Scot Graden's Blog

“There can be a payoff academically for these kids that compares to a lot of straightforward academic interventions,” says University of Chicago professor Joseph Durlak, the lead author, “which is really sort of amazing.”

Thinking about the programs we have implemented at each of our buildings in an effort to support positive student behavior and improve school climate – I am interested to see if academic gains are improved as well.

She states,
At best, the current thinking about school reform gives only a token nod to the unprecedented access and connectedness that the Internet represents. Most educators are content to simply label this remarkable global portal as “technology”—just another tool. Even those who call for teachers to integrate technology into their daily practice imagine such reforms as incremental rather than transformative.

All of this ignores the shift triggered by web 2.0—a human revolution more profound than the shift from hunting to agriculture or the advent of printing and mass literacy. The emergence of a pervasive, collaborative, global virtual environment has changed forever what it means to be a good teacher, an effective school leader, or a well-educated 18-year-old.

“We have been spending more that we have in revenue and we have serious problems.  It’s not time to cry about it, it’s not time to whine about it.  It’s time to go to work.”

In the January 19^th edition of Education Week, Barnett Berry wrote a very interesting opinion piece in the commentary section on the future of the teaching profession titled, “We Can Create the Profession Students Need.”

He made several interesting observations based on the investigation of a dozen educators of the last several years.  Here is some of what they have determined…

Our team determined that effective teachers now and in the future must know how to:

• Teach the Googled learner, who has grown up on virtual-reality games and can find out almost everything with a few taps of the finger;

• Work with a student body that’s increasingly diverse (by 2030, 40 percent of students or more will be second-language learners);

• Prepare kids to compete for jobs in a global marketplace where communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving are the “new basics”;

• Help students monitor their own learning using sophisticated tools to assess whether they meet high academic standards, and fine-tuning instruction when they don’t; and

• Connect teaching to the needs of communities as economic churn creates family and societal instability, pushing schools to integrate health and social services with academic learning.

They view teaching’s future through four emergent realities…

Emergent reality 1 foresees a transformed learning environment in which digital tools allow students to learn 24/7 and develop and use skills demanded by both the local and global economies. Many of the same tools allow teachers to learn from each other anywhere, at any time, while helping them take ownership of a school accountability system that can inform policymakers and the public with far more accurate information about who is learning and why.

Emergent reality 2 posits that expert teachers, who know how to reach the “iGeneration” student and serve as community organizers, will create seamless connections between learning in cyberspace and in brick-and-mortar schools. Even as online learning explodes, an unstable economy and growing socioeconomic divides will require that teacher-leaders on the ground build strong school-community partnerships that provide a wide range of integrated services to students and their families.

Emergent reality 3 envisions differentiated professional pathways so teachers with different skills and career trajectories will join in collaborative teams to maximize their respective strengths. Career lattices, not old-school hierarchical ladders, will allow many teachers to lead in a variety of ways, with the premium placed on expert generalists—those who commit to teaching and broker learning and support services for students and families, as well as colleagues.

Emergent reality 4 predicts the need to develop 600,000 “teacherpreneurs,” defined as those who are the most effective teachers and who continue to teach regularly, but also have the time, supports, and rewards to design new instructional programs, orchestrate community partnerships, and advance new policies and practices. Some teacherpreneurs will be the “highest-paid anybody” in a school district—and their roles will finally blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead.

A group of committed staff have been meeting to develop and clearly define action steps that can support a positive, open and supportive climate within Saline Area Schools, and in particular Saline High School.  At the meetings we have been dicussing articles and resources related to this issue.  At our meeting yesterday we discussed the article “Bully, Bullied, Bystander… and Beyond,  Help your students choose a new role” by Barbara Coloroso.

Ms. Coloroso presents some interesting thoughts on the role of the bystander related incidents of bullying. We are talking about ways to turn the bystander into the role of resister, defender and witness.

One of the topics discussed when I talk about the Bond Extension on the February 22nd ballot is technology.  Of the $22 million extension, which does not raise our current 7 mil tax rate, the vast majority (74% or $16 million) is going to heating & cooling, roofs, lighting, etc.  Basically, the critical needs that keep our buildings safe and warm.

However, there is 10% or $2.2 million allocated for technology.  Of this amount, half is for network improvements and half is for device replacements – computers, tablets, projectors, etc.  The focus of the technology has largely been related to our network.  We are passionate about the need to provide strong, enterprise level wifi throughout all of our buildings to allow students and staff to have access to the internet.  The vision for our high school in particular is for a system that would function well while allowing all 1,800 students and 100+ staff to have a device connected to the network simultaneously.  This does not mean the district would provide the devices for students, but we would need to provide the access.

One of the reasons behind this vision is the reality that we need to be preparing our students for a world where access to and the ability to think critically about information is essential.  Attached is a video that highlights the issue…

Okay… As I think many of you know, I am a big supporter of students having access to technology.  I am also convinced that at certain levels this access can lead to skill development that is essential for success in the future.  With that said, this assertion surprises me…  and I question the validity.  The blog post states,

Based on a series of reading and spelling tests, researchers found a “significant contribution of textism use to the children’s spelling development during the study.” The study made it clear that it wasn’t the access to the phone per se, or even the text-messaging as much as specifically the use of textisms that aided the development. The reason, writes Dr. Clare Wood, one of the authors of the study, “is partly explained by the highly phonetic nature of the textisms that are popular within this age group, as the phonological and alphabetic awareness that is required for the construction and decoding of these textisms also underpin successful reading development.”

I found an interesting post by Tony Schwartz on the Harvard Business Review website titled “Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything” related to developing a level of performance in a complex domain.

Here are the six keys according to Schwartz:

Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.

Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.

Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.

Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.

Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to build rituals — specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.