:Connecting the Dots

Today I got away to Tech Forum NE, a regional technology conference sponsored by Technology & Learning magazine, and spent most of the day thinking about professional development.  I find myself frustrated by the whole topic these days: tired of hearing teachers complain, “why aren’t we being given time to train for this?” yet groping to find a model that goes beyond the superintendent’s conference day and the one-shot click-here-drag-there workshop.

It’s a model that served us fairly well when there were a few applications and no one knew anything about technology.  For motivated teachers, it was enough to get them started down the road.  Others lagged behind.  And all the while the pace of change increased, the number of tools multiplied, and the demands on teacher time continued to rise.  The most interesting question of the day today was one that was posed to a panel that included David Warlick and David Jakes: do we want teachers to achieve mastery of discrete tools or to become master learners?  Clearly the answer is the latter, but how do we get there?  How do we motivate and empower them to learn on their own instead of reinforcing a model of spoon-feeding and dependency?

It’s a project I’ve been working on for many years now, but with few successes.  Today we talked about personal learning networks, building learning communities, online learning– all of the things that are supposed to help make that transition, all things that I’ve tried with mixed results, at best.  What’s missing?  We know there are 21st century skills; we know schools have to change; we know technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace; we know more now about how adults learn than ever before: so where is the professional development to make it all click?

In a roundtable on “professional development successes,” I really rained on the parade by airing these frustrations and asking where the table was for “professional development failures.”  The silver lining I eventually found was this: the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, and at least I – and I suspect many others – are there now.  So what will 21st century professional development look like?  What’s act II?

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I presented at NECC Unplugged today in a very noisy but welcoming Blogger’s Cafe.  My topic was, “Grassroots Technology Change, or: Stop Telling People What to Do.”  I spent a long time preparing a long text for a 10-minute “TED-type” talk.  When the time came, I plugged in my mic and opened the floodgates.  It was hard to stay focused on the text and hard to keep people engaged with so many people walking past and so many conversations going on around the room.  But more clapped than booed  (OK, no one booed) and at least one attendee came up afterwards to congratulate me and discuss.  It was over before it began but I’m glad I did it.  Click here to view the complete version of that long text.

The weirdest moment occured as I was waiting to present and took a casual look around the room.  The woman sitting next to me was reading this blog!  So strange to see your writing on someone else’s screen…

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I’ve always been a fan of focused, incremental professional development. Find a few areas that are “ripe” and work them hard with whatever group of teachers you happen to be helping. I talk with a building tech committee and ask them what they think we should be focusing on and we’ll throw around a few topics and that largely sets my agenda for part or all of the school year. For example, at our high school, we made a push with wikis during the spring, and a few of our teachers made important steps forward in their classrooms.

But David Warlick’s got me thinking that, especially with the constellation of web 2.0 technologies, maybe each tool can’t be taught in isolation from the rest. In a post on “Tying It Together,” he discusses one teacher who approached him recently and said that she was finally “getting it” after seeing a presentation on web 2.0 and personal learning networks:

She continued that she knew about and had played with blogs, wikis, and RSS, and understood them functionally. But she said that after this conference she saw how they all worked together, that there really is a new connectedness today where information flows in logical and directable ways, connecting us not only to the content we need, but to the people we need, not merely because of proximity — but through the content.

Maybe trying to teach teachers about blogging without introducing them to RSS and wikis is a mistake. Maybe the “focus on one tool at a time” approach is robbing teachers of the context they need to understand how these technologies support and reinforce one another and, taken as a group, represent a whole new communication paradigm.

But who has the time? With so few hours for professional development, how can we effectively introduce teachers to “the whole enchilada” in a way that is meaningful, in a way that connects with classroom practice? And does such an approach result in information overload? Is it better to ask teachers to try to swallow the whole web 2.0 thing at once and then go out and integrate it with their practice or to keep them moving along a slow and steady path that may prevent them from seeing the big picture, a path where one tool is forgotten/discarded by the time the next one comes along? Our teachers are standing on the deck staring down in to the giant pool that is the read/write web; do we structure professional development along the lines of toe-dipping or cannonballs?

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I introduced PBwiki to a number of teachers at our high school recently. One just ran with it and now has her ninth grade social studies classes busily putting together review materials on her “Globalpedia.” For the others, I’ve decided to offer a little carrot: an online summer reading list for use by the faculties at our three schools. I thought this would be a simple way to expose people to wikis: a wiki of just four pages (Introduction, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Biography) which could be read quickly and subjected to simple, minor edits.  Focus on something that most teachers know about and like to do at a time when they are gearing up to do a lot of it.

I started by trying to convince the few teachers who were already comfortable using wikis to go in and add a few books. Nothing more intimidating than a blank page staring back at you when you’re a wiki newbie. Once I had seeded the wiki a bit, I sent a blast e-mail to all of the teachers inviting them to participate. Many responded asking to be invited into the wiki and thanking me for putting it all together. But since then, only a few have actually gone in and added their own favorite books.

Frustrating. Am I being too impatient here? Is it just the wrong time of year? Or is the problem that these people thought they were getting a freebie, an opportunity to grab a few titles and run off to the bookstore without adding their own two cents? Is it just that they don’t get it – the fact that in this world the quality of the resource depends almost entirely on the community’s willingness to build it? Who knows? Maybe it just needs time…

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I was just reading the comments to Will Richardson’s latest post and was amazed and the mix: nobodies (like me) not just rubbing elbows but conversing with some of the biggest names in our field: Will, Gary Stager, Chris Sessums, and others. People who don’t just present but who keynote at conferences. People who write the books and articles that we all read. And I’m thinking to myself, “the internet, web 2.0, this is it! It’s breaking down the walls. It’s all coming true. It’s no longer the ivory tower vs. the trenches.”

But is that true outside of the field of educational technology? We tell teachers they should build out their “personal learning networks” and get in on the conversation, but what is the conversation like in their fields? I suspect it’s not so rich as it is up here in the choir loft. Take a look at the latest issue of Mathematics Teacher and try searching for any of the authors of the articles on Technorati or Google BlogSearch. I hope you do better than I did, because as far as I can tell, the five or six that I looked at had no online presence whatsoever. Ouch. Then try searching for blogs on Technorati using search terms like “geometry teacher” or “high school geometry.” Double-ouch. Not only are the experts not part of the conversation, there is no conversation.

A sobering exercise, but one that I will remember the next time I stand in front of a group of teachers and tell them how wonderful blogs are for professional development. It’s possible that the stuff is out there and I’m just missing it. But maybe we just aren’t there yet. If that’s true, how do we get there? How do we jump start these conversations so teachers can see the wonderful things we’re all seeing when we fire up our RSS readers and go running around the edublogsphere?

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Will Richardson is discussing personal learning networks again, and pitying the 75% of teachers who “don’t know they have a network.” I don’t think the problem is that the teachers don’t have networks or that they have them and don’t know that they are there. The problem is that the networks in which they have been involved are so closed, artificial, small, and impoverished. For many teachers, their personal learning network ends at the door leading out of their department office, or perhaps extends only through one corner of the faculty lounge. Maybe – if they’re lucky – that network extends throughout their school faculty and there is a sense of collegiality and an ongoing conversation within the building. Even so, those teachers are still bound to hear mostly the same ideas over and over and over again. Those networks are real, but they’re tiny and closed. They serve to reinforce norms. They are stale. They rely on hiring a few new teachers each year to “bring new ideas into the building.”

The expansion of the reach of our personal learning networks is the real story here. Now, through RSS, blogs, and wikis, we can connect with people in other schools, cities, countries. When I look to see what’s happening in my network on del.icio.us, I don’t know what I’ll find there… and that makes me happy! An opportunity to learn something new. An opportunity to have all that I believe challenged and expanded. These are fundamentally good things. I’ve always had a network. The difference is that now it’s so darn big, diverse, and active.

I look forward to the day when I stand in front of a faculty and ask, “so who’s in your network?” and the answer isn’t “the three people sitting to my left and the three people sitting to my right.” We’re getting there…

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The tremendous comment thread on the next generation of teachers at Weblogg-ed got me to thinking about the value of experience in integrating technology in the classroom. I said it there and I’ll say again it here: more and more, I identify the most tech-savvy teachers by the technologies they reject and the reasons they offer as to why.

I don’t believe the skepticism and creativity are mutually exclusive. The best artists are oftentimes the harshest critics, especially when it comes to their own work. I see many teachers who use technology for the wrong reasons: the desire to “jump on the bandwagon” or lust for a shiny new toy. They fall in love with the tool and then invent instructional problems to “solve” with it. They go to a conference like NECC and are overwhelmed. They come home and say, “I have to start doing this” without knowing why.

The best teachers are the ones who tuck those experiences away in a journal, a filing cabinet, a corner of their very active brain. And they wait. They keep teaching, always looking for a better way to get through to their students. Every so often, a challenge or opportunity arises in the classroom and they go back to that toolbox- wherever it may be – and find appropriate solutions. To me, that’s a real master teacher: someone who is aware of the many ways to get through to kids, can understand their needs and deploy appropriate strategies to meet them.

Don’t get me wrong: good teachers are always learning about technology as well as many other things: their content area(s), assessment strategies, pedagogy, etc. The best, through years of experience in the classroom, develop that precious balance of creativity and skepticism. They say “no” a lot, but when they say “yes,” they embrace that “yes” and run with it… and the results are frequently stunning.

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For a long time I’ve been looking at models of professional development that go beyond the one-shot after-school workshop. As I’ve studied models of adult learning and become more familiar with the ways that teachers are successful at improving their practice, I’ve realized that good professional development experiences share a few core qualities:

• They are sustained, occurring over weeks, months, or even years.
• They are gradual and incremental, involving a lot of short but connected steps with moments of reflection and integration in between.
• They are collaborative, involving questions, support, and conversation with other teachers in similar situations.
• They directly meet the teacher’s needs, offering solutions to real problems in our every day experience in the classroom.
• Over time, they change the way we see the world and therefore what we do with our students each day in the classroom.

As I become more invested in reading and tracking blogs through RSS, I’m coming to realize that those 15 minute sessions browsing headlines in Pageflakes and posting comments on blogs are starting to add up. Every day I have a little opportunity to see what others are doing and to ask myself why I do what I do and how I could do it better.

When a teacher starts using an RSS aggregator to keep on top of news stories, blog posts, and wiki updates, she is really taking the reins and becoming the editor-in-chief of her own professional development journal. “I want to learn about differentiating instruction in a social studies classroom and using a SmartBoard. I found six or seven experts in each area and they are going to be frequent contributors to my journal. When I don’t understand or disagree, I’m going to let them know and listen carefully to their responses and the comments of other people like me. At the end of the year, I’m going to know a lot more about these topics than I do now.”

The best part of it is that the singular voice of the workshop lecturer or methods text (shudder) gives way to a cacophony of differing agendas, viewpoints, backgrounds, and ideas. We are forced to confront the complexity of our classroom experience and to forge – and frequently thereafter to re-visit and re-evaluate – our own understandings and practices. Simple answers provided by gurus don’t long satisfy intelligent teachers: they need to pick and choose from a buffet of best practices and ideas. Our RSS professional development journal does just that.

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