geek.teacher

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?

It’s kind of funny, since this place has never looked more like a ghost town, but I’ve actually done more blogging in the past few months than ever before. It just turned out to be not here. I am, of course, referring to Edcamp Philly, where for almost all intents and purposes, I kind of wound up being in charge of almost all communications, which meant tending to the blog and Twitter feed. Those letters to the Edcampers? I wrote them. Those Meet the Edcampers posts? Did almost all of the copy-pasting. That being said, I performed as only one tiny piece in the larger machine of the Edcamp organization team, and it would have all fallen apart if I had tried to do it on my own. I’m extremely fortunate to have met the right people that, as a team, we were able to pull together a great day.

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.