EduBlog Insights

This post is a follow-up and completion of a previous post on Julie Coiro’s session at TRLD on “professional development, educational leadership, and digital age thinking.”  Julie has a link to models of professional development here. You can explore online examples of each of these components:

1. School Leadership Training
2. Whole Faculty Study Groups
3. Quality online resources to support ongoing, sytematic professional development in the area of literacy and technology integration

Spend time on this page because it contains so much that is worthwhile. One article in particular “Making Sense of Online Text” shares four strategy lessons moving adolescents beyond random surfing to using Internet texts meaningfully.
I also discovered a link to Julie’s blog “Internet in Education.” It contains a list of ideas, resources, and research studies that focus on issues related to using the Internet in schools. I love this site that she pointed out, The Stingy Scholar. It’s all about learning for free on the web.

Julie’s work is top notch and I just keep learning and thinking. I have an idea mulling around in my head about professional development through blogging that I may try out in a school next year. It’s beginning to take shape. I’ll blog more about that later.

Thanks Julie for sharing and making such terrific contributions to educators’ professional development!

In Julie Coiro’s session at TRLD on “professional development, educational leadership & digital age thinking” she pointed out that “the most successful PD models” engage and empower teachers to have a stronger voice in directing their own learning. Then she went on to say that effective PD models for integrating literacy & technology follow three premises:

1. They recognize the developmental process through which teachers use technology.
2. They validate the different attitudes and dispositions that teachers bring to their use of technology.
3. They employ job-embedded study groups as a means of empowering teachers to take a more active role.

Then she stated that study groups have been proven particularly effecting in supporting technology integration among teachers. The 4 phases are frame, analyze, implement, and reflect.

My thought was that all of these phases are so important yet it is rare that it happens in schools.

Next Julie led us to a discussion of the dilemmas school leaders face:

• Paralysis by assessment and the irony of NCLB
• Accountability vs. recognizing the power of classroom intellectual capital
• Meeting professional development needs vs. meeting hardware and equipment needs
• Lab model vs. individual classroom model
• Ensuring access vs. protecting children

Julie showed us some very interesting policy initiatives around the world:

Ireland - manufactures more software than the US or any other nation

Finland - 5 weeks paid leave for PD for integrating new literacies

Japan - has broadband in nearly every home that’s 16 times faster than in US at $22 per month (Foreign Affairs, 2005)

India - companies provide online tutoring for students in reading math, and science (New York Times, sept. 2005)

Mexico - investing more than $1 million to install and Internet computer in every primary classroom by 2005 (Education Week, 2004)

Australia, the UK, Finland, Ireland, & Japan have Internet protals for educators far superior to anything the US has produced

On my mind - the five week paid leave for PD in Finland - hear! hear!

In my next post on these issues I’ll point you to some models she suggested.

Julie Coiro’s session at TRLD on “Educational Leadership, Professional Development, & Digital-Age Thinking: A Vision for Change” began with this Anticipation Guide.pdf.
I obtained permssion from Julie to share this whole anticipation guide on my blog, as well as other items from her excellent sessions.

This is how this session began. We had our anticipation guides in front of us. The idea was to take a few minutes. Read each statement. Decide if you agree or disagree. Next we (the participants) were asked to talk in groups for a little while. We quickly jumped into some lively discussions in our groups of two or three or four for about ten minutes. We just went through the statements and shared our thinking. The anticipation guide has a little space under each example for you to write an experience or an idea of why you agree or disagree with the statement.

This is a reading technique in which you take a controversial issue that you are going to read about. You develop sentences that call a reader’s attention to some of those controversies before you read and you frame them not so you necessarily agree or disagree with them across the board as much as to ask for prior knowledge. Julie explained that our feelings, experiences, and beliefs as we look at the research and we experience technology become very much a part of our beliefs as to whether we buy into it, how we think about it, and how we frame things So the idea is that she created some questions and not that there is a right or wrong answer clearly but for us to kind of find out where we fit. Where do others around us fit?

One of the interesting things that she has seen as she goes out to districts and she does something like this is that particularly when there are challenges in the district you find that different people fit and believe in different things and when they are wondering why it isn’t working it’s because somebody is way over here on the continuum of belief and somebody is way over there. So it’s not that oh you are right and I am wrong it’s let’s take a look at where this continuum is and if we want something to work maybe there is some balancing to do.

Julie went around listening as a way for her to get a feel for her audience and where people are sitting on things and also it was a way for us to find out the different perspectives that we have.

It’s a great way to start a session. I’d encourage you to use this in your workshops. I really liked her statements. Of course the delight for me was that I was surrounded by educators who were all answering the statements pretty similar to mine. No, as you all know that doesn’t always happen in this particular area.

I am going to work at developing some guides for the students I work with. I’m also going to try out Julie’s anticipation guide, giving her full credit, of course!

Now this is just Part 1, much more to come!

I’m back to Ellin Oliver Keene’s keynote at the TRLD conference. There is so much to continue to share from this dynamic conference. This is a continuation of making the dimensions coming alive “when we understand.” My first post was “Does it make sense?”

Keene went on to say that

when we dwell in ideas - we need time to be silent, we need time to listen to our own thinking, to reflect purposefully on an idea.

Here are the strategies she suggested for making this dimension come alive in the classroom:

• Set aside some chunks of class time for focused, silent work in which students can concentrate on more deeply understanding one idea - when they have time to listen to themselves think and consider subtleties rather than rushing to memorize the next thing.
• Model how proficient readers frequently re-read and re-think portions of text - kids often think that re-reading means starting at the beginning and re-reading everything - show them how readers pick and choose among the portions of text they choose to explore more deeply.
• Teach kids about meta-cognition - thinking about one’s own thinking - and the seven most common meta-cognitive strategies.

Here’s a list of those strategies:

1. Connecting the known to the new
2. Determining importance, learning the essence of text
3. Questioning, delving deeper into meaning
4. Using sensory images to enhance comprehension
5. Inferring, finding the intersection of meaning
6. Synthesizing, discovering the contour and substance of meaning
7. Solving reading problems Independently, empowering children to move from problem to resolution

It is so very true that we need time to be silent, we need time to listen to our own thinking, to reflect purposefully on an idea. We need it. Our students need it. Our current focus on testing as our sole measurement of the learning of our students has done more damage to what teaching and learning should be about than any other thing. Just think what we could accomplish if we took the testing prep time and the actual test taking time and translated that back to conversations in our classrooms, conversations on our blogs, and conversations in our professional development that focus on kids connecting ideas, exploring those ideas deeply and discovering what ignites them to be passionate about their learning. Every minute that kids spend focused on covering all the skills and then moving on to another skill on the test is time not spent building a dynamic learning community in our schools. When I think about what has been abandoned in our schools in order to raise scores I cringe. We need to dwell in ideas not continue the insanity of focusing only on raising scores. It’s our biggest obstacle to reflecting purposefully in our classrooms.

I attended Sheryl Abshire’s session at TRLD entitled “Approaching Grantgivers: What Sells!” Sheryl gave a very concise and informative session on getting a grant. She has a great site that lists resources and sources. Be prepared – it will take you some time to go through but it is all there in one place.

Sheryl Abshire listed important keys to great grants like following the rules of the grant to the letter. You may get in the last list to be considered and then thrown out when it comes down to you and someone else. Remember strict adherence to the RFP, integrated program elements, aligned components, tied to high standards, innovation, professional development and evaluation, and high quality and continuous improvement.

Give the grantgivers a good picture of your school and your needs. Present a compelling argument by providing research that supports your proposal.

Abshire listed the top ten questions reviewers ask when reviewing proposals:

1. Does the proposal tie into school’s overall plans?
2. How will the technology be used?
3. Will the proposal impact student learning?
4. How will desired outcomes be developed?
5. Does this initiative have the potential to be replicated or outreached to a larger community?
6. Does the proposal tap creativity in tapping other resources already available in the community?
7. Is the budget clearly defined?
8. Who will benefit from this initiative?
9. How well does this proposal replicate what the grant funder is looking for?
10. How committed are you?

She highlighted these resources:

• Schoolgrants.org (This is her favorite.)
• Grants for K-12 Hotline There’s a $213 fee but it might be something your media center could order. It provides twenty-four biweekly issues, with weekly email updates. Sheryl said the fee was $149 so there may be a discount I missed or they have increased the fee.
• eSchool News K-12 School Technology Funding Directory eSchool news is a comprehensive resource (free).
• Bring Home the Bacon Listserv This fee is $25. She uses another email account and checks once or twice a week. You can pose a question and get answers back’

Sheryl suggested sending your proposal in a week early. Ste your deadline for that as sometimes you can’t get online at the last minute.

This tip could really be helpful. Use the Index to Sample Proposals. I haven’t had a chance yet to find those links but they are on on her list at:

http://www.cpsb.org/Scripts/abshire/grants.asp

It is great to have all these resource centered in one place. Thank you Sheryl Abshire! Now go get those grants!!!