Author Archives: Bud Hunt

The Week in Tweets for 2012-02-20

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The Week in Tweets for 2012-02-13

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On Quinn’s Second Birthday

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Earlier today, we celebrated Quinn’s second birthday. My youngest daugher is officially less young than she used to be.

Her world will happen faster than mine.

And while she’s sleeping off a cupcake-induced late afternoon nap, I had the chance to catch up on today’s paper1. And read this.

And, yes, I watched the video. It was painful. On multiple levels.

This is just to say, mostly as a reminder to me, that when a father resorts to a public airing of grievances concerning his concerns over his daughter’s behavior, using the behavior he claims to despise, then he doesn’t win.

Or help.

And while it’s certainly not my place, nor am I able, to judge the father/daughter relationship here, I feel certain that this video, or the actions it captures, will not do much to improve the general state of relations between fathers and daughters.

There are people on both sides of a relationship. Even if the people are children. Still people. And all people should be treated a little better than that video represents.

And perhaps children sometimes are harder on their parents than the parents deserve. As the world flies to a place of ever-publicness, and the perpetual ease of slinging shots at each other through the public sphere will only grow, let’s be careful with what we’re slinging.

Teagan, isolated from the birthday party, feverish and lethargic, down with a cold and quarantined upstairs with an iPad and TV, reminded me today that she, not quite five, like all of my daughters, will never live in a world where the world isn’t ever-pulsing in a device a finger’s touch away. Part of my job, as a parent, is to create for them moments of boredom in a world of Everything-All-The-Time.

Boredom just happened in my youth. Connections were harder. The reverse is true for her. Her world will happen faster than mine. Time for sitting still and wondering will be something we will have to fight for more and more.

I wish that father and his daughter had some more of that time. I think it might’ve made a difference. I hope they find some soon away from the Facebooks and the YouTubes.

So, Quinn, and Ani, and Teagan, whatever is coming for us as father and daughters, let’s work very hard, all of us, to make sure it isn’t that. Let’s take time to talk and pause and be sure to honor each other, and to keep what might be better said offline offline.

Okay?

  1. That I only ever read electronically, so it won’t be “the paper” for much longer, I’m guessing. [↩]
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The Week in Tweets for 2012-02-06

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The Week in Tweets for 2012-01-30

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#Educon 2.4: Talking Teacher Research

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Later today, I’m honored to be joining my friends and colleagues Jon Becker and Meredith Stewart as we facilitate a session at Educon 2.4 on teacher research and professional development. Specifically, on how we can be critical, in a good way, in our choice and craft of professional development. Here’s the session description:

#edchat
#RSCON3
#140edu
#TEDx______
#edcamp____

Many of the educators who participate(d) in the events listed above and others like them report that the events are/were perfectly wonderful; amazing even. Apparently, this social media-aided PD is more powerful than any PD they’ve ever done; better than any grad school course they’ve taken. And, it may very well be.

But, many of the folks who take part in events like these have been at it for a couple/few years now. And, we’ve become pretty good at sharing what they’re learning and even doing. Theres value in talking about and sharing ideas and actions, but that only gets us so far. Furthermore, many knowledge claims are made about how awesome these ideas are. Students are learning more! Students are so much more engaged! etc.

So, then, what are the warrants for these knowledge claims? What evidence is there that all of these new forms of professional learning are making a difference for kids?

Think of it this way: imagine parents of a student in your classroom wants to know if the new stuff you’ve tried with their kid this year worked. How would you respond? What evidence would you offer? Imagine a principal considering awarding you professional development credits for participation in these events. How would you convince the principal that these professional learning experiences are legitimate?

My favorite part is that we’ll be talking about what a teacher research study designed by the participants of the Educon session might look like. If you’re around at 11:00am Mountain/1pm Eastern, we’d love to have you join us for the conversation. Here’s the session information on the Educon website. A stream should be available from that page.

Join us.

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Schooling That Isn’t School-y

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I sat in on a meeting today of the organizers of our school district’s Innovation Academy, a summer STEM enrichment program that’s a partnership between the district and IBM.1

The DLC will be embedding a teacher research group within the Innovation Academy and its planning in order to see if the work they’re doing, and that students and district staff are enthusiastic about, has something to teach us about how we can make positive change in the classroom.

During the meeting, two statements really caught my ear and got me thinking about the work ahead.

The first was a statement, made during the meeting and repeated by several folks in the conversation, that the goal of Innovation Academy was to create an environment that didn’t feel anything like school.  Both our district staff and our business partners felt this was important.  I find that both makes sense to me and is, well, rather odd.  That we’ve a shared understanding of school as something that isn’t conducive to learning is troubling, but I get where they’re coming from.

The other thing that caught my ear was a mention, in passing, by one of the IBM partners that during last year’s camp, he noticed that the younger students involved in the camp, Kindergarteners, were plenty able to think in creative and nontraditional ways.  That’s not quite how he said it, though.  He actually said that sometimes, the youngest students were the best able to be engaged in the work of the camp2.

If, of course, we are trying to build learning experiences that are not at all like school, then it makes sense that our least schooled students would be the best at them.  Of course, it’s also possible that the Kindergartners at Camp Innovation are students who’ve not yet had their imaginations stamped out by school.

I’m eager to begin the observational work of documenting what makes the Innovation Academy exciting and engaging for students and staff.  And also I’m looking forward to teacher researchers teasing out if they can fiddle with their classrooms in ways that make school less school-y.

There is something worth going after in the space between the school-y and the not so school-y.  I hope it’s a piece of the possible future of public schools.

 

  1. Last year, the project was called Camp Innovation.  Names change.  I like the camp metaphor, but it wasn’t my call. [↩]
  2. And now academy. [↩]
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#DMLBadges for Teachers: We Missed Here, Too

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Justin Reich and I recently submitted a proposal to the DML Teacher Mastery and Feedback Badges Competition.  And, like my recent submission to the DML Conference, it wasn’t accepted.

But that’s cool.  I was curious about the process and I learned a bunch about the problems and opportunities of badges and badging.  In case you were curious, below is the full text of the application.  You can read the winning Stage 1 proposals on the DML Competition Website.

Teacher inquiry has long been recognized as a valuable way for teachers and students to critically examine their learning and pedagogy. We define teacher inquiry, sometimes called teacher action research, as a process by which teachers identify a problem of practice, gather data about that problem, systematically analyze that data, prepare a public presentation (lecture, workshop, published article) about their findings, and then adopt a series of action steps to improve instruction. In countries with very successful national curricula, such as Japan and Singapore, systematic teacher inquiry practices such as lesson study are central to efforts to improve educational systems and help individual teachers develop as practitioners.

In the decentralized education ecosystem of the United States, teacher action research has been adopted less systematically, but it remains a promising and powerful approach. For instance, the DataWise program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has had tremendous success in helping schools and teachers adopt a structured cycle of inquiry in order to use assessment data to improve instructional practice. We propose the development of a badge recognition system for teacher recognition activities. Such a system would both encourage teachers to engage in these effective professional learning practices and to provide teachers and districts with a map through the complex landscape of teacher action research.

Several structural factors in American schools limit the degree to which teacher have opportunities to practice teacher inquiry and teacher action research. In particular, most districts structure professional learning time around a series of “early release” or professional development days. Often, these days are filled with lecture-based teacher professional development which teachers often find to be both useless and boring (teacher professional development is one of the truly shameful elements of our national education system). Teachers are rewarded for their seat time in these professional learning opportunities with Professional Development Points or Continuing Education Units, which are required for recertification, tenure, salary steps, or other rewards in the system. These structures and schedules are not well suited for nurturing teacher action research, which requires a more flexible allocation of time and energy. Generating questions, data collection, data analysis, preparing reflections, and adopting refined practices cannot be broken up into arbitrary chunks of time throughout the year, as these activities need to be tied in with the classroom lessons, projects, and activities that a teacher is trying to improve.

In an attempt to change this dynamic, the St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado created the Digital Learning Collaborative in the Fall of 2009. The DLC introduces intentional institutional subversion through a model that re-centers teachers as both learners and researchers and incorporates a two-year approach. Attachment 1 gives more background on the DLC. Through a partnership with the Colorado State University Writing Project, and informed by the teacher inquiry work of the National Writing Project, these teacher researchers in the DLC are emerging as experts in residence in their schools, not as outsiders, but as insiders invested in the schools and students they serve. The DLC by design allows for the research of its members to spread throughout the district and, through the use of the Web, beyond.

As these teacher researchers, and others like them, move from novice to more experienced roles, they have value to add to their communities as practitioner researchers who are well equipped to ask difficult questions and seek out answers from the communities they serve. But how do teacher researchers develop the skills that they need to possess to engage in thoughtful inquiry? And, how do others know that these teacher researchers are well equipped to serve in that role within organizations they might join later?

Badges, we believe, can help.

We envision that open badges might have two specific roles to play within the teacher researcher community, both outlined below.

1. Teacher Researcher Badges as Instructional Pathfinders

The role of teacher researcher is not too terribly different from the role of a teacher. Like researchers, teachers are expected to make good use of the data around them in order to better understand a situation, in this case, a studentʼs learning. A teacher researcher has a more formal and specific role to play with regards to how he or she interacts with the data to dig for deeper understanding. Badges can help to identify the skills involved in conducting teacher research and provide an instructional path for prospective teacher researchers to follow as they begin to explore and apply the ideas of teacher research. For prospective teacher researchers, a badge or series of badges might function much in the same way as Pac-Man uses power pellets, or Sonic uses rings, or Mario gold coins. The badge serves not just as a carrot or a prize, but as a map.

We propose that within teacher research there are at least five specific skills that might benefit from badging:

1. Asking thoughtful questions
2. Intentional Data Collection
3. Systematic Data Analysis
4. Publishing Findings
5. Improving Instructional Practice

By providing teachers with a structure for exploring teacher action research with badging, we provide teacher-researchers with a map for using teacher inquiry to improve practice. Since professional development structures in schools are not designed to support teacher action research, we believe that a badging system could help teachers use their own more flexible prep periods or team and department to make progress towards these goals. In total, the five badges would represent a sixth badged identity – that of teacher researcher.

Several organizations seem likely candidates to participate in the infrastructure to award these kinds of badges. Districts like St. Vrain could be responsible for awarding badges to their own faculty who participate in projects like the DLC professional development program. Consultants or other professional development organizations, such as those providing training on the DataWise method, would also likely be willing to serve as distribution nodes in a badge network.

2. Teacher Researcher Badges as Signals to Organizations

All learning organizations need more thoughtful, reflective practitioners who carefully study their own practice. Teacher Research Badges can serve to signal to organizations the presence of these teacher researchers in the organization or within the larger community granular detail about the kinds of professional learning that teachers have explored, and are much better suited to helping teachers spotlight their teacher action research.

Moreover, Teacher Researcher Badges could be used to build bridges across districts and demonstrate a national or international “teacher researcher community,” one where teacher researchers could discover and support one another.

The democratization of education reform requires that teachers and students are engaged and informed voices for the practices, habits, and mindsets that are essential to an informed citizenry. Teacher research is a powerful force for institutional subversion that can lead to a better learning environment and experiences for all. Badges that help to cultivate and mentor the next generations of institutional subverters can lead to thoughtful and inquiry-grounded innovation that can be nurtured through an organization and shared beyond.

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The Week in Tweets for 2012-01-23

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The Podcast: A Culture of Inquiry?

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In this edition of the podcast,  I explore some of my frustrations lately regarding some pushback I’m seeing as I facilitate some teacher research in my school district.  I also wander through some first draft thinking on why that pushback exists.

I welcome your comments and suggestions, as always.

Direct Link to Audio

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