as the Pledge controvery. I have told them to come prepared like lawyers to a trial with facts and evidence to support their side and to be prepared to counter the other sides' arguments. Further, students will have their smartphones on hand to do more fact finding during the debate, too. And all this from a teacher who once had a stranglehold over students NOT to bring cell phones into class! The world, and most certainly the landscape of learning, is changing, indeed!

Dollars and Sense: R & D in Education

So, my cohorts and I have finished our Learning Strategies graduate course recently and today is the first day of spring break. I enjoyed learning about a variety of learning theories and paradigms and exploring how they dovetail and interweave in my teaching. Indeed, I have gained a retrospective view of how I have been teaching and gained insights on how and why certain approaches I use are successful. Such has afforded me a "rear-view mirror" of where my teaching was and where it has led to over my fourteen-year career. More importantly, my knowledge and understanding of learning theory has made me more cognizant of fine-tuning my lessons to make them even more powerful, impacting, and effective. With that said, it's a sunny and beautiful day on this first day of spring vacation. And I need it.
Recently I watched a speech by Professor Roland Fryer, an economist professor at Harvard University and found a number of the points he made in his speech compelling. So, why have I included Fryer in this post? Simple. It's because Professor Fryer is endeavoring to use his understanding of economics and statistics to improve education. As the youngest black professor to earn tenure at Harvard University, Professor Fryer is trying to give back and make an impact on improving education. As Fryer says, "Facts are our friends. We need more facts and less politics if we're ever going to really change educational reform." Fryer is trying to gather educational data and statistics to discover effective teaching strategies. One of the ideas he mentions in one speech includes paying students in poor performing schools to take the tests and increasing the payments based upon their performance on the test. This simple idea, it seems, is showing evidence of being not only effective but also cost effective. That is, the money required to pay students for their effort and achievement works out to be less than the thousands spent with little or no effect. So where did this idea come from? Again, simply enough, from Fryer spending a summer talking with the kids themselves. From those conversations, Fryer discovered that the students found no reason for education, and when Fryer told them that they could make a ten percent return on their education, this idea had no meaning for these kids. They couldn't see that far down the road. However, paying these students gave them a tangible incentive to read and to learn. And the program seems to be working.
Several years ago, I attended a seminar on improving students' reading skills, and one of the ideas offered was the Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)program, where time is allotted each school day for EVERYONE to read. And by that, it means EVERYONE -- teachers, students, secretaries, even janitors. I brought my idea back to my school with the suggestion of trimming away two minutes from each of our eight periods to create the block of time to implement DEAR in our school. Unfortunately, teachers decided against the idea, citing their need for the instructional time in class. So I approached my team's teachers, and we created the time within our team's core content classes. After implementing the program within our team, our students showed marked improvement on their Gates reading tests and on the GEPA state testing, so much so that the administration decided to change Study Hall to Literacy. Now students use a twenty minute block of time simply to read, and reading skills have improved as a result. The lesson and point: we need to keep an open mind to new ideas and approaches to improving education.
In closing, Fryer remarks how companies invest far more capital in research and development than we do in education. As our country and the State of New Jersey looks to make dramatic changes to curriculum, testing, tenure, and more, perhaps we need to take a more serious look at what works and what may not. The age-old wisdom of the adage, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!" seems all too fitting here.
It's nice out. I've gotta go now.

Rush to Get in Line?

At my last department meeting, I met with my colleagues to discuss curriculum. This seems to be a never-ending discussion, as it seems we are perpetually redoing the curriculum. In any case, one colleague attended a Principals' Conference where one of the speakers mentioned the direction education may be heading in our state. Apparently, the idea was espoused to standardize the curriculum. How much? So much so that the curriculum would pretty much dictate what is taught and when. Moreover, in lieu of the state testing that takes place once a year, several quarterly assessments will be given to measure the progress of learning that has occured. The logic, I'm guessing, is that if teachers are going to be evaluated, they better be evenly evaluated on a level playing field...which seems to sound all good. Maybe. Or maybe not. I am concerned that such a move would constrict teachers and limit their creativity in finding novel teaching methods. If we are all doing the same thing, the same way, and at the same time, how, then, will there be any difference? If you want to identify your better teachers, then allow them the freedom and creativity to teach their students most effectively. The intent of such changes, I believe, is to try to make the teaching conditions equal. Sadly, I believe such changes may have the effect lowering the effectiveness of some teachers, especially your more creative ones. A look at history, more specifically our American Revolution, points out the stupidity of standing in a line wearing red coats while others are shooting at you. We won our independence by being creative and fighting in unconventional ways. Such has served us well historically, I might add. With New Jersey posting scores much higher than other states in the union, I'm left wondering, are we trying to change too much too quickly. And what the consequences be...

Arab Spring in Africa?

I received an email from a former student who is now a freshman. In the email, she mentioned how she is inspired to promote the message about "Kony 2012," a movement to capture the man who is ranked the number one criminal of the world. And how? Through the use of technology to make him "famous" and to curtail his ability to avoid being arrested. The idea is to use technology -- You Tube and other social networking mediums -- to spread the word of his criminal abuse and exploitation of children, ranging from abducting boys as young as seven or eight and forcing them to serve in his army as well as the raping of young girls. Why has he not been caught already? The best reason is that he is not newsworthy enough, though, as the creator of the movement mentions, had one child in the United States been treated in this manner, it would have become headline news. So how is the movement gaining momentum? So far, several celebrities have joined the cause, hoping to bring an equivalent notoriety to Kony, and the upshot is that a once disinterested United States congress has dispatched over one-hundred advisors to Uganda to aid in Kony's capture. Additionally, the movement plans a "Kony 2012" day on April 20th to make his notoriety known worldwide, which brings me to my former student. She asked, as I mentioned, for me to try to organize the movement in the middle school. However, I noted immediately the red flag of mixing politics and education directly. With that said, I was going to post the link to "Kony 2012" on Edmodo for my students' own interest (and did so, briefly) until I received an email from our school principal not to allow students to hang any posters about Kony. She added that the topic would be addressed in social studies. The video begins with the phrase, "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come," and I believe the seed of this idea originated in the powerful and sweeping changes in the "Arab Spring" which relied upon technology to bring down long-enduring strong-armed dictators. I must say that I have mixed feelings about my principal's decision, and, in fairness to her, have not been able to talk to her about the reasons for proceeding this way. Of course, I am mindful of the ages of the students I teach and of the disturbing nature of Kony's actions. However, technology is shrinking both the time and space of our world -- the tragedies of 9-11 are evidence of that -- and, as educators, we must prepare our children for the realities of the world they are growing into, which, in this case, is a rather harsh one.

Pardon My French!

Today I read and learned about Cognitive Load, and one of the concepts behind this theory is that the working memory is capable of handling a certain number of items at one time. And that magic number, it turns out, is about seven. Hence, phone numbers are of this length to provide the maximum number of phone numbers but still be capable of retained in memory (though, truth be told, with cell phones today most everyone would be lost in the dark of important numbers if they were to lose their phone, as these no longer have to be dialed but simply summoned through a contacts list. Yikes! It occurs to me that I can recall rotory dial phones and how frustrating it was to misdial a number if it were the sixth or seventh number. I'm getting old, I guess!). Anyway, one lesson I teach my students in English underscores the importance of visualization and background knowledge. I provide students with two passages -- one in English about Australian cricket, the other in French about the geography of mountains and rivers in France (see pictures below). Naturally, one would expect to comprehend and retain the passage written in English. However, since the passage is about cricket, with which most students are totally unfamiliar, students tend to have extremely poor comprehension and recall of the text. The French text is accompanied with an illustration and, while written in French, enough of the nouns are Latinate to make them resemble the English ones and, combined with the illustration, the students' comprehension surpasses that of the passage about cricket. Seems schema and illustrations do matter with comprehension, retention, and learning. Something to think about -- Penzez vous!