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Volume 11, Number 13                                 The Source
November 4, 2011
Seven Steps to Becoming a 21st Century School or District

Ken Kay, CEO of EdLeader21, has been leading this fall a professional learning community focused on "7 Steps for Becoming a 21st Century School or District."  These steps develop leaders' skills in fusing the 3 R's with the 4 C's - Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity.

 

The seven steps have been created to help schools and districts get started in developing and sustaining a 21st Century School or District.

  1. Adopt your vision.  Use the 4 C's and more.
  2. Create a community consensus around the 4 C's.
  3. Align your system with the 4 C's.
  4. Use the 4 C's to build professional capacity around the 4 C's.
  5. Embed the 4 C's into curriculum and assessment.
  6. Use the 4 C's to support teachers.
  7. Improve and innovate.  Create a 4 C's organization.  
If there is one factor that distinguishes successful 21st century schools and districts, it is their strong leadership.  While individual teachers can adopt the practices of 21st century classroom, the real impact on students is seen if an entire school or district - the system - embraces and works toward the same vision. EdLeader 21 partnered with Pearson to produce a video, "The Role of Leaders in 21st Century Education."

Interested in joining this professional learning community?  Check it out!  You can see an animated video of the story of the 4 C's.
Check Out the Kahn Academy

With a library of over 2,400 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 150 practice exercises, the Kahn Academy is on a mission to help students learn what they want, when they want, at their own pace. 

 

This is a resource teachers might consider to help students who need another way of looking at and practicing the learning - or even to extend the learning of those who need acceleration.

 

Watch a video or practice with an exercise!    

School on the Move:  Virtual Book Study Using Edublogger

 

Although the summer of 2011 is history, there is a group of educators in the Central Community School District (DeWitt) who are taking the things they learned during a virtual book study and putting them into practice as teacher leaders in the district. Twenty-one teachers willfully and voluntarily embarked on this experience by blogging via Edublogger (www.edublogger.com) while reading the book Switch:�  How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by   Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Some read it electronically while others chose the print version.

 

Before school was out in May, the group met to determine a reading and reflection schedule. Then, periodically throughout the summer, the book group "lead" would post comments at the blog. Throughout the journey, participants eagerly responded with honesty, including intensely, thought provoking comments, questions to one another, opinions about the book, and posed challenges for the group knowing another school year was around the corner.Central Community - Dewitt

 

Here are the lessons learned:

  1. The group participating developed a certain collective efficacy and passion for the work that needs to be done in the District.  Teachers learned from one another; they learned about the "concerns" of the District, and they wrote dialog relative to the book, but solution focused for the District.  There was written dialog among colleagues that wouldn't have occurred within the "business" of the normal school day.  The responses from teachers were very powerful.  
  2. Teachers were able to get a first-hand experience with 24/7 learning. As the District moves toward full laptop integration this year, not only was the content of the book Switch relevant to the group and District, but the blogging was applicable as well. The teachers who participated increased their familiarity and comfort with blogging. After reading and responding to their colleagues, and seeing the sophisticated replies, teachers realized having students blog in their classrooms would be something they could easily integrate. Some teachers even recognized they might be able to get higher quality writing from their students as well if they implementing blogging.   
  3. The book and the activity standardized our vision and understanding of what needs to be done in the District. This fall, the group was able to hold one-another accountable for the lessons learned in Switch while making some important decisions about Professional Learning. The teachers came back refreshed and ready to discuss how we can do better for teachers and students. And throughout the year, the group will continue to use the analogy of the rider, the elephant, and shaping the path when asked to make decisions or take action. 
Lessons Learned on Standards-Based Grading

 

Kit Marshall, who shares weekly the Marshall Memo, provides a summary of lessons learned by Barbara Mondloch, President of The Language Educator.

 

"I get it," says former foreign-language teacher Barbara Mondloch about standards-based grading in her President's Message in The Language Educator. "I'm a believer." But she confesses that when she taught, her grading wasn't standards-based. Here's her analysis of the mistakes she made and what she would do differently now:

 

Lesson #1 - As a teacher, she chunked students' grades into types of evidence - homework, projects/performance assessments, tests/quizzes, and class participation - averaging and weighting each category (for example, homework counted for 10% of the overall grade) and basing grades on combined percentages earned. Now, she realizes, she was grading students on "a hodge-podge of indicators, all wrapped into one... I should have been documenting progress toward a given concept based on pieces of evidence collected (e.g., performance, projects, tests) for each specific standard."

 

Lesson #2 - As a teacher, Mondloch deducted points for late work and often gave zeroes for missing work. Now she realizes that some students take longer to learn material than others. "While accepting late work is inconvenient for the teacher," she says, "docking late work is not standards-based. When a student receives a zero for a missing assignment and that grade is averaged with the other grades, the overall grade is disproportionately affected and does not reflect the student's ability to demonstrate acquisition of the teaching target." Mondloch likens it to getting ready for a driver's test: "If the standard is learning to drive, no matter how long it takes to get there, everyone gets the same license."

 

Lesson #3 - As a teacher, she counted class participation as part of students' grades, and she still believes it's important: "Workplace skills, such as coming to class on time and being prepared, actively engaging and participating, and complying with teacher directions are important and essential for success in school and the world of work." But now she realizes that students can excel in participation without mastering standards - and master standards without being A+ class participants. She believes teachers should give a separate, clearly-labeled grade for participation while reserving the main grade for mastery of the material.

 

"Standards-Based Grading: Are We Ready for the Leap?" by Barbara Mondloch in The Language Educator, August 2011 (Vol. 6, #4, p. 7), http://www.actfl.org.

Schools Cannot Do It Alone

Is your district staff excited and ready to move forward with innovative practices that will revolutionize the way learning looks or takes place in your community? If the answer is "yes", have you really engaged your community to build solid support for those significant changes?

One practical resource that can help garner that needed stakeholder understanding, trust, permission, and support for change is Schools Cannot Do It Alone, by Jamie Vollmer. As he so insightfully recognizes, "You cannot touch a school without touching the culture of the surrounding town...No change takes place in isolation. Any attempt to significantly transform our schools alters the American way of life."

As a lawyer/businessman-turned-education advocate and a speaker at this year's SAI conference, Vollmer gives us this practical how-to manual for engaging your community in the "great conversation" that can build a foundation for local education support. No time to read the book? Visit "The Great Conversation" with Vollmer  for steps you can take to connect with your stakeholders

Students Ask Their Own Questions

 

"When students know how to ask their own questions," say Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of the Right Question Institute in this Harvard Education Letter article, "they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own." Questioning is usually seen as the teacher's province, but Rothstein and Santana believe that students can be taught how to do it themselves, in the process fine-tuning their divergent, convergent, and metacognitive skills.

 

Here are the six steps of the Question Formulation Technique, which takes 45 minutes the first time students use it but can be cut down to 10-15 minutes with practice:

  • The teacher suggests a focus. For example, a class studying the 1804 Haitian revolution was provoked into formulating questions by the statement, "Once we were slaves; now we are free."
  • Students brainstorm questions. They begin after learning four rules: (a) Ask as many questions as you can; (b) Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; (c) Write down every question exactly as it is stated; and (d) Change any statements into questions.
  • Students fine-tune their questions. The teacher helps students see the difference between an open-ended and single-answer question and gives them time to edit theirs so as to elicit the maximum depth, quality, and information.
  • Students prioritize their questions. The teacher suggests criteria for picking the most important questions - for example, "Choose the three questions you most want to explore further."
  • Students and teacher decide on how to use the questions. For example, one class decided that their Socratic Seminar question would be, "How do poverty and injustice lead to violence in A Tale of Two Cities?"
  • Students reflect on what they have learned.

Rothstein and Santana say this process improves group participation, classroom management, and equity of outcomes. Using this process, teachers realize that just asking, "Do you have any questions?" elicits very little, but teaching students how to generate and use their own questions is a powerful spur to high-level learning.

 

"Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions" by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana in Harvard Education Letter, September/October 2011 (Vol. 27, #5, p. 1-2, 5-6).

 

Iowa ASCD - Twitter!

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Iowa ASCD is the source for developing instructional leadership. Serving more than 750 educators - teachers, principals, superintendents, directors of curriculum, technology specialists, college professors, AEA staff - Iowa ASCD strives to develop the collaborative capacity to impact the learning of each and every student in Iowa.

 

In This Issue
Seven Steps
Kahn Academy
School on the Move
Standards-Based Grading
Cannot Do It Alone
Students Ask Own Questions
Iowa ASCD Twitter!

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Leslie Moore

 

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Jason Ellingson 

   

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Julie Davies

 

Membership Information

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Marcia Tweeten 

 

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Elaine Smith-Bright 

 

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Pam Armstrong-Vogel 

Susan Pecinovsky 

 

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Sue Wood 

 

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Kelly Adams 

 

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Chris Welch 

 

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Amy Wichman 

 

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Lou Howell