Author: David Wees (page 76 of 98)

Here’s a presentation I’m giving this Wednesday to the teachers at my school on Connecting your Classroom. After viewing William Eaton‘s presentation last Friday at the CUEBC conference I decided to present on a similar topic to my own staff, using a couple of his ideas (which I’ve referred in the presentation). The idea is that every classroom can be connected in various ways, and I’m showing 5 of the ways we can connect based on the domains of curriculum, community (in this case experts), student work, and the world. Check out my presentation below.

I’m just using this page to store book recommendations I’ve been getting through Twitter. Feel free to comment and add your own suggestions if you don’t see them in my list.

• Different by Youngme Moon
• Lost at School by Ross Greene
• Fair Isn’t Always Equal by Rick Wormelli
• Mindset by Carol Dweck
• The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk
• Iconoclast by Gregory Berns
• Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin
• Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner 
• An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger
• Catching Up or Leading the Way by Yong Zhao
• Making Learning Whole by David Perkins
• Better, Complications by Atul Gawande

Here’s the first quote that really grabbed my attention from the study I’m reading on KIPP Schools:

"On average, KIPP middle schools have student bodies characterized by higher concentrations of poverty and racial minorities, but lower concentrations of special education and limited English proficiency LEP) students, than the public schools from which they draw." (Gleason et al. 2010, p14)

This suggests to me that KIPP schools are being selective. As soon as there is a statistically significant disparity in the enrollment policies of a school, one begins to suspect if the students are being chosen. The fact that the student population is poorer and more diverse than the typical public school is good but the fact that the KIPP population has fewer special needs and ESL students is worrisome. Common sense dictates that these students are more expensive to educate and will require more resources.

Here’s another quote which drew my attention because the study fails to draw a really important conclusion from this inference they make.

"By year three, half of the KIPP schools in our sample are producing math impacts of 0.48 standard deviations or more, equivalent to the effect of moving a student from the 30th percentile to the 48th percentile on a typical test distribution. Compared to national norms during this grade span, a 0.48 effect size after three years represents 1.2 years of accumulated extra growth in mathematics over the three year period (Bloom et al. 2008). For comparison, the black-white test core gap in math is typically estimated as approximately one standard deviation at fourth grade and eighth grade. (Bloom et al. 2008)" (Gleason et al. 2010, p17)

What serious omission are they making at this point? Observing that KIPP students spend much more time in school than do their counterparts is pretty important here, particularly when comparing them on scales which are largely dependent on how much time learning the material students spend. In fact, given that the typical KIPP student spends an extra 2 hours in study each day and 1 extra month in school (1600 hours) compared to the typical public school student (1080 hours), we might hope to see a larger improvement than 1.2 times.

The study does point out that most KIPP schools are doing better than their local counterparts. This isn’t too surprising to me if you look at the previous two quotes: they are selective in their choice of students, students spend way more time in their schools.

I wonder how KIPP schools would fare if students spent the same amount of time as a typical school, or if every student was equally likely to be accepted to their programs. I also wonder what would happen if we measured the success of schools on a broader set of standards than just their performance on some standardized test. What would the creativity index of a typical KIPP student be, I wonder? 

References:

Bloom, H., Hill,C., Rebeck Black A., & Lipsey, M., (2008). Performance Trajectories and Performance Gaps as Achievement Effect-Size Benchmarks for Educational Interventions, MDRC Working Papers on Research Methodology.

Gill, B., Gleason, P., Nichols-Barrer, I., Teh, B., Tuttle, C. (2010) Student Characteristics and Achievement in 22 KIPP Middle Schools, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., June 2010, retrieved from http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/kipp_fnlrpt.pdf on October 17th, 2010

Our school has a great program we’ve been working on developing for about 5 years and which finally got off the ground last year. One of our parents was travelling in Kenya and while in Mombassa she met a man who told her she absolutely had to look at this school he was developing. So the story goes, she went to the school he was working on which was in a poor area of town called the Kipevu district, and then she came back to our school and told us we had to help his school.

For five years we raised money, sent letters to and from the school, and worked on planning on a trip to the Kipevu Primary school ourselves. Last year we sent some students, a parent, and two staff members to the school. The experience was amazing! Our students blogged about the experience on our Kipevu website here.

Here’s a video one of our students produced about the experience. You can tell that this was a powerful learning experience for these students; probably the most powerful learning experience of their lives.

Karibu Kipevu.

Article directed at our school’s parent population, reposted with permission from my school’s monthly magazine, The Imprint

Your kids have grown up never knowing a world without personal computers, but most of you can still remember the time you first used a computer. The world is changing rapidly and a huge part of that change is driven by technology. Learning is still the same, but the tools for learning are changing.

Here are some simple tips for improving your personal learning, which I’ve shared with your students and will now share with you.

Currently when you need to know something, you probably start with a Google (or alternate search engine) search for that topic. Maybe you scan through the first 10 to 20 results or so, and develop your opinion from those results. You also ask the people around you what they think the answer to your question is. You might try and find some relevant books from the library, or make a few phone calls. In any case, the flow of information for you probably looks like this:

You are at the center, actively looking for useful sources of information. The problem is, it’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. Here’s what your information gathering should look like in the 21st century:

Now, information is flowing toward you, instead of you always searching for the information you need. The question is, how do you develop the second method of gathering information?

Here’s some simple tricks to get you started, and if you get stuck at any of the steps you can ask your kids to help you out. They love being able to help adults out; trust me, we ask them for advice on technology all the time as teachers.

Start by signing up for something called an RSS reader; Google reader is a good choice here. If you want to know what an RSS reader is, check out this video available online here: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Next, head to your favourite websites and look for the RSS icon which looks like this (but a lot smaller):

This icon tells you that the website you are looking at publishes something called an RSS feed, which you can click on to subscribe to in Google Reader. Now you can check Google reader on a regular basis instead of all of those websites, and read the updates there instead. If a particular website does not have an RSS icon you can copy the address of the website and subscribe in Google reader anyway; it will still update you whenever there are changes to that website.

Another very useful service is called Google Alerts. If you navigate in a web browser to http://google.com/alerts you can sign up for Google search results, which will be delivered once a day either to your email or to your RSS reader. You can also add multiple alerts for different search terms. Think of it as Google searching the Internet for you each day and sending the top new results to you.

You become the center of the information flowing toward you, instead of the other way around. You will now have more time to do more useful activities, like kicking a ball around with your kids or going for a walk in the park.

Next issue we will talk about the power of social media and how you can leverage it to make your searches for information even more powerful.

I remember growing up in a world where the common wisdom was that if you let kids sort out problems for themselves, it builds character. I remember spending every day after school hiding from bullies who wanted nothing from me except my flesh to beat on. I remember living in fear.

I couldn’t tell anyone. Or if I did tell someone, nothing happened. It was futile to ask for help when there was none available. No one could fight those battles for me, and I felt miserable everyday. I wanted to die. I spent every day at school feeling alone.

I remember being held from behind and kicked in the chest during lunch time inside an unsupervised classroom. I remember being FAST and running across a field with a crowd of boys behind me and then hiding in the woods once I had outpaced my pursuers. I remember having a mountain of boys jump me in the school courtyard and being pinned down. I remember the rage I felt which gave me a surge of adrenaline, and enough strength to stand up and toss them aside like rag-dolls. They were scared of me then, at least for a little while.

I remember telling my crush I liked her and then awful painful next day at school as she told EVERYONE at the school about my crush and how stupid I was to think that anyone could possibly like me back. I remember a middle school dance where a girl came up and ask me to dance, then when I accepted, told me to f**k myself. I didn’t go to many dances after that.

I remember the pity that the nice people felt toward me. How they treated me like some lost puppy they had to take care of, but how they wouldn’t speak up whenever I was bullied. Some of them even danced with me at the middle school dances but never for the right reason, never because they thought I was cool.

I remember having a few friends who were like me. We stayed after school and played Dungeons and Dragons, and I remember that it wasn’t the game so much that I liked, but the feeling that I had some friends. We played a lot and got harassed for it, but what else could we do? The only other activity that wasn’t full of people who wanted to kick the s**t out of us was drama or choir, and most of us did those types of things too. We weren’t all talented people though, and I remember that there were people in our group that even I pitied.

I remember outwitting my bullies. There was one who would challenge me to a fight every day after school and we would establish some place behind the school to fight.  I would wait in the front office until just before my bus came, and then run out to catch it, leaving my bully behind to fume.

I remember taking Tai Kwon Doe for two years so that I could learn to defend myself, and then being told that I wasn’t allowed to use my martial art training in "that way." I remember having to write a long essay after finally snapping and defending myself with a high kick to the face that drew blood. I remember angry parents writing letters to the school saying that I shouldn’t be there, that I was a menace to their kids. I remember a look of hatred from the sister of the boy I kicked and her saying, "You should be in jail!" I remember feeling like s**t and vowing never to use violence again. I remember quitting the martial arts club because of the concern I had I wouldn’t be able control myself in the future, and I didn’t want to know how to seriously injure people.

I remember that when I started high school that it got better. My bullies were small compared to the 12th graders, but active and aggressive and so they became the bullied and I got a reprieve. I remember discovered that there were tonnes of people like me as I was placed in the honours stream at school for the first time. I remember that these people had true compassion and were able to look past the broken exterior of the child in front of them and see an amazing me.

I remember growing in confidence as I sang in the choir and acted in school plays. I remember that before I acted that the only class I had any confidence speaking in was mathematics class. I remember feeling like for the first time that I had a voice. I remember feeling like it was okay to be smart and maybe a little bit weird. I remember that it got better.

I remember going off to university and having the confidence to talk back to the bullies that were there as well. I remember being forced into an all guy dorm and thinking that most of them were pretty okay but some of them were real a******s. I remember living with some stereotypical jocks in a dorm in 3rd year and realizing that I didn’t need to take their bulls**t, I could move on and I did.

I remember discovering the War Gamers club and Safewalk and recognizing that I wasn’t alone, that there were lots of people like me. I remember eventually being one of the cool kids on campus and running the Billiards & Mathematics clubs, and being on the board of the War Gamers club. I remember being recognized for my 9 years of service in Safewalk and knowing that people would actually miss me when I was gone. I remember the first friends I had who actually loved me and respected me and with whom I could share my innermost thoughts and feelings. I remember wondering if everyone had their first deep friendship in university. I remember that it got better.

I remember being depressed for a while and going off track. I remember being pulled back into reality by my aunt, who found me a job in the warehouse in which she worked. I remember hating the work beside the very same kind of person who used to bully me, but I remember becoming powerful and being able to load crates of beer onto pallets at a frightening speed. I remember being respected by the people who were like my bullies and making friends with some of them. I remember being able to forgive my bullies from many years ago. I remember making a decision to go back to school and quitting work the very same day I found out I had been accepted to join the education faculty at UBC.

I remember loving learning how to teach. I remember finding my calling. I remember the first time I stood in front a class full of 8th graders and how nervous I felt. I remember struggling at first but finding the confidence to continue. I remember that I became a teacher not for a love of math, or because I wanted some money, but so that I could help kids like me. I remember the first time I asked for the class’ attention and got it instantly without effort. I remember that this was the first time I really felt like a teacher.

I remember meeting my wife and how much we were in love, and the birth of our son. I remember being really happy all the time. I remember that I never feel lost or lonely, except for a while after my Dad died, and even then being so grateful I had a family. I remember that it got better. I remember waking up everyday and being so grateful that the teenager who was once me lacked the courage to end it all. I remember because I am here to do so, and I remember that I need to do more to stop teenagers from making decisions that will prevent them from being happy people like I now am.

This blog post is inspired by the It Gets Better project which I think is an awesome idea and I wish existed when I was a kid and serves as a reminder for me of why I became an educator.