Where I Stand on Differentiated Instruction

Call me part of the digital education revolution, but I am just going to say it …. You need access to technology in order to more effectively differentiate instruction.

To ask teachers to meet the needs of all learners using differentiated worksheets, different textbooks, flexible grouping -- which by the way simply translates into homogeneous grouping within the same classroom-- with the teacher running around the room like an athlete on the track team trying to give some modicum of individual attention to every student and/or every group, is just plain impossible.  And more importantly, the kids are not getting what they need. They are not really being challenged or helped to become self-directed learners because we are still working way too hard to construct a gamut of appropriate multiple learning activities for them.

 To “differentiate” means to make different.

And in most classrooms in most schools, we are doing very little differently. We are pretty much doing the same thing we have been doing for the last 50 years; probably longer.

If you want to get an idea of the complexity of differentiating instruction, I would invite you to explore the Universal Design for Learning  website at www.udlcenter.org and take a look at the model lesson plans. Consider the level of expertise and time that would be involved with thinking through the differentiated activities, testing them out, redesigning the lesson and reflecting on the student outcomes. And keep in mind that these are single lessons. Think about an entire school year and an entire course of study. Think about the fact that even the most talented, and dedicated “uber” teachers would occasionally, when they are not in their classrooms, actually need some time to …..perhaps ….have a life.  Absent of spending every waking hour working with colleagues to design these kinds of lessons for ever single class and every single student; I think it is fair to say that we are asking a lot. 

I’m a big proponent of differentiation, but I also believe in the power of technology. And I believe it is the means by which we can most effectively help teachers differentiate instruction to its fullest degree. 

Picture this:

·         Teachers use social networks to engage students with their peers in other schools, in other states, in other countries and around the globe to share their ideas and their work.

·         We “flat out” ban worksheets …. period ….no more worksheets projected on the SMART Boards, no more paper worksheets, electronic worksheets …..can we just try this? Maybe start with a “No Worksheet Week” and see what happens?

·         Teachers and students embrace and take risks with project based learning (project based learning is synonymous with learning in depth). We educate and actively engage parents about project based learning and what they can expect and not expect to see in this kind of learning environment. (These activities are designed to answer a question or solve a problem and generally reflect the types of “lifewide” learning and work people do in the everyday world outside the classroom).

·         As a community we are willing to commit resources to teacher professional development that helps them to understand inquiry based lesson design, and then support them as they engage in an inquiry based instructional approach. (An old adage states: "Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand." The last part of this statement is the essence of inquiry based learning)

·         Teachers talking to parents and parents talking to teachers about instruction, having conversations where EVERYONE – teachers, administrators, parents and students --are learners knowing that they are valued equally in the learning community.

·         Parents letting go of the “great idea, love risk-taking” as long as it is with someone else’s child philosophy; this attitude hinders teachers from trying new and innovative strategies.

So back to why I think that differentiation is more and more dependent on technology.  In his paper for the Centre for Strategic Education www.cse.edu.au  Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto says, “Teachers need to get grounded in instruction, so that they can figure out WITH students how to best engage technology.”  He believes that technology can be a dramatic accelerator if we put instruction and skilled motivated teachers and students in the lead.

Kids and teachers need to be able to access the internet in any classroom in our buildings. Both students and teachers must learn to effectively leverage the power of social networks.  True exploration with inquiry involves students developing personal learning networks where they can access on-the-job professionals and academic mentors. Project based learning in its most highly evolved state requires students to work together in groups, and work as a team to design and demonstrate their understanding of central concepts and principles of a discipline. Quite frankly, they will probably facilitate this process most readily on Facebook. 

Whether students bring their own devices to school and are permitted to use them in the classroom; whether we give teachers tablet computers so that they can have their resources always in hand; whether we furnish kids with low cost tablets, netbooks or iPads ….. 

We simply must do things differently, if we want to make the most of differentiated instruction.

Why I Love To Talk To Parents

In September I invited the parents in my school district to join me in reading Tony Wagner’s text The Global Achievement Gap. As you may recall from my early blogs the Wagner text speaks to the Seven Survival Skills necessary for students to be successful in the 21^st Century. He talks about why schools - even the best schools - are failing in this regard. He also talks about what needs to happen to change the educational paradigm rooted in an industrial education model which is ineffective and obsolete.Wagner was the key note speaker today in Boston at the Learning and the Brain Conference and the message is resonating with educators and social scientists from across the country.

In recent weeks, my conversations with parents have been fascinating, enlightening and encouraging. I am learning that parents:

• ·         Are passionately interested in the education of their children
• ·         Value innovation and creativity over teaching to the test
• ·         Wish that we would talk more about engaging students in learning and not engaging them to take tests
• ·         Believe that if students are learning to be critical thinkers, adept problem solvers, collaborative work partners, influencers, leaders and self-directed learners …..the tests will take care of themselves.
• ·         Embrace the philosophy of the International Baccalaureate program but would like to understand more about it
• ·         Want to understand how they can engage meaningfully with our teachers and administrators; especially at the middle and high school; understanding that there is a changing dynamic at these levels but still a place for them to be active and valued as parents
• ·         Believe that there are many extraordinary teachers in our schools and strongly support all efforts to give teachers the professional development resources necessary  to grow and develop their skills
• ·         Understand that they can and do play a critical role in maintaining the necessary community support for our schools especially in these challenging economic times
• ·         Agree that we need to do more to improve technology resources and the use of technology in our classrooms to enhance the instructional program

Although our book chats always begin with discussion of the Wagner text, we quickly move on to parent perceptions, experiences, concerns and hopes for growth in our schools. As one parent expressed recently, “I felt like I was part of a ‘think tank’ and we were thinking together about how we could explore ideas for richer experiences and improvements.”

Parents need to be partners in learning. Educators need to embrace instead of exclude them.

Game On!

I have never been a gamer.

And I will totally date myself here by saying that I was never into Pac Man, I don’t own an X-Box or a Wii and I was generally not following the connections between games and the classroom.

That is until a couple of summer’s ago at the Harvard Graduate School’s Future of Learning Institute where I both learned to “tweet” and had the opportunity to attend a session with Chris Dede, Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard. 

And I thought …whoa! 

He was talking about disruptive innovations and that the disruptive innovation heading toward our classrooms was the customization of individual needs. This was way beyond  differentiating instruction. Chris Dede talks about a full customization of the learning process that is student driven. 

Imagine. 

Students understanding themselves in ways that allow them to create the learning situations which will help them to meet their goals as individual learners.

And then we talked about gaming.

At the recent New York State Council of School Superintendents Conference in Saratoga Springs, Mary Cullinane, Director of Innovation – US Partners of Learning for Microsoft Corporation focused part of her  presentation on gaming. 

She shared an amazing statistic ….. that kids playing video games fail at the game 80% of the time.

 Think about that  …….and think about what do they do every time they fail? 

They go back for more!

When I get a mental image of what this type of perseverance and persistence would look like inside our classrooms I am filled with excitement. Kids so engaged with an activity or a concept that if they failed to understand it 80% of the time they would willingly and of their own volition keep going back until they got it.

 Just picture that! 

Consider the incredible implications this holds for learning. 

In the September issues of “the Journal,” an educational technology publication which you can check out at www.thejournal.com writer Charlene O’Hanlon talks about “a new generation of gamers who are not just picking up skills by playing video games – they’re learning by designing an creating games themselves.” In her article she explains that game creation as a learning tool is really just a digital-age take on the learning-by-doing approach to teaching. All of the current curriculum re-design work being done in schools across the country is being structured to include more opportunities for project-based learning. We know that students pick up concepts more easily and retain more information when they are hands-on with their subject matter. 

I am especially drawn to the use of Gamestar Mechanic because it is targeted toward middle school students. There is much research that points toward middle school as the time when many students disengage from learning; especially boys. Gamestar Mechanic is built on a foundation of pedagogical research that includes systems thinking, digital literacy skills and STEM learning. It is being used in 800 schools and the basic program is free. 

I would encourage you to check out some of the following websites:

www.gamestarmechanic.com

www.worldwideworkshop.org/programs/globaloria

www.elinemedia.com

I am convinced that the use of games as part of the instructional program holds endless opportunities for our students to practice 21^st Century skills such as communication, problem-solving, collaboration and teamwork. These skills simply cannot be replicated in the same way by traditional classroom activities. 

According to David Samuelson, Executive Vice President and Director of Games and Augmented Reality at Pearson and co-moderator of the working group that focuses on game-based learning within the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), “we are graduating through the stage where we’ve accepted that games are now a part of society, and we’re looking for the best ways to incorporate them into the teaching environment. It’s a natural progression.”

So …..to innovative teachers willing to embrace the redesign of teaching and learning for our 21^st Century classrooms ….

Game On!

Ask A Sixth Grader

Change is good and these are exciting times! As the new superintendent in Dobbs Ferry, I have been trying to unravel the “state of the schools” in an effort to pick an entry point for where to begin. As is the case with all schools, we are attempting to “change the tire while the car is moving.” How do we establish the technological culture that will inspire, educate and empower all students to be successful participants in a 21^st Century global society?

We began over the summer with our Board members and administrators reading Tony Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap. The text grapples with the issues facing all schools in teaching our students what Wagner refers to as the “seven survival skills” that our children need in order to be successful in a global society.

In November, I am beginning a series of Parent Book Chats coordinated by our District PTSA. Hosted in neighborhood homes, we will meet in groups of 10-12 parents to discuss the Wagner text and engage in dialogue about the kinds of things we want our students to be able to know and do when they graduate from Dobbs Ferry High School. It is hard for me to imagine a group more invested in the changes that need to occur. After all, every parent holds high hopes and dreams for their child including the ability to secure a decent job and become a contributing member of society.

Today, I met with a group of our new sixth graders. This is their first year in Middle School and .their ideas and feedback on what they think would make their learning more relevant astounded me. In a recent piece in The Next Web, entitled “What today’s Digital Native children can teach the rest of us about technology,” Neela Sakaria, Senior Vice President of Latitude (a research consulting company to leaders in content, technology and learning) explains that research is “focused on giving children a real voice in the broader, often very adult, discussion of future technologies and real-world problem solving. We believe that kids are the architects of the future- they’re creative, have an intuitive relationship with technology and have proven that they think in extraordinarily sophisticated ways about how tech can enhance their learning, play and interactions with people and things around them.”

The sixth graders were explaining to me that one of the things new to them this year was having different subject area classes and that they really needed to be more organized. I asked them the obvious question, “What are you doing to keep yourselves more organized?” They started by explaining that they were using multiple folders and binders to keep all the class work separate, but that there was always lots of “stuff” on their desks because of the various papers, folders and notebooks.

I was fascinated by this since I was thinking “how many adults in the “real world” use notebooks and folders to keep themselves organized?” I will admit to a small number of file folders in my office but …really ….do we think that this is the way that these kids will one day structure their homes and offices? Unable to contain my curiosity about how the students would respond, I asked “Do you think there is any other way to keep yourselves organized?”

Well … I wish you could have been there. Without having any knowledge of Wagners’ “seven survival skills,” our students’ answers demonstrated many of the attributes that he cites are imperative for the next generation to master including critical thinking, understanding resources, problem solving, adapting technology, analyzing information and imagination. Here are some of their creative ideas:

• “Everyone should have an iPad because when we get home we have an ipad and we just use online folders to organize our work.”

• “I think that someone would have to write the code, but you should be able to bring your iPad to school and log on to a network where all of your game apps are disabled while you are in school.”

• “If kids don’t have money to buy an iPad they should able to rent one from the school.”

• “If you added up all the money that the school is going to spend on paper for us from the time we are in sixth grade to twelfth grade it would probably cost the same as an iPad. Using technology is a better environmental solution.”

• “All the desks in the school should have a ‘built in’ iPad so that whatever classroom you went into, you would just log-in to the iPad in the classroom.”

Trying to put aside the pros and cons of ipads vs. netbooks vs. laptops, the larger conversation revolves around why our classrooms are so disconnected from what our students encounter and engage in during their daily life? Why are they being forced to “power down” when they walk through our doors? The research being done by Latitude has found that today’s children perceive a very seamless connection between online and offline worlds.

The pivotal question is “how willing are we to hear what our digital native children are telling us, and what are we willing to do about it?”

Let Kids Rule The School

Let Kids Rule the School

By SUSAN ENGEL

Published: March 14, 2011

Eight teens were given the chance to create their own curriculum, and the results have been transformative.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15engel.html

Student Reflection on Project Based Learning

Sometimes, the kids just “nail it.”

 For the past 18 months, as a learning community of teachers and administrators at Hunterdon Central we have been reading, discussing and exploring the changing dynamics surrounding what we love and what we do. We are teachers. And we embrace the challenges that we face in preparing our teenagers for a rapidly changing world. We have been pulling forward and toward becoming the kind of school that our students really need and away from the traditional school that we have always been.

I think that the following essay from one of our tenth grade students as she reflects on her recent Chemistry class paints a compelling picture:

“When students hear the phrase ‘science lab,’ often their first thoughts are troubling: memories of deciphering monotonous sets of instructions, plowing through procedures, saddled with uncooperative partners. So let’s just say I was less than thrilled to be starting chemistry in September of my sophomore year. However, as the first week unfolded, it became quite clear that this was not the experience my classmates and I were about to have.

On day 2 we were presented with our first lab; a fictitious popcorn company sought our advice to improve their product and increase market sales. We were tasked with analyzing the kernels of several companies to determine the most favorable traits in an ideal popcorn kernel. But there was something missing from this assignment – a set of instructions and a list of lab partners. Soon my classmates and I realized that there would be no one holding our hands, guiding us through every step of the process. In this class, labs challenged us to access and apply our prior knowledge, take advantage of available resources and work together to complete the given task. We would lead ourselves.

At first none of us understood or appreciated the lack of structure and format in our labs. It was stressful having to read between the lines, sift through ideas and collaborate until a feasible solution was reached. What happened to passively following a designated path laid out by our teachers? Where were the rules? We eventually adjusted and surprisingly, my classmates and I grew fond of this approach – it felt as if a layer of freedom and opportunity had been added. We developed a new sense of pride and ownership in our work. Thinking, working and creating together was immensely satisfying (who knew)?

Almost nothing in the “real world” will be simply handed to you. Upon leaving for college, parents can’t give you a detailed map outlining the rest of your life (although many would love to). To some degree, you engineer your destiny. For my classmates and me, Chemistry was an introduction or glimpse at this new world soon to be thrust upon us. Lessons learned transcended mastery of the subject. In working with others we learned compassion; through failure we developed perseverance; free format sparked our creativity; and independence moved us to self-reliance – an unexpected outcome in a subject so absolute.”

As we move through the transformation of traditional teaching and learning, we continually ask ourselves the pivotal question – “Why Change?”

For me, I think of all the kids like Sydney. I know that I want to be smack in the middle of her “ah ha” moment. Where teachers and students belong …..together as they co-create and co-construct learning and discovery.

So thanks Sydney! I couldn’t have said it better myself!

The School Newspaper Meets Social Networking

School Newspapers Meet Social Networking

If you haven’t yet checked out Hunterdon Central’s The Lamp Online, you really must. The students and their advisor, English teacher Tom McHale have done a fantastic job and the online publication is snappy, professional and informational.  Taken directly from the publication’s mission statement, “the online student newspaper of Hunterdon Central Regional High School is an open, public forum for student expression, to promote inquiry and to provide an authentic venue to showcase student work. Opinions expressed are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the position of the school board, administration, sponsors, staff, or student body.”

Once again, we tread into some interesting territory as we continue to embrace the many opportunities offered by technology. Traditionally, student newspapers have been tightly controlled by school districts and content considered the property of the district. At Hunterdon Central as both the principal and the superintendent, I have always given wide discretion to The Lamp. The circumstances in which I have asked to see the content of the paper prior to publication have been extremely rare. Perhaps because I was a newspaper reporter myself when I was in my 20’s I have a different level of respect for freedom of the press. I have also enjoyed the benefits of extremely conscientious student reporters and a student newspaper advisor with whom I share a common sense of what is appropriate and what is not. We are also extremely fortunate to have the support of a Board of Education that embraces divergent opinions and perspectives. This is one of many factors that make Hunterdon Central a forward thinking, progressive district. We are a district that values leadership at every level.

So now, we have the online publication and a marked relinquishment of control. We are excited about taking the leap to allow opinions and the posting of content from across all sectors of our school community (students and staff) who are registered users of the site. As a team, we have committed to “responsible discussion within our school community.” We have also committed to allowing divergent opinions that, when expressed in an appropriate manner, will remain posted to this online, public forum.  We have come a long way from the parameters set forth in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court case that held that “speech that can be reasonably viewed to have the school’s imprimatur can be regulated by the school if the school has a limited pedagogical concern in regulating the speech.” With the online publication, other than profanity, hate speech, personal attacks, false/inaccurate information or plagiarism; content will be permitted and remain in the public domain. Kind of like the school newspaper meets social networking.

We have been working over these past months to craft a policy for students and staff that want to post and comment to our online student newspaper. The proposed policy states that The Lamp Online staff will work toward meeting the standards set for professional journalism developed by the Journalism Education Association. This includes, but it is not limited to, a code of ethics concerning accuracy, balance, fairness, independence, and responsibility.

I have great faith and confidence that this “leap of faith” has far more benefits than risks. We shall see.