Article - Why Ed Tech Is Not Transforming Teaching

Source:
Herold, B., & Smith, C. (2015). Why Ed Tech Is Not Transforming Teaching. Education Week, 34(35), 8-14.

Summary:

Schools have spent billions of dollars on technology to create student-centered, hands on and personalized learning experiences to help student achievement grow. However, that largely isn't happening. More teachers are simply using technology to make their lives easier or to supplement their instruction than are to use technology instead of using it to help students take control of their learning. The ISTE standards are referenced along with a quote from someone at ISTE who explains that teachers can do student-centered learning without technology, and have been for years, but technology isn't going away and they want teachers to use it effectively.

A very student centered lesson utilizing iPads is described and a 24 year veteran teacher explains that she had probably only stood at the front of the room for a total of 3 hours. Yet at this school, there is only about 5% of teachers using the technology at the same level as this veteran teacher.

A study done by Larry Cuban from Stanford came across similar findings in a study of a technology-rich Silicon valley school. He had looked at the same school almost a decade before and found that most teachers were using technology in an innovating way. When he looked at them again ten years later he found that most teachers were again using teacher-centered approaches instead of student centered approaches. In yet another study, researcher Kelly Shapely found that teachers found technology more useful for themselves than for the students.

The next section focuses on barriers towards implementing technology, saying that access to technology is no longer as big a barrier as it once was. Instead, the second order obstacles of teacher lack of understanding, and lack of understanding new instructional practices and how to choose the right tool for their students for the right purpose. Other barriers mentioned are the peer pressure more innovative teachers may feel to teach more traditionally, or less experienced teachers being deterred by experienced teachers who think differently. Another teacher expresses that it takes a lot of time and work to do it wholeheartedly as well.

The final section explains different tips for success with technology integration. They mention that the one approach to professional development that many researchers and experts agree on is the kind that takes place consistently during the work day and addresses the specific challenges classroom teachers face, instead of just focusing on the technology. They also mention using the "early adopters" in schools to teach other teachers instead of bringing vendors to teach and forcing teachers to go. Even with these tips, it ends with saying that for the time being, the innovative teachers creating lessons aligned with the ISTE standards will be the outlier.

Reflection:
There are a few quotes from this paper that stuck with me the most, and the were from the beginning and the end of the paper. The first is "The introduction of computers into schools was supposed to improve academic achievement and alter how teachers taught. Neither has occurred." The second quote being "When all the stars are aligned, you can think about fundamentally changing how you've always done business. But remember, changing how we do education is like trying to move Mount Everest."

While these two quotes have more of a pessimistic view to them, I feel like they are realistic. People are resistant to change, even if there is something that is clearly not working, just because it "has always been done this way" people shy away from change. These are slightly disheartening in a way, but I feel that by using those early adopters, and by being an early adopter myself who sees the value in using technology in innovative ways, I can share my enthusiasm and desire to get others on board to slowly but surely help other teachers be more innovative in their use of technology in the classroom. Even if it takes a long time.

Blended Learning - Breaking Down Barriers

Source:
Horn, M. B., GU, A., & Evans, M. (2015). Knocking Down Barriers. Education Digest, 80(8), 18-25.

Summary:

Three authors from the Clayton Christensen Institute explain how California superintendents from several districts are implementing blended learning. They met and discusses the barriers that came up and solutions to those barriers. There were three categories that the barriers fell into, redesigning teacher roles given contract provisions, purchasing and managing technology and infrastructure, and recognizing online classes as valid for universities in California.

 Redesigning Teacher Roles
-Barrier: Elementary teachers have interdisciplinary credentials vs. specialized subjects
-Workaround: Teach English Language Development

-B: Secondary Level teachers have specialized credentials
-W: Teach together in a large space

-B: Per ADA, students need supervision by certified professionals
-W: Open sight lines - certified teacher who can see students

-B: Class size limits
-W: Average the students per teacher across the grade level

-B: Teacher union contracts
-C: Side-letter agreement restructuring the professional day to allow more flexibility

Technology and Infrastructure
-B: Bids for contracts over $50,000
-W: Borrow request for proposals from other districts and tweak them

-B: California guarantees that students can' pay fees to access ED - BYOD could be violation
-W: Don'r require BYOD - provide devices for those who don't have them

-B: Providing access at home and school to all
-W: Allow BYOD and supplement, look for foundations and grants

Postsecondary Approval
-B: UC and CSU require freshmen to have completed certain courses in high school - approval for online classes has changed and creates a lag
-W: Don't designate whether the class was online or face to face on transcript

There is also a list of 11 suggestions from the superintendents.
1. Use qualified substitutes
2. Train learning coaches
3. Develop a professional development center
4. Create professional development time outside of the school day
5. Encourage teachers to design
6. Rely on early adopters
7. Ensure clear communication channels
8. Don't bring admin into classes early on
9. Build a wall around costs
10. Make some decisions centrally
11. Know what's free

Reflection:
I was unaware that there were multiple districts in California taking on a blended learning approach in their schools. Most of these barriers and suggestions are general enough that they could directly benefit almost any school, while the others that are more specific to California could be tweaked to fit. I'd like to look up more information about these districts in California to see how they implement the blended learning in actuality, after reading about their workarounds to the barriers they've come across. How successful have they found this approach to be? What does the community think about it? This has caused me to think of all kinds of other questions.

Technology (and innovations!) of the Past - The Ditto Machine and Peer Editing

In looking for information about the ditto machine, I came across the article referenced above in the infographic I made. I found this article very interesting and made some comparisons to today.

Source:
Bissland, J. H. (1980). Peer evaluation method promotes sharper writing. Journalism Educator, 34(4), 17-19.

Summary:
James Bissland from Bowling Green State University introduces two tools for teachers to use called the Feedback Profile Project and the Peer Evaluation and Review System (PERS). Both tools take student writing and give them lots of audience feedback in addition to the teacher's comments. In the Feedback Profile Project, experts look at student papers with the help of computers. This became problematic because not all teachers have access to computers and finding experts would take time. PERS is a simpler approach. Students write their papers with spirit duplicators and then the masters are collected. They are stripped of their names and given a code to differentiate between them. They are then duplicated and put into packets and given to each student. The order of the stories is varied in each packet, but they all include an evaluation tool.

When it comes time to review the packets, students are told to first rank them in order. The next step is continue looking through the materials and then to explain why they gave the score they did. They would then be graded on their story, get a grade based on their paper's rankings, and finally a grade of their comments on other papers. The work now shifts to the teacher tallying and totaling to get point totals and a ranking system.  Finally, students are given all of the different pieces which provide for a great learning opportunity for students at all levels and discussions amongst themselves. The instructor of this class found that using PERS allows for great amounts of qualitative feedback peer feedback, it reflects the gate keeping decision process, it gives plenty of time for the writers and critics to have face to face discussions, the feedback is based on familiarity with the audience, the judges are guaranteed, the competition increases interest, and having students critically analyze and assess other students' successes and failures helps to compare to their own writing.

Reflection:
I had a smile on my face while reading through this because you can see how much thought and process went into the PERS process and how beneficial and potentially groundbreaking it was at the time. There was a need for qualitative feedback and they had found a solution, largely in part to using an everyday tool (the duplicator) to make the learning happening in the classroom able to reach heights that were not possible before. With having Google Docs now, it is so much faster for students to share their papers and get feedback from numerous people. They can even leave the feedback inside of the document instead of needing to print off copies. It really makes me think about what articles we might look back on more than 30 years for now about an innovative technology integration example that has long since been replaced with something faster, better, etc.

Remaking the Grade

Source: Barton, A., & Thomas, W. (2017). Remaking the Grade. Independent School, 76(4), 92-100.

Summary:

In this article, middle school dean Annie Barton, and director of curriculum and instruction, Thomas Wendell, share the experiences that their school went through with moving away from the traditional approach to grading. They shared that three years ago, they had attended a conference that left them questioning their traditional grading practices and whether or not they were accomplishing what they wanted. They determined that they didn't and also decided that middle school was a good fit for shifting away from traditional grading practices because middle school students' brains are still very much malleable.

Their next in the process was to look at their school mission and pinpoint what they wanted students and teachers to work towards. They came up with three categories that would be reported to show student achievement, academic mastery, productivity, and contributions. Productivity focuses on individual behaviors like resourcefulness, mindset, and others. Contributions has a more community based focus.

Their next step was to create rubrics that allowed for teachers to show where students were at in their learning of the three different areas. They decided on a 4 point scale, with each section labeled exceeding, meeting, approaching, and unsatisfactory. Meeting+ and approaching+ were two subcategories that could be used as well. They have made over 100 changes to the rubric and still consider it to be a draft as input has caused and will continue to cause changes.

In the 2015-2016 school year, 6th grade teachers began to implement their mission-based system. They knew that they would have administrative support and were ready for their to be bumps in the road. They found themselves questioning new things as they came up, how often to assess, the weight of formative assessment vs. summative assessment, etc. What they found was that there were fewer discipline problems as teachers had conversations with students about productivity and contributions to class which led students to more understanding and self reflection. They also shifted away from trying to get the best percentage and instead were asking for more feedback. This pilot helped them to then transition to policy. They would implement it one year at a time and for the time being, only keep it at the middle school as high school transcripts are something that can be high stakes.

They have been working with their community to explain their purpose for the shift and the benefits that this kind of mission based system can have, but still have three common concerns come up. One concern is that it seems more subjective than A-F systems, the second is that it might be less rigorous, and the third is that it may hinder students' college prospect. To respond to the first concern, they state the numerous studies from many years that show that A-F grading is indeed subjective and also explain how their rubrics have clear key behaviors and that teachers meet regularly to be sure that they are on the same page. For the second concern, they explain that they have yet to see a student earn all exceeding, whereas earning all A's was very commonplace. Having removed extra credit, teachers are also focusing on more depth than breadth to challenge students towards mastery. And for the third concern, it seems to be focused on two specific things. Parents are concerned students won't know how to earn A's at the high school, which doesn't have missions based currently, as well as what might happen for their college hopes if the high school does get rid of traditional grades. The school addresses these concerns by explaining that while students are no longer "gaming the system" to earn A's in middle school, they are learning other very important skills that will indeed help them to earn plenty of A's. For those concerned about their students' college prospects, the school explains that the New England Board of Higher Education and the New England Secondary School Consortium met with admissions officers from highly selective schools in the area. Through the meeting, they determined that students with proficiency based transcripts would not be disadvantaged.

The last part of the article is some self-reflection of where this school is at. Their 8th grade teachers will roll out the last portion of their new policy this fall. While they are confident in the successes they have had so far, in both the students' perceptions towards learning and their teachers' knowledge of where students are in their learning, they understand that it is difficult to fully comment on their results while they are still in the implementation process. There are still certain aspects of implementing it at the high school that they want to look into further before they decide to do the same kind of system there. In the end, they give themselves a score of Approaching+

Reflection:
I enjoyed reading this article, especially because the authors were very honest in what they presented with the difficulties and concerns that arose during the process so far. I think that this kind of model or some other kind of standards based, objectives based, target based system is something that is perhaps in works within my district. I don't know how far in development it is. At a conference I went to, I  heard from Garth Larson, whose district is doing something similar with their grading. What I like about both of these schools/districts and what they did with the grading is that they focus on what is is that students are learning academically as well as behaviorally. Both have included a portion of their grading system that reflects some self-regulatory skills that students need as well as community based skills that students also need to be well rounded citizens both inside of and outside of schools. I feel like the social-emotional side of middle school students is often overlooked in the extreme push for higher standardized test scores. Implementing an approach like this may be one way to help bring back more emphasis on the social emotional side of learning as well. All teachers understand the importance of the social emotional and how those skills are just as important, if not more important, than the academic skills. They should all work together, be taught, and be part of conversations that students have with their students. It is clear that in this middle school, that is definitely the case.

Flip Your Students' Learning

Source: Sams, A., & Bergmann, J. (2013). Flip Your Students' Learning. Educational Leadership, 70(6), 16-20.

Summary:

Authors Aaron Sams and Jonathon Bergmann start off the article with two sentences that set the tone for the whole piece, "Flipped learning is not about how to use videos in your lessons. It’s about how to best use your in-class time with students." They go on to explain that having students go through the lecture at home allows for the teacher to have more one on one time with the students in the classroom. This kind of approach may not work as well in classes that are heavily inquiry based and instead those that have more didactic information. Teachers should think about how they could use flipped learning to increase the face-to-face time with students.

After having decided on where this could come in, the next step is to think about the how. The article lists multiple real examples from classrooms along with links to the videos. Some of the ideas for how to do this are as follows: videos to preview units, videos to pose questions, to review concepts that are needed for upcoming lessons. They go on to explain that the idea of sending students home with something to do in order to be prepared for the upcoming lessons is not anything new. It simply helps to create a more student centered approach where teachers a free to help more students one on one.

Bloom's taxonomy being looked at in conjunction with flipped learning can help to take some of the lower levels of work outside of class, in turn pulling the higher levels back into the classroom. To add on to that, as teachers create a library of lessons, a mastery approach can grow out of Bloom's as well.  In their classrooms, they have students move on to new objectives only once they have shown that they have mastered them. This then changing how assessment works because students need to prove that they have mastered something.

After having done some reflection based on the Universal Design for Learning, Aaron and Jon determined that watching videos was not always the best way for all students to learn. Instead of them being a requirement, they were added to other resources as an option for students to choose what best suited them. Something else that became tied to more choice was the traditional assessments. Students still needed to show their understanding, but they got to choose how to best show their understanding. The authors then explain scenarios from classrooms with varying students, subjects, and needs.

The next section on the article focuses on ways for teachers to get started with flipping, Jon and Aaron explain that they didn't develop their approach in a year and learned new things along the way. One word of advice that they had was to think of the flipped classroom more as flipped lesson, flipped learning, or flipped thinking, because they don't convey the idea that flipping lessons is a 100% kind of thing. Instead, they suggest that teachers implement the videos and other aspects when they are necessary, and to start slowly. Maybe flipping one lesson or unit each semester, quarter, etc.

In the end, the explain that a flipped classroom gives teachers the ability to meet the varying needs of their students in a flexible way. A student-centered way.

Reflection:

I enjoyed reading this article because while at first glance you might think that it will be all about how to make videos for all of your lessons, it really delves into the reasons behind flipping lessons. More so than flipping them just to have students working on application in the classroom instead of listening to lecture. What it all boils down to is using the flipped lessons as yet another tool in the tool kit for helping students to determine in which ways they learn best and to work through things at their own pace. I think a major underlying message in this article, and something that is important for me to remember as well, is that there is no one perfect solution, or tool out there. It is a combination of lots of different approaches with the idea that students have some choice and say in their learning as well.

As I move to another grade level of language arts that I haven't taught before, but keep my two Spanish classes this year, I struggle with which classes I want to try some of these ideas out with. I don't want to take on too much, trying to jump in with these ideas full time in all of the different areas. Two different grade levels,  and three different curriculums (all which are still being written) for language arts, Heritage Spanish, and Spanish 1 are a lot to handle. I will have to keep reminding myself that it will not be perfect in one year and that taking on too much at once can have the opposite effect. Like Jon and Aaron suggested, I can use videos and resources that are already created and set a goal to start recording some lessons instead of trying to set of goal of recording all possibilities.

Podcast

I made a podcast on how I might use podcasts in my classroom. While I thought I was in a quiet spot, my cat was feeling like he needed some attention, so you might hear him in the background! :)
 

Open Resources - A change for schools?

There are more and more open resource websites for teachers popping up all the time. Here are a few that were shared with me or that I found through a quick search: The OER Commons, Illinois OER, Share my Lesson, and LearnZillion. All that I have looked at have a few unique aspects to them, but something they all have in common are free resources, lessons, or other lesson tools that are available to teachers.

Do websites like these have the potential to change schools?

In my opinion, when looking at just the resources that are available, they don't. They can't.

I don't think that I've heard of schools or districts (that have been successful in great growth) say, "You know, the one factor that helped us be the most successful would be the resources that we used in our classrooms." Resources, whether they be textbooks, Chromebooks, or programs online cannot cause change on their own.

When teachers, administrators, and curriculum coordinators come together, having already determined what their objectives are in reaching their students, and then they look at using some of these open resources. That is when I think change can begin to happen.  Many districts, including mine, are having their teachers create new curriculum to replace textbooks and textbook curriculum. This is something that is daunting and time consuming for teachers and schools, especially when teachers feel like they need to create the day to day activities for classes all from scratch. I think that this is where open resources can come into play to help influence change. When schools and teachers have already come together with a common goal in mind, these resources can be picked and used to support that goal and remove some of the daunting tasks of curriculum writing.