Here's the link to my son's comic book: http://www.flickr.com/photos/37259484@N02/sets/72157617411799016/show/
His warning to readers: "Second grade boys tend to like a lot of violent things." So, beware! Also, if you are a stickler for proper spelling, you probably should skip this one.
Wow. That was a fast eight weeks. When the course began, I didn't really know what to expect. I feel like we've come a long way together. For starters, If you had told me two months ago that I would have authored not one, but three separate blogs, I would not have believed you, and yet here I am.
While I consider myself to be pretty technically savvy, all of the tools we used in this class were new to me. I really enjoyed Movie Maker, although I wish we had gotten more time to "play" with it. I can see so many ways that I could use wikis, blogging and interactive tools like Googledocs, Gliffy, and MindMeister in the classroom and at home with my kids. Just this week we took the comic book my 7-year-old wrote and put it up as a slide show on Flickr so that my husband could see it while on a business trip, something that probably wouldn't have occurred to me before I took this course.
While I feel I had a grasp of the concept of 21st century skills before the course began, I think my experiences here have helped me to flesh out the concept for myself and think more clearly about what 21st Century learning can and should look like.
I have really enjoyed getting to know all of the participants in this class. Each one brought such a distinctive voice and perspective to our discussions. I have learned from each of you and I am very grateful for that!
Thanks to this course I will think differently about my kids' education and, when I return to the classroom, I will take with me an updated perspective. Not a bad use of eight weeks.
I have been thinking a lot about change lately, and it has nothing to do with Barack Obama. Our school district is undergoing major changes and the process has been instructive (not to mention discouraging and exhausting at times). Due to economic and demographic shifts, we have just gone through the process of choosing two schools to close next year with more consolidation on the way. By way of background, ours is an affluent district populated by many people who have achieved professional success. A disproportionate number are lawyers, doctors, high-level managers, and business owners. You might assume that such a group, accustomed as they are to managing change and seeing the "big picture" in their professions, would be able to navigate something like school consolidation with some degree of aplomb. You would be mistaken. While I believe that most of us have handled the changes pretty well, a large and very vocal group have resisted every step of the process. There have been news articles, robocalls, editorials, lawsuits, and countless crazy rumors for months now. Even today, weeks after the decisions have been finalized, as teachers, parents and students are working to make the transition, there is still resistance - mostly in the form of "close that school, not mine". It has gotten to the point where the district maintains a rumor control page on its web site.
Did the administration handle the process perfectly? No. Could they have anticipated this reaction? Probably. Are there aspects of the new configuration that are less than perfect? Of course. I think, though that the most significant aspect of this has been lost in all the noise. This situation is a great opportunity for us to teach our kids how to adapt to and manage change. How do you take a process over which you have little control and make it work for you? How do you look at a new situation and decide how to make the best of it? How do you work with others to maximize benefits for everyone? How do you choose leaders whom you can trust to make good decisions in the future? These are just some of the questions we can be helping our kids (and ourselves) to ask and answer.
Fifteen years from now, it will matter very little whether my fifth grader had to get on the bus at 7:45 or 8:45 am. However, the example my husband and I set by the way we handled her transition to a new school is likely to inform how she meets the challenges posed by the unimaginable changes she will face throughout her life.
Assessment is something of an obsession of mine. I came to education via the field of psychology, so maybe that's why I'm especially focused on measuring what students know and can do. I also know from experience that the way we choose to assess learning determines how we teach, for better or for worse. In the 1990's, I watched the state of Virginia implement a high-stakes testing regime with distressing results for teaching and learning. I was so distressed, in fact, that I quit my job in a public school (with great sadness) so that I could teach in an environment where assessment, and therefore instruction, was conducted intelligently and effectively. In perusing articles and blog posts concerned with assessing 21st century skills, I was somewhat frustrated to see that we are still fighting the same battles. On it's page devoted to 21st Century Assessment, http://www.ncte.org/governance/Assessment, , NCTE lists these guidelines:
Assessment must include multiple measures and must be manageable.
Consumers of assessment data should be knowledgeable about the things the test data can and cannot say about learning.
Teachers and school should be permitted to select site-specific assessment tools from a bank of alternatives and/or to create their own.
To this I can only reply, "duh". These are so sensible, so reasonable, so familiar. They are the same recommendations I read twenty years ago when I was an undergrad education student. Sadly, we seem to be no closer to these goals, in fact in some ways we seem farther away.
Now that I am interacting with the education system as a parent, I am even more discouraged about the role of assessment in general and testing in particular. Most parents do not understand how statewide testing works, what it is meant to measure, or how much it influences the curriculum. When my daughter was in third grade, I asked that she be allowed to opt out of Michigan's statewide test, the MEAP. My request was met with resistance from school leaders because of the potential penalties the school might incur under No Child Left Behind for having less than 90% participation in testing (a statistically meaningless requirement). In the end, I prevailed, but not before I spoke to people all the way up the line from the classroom teacher to officials at the State and National Departments of Education. What struck me was that not one educator - teacher, principal, district, State or Federal education official, or testing specialist - defended the quality of the test. All of them admitted that the test was terribly flawed, but that they were powerless to change things and that we should all just go along with the program. When I talked to other parents about the situation, most were only dimly aware of the MEAP or its purpose. They were also unaware of the extent to which the curriculum in our district is being changed (not for the better) in a misguided attempt to boost MEAP scores.
I fear that if this is the prevailing attitude, we will still be chasing the NCTE's perfectly sensible proposals twenty years from now.
