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’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.

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?

And it was a great day, probably the absolute best day of my eight years as a teacher. To think that I helped pull together something which brought so much knowledge and joy to the educators in attendance is, to me, nothing short of miraculous. Two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined doing something like this. One year ago, I could have imagined it, but would have dismissed it out of hand as unrealistic. Seven months ago, I met a wonderful group of teachers who all really wanted to do it, so we did.

But all of that is really besides the point, and not what I came here to blog about today. I really want to talk about one very unexpected moment I had during my day.

I ran a session right after lunch entitled Things That Suck. I’ll be honest I completely stole the format from UX Crank, who ran a session with the same name at BarCamp Philly back in November. The basic idea: throw out a topic, and have the people in the room move around the room to different areas to signify whether they think the topic you’re discussing a) sucks b) rocks c) is not worth caring about. here’s what we talked about:

• Merit Pay
• Interactive Whiteboards
• Full Inclusion
• Students with cell phones
• District Professional Development
• Grades

There was some great discussion as I started calling on people from the different sides to justify their positions and respond to what others were saying. a few times somebody would say something and half of the room would go “ooh!” and raise their hands to respond, which was awesome. On most of these issues, there’s no really right or wrong position, but you can learn a lot about the states of people’s schools by finding out their viewpoints. The cell phone debate was so good that we let it go a few minutes long.

The powerful moment, however came on the fifth topic. To set the scene a little while after we started, our roaming cameraman came in and miked me up to record the conversation. No problem, everybody’s having a good time. Until I say the magic words “Next topic: Your district’s professional development plan for you.” If you’ve never seen a roomful of teachers looking at you like deer caught in headlights, I don’t recommend it. They looked at me, shifted their gaze to the camera, looked back at me, and then I told the camera guy to cut the feed. As soon as he did, I’d estimate that fully three-quarters of the room made a beeline for the sucks side of the room.

People, we have a problem.

The people on the rocks side did an excellent job of presenting why we should all hope that our districts can be forward-thinking to give us meaningful professional development. In particular there seemed to be a strong element of collaboration, particularly in the use of Professional Learning Communities. On the sucks side, people seemed upset about being forced to sit through mandatory professional development programs that frequently follow a “do as I say, not as I do” model. They’re wondering why they’re told they must differentiate their instruction, but never have their professional development differentiated for them.

The main thing I got out of the discussion is that, it doesn’t matter who you are, what age you are, people are hungry for a choice. The people who blessed us with their presence on Saturday gave up their own free time so that they could connect with other teachers and hopefully learn something useful. They didn’t get any continuing education hours out of it, they genuinely wanted to learn. i think a big reason why we got such positive comments from the attendees is specifically because they had complete control over their own days. We actively encouraged people to vote with their feet and walk out of a session if it didn’t fit their needs or interests and find something that would.

At the afterparty, I got to talking with a few different people about the mindbending moment of people being afraid to speak their minds in public with a camera rolling, and we came to an important question: If teachers feel that strongly about how much they would love to have some choice and control in their own learning, what implication does that have for our own instruction? Something tells me that if we feel as if our kids wouldn’t love choice in the same way that we did on Saturday, we’re simply deluding ourselves.

Presented without commentary, a wordcloud from Tagxedo that I made from the options I have for comments when I do report card grades through Portal.

edcamp philly is an unconference, which means it’s not like any other conference you’ve ever been to! Instead of the incredibly intelligent and good-looking organizers picking and choosing the schedule of the day’s events, we place that in the hands of the attendees. At the beginning of the day we’ll have an ominously empty schedule board that we expect the attendees to fill up. Fill up with awesomeness, that is! People do that for the first couple hours or so, do the meet and greet, and plan out the day.

So why am I, along with all of the other organizers, doing this? We have seen it in action ourselves! Back in November a whole bunch of teachers went to Barcamp Philly, which is a general sort of unconference. Most of us had never met in person before that morning. We kind of loosely talked online about ideas for a presentation that we could do, and a couple of days before we decided on a topic for the presentation. On the morning of Barcamp, we met up, chose a time and room for our presentation, and got to work on actually making the presentation. Five hours later, we presented the Social Media Survival Guide for Schools. While presenting, we met a couple of other awesome teachers presenting right after us, and, even though we didn’t quite know it yet, the core of our organizing uncommittee was born. We added a few more here and there as we went along, leading to a great group of people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with the past few months.

It was a really great day for us at Barcamp, and we want to bring the same fun and excitement we had to the K-12 education crowd. So head on over to http://www.edcampphilly.org and register for the event on May 22, 2010. I guarantee a great day, or you’ll get your money** back!

*My new friend Irene Tortolini has ruined the curve for all of you, because she’s coming down from the Boston area. So today’s definition of easy driving distance is 350 miles.

**Oh yeah, edcamp is a totally free event! So no need to worry about taking a chunk out of your fat-cat union salaries, my public school teaching friends.

I think that I chose appropriate terminology there, because my performance was admittedly rocky in following weeks. The last two weeks in particular, I found myself not so happy with my performance on the first day of the session, and more pleased with the repeat the following day. Would more practice have been more beneficial? Quite possibly. But having never really on my own developed a scope and sequence like this for adults, I think I also kind of needed to see the places where people got confused the first time so that I’d have a better handle on it the second time.

I ended up choosing a sequence of Docs > Diigo > Reader > Twitter, figuring that I’d move them increasingly from a position where they can just interact with people in the building to further interaction with a larger community.

General observations, in no particular order due to impending brain implosion from too many things running through it*:

• I scheduled an hour for each session, but I should have probably made them each at least 1.5 hours. The first day stretched naturally to 90 minutes without complaint, but the later sessions people had places to go and I had to let them go at 60 minutes. Especially the last two sessions, I have absolutely found myself kicking myself with the stuff I didn’t have a chance to get to, especially in regards to the important parts about really interacting with your larger PLN
• Seeing the teachers “get it” is just as awesome as seeing the lightbulb turn on in a child. I knew I had hit something today when one of the teachers in my group independently started to send @ messages to the other people in the group, which got all of them then sending messages to each other. Serendipitous.
• There is an awful lot of vocabulary to explain to a bunch of technological neophytes.
• My Twitter network is awesome. I asked for some shoutouts yesterday, and over 90 people responded. Brilliant. More than anything else, the international tweets truly wowed some of my group.
• When you’re showing off Twitter to your audience, it’s pretty comical to open it up just in time for them to see Ira Socol calling Diane Ravitch a “war criminal.” and then have to explain that, no, he’s not joking.
• I loved it when they realized that someone took really good notes in Google Docs, and they could ask her to share it with everybody at once.
• Some people had to miss the session today but asked if I could still show it to them anyway next week. So they want to know!
• I’m honestly not sure how many will go on to use these tools on a regular basis. If I get one or two regular Twitter users out of the 15 or so people I started with, is that a success or failure? Sure, it’s two more than we had before, but that’s a pretty horrible ratio.
• Piggybacking on the last point: could I have done more to get them using the tools, or is exposing them to the tools enough?

I have a lot to reflect on, and I’m sure I’ll have more in another week or so when I get the Evaluation Form together on Google and ask them to fill it out. Right now I’m a bit worried that they’ll be too soft on me and not point out stuff that I need pointed out to me. Conversely, I’m also worried that they’ll confirm my worst fears about doing a terrible job. For the record, I don’t think I did a terrible job, which is why it would be terrifying to find out that I actually did so. When I get some results back, maybe I’ll post a followup assuming that I haven’t died from mortification.

*Big big announcement coming real soon. I might explode from not telling the world yet.

I’ve decided to celebrate this glorious month by freezing artfully-created peanut butter sandwiches. I’ll also tell you about one of the best parts of my job as a middle school teacher: advising Student Council.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy my work in the classroom. It’s hard but rewarding work. I work with students that have some serious learning issues, and I thrive on finding ways to help them understand something they didn’t get before.

The problem is that in my school, I’m pretty isolated. I’m one of a small handful of teachers in my Middle School that has the same students for most of the day. While other teachers work with a wide variety of students, I work with a much smaller number. The advantage, of course, is that it does give me a real chance to get to know my students. The negative is that I sometimes feel left out of the action, as I clearly don’t know nearly as many students as most of the other teachers in the school.

Student Council is a great counterbalance for me. I get to work with an additional 45 students who are very different from the students in my own classroom. This gives me an opportunity to see a much wider range of student than I would otherwise see on a daily basis.

One of my favorite parts about working with Student Council is that it really concentrates the best aspects of Middle Schoolers. The students are intelligent, creative, funny, and passionate. Over the now six years I’ve spent in Student Council, they’ve taken on two different initiatives to contribute to the fight against cancer. For several years we participated in the Relay for Life, a great 24 hour long event that is equal parts fun and moving. In more recent years, we have taken charge of our Alex’s Lemonade Stand in the cafeteria. Between the two, the students that I work with have raised almost fifteen thousand dollars to fight cancer, in addition to the money and time they have donated to other worthy causes in our area. They don’t do it because they’re going to get fancy prizes or awards. They don’t even get a lot of recognition for it. They just do it because they can, and because a world where people can die of cancer is an unfair world. It’s something to be fought with conviction, and is done better while having fun and working together with others. In spite of the image of the jaded, dispassionate teenager, these young adults care about the way the world is, and are convinced that they can help fix it.

That’s why middle schoolers rule, and just one reason of many that I’m proud to be a middle level educator.