Get ready for the school year by getting connected–It’s Connected Educator Month

Posted by & filed under edtech101.

Pratt Personal Network

I tend to trust education advice from the people to whom I feel connected. For early-career teachers, of course, those connections can take many forms including face-to-face meetings, email newsletters and conversations, and social networks. The U.S. Department of Education’s Connected Educators initiative is sponsoring Connected Educators Month. The goal is to get more educators talking about the ideas and resources they need to be better leaders in their classrooms. If you’re already a Tweeting, blogging, screencasting, over-connected teacher, this is your month to show off. But for anyone who wants to be a stronger teacher leader, here are some resources to get you started. If you trust my advice, then read on.

A core idea behind being a connected educator is having a “Personal Learning Network.” I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical of “PLNs” because the acronym sounded like tredy lingo for Twitter “tweet-ups”. But everyone who gets education advice from friends and colleagues already has a Personal Learning Network. It’s the web of connections that gets you lesson plans you need to teach tomorrow and tips you off to the upcoming Edcamp in your city. Expanding your own PLN with social tools is a powerful way to share ideas, break down some of the isolation of teaching and get “‘just in time’” access to knowledge” that you need.

The Learning Network blog at the New York Times kicked off Connected Educator month last week with PLN recommendations from 33 educators they admire. They asked each two simple questions:

  1. What is one important thing you’ve learned from someone in your Personal Learning Network (P.L.N.), however you define that network?
  2. What one person, group or organization would you recommend every educator add to his or her P.L.N.?

I like the simplicity of the questions, so I wanted to answer them too:

  1. Early in fall 2011 I saw the name of a new product in early beta called ClassDojo on an edtech site called Beta Classroom. There were several tools reviewed on the site (including Socrative), but I didn’t feel connected to the site enough to trust the reviews. However, a friend had recently introduced me (via email) to a teacher friend of hers in the Bay Area. When Robert Provnost tweeted about Beta Classroom, I went back to the reviews. Not long after, I was using ClassDojo for management and Socrative for exit tickets. Both tools radically changed my thinking about the amount of data I could capture and leverage in my classroom. What pushed me to take these steps? A recommendation from someone I trusted. Even though I’d never met him in person.
  2. After getting my few wet gathering behavior data with ClassDojo, I added Kickboard to my toolkit. But the folks at the New Orleans startup aren’t just good at building tools for data-driven instruction; they’re good at providing professional development about data-driven instruction. And they share their ever-growing knowledge and connections via Twitter and Facebook. If you want a steady stream of tweets with resources that will help you leverage data in your class for any subject, follow them.

Ready for more? There’s a massive calendar of Connected Educator month events on the initiative website.

Got your own suggestions for invaluable additions to everyone’s PLN? Drop your answer to the questions above in the comments below. Or I’ll catch you online.

–@appratt (cross-posted on EdTech 101)

Ending poverty before fixing education doesn’t make sense

Posted by & filed under education.

Peter Edelman has been fighting poverty since the Kennedy administration. In an NYT opinion piece this Sunday, Edelman asked, “Poverty in America: Why Can’t We End It?” His first of four reasons why poverty is so hard to beat, from a national perspective: “An astonishing number of people work at low-wage jobs.” And how do we create more good jobs that pay decent wages?

The first thing needed if we’re to get people out of poverty is more jobs that pay decent wages. There aren’t enough of these in our current economy. The need for good jobs extends far beyond the current crisis; we’ll need a full-employment policy and a bigger investment in 21st-century education and skill development strategies if we’re to have any hope of breaking out of the current economic malaise.

Contrast that with Diane Ravitch, writing in March in the NY Review of Books:

Every testing program—whether the SAT, the ACT, or state and national tests—demonstrates that low scores are strongly correlated to poverty. … To the extent that we reduce poverty, we will improve student achievement. … But no matter how admired the teaching profession becomes, our society must do much more to reduce poverty and to improve the lives of children and families.

Improve schools to beat poverty or beat poverty to improve education? I’ve never bought the Ravitch camp line that we should forego efforts on the former to focus primarily on the latter. Edelman has fought poverty for more than five decades. If he says we need better education to create the jobs to beat it, then I’m inclined to think that’s what we need to do.

Tennessee & teacher evaluation: They just did it. Now they can make it even better.

Posted by & filed under education.

old map of tennessee

Pragmatic teacher evaluation systems are one (among many) important policies that can help student achieverment. Arne Duncan’s recent HuffPo column introducing the new report on Tennessee’s teacher evaluation system is exciting for several reasons:

1) Incorporaing student test scores into an evaluation system is justifiably unsettling and frustrating for teachers. I was in the fortunate situation at a turnaround school wherein student gains in my scores were a potential boost to my evaluation and merit pay program, but in their absence, my evaluation didn’t suffer. That’s fine for a new teacher, but for years 3, 4, and 5 in the classroom, teachers need to know if and how they’re changing student achievement, and use that knowledge to drive their professional development. Standardized test scores are an imperfect way of measuring this, but just because they’re imperfect doesn’t mean they’re unusable. Duncan:

First, student growth can and should be one of a number of measures in evaluating the performance of teachers – and it’s important not to ignore a teacher’s impact on student learning just because it is difficult to measure. Better evaluation systems improve classroom instruction.

Even though it’s difficult to measure, Tennessee went ahead and tried. I doubt a single teacher got sacked because of this 35% of the eval based on test scores, and now the state has tons of data on the effectiveness of that measure, and can improve upon it as evaluations continue.

2) If you don’t try a new evaluation system, you’ll never know how to create a better evaluation system. Sure it took a massive amount of political and administrative wrangling, but the state just did it, and this report is evidence that they’re now going to reflect upon it and make improvements:

It’s true that there is no perfect system of teacher evaluation, but Tennessee did not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. They insisted on asking the compared-to-what question – how do the strengths and weaknesses of the new system compare to the old system?

3) A good friend of mine left DC to work on this teacher evaluation overhaul. I’m proud of her.

Solving Big Problems with Diversity and Interdisciplinarity

Posted by & filed under edu tech, science.

Watson and Crick with their DNA model

There’s research emerging that interdisciplinary founding teams are vital to creating successful startup companies. Within the education technology sphere, this is obvious to folks who have taught and are looking for engineering and business expertise to help them get their ideas scaled into products. But I don’t think that necessity of diverse startup teams stops with mixing a teacher, an engineer, and an MBA. That’s a good start, but in education and social entrepreneurship, we also have to think about the ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic diversity of a team, as well as the interdisciplinary work that individuals within that team can do.

First, here’s Max Marmer of the Startup Genome Project, in an HBR blog post on “Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas“:

The problem is that creativity works by taking what we know and applying it to something new; and what engineers understand is new enabling technology trends like cloud, mobile, social and big data. This worked great when the problems teams were trying to solve were fundamentally technology problems. But now much of the transformational potential of the “pure information technology” possibility space has been exhausted to the point of terminal differentiation. The new frontier for software is applying our highly developed, easily deployable technology stack to a whole new range of industries, where the problems can’t be properly solved just by firing up a text editor and initializing a LAMP stack.

…one “something new” all that can be applied to is education. Though the glut of Learning Management Systems and flashcard-style apps might suggest a similar “design overload” for tech tools in that market as well. Fortunately, there are still myriad problems in education that have only a few preliminary tech solutions. And Marmer agrees:

I believe the missing piece from the DNA in the founding teams of transformational companies is now the domain expert, who has deep insight into the industry they are trying to disrupt.

And that “domain expert” is a teacher. But I’d like to one-up that by looking to some of the research that Marmer says we need more of in the entrepreneurial sphere. First, economic research indicates that collaboration among a diverse set of problem solvers yields more potential approaches to tackling complex problems than collaboration among homogenous groups. Teach For America is remarkable for many strengths, but this kind of diverse team building is baked into its DNA. This means (but is not limited to) ethnic, religious, gender, and socioeconomic diversity.

Second, the matter of what sort of ideas come from different types of collaborators is something researchers in the hard sciences have considered for more than half a century. What Marmer or TFAers might call “transformational” scientific research is sometimes not just the result of “interdisciplinary” teams, but the result of individuals (working in teams) who primastically combine approaches from multiple disciplines into their own thinking. Watson and Crick (and Rosalind Franklin) are a perfect example: they came from establish scientific backgrounds but applied those skills to the uncracked structure of DNA. The result wasn’t just a Nobel Prize: it was a whole new field of science. “We think of Watson and Crick as molecular biologists, not as an ornithologist and a physicist. The first molecular biologists were a motley crew of misfits and revolutionaries,” wrote Sean Eddy in a commentary on “‘Antedisciplnary’ Science” several years ago that I still find illuminating. His point is that we don’t just need teams that combine approaches from different disciplines: we need individuals who can do the same.

The lesson for education entrepreneurs: work with diverse teams of people from different backgrounds and with different “domains” of knowledge, or disciplinary skills. But recombine those skills into new disciplines that don’t even have names yet. Then we’ll have more big ideas for how to improve education.

Update: Want to see why getting teachers on edtech startup teams is so important? Watch the techies grill Fahad Hassan after he pitches his education data integration tool, AlwaysPrepped. Then watch the teachers/educators go crazy over the tool at 13:07.

(Photo: Science Photo Library)