ASCD Inservice

ASCD Unveils Its 2009 Legislative Agenda

ASCD unveiled its 2009 Legislative Agenda at Annual Conference this past weekend.

This agenda comes at an especially critical time because President Obama and his new administration are about to transform the nation’s education system through a variety of policy initiatives, most notably the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ASCD will use the agenda to influence the policy discussions and decisions that shape federal education legislation and reforms at the state and local levels.

The 2009 agenda calls for

• Equitable educational opportunities so that all students have access to great teachers, engaging and rigorous coursework, and relevant educational technology and career and technical programs.
• Highly effective educators who elicit growth in student achievement and receive comprehensive support at all stages of their careers, from preparation and induction to ongoing professional development.
• Innovative educational redesign that is research-based and ensures that young children are well prepared for school, students successfully transition from the elementary to secondary grades, and high school graduates are ready for success in a global society.
• Comprehensive and accurate measurement of school success that incorporates multiple indicators and analyzes student growth over time.

In his March column about the agenda, ASCD Executive Director Gene Carter said, “ASCD needs the help of educators nationwide to advocate on behalf of these principles. Our legislative agenda is only as good as the ASCD members and educators who give it voice.”

Do you have local experiences or stories that affirm the need for these core principles? What would you tell your local or state policymakers when talking about them?

Black Males’ Perceptions of School

A crucial “conversation about race” got started—but, of course, nowhere near finished—at the African American Critical Issues Network meeting at ASCD's Annual Conference. Charles Willis, a middle school principal in Birmingham, Alabama, was talking about how administrators can inspire black males' intellectual pursuits. He mentioned the need for high expectations for the kids who may have adopted "alternate personas" to defend themselves against the negative images and obstacles they face.

When a white educator from the audience mentioned she faced opposition from her fellow teachers when she tried to teach Shakespeare to students, the conversation got passionate. An African-American educator wondered whether Shakespeare was really the "pinnacle experience." She thought what students might really need was to learn reading skills and have wider reading opportunities. After further comments, it seems both speakers were closer to being on the same page than they first realized—they both wanted to raise the bar for students and they both thought connecting with students was a priority. How to do those things effectively and without racial bias remains a big question.

One of the founders of the network spoke eloquently: "Low expectations keep us from realizing our dreams." Presenter Charles Willis urged, "Even if criticized, keep on raising the bar."

Would Your Admins Embrace MySpace?

When I think of schools embracing MySpace, as Glenn Moses advocated in his Saturday session, I think about the awkward sort of hugs common to weddings, reunions, and work parties. But Moses gives three convincing arguments for giving students broader Internet access in school:

1. Students are already using it.
2. If we block it, they'll get around it.
3. If we don't teach our students how to use social networking appropriately, who will?

To argument one, Moses points out that every kid with a cell phone has Google (via text message to 46645) in their pockets. As David Warlick has asked, "What are we going to ask on our tests when kids are walking in with Google in their pocket? Are they going to be better questions than we ask today?"

But what about safety?

Creating a Consortium in Early Education Initiatives

Susan D’Alessandro, of the Ronald L. Meinders Primary Learning Center, came to present her "Creating a Consortium in Early Education Initiatives" Annual Conference session with a goal in mind: "I want you to understand that partnership is possible."

Describing the creation of the Southern Ocean County Initiatives in Education Consortium in New Jersey, D’Alessandro took attendees on a journey that began in 2004. Seeking collaboration, she began working with a local car dealer to fund a series of workshops for parents of preschoolers and a free series of professional development workshops for early childhood educators.

Since its creation, the consortium has provided 43 hours of workshops and reached 602 people. D’Alessandro advised attendees to look for the hot topic in their district and work with groups to create solutions. She also encouraged educators to not be afraid to ask for funding, speakers, or donations, especially from retail stores, car dealerships, banks, foundations, hospital community relations directors, and retired teachers' union members.

Has your district sought support from businesses or foundations for professional development for your school community? What's worked? What hasn't?

Teaching the At-Risk Teenage Brain

Sheryl Feinstein is an assistant professor of education at Augustina College in South Dakota, where she teaches courses in educational psychology and adolescent development. Her Annual Conference presentation, "Teaching the At-Risk Teenage Brain," explored the functions of the teenage brain and how these processes explain teens' sometimes erratic behavior.

Feinstein defines the at-risk teenager as one in danger of emotional or academic problems or both, including crime, violence, and substance abuse. Factors that put teens at risk include poverty, academic failure, and delinquent friends, among others. According to Feinstein, who has conducted boundless research and written two books on the subject, the adolescent brain differs from the adult brain in three primary ways:

• Overproduction of dendrites (greater propensity for learning new things).
• Pruning, or loss of dendrites not being used, occurring more rapidly.
• Decision-making process governed by the amygdala, making teens emotionally-driven.

Primary use of the amygdala is also the cause of misunderstandings, incendiary language, and bad decision making. Understanding the cerebral functions that cause certain behaviors is a big step toward knowing how to effectively teach teenagers and defuse any possible confrontations.

Are there certain teaching practices and school policies you recommend for supporting the teen brain?

Transforming Preschool for Inner-City Children

After 12 years researching the Chicago Commons Project, Daniel and Sandra Scheinfeld provided their Annual Conference audience with background and case studies about the revolutionary approach. Modeled after the approach that originated in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the Chicago Commons Project eliminates the need for a set curriculum and instead employs trained teachers who pose challenging questions to the children and inspire understanding of the world around them.

The Reggio Emilia approach emphasizes the need to listen to the preschoolers, their desires, their interests, and their curiosities, which are then translated into a naturally flowing curriculum. According to Scheinfeld and Scheinfeld, this process is the co-construction of ideas and understandings through dialogue, motivated by the learners' shared interests and curiosities. This collaborative process of learning applies to all of the participants; children, teachers, other staff, and parents. In this approach, everyone is considered a learner and a researcher.

What approach do you find most effective in early childhood education?

Let’s Get Personal: Tips to Humanize Online Learning

In their session, "Let's Get Virtual: Tips to Humanize Online Learning," University of South Dakota Professors Doreen Gosmire, Marcia Morrison, and Joanne Van Osdel presented one of the upsides to online learning.

"Online discussion allows (and ensures) everyone is responding. If you were sitting in class, some would not contribute,” they said. Introverted students are more prone to come forth in online discussions to express their understanding of and interest in the subject.

Online group discussions provide social interaction, promote reflection, and humanize technology. After all, online learning has real students analyzing, writing, and collaborating. In discussions, for instance, the professor is moderator, providing challenging and thought-provoking questions that inspire students to provide substantive responses, quite often in real time.

Being consistently available is also vital in creating rapport with students and establishing credibility for yourself. Online discussions, assignments, and quizzes or tests are some of these great tools, but can be lost in a virtual world if educators don't provide adequate reminders. Give students the same information over and over. Use e-mail, online scheduling and syllabus, and instructor's notes via wiki to remind them, advises Gosmire.

If you've taught online, how did you humanize the learning exchange?

Moodle: E-Learning Made Easy

Promoting technologically savvy classrooms and teachers is a priority these days. How do teachers implement technological skills effectively? ASCD Annual Conference presenter Carmalita Bieniek shared the simple answer: Moodle.

Moodle is a free virtual learning environment that schools can download. Virtual classrooms enable unmotivated kids—those students who fall asleep in class, suffer homesickness, or dislike attending formal classes—to persevere and ultimately graduate. The technology students' use on a daily basis to interact socially with their peers can now help them succeed academically.

Bieniek loves Moodle because it allows students to take ownership of their learning instead of being passive observers in their own education. The top three benefits of using Moodle include the following:

• Flexibility: Everything on the Web is incorporated into Moodle, but teachers choose the resources that work best for their class.
• Motivation: Students are motivated to learn and graduate.
• Anytime, anywhere learning: Both teachers and students break free of time constraints.

Do you think online education can decrease high school dropout rates in the United States?

Leadership Lessons from Apollo to Discovery

At ASCD’s second general session, NASA Astronaut Eileen Collins spoke about her experience as the first female to pilot an American space craft (Discovery) as well as the first female to command a manned shuttle (STS-3 Columbia). With more than 852 hours logged in space, Collins has seen her fair share of risks, conflicts, and crises; and she’s had to manage these and a team of fellow astronauts. Collins offers these tips for educators as leaders:

• Know your job. Or, in this case, knowing the curriculum you are leading allows you to build credibility and continuously try to improve yourself.

• Know the people you work with. Knowing your students on a more personal level helps you better understand them and their behavior. By always keeping your integrity, including being consistently honest, ethical, and credible, your students better understand the decisions you make and why you make them.

• Practice active listening. Along with an open mind, active listening offers teachers the advantage of knowing what their students actually want or expect from each lesson.

• Be humble. That doesn’t mean you need to be bashful or quiet. Rather, it is a trait that can promote team work and self-improvement when you value your students’ and peers’ thoughts and opinions.

• Be creative. Leaders must constantly be creative while also fostering creativity in their teams. Creativity is a complex cognitive process that develops better problem solving and critical thinking skills in students.

What role do you think leadership skills play in being an educator? Can you relate to any of Collins's tips?

Microblogging from the OCCC Is OOC

That's the Orange County Convention Center, where the past few days, ASCD '09 attendees have been off-the-hook tweeting each other with session highlights, live blogged sessions, session wikis, you name it. Do a Twitter search on the #ascd or #ascd09 hashtags and you'll find 

• Blogging: Chalkdust 101, In Practice (lots of live blogging here), Ecology of Education, The Cornerstone Blog, Principal Reflections 

• We're tagged on Hitchhikr

• Wikis: with live blogged sessions, on Admins. & Web 2.0, DI & Web 2.O, and educators embracing MySpace

• Session notes shared on Google Docs

• Gaming & Learning session Webcast on UStream

• And just generally putting their resources and presentation materials online: Ten Things to Do With a Laptop, Data Data Everywhere, Engaging Young Learners with Web 2.0

I know there's more out there, but this is one heck of a start. Way to go attendees and presenters for really embodying what it means to learn beyond boundaries!

Fix the 9th Grade Problem in PreK

The achievement gap is a deep-seated, long-standing, hard-to-solve issue that isn't going away unless we use a strategic approach to solve it, Vanderbilt University Professor Joseph Murphy told ASCDers in his session entitled "Leadership Lessons for Closing the Achievement Gap." His recent research points to some "big-picture conclusions," including that tackling the problem in high school is often too late.

Contrary to public opinion, schools don't cause the achievement gap, and cannot close it on their own, he said. We must not let society off the hook, he said, noting that raising the average income of lower-income people by $4,000 a year would go far in closing the gap. Yet schools still have the biggest potential to help and when they fail to act, children become more disadvantaged. Among the promising school interventions that work— used best in combination—include preschool programs, smaller class size especially in the early years, use of cooperative strategies, personalized learning, extended time for learning, extracurricular activities targeted particularly for underachieving students, and, finally, providing high-quality teachers who understand the students, respect them, and believe that the students can learn.

The place to fix the 9th grade problem is in preschool, he reiterated. "The hill gets higher as we climb it . . . It is time to see the problem as the moral and ethical issue it is."

Paying Attention: Effectively Communicating Education Improvement

Most schools recognize the need for improved public outreach, especially with the increasing popularity of alternative education media. EduFlack blogger Patrick Riccards had several suggestions for developing strategy in his session, "Paying Attention: Effectively Communicating Education Improvement". (His full account of this session, here.)

Riccards began by dispelling myths: the importance of big budgets, big names, research-heavy focus, strong media relationships, emphasis on traditional media, and a lack of media interest in education stories. So what's true? "At the heart of effective communications is good storytelling."

Riccard noted that audience targeting is essential, especially when using blogs and Twitter. However, he warned against seeing the media itself as an audience: "They are a conduit and a lever but can't actually get anything done unless the message they pass along inspires action. Your goal should never be to simply 'get a news story'; you want to change public behavior."

How does your district handle external communications? Does it blog or Twitter?

Liveblogging "Using Humor in the Classroom"

Angela Powell over at In Practice liveblogged the heck out of the session "Using Humor in the Classroom." We're relieved to learn from her coverage:

Don't worry if you're not funny: people remember content 16% better when humor is used, even when the humor sucks and they don't laugh.

Get the full session here.

Briefly, Why Taiwan's 1st in Math

Presenters Shu-Wei Wu and Mary Kay McGurl in the session, "Academic Excellence: Learning from Taiwanese Excellence," presented a compare/contrast of some of the defining qualities of U.S. and Taiwanese schools and education.

Notably, in Taiwan, parents pay for everything. Lunch, materials, uniforms, school--if they can pay, they do. If they can't pay, students are guaranteed an education from grades 1–9. Also, all K and preK learning must be arranged by parents through private institutions. In terms of curriculum, Taiwanese students don't take electives--it's all core curriculum, and subjects are not sequenced by categories. For example, math is taught as math, not algebra, geometry, and calculus.

It Takes a Girl to Raise a Village

This morning, author, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize candidate Greg Mortenson spoke about his journey toward his first book, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace, One School at a Time, and how this snowballed into an ongoing, global agenda to end poverty through education.

Mortenson talked a lot about the critical need to educate girls, especially in developing nations. Global statistics show that populations where girls have access to education have lower rates of infant mortality, more sustainable population growth, and a better quality of life. And the girls teach their mothers how to read and write, and mothers, Mortenson said, are critical to shaping their sons' decisions to join a gang or militia, or use drugs.

It's interesting that Mortenson's publishers originally lobbied to run Three Cups of Tea with the subtitle "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism, One School at a Time." They switched to Mortenson's suggested ". . . Mission to Promote Peace . . . " after the book stalled on the shelves. Next thing you know, it's a best-seller. It's encouraging to hear someone talk about improving communities through educating girls who will be the torch-bearers of peace for generations to come.

See a longer session recap in the Conference Daily newspaper, and if you're interested in getting your students involved with Mortenson's Pennies for Peace program, go to www.penniesforpeace.org.

Transforming Urban Classrooms Through Strengths: Making Students Smart Again

In "Transforming Urban Classrooms Through Strengths: Making Students Smart Again," Dr. Yvette Jackson, CEO of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, presented about how to reverse underachievement. Throughout her interactive presentation, Jackson focused on her Pedagogy of Confidence principle, stating teachers must feel a sense of confidence in order to bring about the same confidence in their students. Jackson also stressed the importance of assessing students' strengths, rather than their weaknesses, in order to effectively motivate them.

Jackson outlined six strategies that she calls "low focus/high impact":

• High intellectual performance comes about when teachers focus more on the development of students’ cognitive skills.
• Ask the students what they are looking to get out of their education.
• Understanding the learning process in terms of physiology and emotion helps teachers cater their lessons to each student.
• Student strengths are an important focus in order to nurture the students’ individual skills.
• Prerequisites for learning set the stage for any new information students will be learning. Each new subject is like a new language that students need to learn.
• Situate learning in the lives of students in order for them to feel more connected to the topic. If they can’t relate somehow, why should they pay attention?

How do you think perceptions or labels may have played a role in your own students' learning? How do you support student strengths?

ASCD's 2009 Outstanding Young Educators

ASCD announced its Outstanding Young Educator Award (OYEA) winners at today's opening General Session at Annual Conference. Marc Cohen, principal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Germantown, Md., took home the administrator award and Bijal Damani, an 11th and 12th grade commerce and business studies teacher in the Galaxy Education System in Rajkot, India, won the teacher award. Last year, ASCD revamped the OYEA Program to allow for two winners (a teacher and an administrator) and to provide both the winners and a cadre of honorees with opportunities for leadership skill building and sharing of best practices with one another and the ASCD community.

Remember This!

Those who remembered to attend Marilee Sprenger's "Eight Ways to Help You and Your Students Remember" session walked out armed with knowledge about memory and practical ways to improve it in both themselves and students. Findings and exercises were provided for each strategy with advice on how to adapt them for classrooms:

• Teach others
• Visualize
• Movement
• Mnemonics
• Chunk
• Games
• Music
• Storytelling

Sprenger also gave suggestions that enhance health and performance on the exercises:

• Eat right
• Get plenty of rest
• Exercise
• Hang out with interesting people
• Learn something new
• Teach someone else
• Talk about your experiences

Sprenger affirmed that improving memory in classrooms is not impossible. Providing techniques and study skill tips for students to adopt as their own is the solution, she says. "Practice makes permanent."

What memory aids do you use in your classroom? Have you found any of Sprenger's strategies useful?

Social Networks Are the R&D Teams of the Future

This morning's session "Professional Learning Networks Using Web 2.0 Tools," presented by Meg Ormiston, shared a bunch of networking tools (find the liveblogged rundown on the session's wikispace) and some big ideas:

• "Social networking for educators is about breaking down isolation. Imagine if every 2nd grade teacher was on Twitter and their network was primarily other 2nd grade teachers. It would accomplish so much more than all our binders of curriculum."

• Use Twitter and Skype in tandem to arrange for experts to speak to your staff or students (i.e., reach out to your Twitter network, "I need an expert on X to speak to my class/staff," and then schedule their availability for a Skype presentation).

• Use LibraryThing.com (or SafariU) to create professional libraries that you can share with staff.

• Video is the future of professional development. Want to know how to use some of these new Web 2.0 tools? YouTube. For example, Meg wanted to know how to use Google SketchUp, and found one printed book and 3000+ YouTube videos on how to use SketchUp. 

• "Also, for struggling learners—is the goal for kids to struggle with the book, or learn about gravity? We need to open up YouTube for teacher use.

This is the world we live in—especially our students and new teachers—we need to educate on how to use social networking responsibility, and use it."

Ormistan covered a variety of Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) and emphasized that harnessing the wisdom of crowds is the future of improving educational practices.

How are you using Web 2.0 to network with your colleagues? Have you seen benefits, resistance, or challenges to using Web 2.0 among educators?

Morning Must-Read ASCD09 Links

If you're following #ascd09 on Twitter, these are old news to you--but real quick, here are some places you can already check out for ASCD Annual Conference blogging:

Patrick at Chalkdust 101 sees the tech difference in this year's Con and is looking for content-rich examples of teaching 21st century skills.

Jason at Ecology of Education is taking in the enormity of ASCD09.

Dennis at Liveblogging at ASCD09 Wikipsaces covered this morning's Professional Learning Networks Using Web 2.0 Tools and will cover more sessions throughout.

Angela at AngelaMaiers.com catches up with Art Costa and Bena Kallick to talk Habits of Mind.

Did we miss any? Add 'em in the comments!