geek.teacher

Due to a lack of funds (hey, I’m moving!), going to ISTE this year was just not going to happen. Fortunately for me, a confluence of factors turned this weekend into a conference weekend anyway, complete with networking with Twitter friends.

My wife was out of town for the weekend, and a good friend of mine just so happened to be going to DC for the annual American Library Association conference. He had an extra bed in his paid-for by work hotel room and invited me to join him. One bus trip later, and I’m in DC.

Something many people don’t know about me: I was a teenage librarian. In high school I spent a year working after school in my high school’s library, and then two years working in my town’s public library in their children’s department. It was a formative experience that definitely helped set me on my future career path as an educator. Given that, I spent the $25 for the exhibits floor pass.

In a lucky coincidence, I saw that Melissa Techman was going to be in DC on Saturday for the conference. A year ago at NECC, I went down for a day and had lunch with a bunch of special educators and a few other “friends of sped,” Melissa being one of said friends. In some nice symmetry, this year I got to go out to lunch as a friend of libraries with Melissa, Diane Cordell (a long-time Twitter friend that I finally got to meet in person), Gretchen Caserotti, Cathy Jo Nelson, and Kathy Ishizuka. We had plenty of good food and better conversation, as was the case last year.

Kathy is the Technology Editor for the School Library Journal, and later wrote me an e-mail asking for my impressions of the conference. Here’s what I wrote in reply:

It’s funny, this is the second year in a row that I’ve been to the Washington Convention Center and only been able to see the exhibits floor for a conference. The floor is pretty much like the floor of any other large convention: it’s heavy on the free stuff and phony marketing interactions. On the plus side for ALA, this convention didn’t seem to have any strange cult-like booths like the SMART booth at NECC last year.

As a special educator,I was really disappointed on the floor by the assistive technology pavilion, which didn’t seem to really have much in the way of assistive technology at all that I could see. I’d imagine that people with reading difficulties are one of those underserved populations that could stand to have more opportunities for access, and there wasn’t much of that there.

I noticed a definite trend toward making friendlier spaces for the visiting public. Lots of furniture and shelves that look cozy and inviting. I noticed in one booth they were featuring gaming stations to try and get the teenage demographic back into libraries. In the same tone, it was nice to see a good-sized presence of companies that produce comic books and graphic novels there.

On a side note: I’m somewhat surprised by the number of companies that specialize in moving libraries.

Just from the bits and pieces I picked up on from talking to some people and listening in on some others, it’s interesting to see many of the same shared anxieties that teachers and librarians share right now. Increasing technology and decreasing tax revenues are big stressors on both groups, and I very much get the feeling that we’re in the midst of a major reordering of the way the world works for all of us. I think the concern for both groups at the moment is to get out in front of the changes to help guide them in a positive fashion.

I’m pretty sure I just wrapped up the most momentous month of my professional career.

I’ve written, of course, of how just 30 days ago, I hosted the first inaugural edcamp here in the Philadelphia area with a crack team of awesome educators. It’s almost frightening to me how quickly the idea has expanded, as one can look at the wiki and see edcamps being planned in 9 different states across the country so far, with some more in the works and not quite ready to go live yet. We’ve even got our own spinoff here in Philly with ntcamp.

We’ve nearly hit escape velocity.

Today is the first day of my Summer vacation, and as of 3:00 last Friday, I no longer work for my employer of the past eight years.

I’m moving on up to the east side.

About a year ago, my wife and I definitively decided that we would plan on moving to Massachusetts sometime following this past school year. Since I crave stability in my daily life, I found this a bit frightening. While I have repeatedly mentioned my own frustrations with my position in my school, I still did rather like many aspects of the job, especially the people that I worked with.

So what’s next?

Given how this is pretty much the worst year ever for teachers looking for a job, I’m as amazed as anybody that I was fortunate enough to land not just any job, but a position that I’m really excited about. Next year I’m going to be the Technology Integration Specialist for Pine Glen School in Burlington, MA. Quite honestly, this is exactly the kind of job that I really wanted to do, but didn’t think would possibly happen to me. I’ll run a computer lab and teacher students about using computers, which is nice because it means I’ll have contact with every kid in the building.

To me, the even more exciting aspect is that I’m supposed to have time specifically for working with other teachers in the building and helping them to bring technology use into their own classrooms. Given my increasing interest in professional development over the past couple of years, this will give me a real chance to help bring about more systemic change.

I’ll admit to being very conflicted that I’m abandoning a lot of the core elements that have defined my first eight years as an educator. My new position is going to be so drastically different from what I’ve been doing on so many different levels, and it will differ in a lot of ways from what I set out to do when I got my first job.

• I’m going to be moving from a semi-urban district to a much more suburban environment.
• I’m going to be moving from middle school to elementary school.
• I’m going to be leaving special education to work with a much wider portion of the student body.

In my darker moments, I’ll admit, it feels like I’m selling out. While I know that my new position will have its own challenges, I have to admit that those areas highlighted above feel important, and it feels like I’m abandoning them.

That being said, I’m super-excited about the possibilities for my new job. I’ve already had more facetime to make meaningful decisions with my new principal than I did in seven years in my previous building. I get to help spend money and direct the future use of technology in my building. I can finally let my imagination run wild with possibilities for things to try when given access to technology because I don’t have any scripted programming to deal with. I’ll get to help other teachers make their great classrooms even greater. I’ll have time to meet with tech people throughout the district for larger coordination. I have a principal that’s as excited about technology as I am and wants to try new stuff just as much as I do. I’m going to be in a great district with an excellent superintendent. Their have smart filtering that actually leaves the stuff I want to use open.

It’s time for a change, and, concerns aside, this really does seem like the right change for me at this time. I think this is the step I need to take in order to continue my quest to become a great teacher.

On my last post, I wrote about the feelings of some teachers in my Things That Suck session at edcamp. Specifically, i wrote about their strongly negative feelings towards the Professional Development provided to them by their schools. I got a great series of questions from somebody I’ve been following on Twitter for quite some time now, Bethany Smith, an Instructional Technologist from North Carolina:

I think Mandatory PD is one of the things I struggle with the most. How do you get people that you need to attend a workshop show up? I find that the “best” teachers show up to my workshops and they tend to be the ones doing everything already. How do we provide incentives to get those other teachers to show up? I haven’t come up with a good answer. I’ve tried having several workshops to pick and choose from during a mandatory time. Also tried varying the topics, being more curriculum specific, but it is hard to get that buy-in. Did your discussions lead to any ideas on how to get everyone on board with PD?

I started to write a response, but it turned into something a bit bigger. So here’s a blog post in which I kind of dodge the questions, because it’s not really what we talked about, but bring up the other side of the coin:

Bethany,

Keep in mind that the audience I was working with was a self-selected group of people who chose get some PD on a Saturday, so their perspective isn’t necessarily going to help you with the issue you’re addressing. Their concern seemed to be much more in that a lot of the mandatory PD they were receiving wasn’t particularly relevant to their needs as growing teachers. As you say, if you make PD optional, like edcamp, all the awesome people automatically show up. Those are the people actively trying to grow as teachers every day.

When those same teachers are told to attend a mandatory PD session, it seemed to me that they expect that the mandatory PD is going to be something that you need to get the lowest common denominator on board with. For all intents and purposes, in the same way that a good school will differentiate its instruction for students at all levels, these teachers are desperately looking for the same when it comes to instruction for them. Think of the superstar teachers as your gifted students. They don’t want to spend an hour learning about some new tool they’ve already played with, or that they could figure out on their own in less than 10 minutes of the time.

As an example, here’s a personal anecdote: several years ago I was in a training to earn how to use our fancy new online Special Ed paperwork management system. This was a training specifically for a small group of people in my district, and then we were supposed to be the people who would go on to train everybody else in the district. We were generally chosen because of our excellent knowledge of Special Education paperwork procedures and solid technology skills. I sat next to a teacher that started the same year I did, who is now our district’s awesome Assistive Technology guru.

We, of course, proceeded to do what anybody who loves technology does when given something new: we started to play with it. By working together, we were able to figure out an amazing amount about how to work the system. Finally, we reached a dead end, and so we asked the trainer a question about how we would solve said problem. He actually got upset with us, saying that we aren’t there yet, and refused to answer the question. It probably would have taken less time to answer our question than to berate us for plowing ahead and learning on our own. Needless to say, we spent the next half hour getting up to date on our e-mail and putzing around the internet waiting for him to get to the point that we got confused at. We then continued our own trips down the rabbit hole, but clearly with less relish than we had before.

But I digress.

As I said before, this answer is definitely a dodge on the original questions, because it wasn’t brought up in our discussion. If anything, I can tell you that the people in the room were just as frustrated as you that many of our colleagues don’t care for PD in the same way that they do. But they were even more frustrated by having their own time wasted by poor professional development that wasn’t helping to improve their own teaching abilities in the classroom.

Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the difficulty of your position. Finding a way to appeal to the masses is difficult at best. But if a district’s PD is so poor that it loses the people who love this stuff and want to be there, then it’s already dead in the water, even if the district doesn’t know it yet.

-Dan

PS: Anybody out there able to actually answer Bethany’s question?