Dangerously Irrelevant | @mcleod

Yesterday I blogged an update on the 7-day Innovation Academy that we are conducting for 72 school leaders in North Dakota. Today I thought I’d share that we are about to launch a new initiative in Virginia.

The first round of the Virginia Is for Learners Innovation Network will launch in March and run through December of this year. Applications are rolling in from Virginia school districts right now. Up to 20 lead innovation teams will be accepted. We will spend 6 days all together on site, plus Amos Fodchuk and his coaches from Advanced Learning Partnerships will be facilitating both regional meetups across the state and ongoing coaching with each participating district.

I’m very excited to be working with Amos and Pam Moran, Executive Director of the Virginia School Consortium for Learning (and former superintendent of Albemarle County (VA) Schools), on this initiative. Other key players include Gena Keller, Acting Deputy Superintendent for the Virginia Department of Education, and Ted Dintersmith, who once again is lending his generous support to building leadership capacity for future-ready learning, teaching, and schooling in yet another state.

The goal is to eventually have about 60 of Virginia’s school districts participate in the Innovation Network (20 per year x 3 years). Unlike any other Innovation Academy that I’ve helped conduct, this one has a significant ongoing coaching component that I’m super enthused about. I can’t wait to work with Amos and his team to support our participants over the course of the initiative. Plus I’m a Virginia kid so it will be great to be back in my home state multiple times this year…

Stay tuned for more information. The adventure continues!

Back in October I blogged that CASTLE and I were launching a 7-day Innovation Academy for school leaders in North Dakota. Generously supported by Ted Dintersmith and in cooperation with the North Dakota Council of Educational Leaders, the goal was to kick off a three-year investment in leadership capacity-building across the state for future-ready learning, teaching, and schooling. I thought it might be time for a quick update…

We are three days into the Innovation Academy, with Day 4 coming up in February. We have 72 participants representing 14 school districts. Here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• Day 1 – the big picture; relevance gaps between schools and the needs of society and our graduates; new demands related to college and career readiness; the impacts of automation on the economy and workforce preparation; computers that can see, hear, move, think, and do; new literacies, including multimedia and transmedia
• Day 2 – what does it mean to be a connected learner?; connected learning audit (personal analysis of our analog and digital learning connections); our connectedness outside of school; connected learning in schools (lots of examples!), crowdsourced learning and resource production
• Day 3 – student agency and deeper learning, with a strong emphasis on project- and inquiry-based learning; school models that foster deeper learning and student engagement; innovation leaders across the state presented what they’re doing in a PBL showcase
• Day 4 [coming up in a few weeks!] – rich technology infusion (with a focus on the 4 Shifts Protocol) and blended learning models; translating 21st century vision statements and frameworks into concrete, day-to-day classroom implementation; innovation leaders across the state will be presenting again in a tech integration showcase

As we go along, we not only are highlighting what’s possible but also trying to connect participants to educators in the state who already are doing this work. This allows them to see innovations in action without having to drive too far. We also have an ongoing book study where we discuss a couple of chapters of Ted’s book, What School Could Be, each time we meet.

Things have gone very well so far. Here are our ongoing evaluation results:

Our Innovation Academy participants have been amazing. They have dived right in and are doing a fantastic job of wresting with difficult and challenging concepts. It’s not easy to rethink school but they are giving it all they can. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with during the last two days of the Academy, which is when we begin action planning for next year (and beyond)…

The adventure continues!

[Learn more about my Innovation Academies – including all evalution results – by clicking here!]

I recently had the good fortune to talk with Aaron Maurer, an amazing Iowa educator who I’m proud to call friend. Aaron also received one of ISTE’s 2018 Making It Happen Awards! Aaron invited me to participate in his Coffee for the Brain podcast and the end result is below.

• How to take our leadership and teaching to new levels

Happy listening!

Like many school districts, the Southeast Polk School District in Pleasant Hill, Iowa monitors the Web usage of its students on district-provided computers for inappropriate activity. And like some school districts, Southeast Polk also uses a monitoring service that sends weekly emails to parents summarizing their students’ Internet search history. This raises some difficult issues because we know that young people need space away from the heavy thumb of adults for healthy identity formation and the development of self. 

Why do teenagers go to the mall, or congregate at the park, or cruise the strip, or gravitate toward the online spaces where adults aren’t? Because they need spaces that are separate from us. Should we monitor every single book or online resource that our children read? Should we use biometric school lunch checkout systems so that we can see exactly what our children eat for lunch each day? Should we dig through our children’s belongings and rooms every morning after they leave for school to see if they’re doing something that they shouldn’t? Should we install RFID and GPS tags into our children’s clothing and backpacks so that we can track them in real time? Should we slap lifelogging cameras on our kids and review them every evening? Should we install keystroke logging software or monitor everything that youth search for on the Internet? Which of these makes you uncomfortable and which doesn’t?

We can think of numerous reasons why students might search the Internet for things that they don’t want their parents to know about, just like they talk daily about things that they don’t want their parents to know about. For instance, perhaps there is a gay boy who’s struggling to make sense of things but is not ready to come out to his family yet. Or a teenage girl with liberal politics in an ultraconservative family. Or a young couple that is pregnant and searching for information and options before they tell their parents. Or a teen who’s in a spat with a peer but doesn’t want clueless adults stepping in and creating more drama. Or any teen or tween with normal adolescent concerns who just needs some information, resources, or nonlocal empathy and connection. Do these students deserve some space? Do they deserve a presumption of privacy? Or should they immediately and automatically be outed by school software?

danah boyd asks some important questions about youth privacy, including Who has the right to monitor youth? and Which actors continue to assert power over youth? She also notes that:

Just because teens’ content is publicly accessible does not mean that it is intended for universal audiences nor does it mean that the onlooker understands what they see. . . . How do we leverage the visibility of online content to see and hear youth in a healthy way? How do we use the technologies that we have to protect them rather than focusing on punishing them? . . . How do we create eyes on the digital street? How do we do so in a way that’s not creepy?

Similarly, First Monday notes:

The right to privacy is stipulated in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [and] Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as numerous international and regional human rights treaties and conventions [and has been found to be a protected Constitutional right by the U.S. Supreme Court]. The right to privacy essentially protects the integrity of the individual and his or her home, family, and correspondence. A common denominator for the different areas of privacy is access control: thus control over what others know about us; control over private decisions and actions; and control over a physical space. The right to privacy builds on the presumption that a zone of autonomy around the individual is central to individual freedom and self-determination.

Should school districts be complicit in the hypersurveillance of our young people? What messages do we send our students when we monitor their every action and send out weekly reports? Are we creating digital social graphs for our children and then placing them in the hands of commercial vendors? Are we intentionally instituting oppositional and distrustful stances against our own students? Are we fostering the creation of graduates who will shrug at the infringement of their civil liberties as adults because their families and educators have done so for years?

I wonder if there’s an opt out for families that don’t want to Big Brother or helicopter parent their children…

See also

• Surveillance Technologies and Children
• “Honestly, We’re Not Spying on Kids”
• Types of Surveillance (of youth)
• Black Mirror shows who’s really losing their mind in the digital age – parents

Image credit: Big Brother is watching you, Photon

Betsy Corcoran, CEO of EdSurge, asked me to do two podcast interviews with her while I was at the EdSurge Fusion conference in San Francisco in October. The second recording is now available. Betsy asked me to discuss the 4 Shifts Protocol; my new book, Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning; and how we should be thinking about instructional redesign for deeper learning, greater student agency, more authentic work, and rich technology infusion.

• How to move from digital substitution to ‘deeper learning’ [12:51]

Happy listening!

We spent the last 200+ years (at least) pushing consumption models of learning on most of our students. We asked them to be passive recipients of whatever information came from the teacher or textbook. We gave them few opportunities to question the reliability or validity of the information that we spoon-fed them. We trusted that someone else did the filtering for us and them beforehand. And in many cases, we actually punished kids who dared to ask questions or present alternative viewpoints.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that we now have an information / media literacy problem with our adults. We shouldn’t be surprised that most of our citizens have trouble determining the validity and reliability of digital and online information sources. We shouldn’t be surprised that we are easy prey for those who spread misinformation, deception, and outright lies.

It’s going to get even worse as new tools for creating and spreading falsehoods proliferate. We should be more alarmed that we’re not doing more about this issue in our elementary and secondary classrooms. But we don’t seem to be. Not yet, not in most school systems. A few token ‘digital citizenship’ lessons from a teacher or librarian and we seem to think we’ve addressed this concern. A few conversations that in no way prepare students for this:

When will we take seriously the challenge of preparing our graduates for our new information landscape? And what are we going to do about all of our graduates?

… you must have deeper teaching.

You can’t get to deeper learning with worksheets and end-of-chapter review questions.

You can’t get to deeper learning with self-paced adaptive learning modules that emphasize facts and procedures.

You can’t get to deeper learning with multiple-choice software and apps.

You can’t get to deeper learning without actually changing day-to-day lessons and units.

You can’t get to deeper learning without shifting toward critical thinking, problem-solving, student agency, and authentic work.

You can’t get to deeper learning without changing your teacher observation and evaluation rubrics.

You can’t get to deeper learning without changing your classroom walkthrough templates.

You can’t get to deeper learning without changing your hiring criteria and interview protocols.

You can’t get to deeper learning without changing what you ask PLCs to focus on.

You can’t get to deeper learning without changing your professional learning structures.

You can’t get to deeper learning without changing your budget.

You can’t get to deeper learning without changing the types of concrete ‘look fors’ and ‘think abouts’ that you prioritize as a school leadership team.

You can’t get to deeper learning with replicative, shallow instruction and status quo leadership behaviors.

You can’t get to deeper learning without taking risks.

Your new 21st century learning framework is awesome. How are you going to ensure it’s more than just lip service?

Image credit: deep eye, carlosdiazwa

Every school system has pockets of innovation. Those three forward-thinking teachers in the elementary school, that one grade-level team in the middle school, the department that’s really trying to do something different at the high school, that amazing principal over there, and so on. As school leaders we’re proud of – and point to – that cutting-edge work and rightfully so.

But we also have to recognize that pockets of innovation mean that inequities exist. What if you’re a student that doesn’t have one of those forward-thinking elementary teachers, who isn’t on that middle school team, who has nominal exposure to that innovative high school department, or who doesn’t attend that principal’s building? You’re out of luck.

We always will have educators who are ahead of others. That’s inevitable. What’s not inevitable is our lack of a plan to scale desired innovations. What’s not inevitable is our lack of a guaranteed viable curriculum that strives for every student to accomplish more than mastery of factual recall and procedural regurgitation. If we want our pockets of innovation to ever be more than just pockets, we have to intentionally and purposefully scaffold and design and support to move the entire system to something greater. We also have to be smart about the design choices that we make. For instance, that intervention / remediation / extension time block that you created in your school schedule? During that time, who suffers through low-level thinking work in order to ‘catch up’ and who’s building robots or rockets? The very mechanisms that we create to close achievement gaps often intensify life success gaps.

Who in your schools gets to become future-ready and who doesn’t? Are you remedying traditional inequities or exacerbating them? What’s your plan to scale your innovations so that every student has opportunities to be prepared for life success, not just a few?

Image credit: Pockets, Astera Schneeweisz

Will Richardson said:

As schools and classrooms, why do we exist today? What do we believe? What are our values? What are our deepest commitments to the children we serve? And do we live all of that?

Without coherent, clearly communicated answers to those questions, no serious change will survive. And, importantly, there will be nothing to judge the next “new thing” against.

I know “change fatigue” is real. But that’s not what most people are tired of. What they’re tired of is incoherence, of flailing away at change that isn’t driven by a belief system everyone is committed to living.

via https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6473548129395318784

Nicely said, Will…

[Every week a ‘Monday Morning Message (MMM)’ email goes out to all doctoral students from a faculty or staff member in the CU Denver School of Education and Human Development. Here’s my second one, which came out today.]

[Please join Dr. Heather Johnson and me for one or both of our two Spring 2019 social media workshops for SEHD faculty and students!]

In my previous MMM, I noted the power of having an active and visible online presence as part of our professional and scholarly work. In this MMM, I want to follow up on some of the ideas that I articulated in my previous message. 

I had an opportunity recently to participate in a gathering of CU Denver faculty and staff at which we discussed and debated the merits of including our digital work in our tenure and promotion portfolios. I advocated strongly for the idea that the more visible we are, the more impact we can have. Not every scholar or educator wants to be a public intellectual. But for those of us who want our ideas to spread and who actually want to influence practicing educators and educational systems, participating in these online spaces is critically important.

Unfortunately, two decades after the Internet became accessible to the masses, many educators still are slow to realize the possibilities that accompany our new digital tools and online environments. As a faculty member who has an outsized social media presence (53,000+ Twitter followers; video series with 100+ million views; one of the top education blogs in the world, etc.), I can attest that there is great power in being engaged in relevant online communities. Every day I learn with P-12 and postsecondary educators who are doing amazing things in their domains.

One of the reasons that I think many educators and faculty are hesitant to participate in social media spaces is that we incessantly hear about the negative aspects of those platforms. Tales of “Bad Twitter” are legion, for example. We hear less often about the numerous ways to use “Good Twitter,” professional blogs, YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, Pinterest boards, Facebook groups, and other platforms in ways that are productive and empowering. There always will be those who engage with our work in negative ways, but we can utilize a variety of strategies and techniques to manage our networks, decrease our exposure to bad actors, and engage with the audiences that we are trying to reach in order to share ideas and resources and have productive conversations.

I would encourage you to see how the following scholars are engaging online. They are great models for how to use social media in empowered ways for research dissemination, policy advocacy, and educational impact.

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, @tressiemcphd, tressiemc.com (sociology and higher education) 
• Julian Vasquez Heilig, @professorjvh, cloakinginequity.com (P-12 educational equity)
• Chris Emdin, @chrisemdin, chrisemdin.com (#HipHopEd and science education)
• Sara Goldrick-Rab, @saragoldrickrab, saragoldrickrab.com (college affordability)
• Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, @vamboozled_, vamboozled.com (educator assessment)
• Bruce Baker, @schlfinance101, schoolfinance101.wordpress.com (school finance)

What these postsecondary educators recognize is that if we don’t engage online, we cede conversational ground, policymaking influence, and mindshare around good educational practices to others who ARE willing to chime in, regardless of how inaccurate or harmful their contributions are. That’s the ultimate point of this week’s MMM. Are we just going to sit back while others offer misinformation and educationally-unsound practices or are we ready to engage?

Previous MMMs

• Increasing the visibility and impact of our work [July 2, 2018]

Image credit: Social media class, mhmarketing