LeaderTalk

How far we have come

I just returned from a long postponed visit to the high school where I began teaching in 1980. After reviewing the staff roster, I did not see a single teacher who was still there back when I started teaching as a fresh-faced newbie. I was expecting that, of course. Almost 30 years had passed; a whole career in a blink.

Thanks to Facebook, several students from those days recently contacted me. The word got out that I was online and approachable. Most online conversations that followed were of the “What have you been up to?” or “Here’s what I’ve been doing” variety.

Most were genuinely pleasant to read. Students enjoyed reflecting on their high school life. Some sad stories emerged of lives damaged by drugs; some successes emerged also. There were medical doctors, editors, pilots, software engineers, musicians, and a television personality in the ranks of my former students.

Some letters were repentant, their writers apologizing for being disrespectful as students. I recall one of them who used to slouch back in his chair every time the national anthem played. He has a career now building models for the military. “Sir,” he wrote, “if I knew then what I know now I would have been a much better student.”

Standing in the halls of that building, I realized the school was just a shell. It was the canvas, the atmosphere, the background hum to a shared human experience.

My students shared with me the memories of their friends, their successes, their loves, the assemblies, games, trips, and fun. They recalled the struggles in the classroom but not the details of the struggles. They left the school stronger and more complete people than they were when they entered. 

One student, the editor of the yearbook two decades ago, now an editor for a Canadian publishing house, invited me over for tea on hearing of my trip. As we sat and poured over the yearbooks we had worked on, she showed her daughter a photo of herself and an impossibly young version of me saying, “There I am with my favorite teacher.”

The years have swept all evidence of me away from the halls, as they will sweep us all away, but I know I have made an impact and left an impression on at least a few students. That has to be one of the greatest signs of success in our careers.

I strongly recommend you take your own nostalgia tour someday – when you’re ready. Such tours are not for the faint of heart.

A new skill set for leaders

At the best of times, I am not a social magnet drawing people to my brilliant light, but anyone who manages to get close enough will find me attentive, interested, and polite. However, a few months back, I discovered spending hours at a computer was starting to muffle and dull my interactions with people.

We engage in social interactions with our family and with people at work, but the ones that really challenge us, are the interactions with strangers. In our work, when a teacher or a student comes to us with a problem, the relationship is clear and falls into a predictable pattern. Interacting with strangers, though, is more challenging, more humbling, and more wrought with challenge. 

I made it a point to begin starting up conversations when I found myself with strangers while standing in lines. Being able to present myself as interested and personable in a short time frame was surely a skill set for leadership that I needed to develop. The results of my efforts were surprising.

People, it appears, like to have their envelope pulled back a little if done with humor and honesty. A smile and a comment about their line of work, if it is obvious, are all it takes. In the line at a local coffee shop I have learned about the lives of lawn maintenance crews, ambulance drivers, store cashiers, mothers of five, and many others. The most interesting came this week.

I parked behind a car with a “WW II Vet” stamp on its plate. Inside the shop, I noticed a knot of retirees and introduced myself by asking with a smile, “So which one is the World War Two veteran?” One fellow admitted it and I shook his hand to thank him for his service then left to finish my brew.

Minutes later, he came by to sit for a while. He was in his late 80s and still very fit and lean with a sparkle in his blue eyes. He told me a little about his experiences fighting the Battle of the Bulge. Then he told me something quite startling. In sixty years, a stranger had thanked him unexpectedly only twice. He told me it had made his morning and likely his whole week.

So now, at conferences in distant cities, I seek out strangers and engage them. I am rarely disappointed. I am working on my newest skill set, broadening my network of contacts, and enriching my life while doing it. After all, why else learn a skill if it does not enrich?

Front Office Blues

A few days ago, in LeaderTalk, Stephanie Sandifer wrote a post on her perception of technology in schools. One part of her piece startled me. She suggested campus leaders use wikis and other tools. Contrast that plea with Tracey Weeks’ comment the next day where she expressed frustration with administrators who are blocking wikis and blogs at the suggestion of the state.

Stephanie and Tracey, after working with teachers and community leaders to help identify 21st century skills, I have concluded that too many administrators still do not know how to assess these skills much less recognize them.

The problem is greater than a lack of knowledge about the tools. The administrators with whom I have worked in committee have displayed a lack of insight about the impact these tools cna have on student engagement and achievement. When they do not recognize great teaching using technology or the efforts that go into it, they cannot lend their full support to it.

Even if teachers integrated technology to take full advantage of collaboration and communication and engaged students in brilliant projects involving teamwork, research, and authentic assessment activities, I am convinced that many administrators are not comfortable enough with the tools and skill sets to recognize the learning that is occurring in the 21st century classroom.

I do not believe we will see the growth of technology in the classroom without administrators, so I would call on my colleagues to clearly explain the benefits of new technological applications.

Suggestions:

• we need ways of showing administrators the bright spots in their faculty
• we need to advocate on behalf of teachers doing brilliant things with new tools
• we need to remind teachers to take the time to explain clearly where their students are learning, what skills they are developing, and why the use of the technology is an important step forward,

The Teachers We Need

Recently the PBS show Frontline produced Growing up Online. In some respects it was insightful and even included a few words of wisdom from one of my favorite writers on new technologies, Danah Boyd. But in other respects, there were too many nods to fear mongering than I would have liked. What really stopped me cold, though, were interviews with an English teacher who steadfastly refused to use technology in her classroom.

When I was a High School English teacher, I taught literature from Shakespeare to Sophocles and from Margaret Laurence to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. From the beginning, I have tried to show students that words on paper are starting points for interpretation and thinking. Like notes on sheet music, they demand to be interpreted in the light of a new age and through the eyes of a new audience. Think Bach on a banjo or Handel on a harmonica.

I have worked with technology-eschewing teachers who believed students were frustrated by the pace of their class because they were so revved up by the multimedia and instant gratification now integral to their lives. But rather than meet them somewhere in the middle, these teachers decided there was no place for technology in their classes. The students today, they suggest, are restless and cannot settle into a quiet conversation.

Of course they are restless. They are moving at a different pace, they are making broad social and conceptual connections, they are creating and consuming media, they are listening to more music in more ways than their parents ever had at their ages, and they need a teacher to help them tie the pieces together. They need a teacher to encourage them to use the new tools at their disposal to dig out the universal lessons lying just under the surface of Shakespeare, for example, and bring to light the pantheon of writers and thinkers past and present.

When Romeo raises his eyes to the heavens and falls on his knees crying “Oh, I am Fortune’s fool” the good teacher gets students to modernize these words, to alter their setting, and to make the words relevant. The good teacher is encouraging students to create mashups, to build social networking pages devoted to Romeo, to create discussion groups to second guess Juliet, and to figure out why Shakespeare separated lovers in two feuding houses in the first place. Students in that teacher’s class will be Twittering each other as they create dialogue for their own version of a scene from the play. They will later capture their scenes on webcams, edit then on free software, and score them with Creative Commons music tracks.

They will blog about their friends, their upsets, their loves, their ambitions, and their lives. Their teachers will help them figure out what generations of poets and poetry have sought to discover. Their teachers, with years of experience with literature, will guide them to poems and plays, to stanzas and stories. They will all be rewritten, reconsidered, simplified, exaggerated, illustrated, blogged, posted, scored, graphically serialized and dissected.

Students will walk away from class at the end of the year with ideas in their hearts and a sense of power that the words they write may change the world or shed light on some corner of the human condition. They will leave knowing they had a teacher who engaged and challenged them to use the tools of their world to make sense of the wisdom through words that make us human and bind us together.

That said, will administrators recognize these teachers? Will administrators accept these tools and these means of expression? Right now, I am not so sure.

One Rock at a Time

Two weeks ago I attended a conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It was hosted by Michigan Virtual University and their keynote speaker for the morning was Gordon Freedman, one of the vice presidents of Blackboard.

Mr. Freedman related the story of his travels to Singapore where the government there has become singularly dissatisfied with their educational system despite the fact that students from Singapore are among the top scorers on international achievement tests. This is an honor they share with students in Finland.

The cause of their dissatisfaction is the observation that, despite such high test scores, their populace appears to lack an innovative spark. When they cast about to find the land of innovation, they invariably look toward the United States.

When I taught for year in Japan, I watched as Saturday classes began to be phased out. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Monbusho, thought giving students extra time to play and be creative might be just the thing the country needed.

When the results of the internationally standardized Pisa tests were released, many of my colleagues lamented the poor showing of American students. Mr. Freedman, echoing the thoughts of others in the educational community, concluded his talk by suggesting that our curriculum should be reinvented. He adds his voice to a deep and resonant chorus.

Mr. Freedman may not have been aware that our curriculum is being revised every day in new and innovative ways but, just as our educational establishment arose slowly, one interlocking piece time, so it is being reinvented, one interlocking piece at a time. Changes occur in bursts and, if they demonstrate success, they are replicated.

Moving that mountain is a mighty task indeed, but I have decided to rely on my observations of institutional change. I will not to try to move the whole mountain, but rather only move my one small piece of it. Pass me that stone, would you?

Essential Non-essentials

During a physiotherapy session this morning, a fellow next to me chatted with his wife and explained how he had just finished cleaning out the trunk of the family car. With pride he explained that he tossed out those pesky jumper cables. My senses started tingling.

His logic appeared impeccable but also very selfish. He claimed to have never had a dead battery, his car had headlights with auto-shut off, and it was a relatively new car. Back in Tucson, with 100 plus degree weather, the battery in my car would last perhaps three years before it gave up, usually without warning. But in Michigan perhaps jumper cables really wouldn’t be necessary. My senses started tingling again.

But batteries are parts of machines and machines die, break down, and run out of juice. I wanted to grab him gently by the throat and explain to him that my real cause for concern was that he was denying himself the satisfaction of helping out a fellow traveler with a dead battery. In the past ten years, I have been able to play the Samaritan role a good dozen times.

This whole inner dialogue led me to wonder if there were things I had cleared out of my own office, in the honorable cause of simplifying things and reducing clutter, which may have shut down possibilities for bringing assistance and joy to others.

So I present to you my starter list of "consumables" administrators should have in their offices:

• Blank cards for sending thanks and warm thoughts to colleagues and teammates as they arise
• A box of tissues for colds, tears, and coffee spills
• A pack of breath strips since not everyone enjoys your coffee breath
• Some dollar bills or loose change since there is always somebody collecting for something
• Crayons and a coloring book since some visitors bring little ones with them
• Photos of your loved ones because they make you look more approachable and less administrative

Feel free to add more in the comments section.

Swimming into Change

The President has 100 days; you have 90.”  This is the premise for an interesting book on transitions titled The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels by Michael Watkins. I came across it while sitting in the natatorium (love that word) watching my daughter do length after length of the backstroke, crawl, butterfly, and breast stroke, While there, I struck up a conversation with one of the other swimming dads who is working on becoming a leader in his organization. This book was his personal homework.

Transitions certainly are an essential part of everyone’s lives as they change careers or move along in life and they should not be approached lightly. When you make a transition into a leadership role, you must also realize you are creating a change for those around you. Your new co-workers are figuring you out as much as you are figuring out them. The difference is that they know the invisible networks and the institutional culture, the edges of the pool, so to speak. You, as the new member of the team, will inevitably bump into some walls.

It is funny how we all find ways to test out the culture and reach out to find the walls and sharp edges. I use humor. I heave learned some jokes that worked in Tucson fail miserably here. We learn, sometimes the hard way, where the walls are. I used to use that analogy for my students when I was teaching high school. You toss them into the big pool that is society and encourage them to figure things out. Oh, and did I mention the lights are off?

They flail about in the dark, in a crowded pool, uncertain where the edge of the pool is.

“Marco!”

It is only natural that they will reach out and push the limits of their space.

“Polo!”

How else will they find the walls, the edges of the pool, the other swimmers, and the deep end? I tell jokes. Others quietly observe. My students push and bend the classroom rules to see where the limits really exist.

“Marco!”

Still others dive into the fray, impose their will, and summarize the damage when it’s all over. I am figuring out my own colleagues, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their patterns of interaction just as they are figuring out mine.

“Polo!”

I think my 90 days has just ended and, coincidentally, that was just about enough time to figure out the basics.

Classroom Interrupted

“Just love them.” That’s what the bumper sticker said.

I had been seeking an easy answer but I knew there wasn't one. Last month, a teacher in one of my online communities reached out to her colleagues for our insights. Never in all her decades as a teacher had her students been so disruptive and so personally challenging. She wondered what was going on in their lives to make so many children so difficult to manage and teach.

My disciplined mind tried to make sense of the blizzard of modern influences. But, to my dismay, I was unable to isolate only one factor responsible for the state of today’s classroom disruptions. The more I thought, read, and pondered, the more foolish I felt for trying.

Not only that, almost every one of the issues was confounded by some political force or policy dictate that has muddied the clear stream of discussion and discourse.

The list of possible contributing factors includes high carbohydrate diets, less daily exercise, reduced support for play, higher levels of airborne pollutants, conflicts at home, violent messages in television and computer games, peer pressure, cyberbullying, disrupted sleep patterns, access to alcohol and other drugs, drafty residences, the pressures of high stakes tests, genetic predispositions, religious fervor, fetal alcohol syndrome, fluorescent lights, poorly planned lessons, and the list spirals onward.

And for almost every issue you might care to meet, you may be met with challenges from vocal opponents, nitpicking proponents, or casual references to a mainstream attitude untainted by either research or logic. It's enough to make a concerned adult cower in the corner.

The one good thing emerging out of all these factors is that the "blame the teacher" chorus has considerably less to work with. I am now encouraged to challenge every affront to teachers I encounter.

So it was without warning that the simple answer presented itself to me on the bumper sticker ahead of me at the lights. “Just love them,” it said.

Okay, that’s a good place to begin. What's next?

Plagiarism's Teachable Moment

My daughter, a middle school student, slowly explained to her stone aged father that she had to submit her assignment to a class blog. I was excited to see the writing process at work, from reading to thinking to composing to editing to polishing and, finally, to posting. My RSS reader notified me when she had posted her entry on the class blog. I must say it was interesting to read what other students had written and then figure out how much influence adults had on the piece.

One response was a single sentence; bonus points for doing it entirely on your own. One had misspelled some common words; points off for not using a spell checker. Some wrote about music stars; bonus points for choosing your own article. Some responses were about weird car crashes; points off for not choosing a current event. One was about the Alternative Minimum Tax. Hands up if you parent is a CPA. One response weighed in at twenty sentences; points off for too much parental influence.

This is the point at which parental influence bumps up against the issue of plagiarism. My pre-service student teachers get riled up about plagiarism too, but on mentioning programs that scan for plagiarized articles, to my surprise, there was not uniform support for such tools. My students could not quite but thier vague feeling of disquiet into words for me, but Charlie Lowe could.

Charlie Lowe is the spokesperson for the Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies (CCCC-IP) and recently wrote that plagiarism detection services such as turnitin, iThenicate, and iparadigms are creating the wrong atmosphere for writing in schools. The organization’s statement notes that academic integrity could be compromised in at least five ways:

1. since students’ writing is going into databases, students are losing authority over their work;
2. students are viewed as guilty until proven innocent and not as trustworthy learners;
3. the services promote a culture of mistrust;
4. the responsibility for detecting plagiarism is removed from the professor, and;
5. the databases of student work risk being available to third parties not directly engaged in the educational relationship originally implied.

From my own perspective, plagiarism, when it occurs, could be a teachable moment between the teacher and student – and both should benefit. The student should come away from a discussion about writing with the understanding that his writing is being considered seriously and that his own ideas are what are being sought in the writing assignment. The student should realize that teachers are asking for students to engage with a concept and writing is a way of making it their own.

The teacher must come away with a lesson learned also. If a student can think she can get away with a copy and paste product from a web site or an online encyclopedia, then the assignment has not been particularly engaging or thought provoking. The teacher should come away with the understanding that assignments need to engage, to challenge, and to promote an inner dialogue with material student are studying. If the student can just copy and paste to fill out a traditional ten pages, then it is time to re-examine the assignments being imposed.

There is support for P-20 teachers looking for ways to change their ways of assessing students. From self tests and study guides to portfolios and synthesis projects, teachers have more at their disposal than the ten page paper.

I have observed that most students will rise to the challenge of being assessed in novel ways and some teachers will attempt the change.

The Fork in the Road

Last week, the e-mail system at Eastern Michigan University went off line. I had just sent a number of messages to students regarding a fall semester class when I noticed the first signs of the outage. That was on a Friday. By Sunday, campus technicians assured us e-mail would be up by Monday. They then pushed that day back to Tuesday. Mail finally came back online by Thursday morning after almost six full days.

By then, agitation and anger had boiled over onto blogs, newspaper editorials, and letters to the editor. Some of us, realizing students would visit our online course pages or blogs, set up temporary e-mail channels through Google or Hotmail. Many others, however, did not have such an option readily available and felt the need to point a finger of blame.

Most of the comments to one professor's blog were supportive of our technicians and expressed thanks for the regular updates posted on university web pages. Readers soon called university leadership into question. Where were the leaders during the "crisis" and what steps were they taking to ensure such an outage would not happen again? One wag went to far as to directly blame the recently fired president for the e-mail collapse.

This accusation raises the question of how much a leader should know about the workings of the institution. Considering just how complex they can be, the answer is also complicated. Can we forgive a university president for not realizing the telecommunications infrastructure was in jeopardy? Should a high school principal be required to know the parking lot is in disrepair or parents are upset about a newly imposed policy?

The answer, for both university presidents and high school principals, I believe, is yes, they should know but they should have in place a system to help them with their environmental scan. The person in control of the budget should seek assurances from colleagues that the institution is working properly. That team of colleagues should be capable of assessing their areas of control and be encouraged to promote advanced planning. The leader, in turn, should be capable of hearing where the weaknesses in the system lie then act as needed. That seems straightforward enough. 

When I was responsible for the computer infrastructure in my college, I sought advice from everyone, especially those who knew our legacy machines and their quirks. When my team advised it might be wise to replace older servers with more reliable new ones, the advice made sense. We scheduled their replacement and figured out a plan for refreshing the technology so we could build the costs into the budget and plan for downtime when it would least affect the professors and students. There was nothing magic to servers running smoothly; it was planning.

Universities, like school districts, can plan for change - and they do. So is the president of the university directly responsible for this particular e-mail outage? It depends on the advice this one sought and whether or not he knew the system was sketchy. It depends on whether his team offered him a plan and whether he acted upon it. This is information an oversight panel might be able to determine.

Now that we know a system essential to our work could possibly crash, is it not up to us, as users and employees, to raise questions to the leadership? Should we not be waking up a dormant technology committee or creating an oversight committee to provide suggestions to campus leadership. There is no such committee on my campus - at present.

A technical crisis can become the fork in the road: we can blame the folks in charge or we can present a plan to prevent the problem from recurring. I am choosing to set aside blame and look forward to positive change. I am also looking forward to regular e-mail service.