kamccollum's Blog

I think all education is an exercise in influence.  If education doesn't result in a change, then it has failed.  I'd like to see influence strategies incorporated into teachers' daily and unit planning.  Of course, to implement this, I'd have to do some influence planning of my own. 

Dan -- How are the adults giving feedback to each other?  Is it just a passing comment in the hallway or is it more like a conference or interview session?  I think how you structure/define the feedback sessions wil affect how easy it is to track.  It'll be awfully hard to keep an accurate count of hallway feedback, but if you have a scheduled time and place for teachers to give feedback to each other, it wouldn't be hard to track who showed up for their scheduled times.  You might even be able to get the teachers to fill out a quick 3x5 size card to describe/rate the feedback session.

I believe that changing the environment can yield huge results.  Unfortunately, I've also seen changing the enviroment used ineffectually as a single source influence strategy.  My first two years as a classroom teacher were in an inner-city middle school where grafiti was a problem.  The principal spent a lot of money repainting lockers, walls, bathroom stalls, and even refinished the auditorium chairs, but never addresse any of the root causes of the grafiti.  It went back up almost before the paint was dry.  When looking to influence a situation by changing the physical environment we need to

• make sure it is the right change
• combine our efforts with the other sources of influence

I think an ergonomic designed desk chair is more appealing than a plastic classroom chair, but honestly, I'd rather not have to sit still for the next 12 to 13 years.  Now that I'm an adult and don't have to do the things the teacher told me to do, I often work semi-reclined on a couch or occasionally on the floor or a table, with all my stuff spread out.

Sometimes work has to be done from desk or a conference table, but I think we should allow children to try out multiple arrangements for getting their work done.  Sometimes a small change in scenery helps us think more creatively.  I've scene a few classrooms with cozy reading corners and inviting work tables, but shouldn't we have more of them?

@Rob -  I think you described a fantastic example of influencing "structural ability".  It's great to hear how your small change in the environment had a great payoff for your school.  I wonder how many small changes like that are right under all of our noses. 

Mark  -

I agree summer-time PD should be part of a teacher's mission, but any incentive system should also encourage teachers to make conections between their summer activities and their classrooms.

Also, thanks for taking a look at my blog and my mind maps.  I'd love to see how other people are organizing the ideas that they've been reading.   

I'm not sure what the next step is.  I fear that the current system is so entrenched, that no real alterations will be made until something catastropic happens.  For all the talk about dissatisfaction with schools, I've read that while most polls show that people [at least the people who respond to polls] are troubled by education "in general", they usually respond positively when asked about the school that their child attends.  If this is true than we shouldn't be surprised by the glacially slow pace of change. 

Frankly, I think education reformers have failed to offer a coherent alternative to the current system.  I think charter schools are a great opportunity for experiementation and offer many children great opportunities to learn.  I also think that their success lies in their limited application.  The forces that resist change, including most parents, are able to rest peacefully knowing that no one is going to try anything silly at their child's school. 

I am sounding pessimistic, but I do believe that we have the power to influence change.  I just wonder if we can influence change without a detailed vision of what our end goal is--something more tangible than "success for all".  Does each person in this discussion group have a detailed idea of what education should be?  How similar are our ideas at the implementation level?  If we do agree, how do we communicate our vision to others?  If we don't agree, how can we expect anyone else to listen to us?

Before looking at creating any new rewards/punishment/incentive program.  I think it is worth taking a long look at the existing system, especially the unintential rewards.  What rewards to teachers get for doing a great job?  What reward do teachers get for doing a lousy job?  I had one colleague once tell me about how great teaching was because he could leave work by 2:30 every day and had the whole summer off.  To me, he had the worst possible motivation for being a teacher.  However I may felt about his motivation, it was genuine and any incentive system for him had to take those types of motivations into effect.  At the same time, I had colleagues who spent nearly every waking moment focused on their classrooms and their students.  Administrators saw their motivation to help students and "rewarded" them with more and more responsibility.  As a result, many eventually burned out. 

Rewards and incentives need to be tailored to the individuals we are trying to motivate. 

I worked on a team of teachers in a high school setting.  We were all teaching the same subject and together we worked on designing lessons for the classroom and interventions for the after school program that would help students grasp the concepts that they were required to know for the Maryland High School Assesment in Biology.  We poured over test scores together, diagnosed weak areas and helped each other out.  I would have loved the opportunity to work on an interdiciplanary team as well.  The 10th grade students read Brave New World as part of their English curriculum and always had questions to ask when they came to biology class.  I still regret not approaching the English department about putting something together.

Years ago, I watched a clergyman introduce a simple idea that resulted in huge benefits to the "social capital" of his congregation.  One Sunday, he looked out on a divided congregation full of cliques, divided by age and social class, and asked everyone in the congregation to get up and sit next to someone they didn't know.  Then he gave everyone some time to talk and get to know each other.  He repeated this at every church meeting for months.  People participated, grudgingly at first, but then began to realize the talents of the people around them.  Cliques disappeared and people began to work together.

I've often thought that this simple idea could help in the schools where I taught.  For a faculty to feel like a team with a common purpose, the team members need to have a sense of comraderie.  Interdisciplinary efforts require us to reach beyond content area cliques.  Surely, a ten minute investment of time at the beginning of each faculty meeting to get people talking to each other as people is worth it to help forge social capital.

I agree that ineffective teachers, teacher burnout, and student drop out rates are among the biggest "elephants" that need to be dealt with.  I would add another elephant to the list.  I think that the content based curriculum that we've been teaching for generations is a silly laundry list of trivia items.  I would like to see a skills-based curriculum that allows students more choice about the learning that they want to pursue.

@Skip -- I love your questions in this thread!  I wish I knew if my answers would really work or not, but I'll offer my two cents anyway.

how do we change this?  . . . Is it possible to change the current institution and its practices and protocols or is it much easier to abandon it and create new learning environments?

 I tend to agree with you about abandoning the current system.  I would prefer to start from scratch and create new learning environments based on what we know about learning rather than tradition.  At the same time, politically, I don't know "easy" such dramatic change is on a large scale, but I think a lot of positive change can occur at a school level.  I thought that having two planning periods, one individual and one team planning, was the best small change that I experienced when I was teaching.  It gave me and my teammates the time to create new learning environments in our classrooms.

What about that other elephant called teaching and teachers?

This is a very BIG elephant.  I had the privilege of working on a team of teachers when I taught high school biology.  Together, the four of us helped our students achieve the highest performance in the county on the end of year exams in biology (even though demographic data predicted that we would come in 2nd to last).  The next year another teacher was added to our team and we couldn't convince him to collaborate with us.  While he was personable to the rest of the team memebers,  he resented that the administration required him to attend team planning meetings and showed his contempt by exercising during the meetings.  Technically, he had more seniority at the school than any of the other team members.  At the time, we all felt powerless to do anything about it. 

Four years later, none of the four original teachers from that team are still at the school, but the troublemaker still is.  We all know that problem teachers can hurt student success directly, but they can also chase away their harder-working peers. 

Books like Influencer and Crucial Conversations would have been a great help to me back then.
     

I realized that I responded to David's interest in the course that I'm teaching, but didn't really say anything about my own PLN.  My PLN is very reliant on tools and web-based resources.  For example, when I think of my PLN, I think of my Google reader and the blogs that I follow more than I think of the authors of the bogs.  I think this is because I've only been a member of the online community for a short time and I haven't made many lasting connections with other individuals . . . yet. 

So far, I've used blogs to lead me to other blogs and information sources and to useful applications, usually web-based.  Only recently have the blogs and tools begun to lead me to connect with actual people.  It's been a fascinating process and I'm interested in how my experience with growing a network compares with others; I don't know how useful my advice about PLN will be for my students if it turns out that I'm an outlier.

I'm happy to share a little about what I teach in the course.  I'm a little constrained in what I can teach because the course is only one credit hour.  Because it is only one credit hour, I don't require any textbooks and I haven't required any journal articles in the past.  The required readings that I have assigned have been mainly from wikis, and blogs.

The basic activities that I require include:

• A learning contract in which the student establishes goals for learning in the course and outlines what he/she intends to do to achieve those goals.
• Active participation in a class discussion (including a web-based portion) about Internet Safety.
• Active participation in a class discussion (including a web-based portion) about Copyright and Fair Use.
• Active participation in a Q&A session with a guest speaker, a k12 teacher who is using technology in innovative ways.
• Establishment and maintenance of a RSS feed reader.
• Organization of web-based resources using a social bookmarking tool.
• Completion of three projects that relate to specific objectives in the curriculum they intend to teach.
  • one project involves multimedia.
  • one project involves Web 2.0/collaborative tools.
  • a third project may involve discipline specific hardware or software (eg. Vernier Science Probes).  How strictly we interpret 'discipline specific' depends on the discipline
• Reflection on how well their planned activities and their peers' planned activies meet criteria for "good technology use".

I've tried to give students a lot of flexibility to pursue their own interests while still requiring them to take risks (in a safe environment) and see the possibilities that technology can provide for them and their students.  In the fall, the class will be moved entirely online and I'm still playing with ideas about how to make that transition smoothly.  As a result, this basic outline may change quite a bit in the next two months.

Greg, I've never been part of a formal professional learning community but I have been part of informal communities that resulted in some pretty dramatic behavioral changes.  I think the key is motivation to apply what you are learning to your situation.  If the motivation isn't there, then I don't think anyone will bother to practice a new skill.  Without practice, change or growth will be stymied.

In response to Mark's comments, I think there are relatively few teachers who seek professional development to change their own behavior.  Most are pursuing professional development to fulfill a requirement and choosing the most interesting topic (or most convenient class) available. 

The common theme was putting the knowledge into action immediately or very soon after the training.

Shouldn't all education, including the education we are providing to k12 students, put knowledge into action immediately or soon after it is taught?  I think the passive model of professional development is just an extension of the traditionally passive model of large-scale education.  It leaves me wondering: is professional development the the "key behavior" we need to tackle or should we be looking somewhere else if we truly want to influence change?

I thought that Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers was a very thorough look at the process of change.  I also think that Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell has some overlap with Influencer.  I'd recommend both.

I think it is possible to create profound vicarious experiences for teachers and students within the context of school.  However, profundity is measured at the individual level.  I was profoundly moved by stories in novels and textbooks that left my classmates unmoved.  I was left cold by other stories that deeply affected some of my peers. 

It seems to me that you are thinking of a certain type of vicarious experience, used for a particular purpose--to reform education.  One of the problems is that educational reform does not have a single compelling story, it has several stories, each compelling in a certain situation or with a particular population.   We don't have a universally appealing story, or even a story that apeals to the majority of the population.  At least not yet.

I've also been puzzled about what I call our "one-size fits all curriculum".  I think one of the most important things that our educational system lacks is choice.   As you pointed out, students are much more engaged when pursuing their own goals and interests.  We can't expect children to have a complete understanding of thier goals and interests, but part of our role as teachers should be to help students identify their goals and give them the tools and skills they need to acheive them. 

As a teacher of NCLB tested subject, I did not feel that I had the power to deviate from the prescribed curriculum.  What do we need to do to introduce changes into the system that will empower children and help them become lifelong learners?

Skip, I've also been reading a lot in blogs about Personal Learning Networks.  I'm in the early stages of my dissertation research, which will be on PLN.  I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the topic.  I teach a course on "Instructional Technology in Teaching" for pre-service teachers and am trying to incorporate skills for creating and organizing PLN into the course this fall.  I welcome any ideas you (or anyone else) could offer.

How many "vital behaviors" are suggested by Marzano's work?  Would it be manageable to focus on all of them at once?  If not, which should be focused on first?

Do you think educators see themselves as influencers? If so, how does this manifest itself in their behavior? If not, why not?

Most educators were at one time very goo or at least above average students. In order to be a successful student, they had to be teacher-pleasers, at least to some extent. Basically, good students are trained to be conformists. To influence change educators need to see a compelling need for change. However, I believe that it is difficult for most educators to leave behind the conformist habits that made them successful as students. As a result, I think very few educators see themselves as influencers in the educational system and I think there are many who don't even want to be.