Bud the Teacher

I sent slightly different versions of this letter to my legislators this afternoon. (I didn’t ask my senators to sign on to a House letter, for example. Nothing substantive.) If you support the National Writing Project, I hope you have done, or will do, the same. I would have written sooner – but this all happened as I was getting acquainted with Quinn. This is one of the first times I’ve been able to put fingers to keys in order to compose more than a few tweets. (Again – the iPhone is NOT the right long form writing device.)

Speaking of tweets, I should talk a bit about my latest gentle request for information from @EDPressSec, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Department of Education’s Press Office. It’s now been more than a week since I started asking why the ED had decided to eliminate the National Writing Project’s funding. I still don’t have an answer. As Zac has accurately pointed out, the press office stated in their 2011 press release on the appropriations proposal that programs removed were done so either because they “duplicate local or state programs or have not had a significant measurable impact.”

I don’t get it, and I have requested that @EDPressSec provide me with the data that they used to make the determination that a national network could be duplicated at the local or state level, or that the NWP has had no “significant measurable impact.” I’m hopeful that they’ll provide me with that information. Soon. But, if not, I’m asking my legislators to help me get that data. Seems like the right question to be asking. Thanks to those of you who are asking it along with me. The question should be easy enough to answer, and my fingers are crossed that this is certainly some big misunderstanding.

(If you’d like to see the entire conversation between myself and @EDPressSec, I’ve created a Twitter account and favorited the exchange. Start at the bottom and read up. I’ll keep updating as the conversation continues. I hope it’ll be productive. I really do respect that the press office is on Twitter, and I hope they work to create more opportunities for teachers and policymakers to actively be in meaningful conversation.)
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Dear Rep. Markey, Sen. Bennet, and Sen. Udall:

I have grave concerns regarding the proposed elimination of the National Writing Project’s federal funding from the current Education Appropriation Bill. I cannot tell you of a program that I believe is more essential to good teaching, learning and thinking in our schools today.

In light of that opening, I am writing today to seek your assistance with two items:

1. I would like for you to show your support for the National Writing Project by signing on to Rep. George Miller’s Dear Colleague letter of support for 2011 funding for the NWP.
2. I have asked the press office, via Twitter, of the Education Department for information regarding why they removed funding for the National Writing Project from their appropriations request. I need your assistance in obtaining that information, as they don’t seem able to provide it to me. I was hoping your office might help me navigate the issue.

I work as an instructional technologist for the St. Vrain Valley School District. Prior to my transition to providing professional development to teachers in a district support role, I was a classroom language arts teacher for five years with the same school district. I am certain that I have experienced no better model of professional development than that of the National Writing Project. Since I first learned of and participated in a local project at Colorado State University, my students have benefited from my exposure to the NWP, as have the hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students similarly impacted by their programs.

Writing remains essential to student and societal success. The National Writing Project, through its network of local affiliates spread out across the country, makes a substantial difference for students everyday. We would be foolish not to support them.

(My colleague, Zac Chase of Philadelphia, PA, has written a brief letter explaining some of the data regarding NWP’s success. You can view that here.)

In Colorado, three NWP-affiliated local writing project sites work to promote the same ideals of teachers teaching teachers. Each of those programs would be in jeopardy if not for the support of the national network and their matching funds.

I do hope that you will consider signing on to the “Dear Colleague” letter.

I would be happy to speak further with you about the National Writing Project. I’d also love the opportunity to invite you and/or your staff to a NWP or CSUWP event in the near future. There’s always room for more writers. We’d love to see you.

I look forward to discussing navigating the Department of Education’s decision process soon.

Sincerely,

Bud Hunt
Instructional Technologist
St. Vrain Valley School District
Teacher Consultant
Colorado State University Writing Project

Jaron Lanier, in his new book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, writes:

Every save-the-world cause has a list of suggestions for “what each of us can do”: bike to work, recycle, and so on.

I can propose such a list related to the problems I’m talking about:

• Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

These are some of the things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others. (p 49-50 of the B&N eReader edition.)

I’m thinking that Lanier, so far, is overselling his case that we are, in fact, becoming locked-in to a particular way of thinking, being and doing because of the technologies that are shaping our world today. Yes, I think such lock-in can occur – but only when we don’t pay attention to it.  Television and movies provide similar opportunities to fiddle with reality.  And have for some time.

But I think his calls to action are dead on.  And not so terribly new.  We’ve been creating culture through media for a very long time.  I wonder who has written similar calls to action against becoming so swept up by professionalism or industrialism or society’s particular rules of okayedness that folks forget to feel. (Yes.  That last sentence was sarcasm – much of the literature that I find fascinating is a reaction in some way to whatever the writer finds to be an artificial limit placed on humanness.  I’m thinking this book fits in the “literature” category more than the “nonfiction” shelf.  But it’s early yet.  I’m only a couple of chapters in.)

I wonder who will write about that next.

This book is, so far as I’ve gotten, as much poem as argument.  He writes in the preface that “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”  He’s right.

How are you supporting your somebody before you’re racing to share?

Edward R. Morrow, October 15th, 1958, in a speech to the RTNDA:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

I’d encourage you to read the speech in its entirety.  Maybe even twice.  Think about the tools you have, and whether or not you’re determined to use them.

Earlier this morning, I tweeted this:

Do you ever want to say to folks who scream they don’t want their private lives online: “Maybe you should just try to be a better person.” ?

And I realized that I didn’t quite say what I meant there.
I believe that pivacy is important and special, and that there are plenty of moments in my life that are my business and perhaps my family’s or close friends’ or colleagues’ business. That said, I think anything public is fair game for public. And I think my public persona, the person I am at work and in the world, be it the store, or church, or at the park or anywhere else, should be the same public persona online.

Because that’s who I am. Or who I’m becoming, at least.

I made a choice when I went online in 2005 that I was going to be the same grown up online as I was in the physical public. For the most part, I’ve kept to that. If I’d say it in a classroom, I’ll post it to the web. If I wouldn’t, I tend to keep it to myself. Sure, I’ve stumbled and posted in anger or frustration, but not as a habit. (Maybe. You’re certainly welcome to disagree with me here.) And I’ve made a trade – I don’t say everything that I might wish to say.

Modeling is perhaps the greatest teaching tool that we have. The actions that we engage in say as much and more about us than our directions to students ever will. I’ve never asked a student in one of my classes to do something that I wasn’t willing to do myself. And I’ve constantly sought out ways to show my students that I am engaged in the world in the ways that I want them to be – my students caught me reading and writing and thinking about things all the time, just as I asked them to read and write and think. I went to math class and struggled through geometry tests. I participated in science experiments. I got excited about things.

I tried to model for them what learning looked like. And I try to do that in my online public persona as well. So when people say to me “I don’t think I want my students to see my [insert online profile], I wonder what it is that they’re uncomfortable about.

We all stumble as people and don’t quite do the things we’d like to do, or behave perfectly. That’s human. And there are boundaries between personal and professional, between public and private. But those boundaries are far from hard and fast lines.

I’m sure that I’m not anywhere close to where I’d like to be in my actions. But I think it’s worth it to struggle to be a better person. And I think that struggle is human and worth sharing. We can all be better people, and education is a big piece of how that happens. And modeling is a big piece of education.

These ideas are still developing for me; I wonder what you think about them. What stays private? Public? What do you do online that you wouldn’t want your students to know about? Why not? As more of ourselves finds its way online, will these conversations stop being binary in nature?

Earlier today, I sent a link to a student’s Twitter account to a staff member in the school he attends with a request that she share the link with a counselor in the school.  I read some things that caused me to worry for him.  Nothing too extreme, the sorts of things that kids, particularly young adults in the space between adolescence and adult, say and that are important.  I like this particular student; I only met him briefly in a presentation at a school in the district, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know him a bit better from his tweets.  Smart kid.  Needs some attention.  Worth it.

I find much of value in getting to interact with many district students via Twitter, my preferred channel for such interaction. Our students are online, and they are curious about the world, and they have things to teach us, if we are prepared to listen and learn them.

But sometimes, they will say things that may make us uncomfortable.  When that happens, it is up to us to follow up.  That’s the job.

I was reminded today of a counselor that I used to work with some years ago.  I went to her one day during the semester when I really started to wrap my head around social media and the power of the subscribe-able, bring-the-world-to-you Web.  I wanted to show her what I was learning about my students by following their writings on Xanga and MySpace, their public postings coming into my RSS reader.  I saw these students as people engaged in the world.  I laughed sometimes.  Was amazed on occasion.  Worried for them others.  “What an opportunity,” I said to her, “To see a little bit deeper into our students’ worlds, to engage them as people.  Perhaps counselors could and should be paying attention to these public spaces and learning from them, maybe even catching early glimpses of future problems.”  (Thinking back – and opportunities.)

She was hesitant to invade the students’ “personal” spaces, space that they were sharing in public.  She didn’t want to intrude.

Intrude.

I don’t believe that we have the luxury of ignoring our students when they share in public.  I don’t believe that we should duck away from engaging them for fear of finding ourselves in awkward situations.  That said, I think societal climates suggest we should avoid private connections for a bunch of reasons – one reason I like Twitter as a meeting place.  I don’t encourage students to come to Twitter.  But when they’re here, I do look for them as folks to learn from and with.  And while they’re here, I will treat them the same as I’d treat any other person.  Perhaps better than any other – they’re students in my school district, and I have a professional and legal obligation to them as human beings first, students second.  We all get lonely.  We all get down.  We all worry and lose perspective and have rough moments.  Students.  Grown ups.  All of us.  And we’re supposed to look after each other.

That we avoid fumbling through awkwardness is human, too.  It is often simpler to disengage and to not know what happens in the world where our students will spend 85% of their time.  But it’s not right.

No one of us can pay attention to every utterance.  That’s beyond human. But together, we can look out for each other.  Some students will never reach out to us.  But others will.  What a gift.

I learn from and with students in a different way now than when I was a classroom teacher, responsible for the learning of a certain group of pupils.  Now we learn together wherever we can, in the informal publics of our school district, both the physical world of seminars and workshops and classroom visits and also in the virtual worlds of Twitter and the other public spaces of the Internet.  I’ve mentioned to colleagues that I follow students on Twitter and similar spaces.  Often, the response is surprise.  I always worry about that.

I want educators online and paying attention when a student exploring the public voice begins to share some things that are too often left unshared.  I want those educators and students to trust each other to handle those opportunities with respect and care.  I want growth to happen.  I want it to be good. I want positive and supportive models for students to light the way.

And, yes, I do want to intrude.  Each and every kid is worth the intrusion to keep them safe and vibrant and engaged and with us.

And you are, too.¹

1. A gracious thank you to Michelle Bourgeois, who kindly read and responded to an early draft of this post. [↩]

Do me a favor, would you?

Take a few minutes, right now, and read Tom Hoffman’s “10 Reasons You Should Care About the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s Draft English Language Arts Standards.”   He’s doing the thinking and linking that needs to be happening around these proposed standards.  Folks need to be reading and talking about the points that he’s raising.  Here’s a taste:

We are inviting testing companies to determine the future of our schools with virtually no accountability or public input.

These standards were developed by two testing companies, the College Board and ACT, with help from a nebulous non-profit, Achieve, Inc. It is essential to understand this when reading the Common Standards; it explains many of their odd choices. In the example above, the obvious interpretation is that they chose to define the standard as “support or challenge assertions” rather than “construct a response or interpretation,” as every international example they cited did, because the former is much easier and cheaper to score reliably on a standarized test.

No high performing educational system in the world would consider giving testing companies this much control over their standards and curriculum. It is absurd.

After you’ve read the post, please link to, print out and mail, e-mail, or do whatever you need to do to share it with smart folks you know interested in language arts.  Tom’s right – the wrong people are having their say in a pretty important conversation and the validation committee’s pretty light on language artists.  Public comment on the standards is open until October 21st. There’s time, but not much.  Tell folks that you know or that you think should know.

You’ll share this, right?

Ever since we opened up lots more of the Internet in our school district earlier this year, the district has received several requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom.  I’ve written a stock response to those requests that I thought might be worth sharing.  It’s my hope that their requests and the conversations that come from this response lead to changes in classroom practice.

Here it is:

Thanks for your question.  When we implemented our new filter this school year, we looked at all the things we were currently blocking, what things were required to be blocked by law, and what we were blocking that we shouldn’t be.

What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool.  Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them.  Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem.  It is our intention that we help students to learn the appropriate on-task behaviors instead of assuming that we can use filters to manage student use.  Rather than blocking sites on an ad hoc basis, we will instead be working with folks to help them through computer and lab management issues in a way that promotes student responsibility.  We know that the best filters in a classroom or lab are the people in that lab – both the educational staff monitoring student computer use as well as the students themselves.

This opens up possibilities for students and staff using websites for instructional purposes that in the past were blocked due to broad category blocks.  It requires that staff and students manage their technology use rather than relying on a third party solution that can never do the job of replacing teachers monitoring students.

That said, we will still block sites that are discovered to violate CIPA requirements.  If you discover one, please do not hesitate to share it with us.  Also, if you discover a site that shouldn’t be blocked, please pass that along so that we can open it up.

I hope this makes sense.  I’d be happy to speak further with you if you have further comments or questions.

How do you talk to folks in your districts about your Internet (un)filtering?

I received a Twitter direct message earlier today from someone who is frequently a teacher of mine.  This individual was curious about why my Twitter following/follower ratio was something like four to one.  My answer, which was also a direct message, was:

The short answer is because I don’t find value in following every person that follows me. It’s a bit more complicated than that, though.

There’s an awful lot of baggage tied up in followers and friends and whatnot online, but there doesn’t need to be.  One reason I’ve always liked Twitter is that I find that it’s incredibly open.  Through an @ message, anyone can get the attention of anyone else who uses the service (so long as the person you want to get a hold of  has their @messages settings in Twitter open to anybody.)

But the way I screen Twitter followers and make decisions about who to follow is pretty simple:  If I find the person or the content helpful to me in my work or engaging in some other way (funny, wise, curiosity-inducing, teaching, etc.), I follow.  If I don’t, I don’t.

It’s not personal.  Except when it is.  By that, I mean that there are far more people in the world than I can learn from at any one time.  If I find a stream useful, I keep it around.  If I don’t find it useful, I let it go.  If the person or stream is more distraction than help, I let it/them go, too.  I don’t have a magic number of people or a ratio, but about four to one seems to be consistent – I get the question of “Why are you not following as many people as follow you?” enough that I’ve noticed the trend.

I don’t follow all the folks that follow me for a bunch of reasons.  Some folks aren’t teaching me anything.  Others are sharing resources I’m finding from other sources.  For the most part, I don’t block folks whom I don’t like or find “offensive” that follow me.

I expect no reciprocity in my reading and/or following habits.  I continually think others who expect such are misunderstanding the opportunities herein, or are using social media for drastically different purposes than I, which is fine, except when they expect me to follow their “rules.”  I try to approach most of these spaces as places in which I can be selflessly selfish.

There’s very little new here.  Friendships and other relationships in “real life” are often one-way.  We get a little hinky sometimes when we see these relationships documented, though.  No need.

I’m spending some time today with the folks at Flagstaff Academy in Longmont and digging into an old bag of tricks. Can you guess which slide is the yarn slide? Flagstaff folk – I hope we can continue some of the conversations that we started today here in the comments.  I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions.  Thanks.

PS – Terri, the link to the video you saw is here.

I’m enjoying the review of the week’s tweets that I am basically assigning myself to read.  Looking at the weekly post is a way to review my thinking over that time, and now posting a tweet is also writing a short note to myself that I’ll read the following week.

Here’s one from the other night:

Too much censorship begins with well-intentioned people worrying about other people’s kids.

The tweet came at the beginning of a conversation with Vicki Davis in reference to an idea that she has about ratings on YouTube videos.  I promised her an explanation of my position.  So here goes:

I’m not for forcing one’s will on any organization that exists as a for-profit, private enterprise.  I’m certainly not for forcing one’s values on that enterprise, either, in the name of education or anything else.  It sounds cold – but it’s not YouTube’s responsibility to be everything to everyone.  They built themselves around the audiences that they wished to serve. Further – I think we hide behind the education shield a little too often.

If I wanted to build a school on the block where a popular bar was, and then I decided that I didn’t like having a bar so close to my school, so I attempted to try to shut the bar down, I’d be completely in the wrong.

So, too, with YouTube.  When we go there for educational purposes, and don’t like what we see, how is that the fault of YouTube?

I’d rather let YouTube be YouTube.  I can bring their content into my educational spaces, if I choose too, but I could also be responsible for creating my own space to post and share videos and decide the rules for its use.

It’s not up to them to make a space that I am happy with.  Nor is it up to a third-party to make them change for my benefit.

Hope that makes sense, Vicki.