This is a fabulous video of Kurt Vonnegutt talking about the shapes of stories. Notice the different types of graphs he produces? This is a fairly mathematical procedure, and I love both the idea of embedding everyday variables on the axis, and of representing the rise and fall of the fortunes of the protagonist in the graph. I remember my 11th grade English teacher sharing with us the common graphs of Shakespeare’s trajedy and comedies in an effort to help us understand the two distinct genres.

Wouldn’t this be an interesting activity to do with your students?

About 6 and a half years ago, I started a blog. The purpose of the blog was to provide updates for my family back home while my (new) wife and I were living abroad in London, England. At the time, Facebook was still a closed site for college students, and Myspace was too messy to share with my parents. I needed an electronic space to share pictures, thoughts, and stories from our lives.

As I was jumping into learning programming, and educational technology, I decided to switch from the free hosting offered by Blogspot to my own server. I first installed Movable Type, then WordPress, and finally settled on Drupal for my blog, learning each of the technologies as I transfered between them. My first choice of domains, "UnitOrganizer.com" was intended to be a place for teachers to share their ideas, in the form of unit plans. That never actually came together, and a couple of years later I switched to my own name for my domain.

During the past few years I’ve switched from blogging about my personal life, to blogging about my programming projects, to blogging as a form of eportfolio, to blogging about my interests in education almost exclusively. I’ve had more opportunities come to me than I can count through my blog including having the opportunity to write a textbook, be published in 3 different magazines, have a short series of articles in a newspaper, and to present at conferences all over the world.

I read through some of my earliest writing, and I can see a big difference between both the strength of my writing and the quality of the ideas behind the writing. My earliest writing on education is fairly naive sounding to me today. I wonder what I will think of my writing in 10 years.

To those of you considering a blog, I say go ahead and do it. The opportunity for reflection and personal growth have been tremendous.

I got paid the highest compliment one can get from a fellow teacher after my presentation at ISTE Unplugged.

"I know I’ll be changing some of my teaching decisions." Tom Grant

After reading many posts on standards based grading, it seems clear to me that I too need to change my assessment practices. I need to ensure that I have mastery from my students, rather than a superficial level of understanding. I also need to do more to engage my students with more problems which are relevant to their lives.

I need to rethink my practices. Hopefully, that will always be true. Keeping my teaching practices completely static in a changing world seems like a pretty foolish thing to do.

Here is a list of education jargon I don’t get for various reasons.

• Learning management system

  Learning management systems don’t manage learning. They manage resources which teachers and students use to facilitate learning experiences. Why use the phrase learning management anyway? Who should be managing the learning? Shouldn’t we hope that students should eventually be managing their own learning? Will using a system help them become better at self-organization and eventually directing their own learning?
   

• Mobile learning

  This implies that there is another type of learning which is equally satisfactory, but different, which we should call stationary learning. While I like the idea of moving learning activities from inside the classroom to outside of the classroom and I recognize the role mobile devices have, I’m not sure I appreciate the distinction this phrase offers.
   

• Professional development

  When we call it professional development, we imply first that it is a special kind of learning associated with our occupation, and that the control of the learning may not be in our control. This reminds me of those "terrific" algebra tile sessions I was "asked" to attend in NYC. I’m much more fond of the phrase professional learning instead. We must allow teachers more ownership over the professional learning they do, and that might mean ending professional development and finding a new paradigm. 
   

• Transform learning

  As I understand the process of learning, it is a building and pruning of neural pathways in our brain. As we learn more about something, we prune unnecessary connections, and we grow connections in our brain. Nothing we are doing now is changing this process, except possibly to accelerate it, or to occasionally change the part of the brain in which the learning is being manifest. In any case, we aren’t transforming learning, we are transforming the types of learning opportunities kids experience.
   

• Attention deficit disorder

  This is much too widely diagnosed in my opinion. If I had been tested as a child, I surely would have been diagnosed with ADHD. Unfortunately, the problem was that most of the time I was bored. The problem is that any child who struggles to pay attention to the teacher in a classroom runs the risk of being improperly diagnosed by the teacher, who then may improperly suggest counselling and medication. There are children who legitimately struggle with focus because of their brain chemistry, but most of them are just bored. I heard somewhere that 15 minutes a day in nature "cures" most cases of ADHD.
   

• <fill in the blank> literacy

  Literacies change over time as society evolves. Every time a new time of medium is introduced, the definition of what it means to be literate changes. The fact that our literacies now include digital media just means that the new definition of literacy itself now includes all of the new components of our interactive digital world. If we say that we want our children to be "digitally literate" then are we naturally demoting the other, still critically important types of literacy? If a school doesn’t teach digital literacy, then they aren’t really going to produce literate students. I’d much rather be clearer about how literacy is changing then let schools pick and choose which modes of literacy they are going to teach.
   

• 21st century learning

  First, this phrase is inherently denegrating to the types of learning opportunities which have been around for ages. It implies that the type of learning not characterized by the affordances of the 21st century (ie. computers) is out-dated. There is tremendous value in many non-21st century learning opportunities, like discussions for example, which have been around for eons. It also fails to recognize that much of what is described as 21st century learning is in fact in use from the 20th century by many excellent educators. Further, it lumps together two kinds of pedagogical practice, that of student centred learning, and technology based learning, which allows educators to reject both of these types of learning simultaneously.

What are some of your least favourite educational phrases?

The orange circle represents the leader of the school, the lines between the circles represent the relationships between people. Which school would you rather work in?

                                                                or 

Which school do you think functions better when the leader is away?