EduGirl 2.0

PD in my PJs

After a decade-long hiatus as a SAHM, I am preparing to reenter the workforce as a full time elementary teacher. When I was teaching, I specialized in Pre-K, and unwisely let my credentials expire in a year I am embarrassed to mention. I am subbing and taking online courses through PBS TeacherLine. A wise advisor suggested I take at least one class related to technology in the classroom, as that is likely the area of education that has changed the most since I was trained and in a classroom. That would be the understatement of the year. Enough with the exposition, however.

I started with a course entitled "Cooperation and Collaboration in the 21st Century". This was a marvelous class that, among other things, led me to a myriad of Web 2.0 tools and opened up a new world to me. I've had a personal blog for more than 5 years. I had a couple years of social networking under my belt, and I was an active Twitter user. I thought I was pretty tech savvy. What I learned about in this class made me feel like I was Fred Flintstone powering my car with my feet.

The most valuable thing I learned from this class is the value of a PLN. To be honest, I had not heard this term before. What I suppose could have been called my PLN at the time consisted mostly of my best friend, my sisters-in-law, and a couple of the teachers I subbed for regularly. I quickly set up a second blog (EduGirl 2.0) and Twitter account (@EduGirlSDB) with handles to reflect the new phase in my life. The Twitter account has been an incredible boon to my professional development. I started following people I had met through class, people I found through Ning Rings, and through EDU blogs I read. Soon I found #ntchat, #edchat, and #edtech, and the people I chatted with through those tags expanded the list of people I followed again.

Now, I have instant professional development from my desktop in my home. The people I follow link me to blog entries about professional issues and articles about integrating technology in the classroom, ethics issues, education in a political context, and many other topics. Any night of the week, I can open up TweetDeck and participate in a chat with other educators on topics such as differentiation, tech integration, and literacy. Last night I took it a step further and attended a Webinar given by Shelley Terrell on Elluminate, which I found out about when she tweeted it to her followers and #edchat. It was on the topic of Graphic Organizers, and it was an hour very well-spent. Shelley was positive and engaging, which was particularly impressive, as it was approaching midnight where she was in Germany! I came away with a wikipage FULL of resources, and opened about 8 tabs on my browser for later review as participants suggested sites and tools. None of this requires me to register, get up early, drive somewhere, wear a name tag or sit in an uncomfortable chair. Professional development in my pajamas. It works for me.

Confucius says...

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

                                                                                -Confucius

 

It's a bit ironic that thousands of years later, we're still defending a simple  truth proclaimed by an ancient Chinese philosopher. Students learn and retain more from the experience of project based learning than they do from lectures and rote memorization of facts or formulas for a test.

You can support it with anecdotal evidence:

Have you had the experience of riding along with a friend someplace a half dozen times or more, but when you want to go there yourself, you can't remember how to get there? Until you did the driving, had the experience, you didn't retain it. You saw the route as you drove with your friend, your friend may have even pointed out landmarks to help you remember the route, but perhaps you were chatting or listening to the radio and you were distracted. Until you were immersed in the task, you didn't truly learn how to get there.

Many parents will identify with me as I describe how I can instruct my daughter to clear her dishes, go up and brush her teeth, and bring her backpack back down with her to go to school. I can go so far as to have her repeat it back to me, and inevitably I will find her, teeth unbrushed, backpack unfound, petting the cat. Children may be able to retain what they hear for a short time, long enough to be tested, but that doesn't guarantee that they will continue to retain it, or apply it.

Let your children stay up late one summer night and catch fireflies in their pajamas, and you have a memory FOREVER. When they are adults, they will fondly recall to their own children the time "Grandma let me stay up late and catch fireflies in my pajamas." No book about fireflies or museum exhibit on fireflies will be as memorable as the experience of catching fireflies and seeing them up close.

You can support it with research:

The goals of teachers are retention and transfer of skills and information. In other words, we not only want students to remember what they've learned, but we want them to transfer the knowledge and use it in different contexts and situations. In "Teaching for Long-Term Retention and Transfer," authors Diane F. Halpern and Milton D. Hakel outline "a few basic laboratory-tested principles drawn from what we know about human learning." Several of those principles directly support project based learning.

• Varying the conditions under which learning takes place makes learning harder for learners but results in better learning.
• Learning is generally enhanced when learners are required to take information that is presented in one format and “re-represent” it in an alternative format.
• Lectures work well for learning assessed with recognition tests, but work badly for understanding.
• What learners do determines what and how much is learned, how well it will be remembered, and the conditions under which it will be recalled.

Though the article is aimed at college professors, the principles the authors share about human learning are universal. If we want students to really "get it" we need to vary the way we teach things, assess early and often, task students to gather knowledge and turn around and present it in a new format, and remember that "understanding is an interpretive process in which students must be active participants." All of these things can be achieved through the implementation of project learning.[i]

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[i] Halpern, D. F. and Hakel, M. D. (July/August 2003). Teaching for Long-Term Retention and Transfer. Change, 36-41

Giving Math a Makeover

I posted this in May on my personal blog, before I created this blog. I wanted to move it over and share it here.

It was just a few months ago that a friend posted a link on Facebook to a talk on TED by Sir Ken Robinson about how schools kill creativity. At the time it was contributing to the decision I was struggling to make about whether my daughter was ready for middle school, or whether I should home school her. She applied for - and was admitted to - the arts magnet program for her school. That quelled some of my concerns, and we decided that the middle school would work for our family at this time.

Since then, I have started the process of renewing my teaching license. My goal is to be licensed to teach and actively job searching for the 2011-12 school year. I have registered for my first online course through PBS TeacherLine, and it begins in June. Now I view that video and the one I link to below as a teaching professional, rather than as a parent. I want to understand the way that people think the school system is failing children and strive to overcome that in my own classroom. Yesterday, my friend Erica posted a link to this video on TED about how "Math Class Needs a Makeover." 

I will admit my first reactions to this talk were as a parent of a 10 year old who struggles with math. When Mr. Meyer describes students that look for the formula or think they don't have the math comprehension to participate in a discussion of a math problem, I immediately think of my daughter. She is not what Meyer calls a "patient problem solver." That's why I love his idea of taking the details out of a textbook problem and make it into a life problem. He examines a word problem for a high school math class where they are to calculate how long it will take to fill an octagonal beverage dispenser with water. The textbook provides a 2 dimensional diagram with measurements and numbers and symbols. Even I look at it and think, "Jeez, I have no idea." Then Meyer removes elements of the word problem. He removes the question and multiple choice answers. He removes the dimensions noted on the diagram. He changes the line drawing to a photograph of a beverage dispenser like the one described. He makes it a video of said beverage dispenser being filled by a hose.

He took a problem that high schoolers, and even I as an adult, think that they have no expertise to answer and he turned it into a real life situation that everyone has experience with. Even my 10 year old would look at this new version of the problem and have an idea about it. Everyone has experience with filling a container with liquid. Whether or not they can then get the correct answer, Meyer is recommending that we at least get students to join the discussion and feel like they have a contribution to make by first, making it relevant to their experiences, and second, not feeding them the details to plug into a formula, but to enlist their help in developing the problem.

A couple of weeks ago I was subbing in an elementary school. I was a subbing for a paraprofessional who assists in the classroom. The teacher was also absent that day, and the other substitute was introducing a lesson on capacity to third graders. The textbook included clip art of items to represent a cup, pint, quart, and gallon. That was very abstract though, and I saw some students struggle on the classwork comparing these capacities.

The next day I was in for the same paraprofessional, and the regular classroom teacher was back in the classroom. They moved on to metric capacity and were talking about milliliters, liters, and the like. The classroom teacher walked around the room with a dropper and water and placed a milliliter of water in her hand at each group of student desks to allow them to see what a milliliter looked like. I noticed a difference in student comprehension that day as they completed the classwork. Just that small amount of concrete experience with the capacity increased their understanding and ability to compare capacities.

Math in classrooms of early learners (PK-1) is most often full of manipulatives and hands on math experiences for concrete understanding of math concepts. As children progress, math becomes more and more abstract in the classroom. It becomes more worksheets and line art, and strays further and further from real experiences. Mr. Meyer reminds us to keep math within the realm of real life experiences, to engage the students in developing the problem, and get everyone involved in the conversation to build confident math students who can perform patient problem solving.

Me 2.0

In 1991 I graduated from Syracuse University, a newly minted Elementary School teacher. A crowded job market and a last minute move later and I found myself "temporarily" teaching preschool. That temporary job lasted pretty much the next 10 years. Then, while living in India, we added this beautiful little maharani to our family. I finished out my contract, and spent the next 10 years at home with my little class of one. Fast forward to 2010. My college education is about 20 years old and I am ready to re-enter the workforce.

The old ways won't cut it any more. When I was a student teacher, a classroom was lucky to have one computer station. It was most frequently used by students to play "Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego?" when their "real work" was done, or by the teacher to make cute posters and papers using Print Shop Deluxe. No-one taught me about integrating technology into the classroom, because at the time, an overhead projector was high-tech. As a student teacher, my kindergartners sang along with the record player, and the fourth graders still watched filmstrips.

It's time to create the new version of me. During my time home as Mom, I've learned quite a lot about technology. I e-mail, Facebook, Tweet and Skype. I've had a blog for about 5 years. I have photos on Flickr, and videos on Vimeo. I'm hip, right? I'm happening? I have this technology thing under control...or so I thought.

Glog? What's a glog? Is that a villain from the last Spiderman movie? Weebly? Weren't they the toys I had when I was a kid that wobbled, but never fell down? Diigo? That's Dora the Explorer's friend, right? Slide Six? What? BuzzDash? Huh? Shmoop? Oh come on, you made that one up, didn't you? Needless to say, I still have a lot to learn. A lot of it is alphabet soup. I want to build my PLN. I want to use more PBL. I take classes from PBS. For lunch I had a PBJ. My head hurts.

So this blog is where I hope to work it out, to reflect and ponder and question. With any luck, perhaps a handful of people will read this blog, and help me work it out. If I want to create for my students a flat classroom, and teach them to collaborate and use this wonderful tool that is the internet, I'd better get a few steps ahead of them and try it myself, eh?