#beyondthetextbook – Considering Inputs

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I’ve been meaning to write more about the idea, expressed by many at DML, myself included, that we need to be paying lots more attention to our inputs in education, rather than our outputs. I wrote a note to myself near the end of the conference so I wouldn’t forget:

So we need APIs that’ll help us pull our data out of the tools we use and put it into the tools that we use so that we can build dashboards of useful data

input information, not output information – but maybe some of both – descriptive tools – not prescriptive ones this is important and I need to write about it

inputs rather than outputs; experiences rather than tests

describing the learning by the institution – not so much on the student¹

Mimi Ito, responding to Doug and my ideas, said it like this in a really solid summary of the entire DML 2012 Conference:

We need to be looking much more at the connections, relationships, and spirit of inquiry that goes into the system, and focusing less on optimizing measures and pathways that sort kids, schools, and teachers based on output metrics.

The continuing comments on my last post, as well as some of the thinking I saved to do for later, are helping me to make more sense of the notion of focusing on inputs, at least how that might relate to the #beyondthetestbook conversation.

I think the emphasis on educational outputs, i.e. test scores and not much else, is pretty wrongheaded. And it leads to the degradation of the educational environments that we should be building up. But we knock them down instead, in the name of what we get out of them.

One of the more interesting elements of John Seely Brown’s keynote at DML was his discussion of how gamers build dashboards, or collections of vital, real time information, to help them complete complex elements of the game. He referenced World of Warcraft, in particular, but I suspect this is true of many games and the gamers that play them. Certainly, this is true for me as a learner and as a grownup – I collect the necessary data that I need when I’m learning about something or making a decision about it. Brown suggested that such dashboards for learning might be things that students need to make².

And I began to wonder what the dashboards for learning might need to look like. Certainly, the value isn’t in the dashboard so much as it is in the making of the thing – identifying what one needs to know in order to do the thing he or she wants to accomplish. And so the creation of a good dashboard for learning is certainly dependent on the availability of the necessary raw materials that someone would need to cobble together to build such a dashboard for learning.

So I went looking for those raw materials. And it’s pretty clear to me that students, in general, don’t have those sorts of materials readily available. Even if schools wanted to encourage students to make these sorts of dashboards for learning, they couldn’t do so³.

I found two places in my daily life that have useful dashboard for learning stats available. Here they are:

The first is from this blog’s WordPress Dashboard – a pretty simple collection of information. The second is from my Amazon account – which is a bit deceptive. I’m not reading 39 Clues – my daughter Ani is, but I think it’s interesting that I’ve got a limited look at what Amazon sees when they look at me.

I know it’s limited because Amazon certainly knows an awful lot more about me than they let me look back at. They know what I highlight. What page I’m on in every book I’ve used. How long I spend on each page. How often I flip back and forth. What I do on their website after I’ve read a particular book or books. And much, much more. I can get to a few of those items. Not most.

If only they’d share some of that information back with me. Imagine if schools had that sort of information about students’ reading habits? Suppose the books themselves could tell the teacher if they were being read⁴?

And if students could examine their own reading habits and limitations, and fiddle around with the data their devices and systems were collecting on them, then perhaps those dashboards for learning wouldn’t be so hard to create after all.

Dan Meyer said something the other day about dashboards via Twitter⁵. I responded that, certainly, portfolios could be dashboards for learning. He replied that portfolios aren’t so “heads up,” or words to that effect. And he was right. Portfolios are too output heavy, and not useful for quick glances along the learning way.

But building portfolios, now that’s a fine way of figuring out if you’ve learned anything.

So the question for textbooks, then, is this – how can a text provide data about its use to those who use it? How can students own and manage and fiddle with that data to track/monitor/explore their learning? And how can we create spaces within our books for students to make sense of their learning? How can our students’ inputs be privileged in the texts that we make, use and create at school?

Dan sketches out, here, how a math text might look when spaces for inputs are considered thoughtfully. I wonder about how teachers and students can meaningfully share annotations via their texts. I wonder what tools could provide this sort of input information easily – Instapaper, I’m thinking, or Evernote, have fabulous collections of data about their users. I use those tools daily to help me learn things. How could they make my data available to me in more useful ways? What sorts of infrastructures would need to exist for that data to be useful in a dashboard for learning?

And, of course, I wonder about the other inputs that are worth wondering about. What am I not considering in terms of inputs? How are you considering inputs in your work?

This was in reference to comments by Gever Tulley that much of assessment in his school is done by the staff and about the experiences they’ve created – did they accomplish what they wanted them to, etc. – and there’s less emphasis on what each individual student learned. The students themselves are focused on what they’ve learned. There’s some control left for them in their learning. [↩]
And the making resonated with me – it’s less about the actual dashboard, and more about owning a process through laying hands on the data and the pieces and building something out of them. [↩]
Maybe I was wrong about this – are there data sources that I’m not thinking about? [↩]
Certainly, students would figure out ways to game these systems, but tracking inputs could be a fine way to see what a student was doing – and where they were stuck, or confused, or frustrated, or what have you. There’s potential there. There’s also danger there – tracking data and privacy concerns are important and worthy of consideration. [↩]
I looked, quickly, but couldn’t find the exact tweet. My apologies. [↩]

Not #beyondthetextbook. #betterthetextbook

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Bud Hunt

A big bunch of friends, associates, colleagues, and interesting strangers will be sitting in a conference room in Maryland this weekend, talking about the future of textbooks. This is market research, but hopefully semi-public and sharable to others. I suspect it’ll be an interesting conversation.

I’ve written before about some of what I think needs to happen when it comes to textbooks at schools. And my colleague, Kyle, is working very hard with our curriculum staff to prototype some of what our new curricular resources might look like. But I thought it would make sense to share some thoughts here, as grist for the mill of conversations in Maryland.

I’m hoping that folks’ll at least take some time to make sure they’re working from shared definitions when it comes to words like “textbooks” and “resources.” Might not hurt to define “curriculum.” The problem with those words, and others that are likely to come up in the conversation, is that “everyone knows what they mean.” But they know that differently. Shared definitions matter.

I’d humbly offer this definition for textbook – “A collection of information organized around thoughtful principles intended to provide support to instruction.” It’s not the best definition – I’m sure there are better¹ – but before you go too far into a conversation about moving beyond something, it’d be good to have a sense of what it is that you’re going to move beyond.

I might drop “book” from the word, but I’m divided on that, as I’ve learned it’s hard enough for people to consider that video or audio are “texts.”² The book part really bugs people. That said, a “book” has never been a codex. That’s the delivery technology.

In your conversations this weekend, try to separate the delivery technology – the way the information gets to the people – from the information you’re trying to send. If you argue that “the Internet is the textbook,” then you have failed to separate delivery from information. You can’t completely separate the two – the way something comes to you affects what you get, of course – but try to at least be aware of the two elements. And take advantage of the right delivery tools to allow for the types of stuff you want to see your textbooks do.

Also try to refrain from overgeneralization. “Textbooks are dead,” might feel good to say, or to retweet, but is a foolish statement. No, BYOD solutions aren’t the only answer. Student 1:1 environments aren’t the only answer. There is no one size fits all answer to the problems you are trying to solve. Platform and device neutrality and Web standards are pieces of the puzzle you’re trying to solve. So is on-demand printing. Or sometimes mass printing. Paper is not the enemy, nor are screens the savior.

Don’t be afraid of relying on expertise. Expertise, after all, is what you’re looking for in a textbook. The reason for textbooks is to bring a collection of human expertise on something together. But do not let that expertise lie in a publisher’s office alone.

The best textbooks moving forward are likely those that start with small building blocks from publishers, OER repositories, classrooms, websites, movie studios, and pretty much any other source for interesting information, and they become textbooks when they are hung onto a curriculum frame by a local school district. This might be done by a committee of teachers, or a small group of curriculum coordinators in a front office somewhere, but what important is that it’s not done by a salesperson seeking to please a state official in Texas or California.

The shift that I hope is coming in instructional sources is the local creation and curation of this stuff, followed by the local distribution of it to students. Some of this local curation work will be scalable and useful to other places – that is one advantage, for both business and school interests, of the Common Core State Standards. But lots of it won’t.

If textbook companies want to sell us things for and in the rest of the 21st Century, they should be selling the building blocks of content. Small pieces. They should be selling expertise and guidance in how to create these local curriculum creation teams. They might sell the platforms that help us to put the pieces together and distribute them to our communities. Discovery actually does this now – and could lead in this area.

But no publisher can sell us monolithic books written for imaginary populations of lowest common denominators. That’s why folks are so angry with and about textbooks – in the race to create One Book to lead them all, our publishers gave us stuff that wasn’t super-duper for anybody. And we bought it.

We’ve got to better the textbook. Not move beyond it.

Looking forward to seeing what folks come up with during the conversation. I suspect I’ll have more to say on the matter.

Wikipedia’s isn’t bad. [↩]
Wikipedia even has trouble differentiating between the format and the content in their definition of “book.” But the entry on the term still might be useful. So, too, would “text.” [↩]

#DML2012 – On Love and Infrastructure

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I’ve been continually struck at DML with the notions of connectedness and participation. It makes sense that these would be sticky ideas here, and dominant ones. The conference opened with the announcement of the Connected Learning Research Network and a talk from John Seely Brown that dealt heavily with notions of participatory culture.

But in our rush to make and play and tinker and connect and engage in learning that matters in institutions that might not, I feel like I’m missing the love.

No, that’s not quite right. Actually, I’m finding notions of love everywhere I look. But perhaps that’s because I’m focused on looking for it, and you know how it goes – when you look for something, when you look really hard, you can find it anywhere.

I keep coming back to this interview that Fred Rogers gave to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. You should watch the entire series, but here, at 5 minutes and 17 seconds into this particular segment, Mr. Rogers give his definition of teaching and talks about what he was trying to do with his television show:

His words here stick hard with me – I cannot divorce his concept of love and teaching from my way of thinking about teaching now. And the Internet, or a school, or a community center, or a museum, or any institution of and about learning, can and should provide examples of teachers in love with what they love in front of others as a way of communicating that love, and helping students to find and communicate their own.

And I see resonance with that in the talk of the new DML Connected Learning Research Network, especially in Mimi Ito’s description:

In a nutshell, connected learning is learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational and economic opportunity. Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose.

In talking with her briefly the other night about some mentoring work she’s hoping to do, work to connect passionate mentors to interested learners, I wondered more about issues of scale that have been raised at the conference, about what can scale, and what cannot.

And while I’m not sure that love, itself, can scale, I wonder if finding love maybe can. Certainly people have limited capacity, and can only love so many so deeply, but computers can help us to find each other. Networks can help us to find each other. Institutions can help us to find each other. Then we can do the human pieces better.

And finding each other, then looking after each other, is well worth doing¹.

In this morning’s panel on technical and social innovation, I saw too much emphasis on systems designed around outputs. I think that’s a large problem in education – we look heavily at what comes out of a system, but not so much on what we put into it. I’d argue quite strongly, with anyone who’ll listen, that we need to look quite closely and intentionally on what goes into a system, and on what sorts of inputs are privileged in our infrastructures. And how we inject love and care and compassion and concern into infrastructure is very, very important. It’s not considered enough, if at all, and these things rarely show up on measures of output.

So how do you build love and care into your systems and infrastructures and learning environments and experiences? How are you doing so in a way that doesn’t over simplify the complex backgrounds of the people and communities you’re learning from and with? How are you looking for ways to increase the love and care in your systems?

What are you loving in front of your students and colleagues? What would they say gets loved in your spaces?

Certainly, too, it’s worth wondering about people who aren’t getting found, or served, or looked after, by institutions of love and learning. How do we make sure that we focus on entry points so that those who wish to be found can be, and those who don’t want to be found can do that, too. I’ll say more on entry points, infrastructure and inputs in a future post. [↩]

#ISTE11: On Longitudinal Web Presences for Writing, Learning, Being

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I had the opportunity to hear Paul Allison, one of my favorite teachers, talk at length about his work with Youth Voices yesterday. Usually, Paul’s asking about others’ work, or showcasing the work he’s doing – but not talking about the thinking behind the work. And I like it when he does so. I hope he’d do that more.

He said that the pedagogical and philosophical¹ recipe for Youth Voices was something like:

James Beane and his work on breaking down the curriculum barriers and asking good questions
plus Paulo Friere’s thinking on asking learners to look for generative themes
with a dash of Peter Elbow who reminds us of the power of making things through free writing.

I need to return to all three of those folks and dig back in to some of their thinking.

But he said something, off the cuff, that I thought was really important. He mentioned that he’d been in the Youth Voices work for eight years², and that students who started in tenth grade were able, in eleventh and twelfth, to return to the space and pick up where they left off. They didn’t have to learn a new space, and their work from previous years was right there.

That’s powerful and important and worth unpacking a little bit. Teachers who are using interesting technology with their students find themselves too often in the setup and infrastructure business – and that’s fine sometimes. But not every time or every lesson or every year.

One of the reasons I went to work for an IT department was because I wanted to help make spaces that had a life beyond one classroom. A student shouldn’t create one blog to suit the needs of every teacher that asks for work to occur in such spaces. Students create short term tools for what should be long term work, and they find themselves create blogs every time they start to do interesting work. The assumption becomes that the work they’re doing in these temporary spaces is throwaway work. When the unit, semester, or year ends, the space dies and the student is asked to create the next one.

That’s not how it should work.

What I love about Paul’s work, and the work of other folks who are thinking about the long game of educational spaces where work lives and breathes and mingles with other work, is that they’re building what I call³ longitudinal Web presences. Spaces where the portfolio happens as the collection grows. Places where the stuff a student made yesterday and the stuff a student makes today will be around for a student to add to tomorrow. Places that don’t die every few months or are subject to Teacher A or B’s personal web tool preference.

When Karl or Michelle or I talk about digital learning ecologies, or Paul talks about Youth Voices, I think that’s what we’re talking about. Teachers shouldn’t have to be in the creation and infrastructure business all the time. Nor should they be helping kids to cram important work into temporary places.

If you’re a tech director or a CIO, I hope you’re thinking about how to create these spaces. I also hope you’re thinking about how to help students return to them over time and to think through what they’ve made and how it resonates, or doesn’t, as they expand their knowledge and experience. In St. Vrain, we’ve built a few tools that help with this, but we’re nowhere close to figuring it out.

We do, know, though, and have been charged by our school board, that we are stewards of the work our students produce. That’s an important word – the IT department is responsible for looking after the students’ work. We’ve got to make sure it’s well taken care of and preserved and saved until they leave our care. And that they can take it with them when they go.

That’s what a portfolio should be. That’s worth making. Thoughtfully.⁴ I continue to be inspired and pushed by the work of folks like Paul who are building places of learning that last on the Web.

My words, not his [↩]
Eight years. How many writing spaces do you have that last six months. Learning, folks, is a marathon. [↩]
Probably incorrectly, but playing with words is fun. [↩]
Sometimes, the curbs matter and the making of the containers are essential, in no small part because the traffic on the road and the stuff in the boxes is precious and worth looking after. The road needs to last for a long, long time. [↩]

#ISTE11: NWP’s Inaugural Hack Jam

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Bud Hunt

Yesterday afternoon, I had the opportunity to attend the first ever National Writing Project Hack Jam, an exploration of the opportunities to fiddle with text and writing and code on the Internet. It was a useful event for me, as we were able to think and play with ideas about what “hacking” means right now, and how it’s about reading and writing and thinking.

Masterfully facilitated by Chad Sansing and Meenoo Rami, the event took us to some interesting places and conversation. Here’s my recap.

We started the day in table groups with a box of Monopoly and a simple task – hack the game. Chad and Meenoo explained that our task was to fiddle with the rules until we found a game that was better than the one we were handed – and so Sandy and Gail and I tinkered our way through a version of Monopoly that was all about freebies. Other groups fiddled to make the game about tossing pieces and giving to charity. It was good¹.

But the point of the hacking was to give us an opportunity to explore that games and systems have rules – rules that were made by people. And we can mess with those rules if we understand the underlying principles involved. That’s powerful learning – and applies not just to board games, but to school, and to work, and to civic engagement and to computer systems or the Internet.

Hacking matters. Douglas Rushkoff would say that we need to Program or Be Programmed, but I’d fiddle with that statement and say instead that we need to hack or be hacked. Someone made the rules and systems of the Internet, power structures, as John Spencer called them during out conversation yesterday. And, as others have said before, we’ve got to help our students fiddle with them, understand them, and, hopefully, change them.

We moved from that work into a visual exploration of our definition of hacker – folks focused on several things, but I was reminded of MacGyver, and thought of duct tape and wrenches and making things out of what we’ve available. Purposeful play.

This led to some interesting conversation that I think was my key takeaway from the day². Paul Allison, who is always thoughtful, wrote this during the workshop:

My first thought is that hacking sounds like an important idea, but really? Do we need another word that takes teachers out of the mainstream “common core” standards conversation? Does hacking get my students more college-ready? Like gaming, isn’t hacking just another thing that pushes the risk-takers into the margins, and makes risk-adverse teachers run? How do we find a way to be more inclusive in our language and processes? Is it just a language thing? What else might we call hacking?

Later on, Paul continues³:

So part of why we hack has to do with understanding our sources more deeply, and this is absolutely an academic concern. But don’t we need words like “analytical reading” and carefully sourced research? Right so what else might we call hacking? It’s about creativity, but it’s also about making new things by really understanding the old, and this is a traditional, academic exercise.

I’m looking for language that will encourage the risk-adverse teacher to join with us in these enterprises.

And that’s what I leave thinking about. Hacking matters. Academic reading and writing matter. And they’re not unrelated things. Groups like the National Writing Project know an awful lots about good reading and writing practice, and are exploring thoughtfully things like gaming and hacking – but can they do so in a way that doesn’t scare off the “risk-adverse teacher,” as Paul asks?

I think we need the National Writing Project and folks like them to help navigate these spaces, and to explore them thoughtfully with teachers – and to help folks recognize that reading and writing and thinking and gaming and hacking are related – but in a way that doesn’t lead to further fragmentation and paradox. I think we need teachers to play, like we played in the Hack Jam, with the rules and ideas that affect them.

Yes, let’s teach kids to hack. Both the Internet and Shakespeare. Minecraft and Fitzgerald. Wordle and essay. Picture and paragraph. Logarithm and link. Tweets and Tennyson. Second Life and the State Legislature. It’s a big world.

Worth doing. If you get the chance to attend a future NWP Hack Jam – you should go. I’ll see you there.

Because it was a National Writing Project event, there were snacks. Good ones. [↩]
And I know I’ve buried the lead, but that’s okay. [↩]
Read the whole piece. It’s good and I can’t stop thinking about it. [↩]

A #blog4nwp in Which I Ask for Your Assistance. Urgently.

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Bud Hunt

Dear Friends¹:

I’m doing something that I don’t normally do – writing a letter. If you know me at all, then you know that I carry a very special appreciation for the work of the National Writing Project. I talk pretty much whenever and where I can about the work of the NWP and what it’s meant to me as a teacher, as a writer, and as a person.

In short, it’s by far the best professional development experience/community/network I’ve ever been involved in.

And, fortunately, it has survived, grown and flourished these last twenty years with support from the federal government – originally, the National Endowment for the Humanities and then the Department of Education². Sometimes, the good guys win.

On March 8th, unfortunately, that federal support ended, at least for the moment, when President Obama signed a continuing resolution that eliminated NWP as well as several other groups’ educational budgets. As of October 1st, 2011, there will be no federally funded National Writing Project. In preparation for that, the NWP laid off 60 percent of its staff last week and announced to local site directors that they will have to reduce their local funding by 25 percent.

And that breaks my heart.

And I need your help to fix this mess.

You are movers and shakers in your respective worlds. People listen to you and seek your counsel. On many occasions, I’ve sought you out for assistance and/or advice. I need your help to help restore funding to the National Writing Project through whatever reasonable, rational and responsible means necessary.

That’s, well, pretty much all I’ve got. I suspect that the usual avenues for these sorts of situations are to do two things:

1. Get the word out about the power of the NWP
2. Ask people with access to money if the NWP could have some.

You may not know much about the project, so I thought I’d tell you a little bit more before I ask you to do at least one of those two things.

Basically, the National Writing Project is a professional development organization. In the same way that antibiotics were helpful to modern medicine. They’re powerful. They work with universities and schools to build spaces where teacher expertise is shared and valued. Specifically, they work to promote the ideas that:

1. The best teachers of writing are writers themselves.
2. The best teachers of teachers are teachers themselves.
3. The best way to make a difference in classrooms is to invest in thoughtful reflective inquiry and practice among teachers and their students. Cross pollinate like crazy, and let teachers be teachers.

They’d say it a little bit differently, but I’m thinking that, if you know me at all, as a teacher, as a learner, as a colleague or as a writer, then you know the National Writing Project. I am the professional that I am in no small measure due to my exposure to the NWP, our local affiliate the Colorado State University Writing Project, the influence of the NWP on my teachers and professors, and my interactions with NWP colleagues and friends around the country.

The National Writing Project believes in teachers and their agency at a time when almost no one else does. They believe that students, teachers and administrators should write regularly – to include composition in all kinds of media, from papercraft to circuitboard to movie to audio to video game to good ol’ fashioned paper.

The power of writing and the power of teachers are two things that we need plenty of in this country right now.

So here’s the part where I ask for your help and thank you for sticking around in this letter for as long as you have. If you remember that list a little while back, I need your help to either make noise or find money. So I was hoping that you might be inclined to take some sort of action. I’ll break down a few easy ways you can help:

Advocacy:

Write your Congressperson and tell them of the importance of the National Writing Project. NCTE has an easy to use form.
Call your Congresspeople to follow up. Repeatedly. It’s okay. They work for us. Be polite.
Write publicly about your exposure to and experience with the work of the NWP or your desire to fund work like the NWP’s.
Help NWP teachers find venues to share their expertise and remind them to mention the NWP as they do so. Offer them conference and unconference sessions where they can write with your organization.
Write a #blog4nwp.
Borrow these easy tweets. Post them. Often.

Fundraising:

Make a donation to the NWP
Write your Congressperson, etc.
Investigate hiring your local Writing Project to do some inservice in your area. They work for reasonable rates and you’ll get a high quality, teacher-led and centered experience.
Ask the people you know that work for foundations and corporations if they’re aware of the awesomeness of the National Writing Project. Introduce them. Politely ask for support.
You know that uncle or cousin or whatever that you’ve not spoken to in forever who went to work for that person that is in charge of whatever it was? Drop them a note and let them know about the NWP.

I hope that you’re able to take one or more of these actions to help ensure that the National Writing Project remains a viable force for teaching, learning and writing into the 22nd Century. And hopefully longer. Writing doesn’t go out of style – it just keeps changing.

Writing matters. And the National Writing Project does, too.

All the best to you.

Bud

I’m emailing this to pretty much everyone I’ve ever known. I’m posting it here and everywhere else I can because I don’t yet have everyone’s email address. It’s a big world. Feel free to share this with whomever you’d like. I’d consider it a favor if you would. [↩]
You can read more about the history of the NWP in James Gray’s memoir about its founding, Teachers at the Center. I’m reading it right now – and it’s quite useful. [↩]

The Podcast: Infrastructure Matters

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Bud Hunt

Today’s podcast is an excerpt of Troy and Sara and my Reports from Cyberspace conversation at NCTE’s 2010 Annual Convention. Specifically, this is my prepared section of the presentation, which I’ve called “Infrastructure Matters.”

Infrastructure does matter, and it’s never been more important to make sure that the conditions for learning exist in every element of an education organization. I hope that my remarks get to the heart of how I try to model that in my work supporting teaching and learning here in Colorado.
As always, would love to hear your thoughts about the content of the presentation. I’m sure there’s something that I’ve missed. Let me know in the comments.

On a related note, I just want to express my continued appreciation for Sara and Troy as colleagues and thinking partners. I look forward to continuing to learn from and with them. They’re smart people, and I hope they’re on your radar.¹

The thrust of our invitation for others’ reports from cyberspace was that conferences shouldn’t be endpoints, but waypoints, times to recharge and retool before heading out into the work again. I hope that our session was useful to folks. I’ll know that it was as I see work emerge from it. Talk’s fine. It’s useful. But it’s not enough.

Hard work matters, too.

Direct Link to the Video Version
Direct Link to the Audio Version

I have sections of their presentations recorded, too, but wanted to talk to them before I published them. Look for them here soon if they consent. [↩]

Leadership Bootcamp – You Come, Too.

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Bud Hunt

One of the projects that I’ve been working on this year, but I’m sure I haven’t spoken about in this space, is the TIE/ISTE Leadership Bootcamp, a conversation about how communication practices can affect change and serve to support leadership in schools.

It’s an interesting event and a pretty good conversation, and still pretty new. Perhaps you’d like to join us there, as we’re talking about ideas that have come and gone through this blog over the last few years. Joining the community is free, and you’re more than welcome to come on in. In fact, I’m hoping that you will, because I suspect you have something to offer that conversation.

I was fortunate to be asked to give the opening preconference virtual session back near the beginning of the month. You might want to watch that to get a sense of the Bootcamp. Larry Anderson will be giving the next one on April 14th, and there are a couple of other great preconference speakers lined up, too.

See you there?

An Open Letter to my Elected Congressfolk: Please Support the NWP

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Bud Hunt

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:

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.
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

Relations & Expectations

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Bud Hunt

Teagan has, since her birth, been known to all of us as the little sister. The baby sister. That changed the day that Quinn came. Teagan’s now wearing two hats in our family – little sister to Ani, and big sister to Quinn.¹

How we identify her is in large part via her relationships to others. How she identifies herself is tied up in those relationships, too. Rightly or wrongly.

And I’ve seen Teagan change her behavior to match the role that she’s filling at any one moment, alternately trying on the big and little sister roles to see which fit any given situation. She’s fiddling with expectation and agency. It’s fascinating to watch, particularly as the role of big sister is a new one for her. But she’s picking it up quite nicely.

All of the above to say this – I know that the people around us will rise to the level of expectation we have for them, which is why we should always set high expectations.²

But I’m re-realizing this morning that our expectations and relationships and even our identities are wrapped up in our relationships with others.

And I’m thinking about how I can honor existing relationships while building better ones in the context of high expectations.

How do we, I wonder, work to build, support and sustain roles and relationships that help us all to aim high and be better?

That’s a heavy question for a Monday, but a good reminder for the week.

There are several other hats or roles that she wears, but you get the idea. [↩]
One reason Teagan is a great big sister is that we believed that she would be and we told her so. Had we said that she wouldn’t be able to handle it, she probably wouldn’t have. Funny how that works, and how we so often tell people that they’ll be unsuccessful before we even let them try. [↩]

Bud the Teacher

Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning

Category Archives: Infrastructure