Category: Education

We Snuck A Teacher Into SXSW.Edu This Year

Post author By North Navigation
Post date March 11, 2016

We were only two hours in, yet Sarah and I had already hustled through the exhibitor floor, meandered in the Playground, created LED-light up clouds in a Makers Space session, and caught half a panel discussion on Competency-Based assessment. Now on the hunt for coffee, my 4th grade teacher companion, sporting a Canvas LMS tattoo sleeve, and Kahoot stickers proclaimed, “Wow, this is so different than any other conference.”

That caught my attention. “How so?” I asked. “We haven’t even really been here that long.” Without hesitation she exclaimed, “Everyone here seems so incredibly happy and optimistic about all of this stuff.” …then put a lid on small to-go cup.

“Hmmm, ok.” I responded. As we headed off to our next thing she abruptly stopped and turned to me. “Are there any teachers here, I mean really? ”

I assured her, “Well, it seems like there are more here than I’ve seen in the past. Do you think there should be more?” She pondered, “I’m not sure.” as we showed up late to a session on Mindfulness. “Actually, Yes. Although a bunch of teachers might bring a bit more reality to the scene than many here are looking for.”

The best way to predict the future is to make it.

The next day we sat and listened to futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal during her keynote, make a case for shaping the future. Five years from its inception, I wondered if SXSW.edu had taken steps to make a future where a teacher felt as if this was an education conference largely not attended by educators, or if in not planning, it had inadvertently become that. However, the “Signals of Change” that Ms. McGonigal alluded to during her address felt present this year. And in a message about understanding trends and projecting where they might potentially take us, there was a sense of collective I hadn’t felt in the past here, where potential solutions to problems should be the work of many, not just a few.

In years past, it seemed that key persons and groups used SXSW.edu as a platform to boldly propose a future where technology (specifically, their technology) would inevitably solve all of education’s problems: Give us enough funding and enough data, and we will match it with enough venture capital bravado and programmers and young MBA’s in a newly opened, hip office in a dilapidated urban neighborhood and create the software to solve education’s problems for you.

In subtle, but real ways…the message seemed to shift this year to: Give us enough understanding of your work, a sense of how you reach kids on a day to day basis through specific strategies and interactions, and we will come to your classrooms, listen to you, pay attention to how and why kids engage and use that to create supportive software to help amplify those approaches to solve problems with you.

In a session titled, What Do We Mean When We Ask if EdTech “Works”?, Chief of Learning Innovation at LEAP Innovations, Chris Liang-Vergara, summarized his team’s research report Finding What Works with this (as interpreted on a half cup of mediocre coffee after a very late night – all apologies Chris):

When people ask, “What are the qualities of a good digital learning tool?” we want to resist the urge to place the promise of measurable learning gains on the tools alone. The tool is such a small percent of the formula in relation to the skill of the instructor. Instead, we tend to look for tools that support innovative pedagogical practice, provide a learner focused approach, and enable the type of learner agency that the teachers are already looking for and fostering in their classrooms….where teachers don’t have these core expectations nor are implementing strategies that support student inquiry and access to diverse resources and differentiated demonstration of knowledge, the tools provide little help to change the outcomes of those classrooms.

Having spent the better part of the last 7 years watching educational software development largely focus on processes that take place at the perimeter of the teaching and learning cycle, it was refreshing to hear and see groups begin to circle back to the important instructional authoring and delivery pieces that truly inform best practice and inevitably have the most promise in supporting learning gains.

So as part of a team that showed up to illuminate our recent work with our colleagues from the Smithsonian on their new Learning Lab, we definitely felt like we were a part of that message and were thrilled with the numbers that turned out for our presentation and later for our social mixer in downtown Austin. It felt right sharing how much time we spent in classrooms, and how much of our system could be cited back to a specific teacher’s needs or a given group of 6th graders trying to accomplish a complex learning activity with one of our many prototypes. I was happy to see two of the teachers in the crowd who had been part of our testing team across 3 years of research and development and to know that our lead researcher, programmer, educator-specialist, and project director knew them personally.

The questions we received during our presentation and the conversations at our follow-up event were pointed, vibrant, and clear. Afterwards, we invited an eclectic group to come meet the Smithsonian team that included this small band of teachers interspersed with industry leads from t’es, Nova, SETDA , U.S. OET, National Film Board of Canada, the Annenberg Learner Foundation and NYLearns, amongst many others. (Thank you all for your attendance and support.) There was a general desire to see the ways in which teachers had played an active role in the organizing of open educational resources while applying of their own instructional cohesion as part of the process. The Smithsonian Learning Lab was received well, and many wanted to know what kinds of inputs, efforts, and culture supported its development and ongoing implementation. Good people intermingled with good drinks and food in a music filled environment where ideas could take form over handshakes, laughing, and genuine collegiality.

At one point I stumbled into a conversation amongst educators about what makes for a great teacher, and because we had asked people to remove their SXSW badges (and thus titles and affiliations) at the door in order to have people meet merely as people, I was surprised to to find out later that the conversation actually involved a software CEO, a lead actor/educator from the Royal Shakespeare Company, a middle school History teacher from Utah, and an Ed Tech Incubator from Tokyo. That evening was the culmination of one of the better experiences I’ve had at a conference in the last few years, and not one I would have suspected could have occurred at the SXSW.edu events of the past.

Perhaps this conference really is growing into an educator affair? Perhaps we bring more teachers next time? I thought to just ask Sarah since she was sitting next to me on our long flight back home.

Under the beam of the small personal overhead spotlight she had turned
on, I saw that she was scrolling through 3 days of emails from her teaching partner, scores of parents, administrative site announcements, fund-raiser events, etc. “Over 120 in all.” she tells me. She was working to select those that need immediate answers and those that can wait a day or two. So instead, I offered to start developing the slide show she’s required by her administrator to present to her faculty from my laptop while she openly cites from 3 days of notes. “That would be really helpful.” she replied with a sigh that I assume comes with connecting back to the reality of a teaching life waiting at home…”at least I got my grades in before I left.”

“So what do you want to share with your colleagues?” I asked, opening my laptop. She fished out her notes while I started a new Google Slide presentation, and typed What Sarah Learned @ SXSW.Edu.

Career and Technical Education Education Educational Leadership Professional Development STEM

Sorry for Making Trouble at Your STEM Conference

Post author By North Navigation
Post date December 5, 2015

The education conference is a thing. We’ve all attended them, learned things, felt connected at times, got excited, got bored, decided to skip out a bit early, maybe even met some other good teachers here and there. But wether attending and/or presenting, inevitably most of us have ended up back at school or work fairly untethered from the experience with little lasting evidence or modification to practice hoped for by those that organize these affairs. My last conference was the CA STEM Symposium a month ago, and after all these years, I got to experience a few things all together new and unexpected.

For the last decade, I’ve primarily been a presenter, but this time I was able to finally step back and take it in from the sidelines as just an observer. I wasn’t responsible for a presentation, nor was I responsible to learn something new for a current project or to bring back some research-based strategy or exciting new curriculum to my team. I merely went to support a program I had helped shape and grow over 7 years ago in my home state, and to listen in on how my former colleagues and their new teacher teams were using the tools and resources we had envisioned and designed. As is the format, the project was afforded a concurrent session as one of many offerings, so I volunteered to at least stand at the door and handout introductory materials to those coming in for the show. The room had a stated capacity of 100, and I had 150 handouts. As more and more attendees came down to our far end of one of the many hallways, the room slowly filled up, and I realized I was starting to run low on handouts. People started sitting on the floor, crowding around tables, and carrying chairs from the adjoining presentation rooms.

Yet, with 5 minutes remaining until start time, people were still streaming our direction and along with them I spotted a bonafide fire marshall charting a course through the crowd targeting the large line that was now forming at our session’s doors. As my handouts were now gone, I knew the room was clearly in breach of the official limits. I attempted to run some interference by saying, “Hi there; it looks like offering teachers free dry erase markers turns out to be a hit huh?” No smile. So I assured him I was now turning people away, and that I would be happy to go see if a larger room was open that we could move to in the next 15 minutes. He listened, said he understood, and then did his job by posting a sign in front of our door. He turned to me and said, “If one more person is allowed in, this presentation will be disbanded.” He politely thanked me for my understanding and walked back down the hall.

I quickly went down the hall as presentations were just starting. Quickly glancing into spaces up and down our two adjacent corridors, I couldn’t immediately find an empty room. But I did find plenty of almost empty rooms. Typically one or two people at the front, moving through slides and presenting on anything from Coding for Girls to Robotics for Middle School to STEM Integration with NGSS. Some rooms had 5 participants, some 10-15…none more than about 25 though. Lots of empty chairs. Lots of fairly quiet, reserved, small audiences in large, cavernous spaces. As I rounded the hallway corner returning to my team’s session, I immediately saw that 10 or so teachers, undaunted by the marshall’s sign, were standing on tiptoes just outside the room peering in as best they could. The sound of energy, excitement, engagement, and sharing was creeping out into the hallway. Flashing my “Presenter” card, I begged and squeezed my way back in and was struck by what I saw. I guess for so many years, I had just been part of the party and hadn’t really reflected on the difference between our sessions and others’. I decided to just snap some shots with my phone as evidence of what was occurring here as opposed to the session in progress next door…I bet you can guess which is which.

I had overhead the CA State Superintendent of Public Instruction that day promoting the concept of this conference by sharing that their goal was to:

“Bring together the experts, and the teachers in the field and in our classrooms. Let’s have them work and share their best practices, their best lesson plans, how they excite students in their classrooms…then clone the ideas and get it out there and have our teachers here go back motivated and excited to their classrooms to get students motivated and excited.” (Conf. Video)

With the exception of a few presentations I’ve attended over the last 15 years, it’s been my observation that gathering for 2-3 days in a central location for a few keynotes and a series of 1-2 hour sessions is not the ideal vehicle for “Sharing Best Practices” in a way that allows for the “cloning of ideas”. Those managing conferences would need to re-structure the nature of what is presented, how it is shown to more directly support teachers’ needs, and the means by which it is packaged for in-depth operational understanding and delivery to an audience of learners. But as was the case, a conference organizer who had received some complaints from participants unhappy they could not get into our session, came to find me and discuss if I felt our session went well despite the over-crowding. I shared with her that, “Again this year, as was the case last year, we maxed out the room and had to turn about 30-40 people away.” “That’s too bad.” she said, “because we had one of our larger rooms for 250 people open and available in the other corridor.” She must have read the pained expression I was trying to conceal when she offered, “But it sounds like a good problem to have though.” I guess it was a good problem to have if your concern was solely your session’s popularity with attendees.

The problem however, good or bad, wasn’t mine. The problem belonged to this and other conferences that want to be a venue to promote and share best practices. The problem was in determining the relative value of certain presentations as aligned to attendees’ interests and needs. The problem was in how to ensure presenters could provided or structure their concepts, ideas, resources in ways that optimize dissemination and acquisition for attendees. But most importantly, the problem is solvable. Clearly, some teams and projects have devised ways to functionally “Share Best Practices” while most others merely provide a perfunctory slide show of “resulting data”, “lessons learned” or “Big Aha’s” that has little actual impact or potential for extended implementation. For a start, conference planners who collect evaluation data on session attendance, session ratings, and the like, might begin by analyzing and using that data. For those sessions that have had similar “capacity problems” or are deemed high-quality through other metrics ….someone should contact those teams to know more about what they’re doing and how. For our part, I think there are 3 pronounced elements that draw teachers in and keep them continuously on the watch for our sessions at various conferences.

Provide Substance: What is being shared is bonafide, high-quality, teacher-developed, classroom-sourced, student-tested lessons, activities, and projects. Where there is instructional discourse and analysis of a given PD approach, it always comes with an observable model or product. Any teacher examining any of these materials can readily recognize it as evidence of another teacher’s instructional thinking, challenges, learning, and implementation. As such, it is simple to discuss in terms of its applicability in the classroom and in aiding others to consider the strategies and outcomes it entails. They are NOT general frameworks with some guiding instructional questions or a series of low-cognition assessments based on a specific standard. They are not administrative outlines or arbitrary pacing guides or any number of items so often passed off as “curriculum” or “instructional strategies”. We err on the side of what would be deemed of real value to help educators examine existing practice and consider opportunities for enriching their own strategies, approaches, and content.
Provide Access: Everything is published online and provided up front so people aren’t clamoring to grab handouts before their gone, or feel as if what they are being allowed to access is a mere teaser sample. Within the first 5-10 minutes of the presentation: Here’s the website, here’s every project, lesson, and related material…you can copy it, modify it, use it, whatever you want, its yours. There are no catches or exceptions. If you get the site address, and enough to know how to go retrieve it later and want to leave to another session,you can. We are satisfied that we are connecting people to an online community of practitioners and their resources, and for many, they can elect to engage in that space and time. We typically have 100 or so attendees to our session, but have averaged 600-800 new accounts in the hours and days immediately following our sessions. (So why do some tend to stay then for the full presentation?)
Provide Collegial Collaboration: We do not subscribe to the notion of our own expertise. Access to us is not what makes the process valid. We see ourselves as equal practitioners and colleagues to the people attending our session and participating in our programs. As such, budget is set aside to bring a diverse selection of actual teams of teachers from our projects to the conferences we attend now. As they are the creators and implementers of our processes in their own classrooms, their voices and experiences and products are a more valid interpretation of our work. We simply introduce the project’s primary concepts and then identify these teams by name, school, their respective teaching assignments or disciplines, and the focus of their projects. From their we invite attendees to move about the room to connect with our project leads, or with any one of our teams of teachers, to look at, and discuss the program, the materials, review samples of activities, explore methods of student engagement, assessments, ask questions about student work, and hopefully get what they need or at least a start on connecting with folks that can continue to assist them online beyond our session, beyond the conference by joining our learning communities.

What this looks like is indicative of what you saw in the hastily snapped pictures shared above and below. I believe there is real credence to what the Superintendent stated as an overarching goal. I just don’t believe that traditionally structured conferences are currently designed well to achieve those objectives. We have found that programs that engage teachers in the development of authentic learning products that adequately allow them to express their full instructional creativity and curricular craft in collaborative teams, both lends to their professional growth, and serve as rich experiences for discovery and discourse with other teachers when examining those products for use in their own classrooms. And when those products are intentionally designed and published as useable curricular artifacts in an accessible digital environment, people will indeed breach fire-codes to gather, engage and secure the practices shared by other quality instructors. This is what we propose a professional learning community looks like and how it gets shared out to others. Let the “cloning” begin.

Digital Learning Design Education Educational Partnerships Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Launching the World’s Largest OER Collection… Yeah, That Just Happened.

Post author By North Navigation
Post date November 24, 2015

Perhaps nobody told you, but over 1.35 million objects from the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, 9 major research centers, and the national zoo have been recently released and combined with custom tools to support rich, digital learning around the globe using the largest treasure trove of historical assets in the world.

Somewhere between 9 and 10am EST on a chilly Thursday morning late in October, a year of work culminated with the activation of a new domain. You might not have felt it, but the Smithsonian quietly released the single largest worldwide collection of OER by any one agency in the history of digital resource publishing. And the fun’s just begun.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. After a year of planning and design headed up by the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) with technical design and development led by Navigation North Learning, the Smithsonian Learning Lab was launched.

Three weeks beyond a very hushed “soft-launch”, SCLDA already finds itself managing nearly a 1,000 sessions a day and has over 600 registered users. Amazingly, over 700 private Learning Collections have been created, with over 100 of them now published by teams of Smithsonian educators and various classroom teachers from across the country. With the big, official “PR” launch still months away, many already seem to be finding their way to this new environment. Teachers do talk after all. And it’s no wonder; we worked with SCLDA for two years conducting research with hundreds of top educators and classrooms across the country to design a system where otherwise passive purveyors would now have the freedom to peruse and select their own artifacts and create custom collections focused on specific topics, or designed to teach a certain concept, or explore a given genre, or examine a selected historical era.

Where there was nothing a month ago, there are now fully digitized, engaging, learning experiences as assembled by local teachers, top researchers, and historian/educators alike using artifacts from the Smithsonian’s treasure trove of historical holdings and assets. We are very proud of the contributions we were able to make to the new Smithsonian Learning Lab and look forward to seeing people assemble their own collections, make usable copies of others’, browse through the world’s largest digital repository of materials, or focus on topics as diverse as:

With over a million useful resources available right now, and an aggressive digitization strategy in place targeting another 130 million more records (that is correct, 130 million), the Smithsonian is doing its part. And we’ve done ours as well. When a system blends vast resources with teachers’ immense creativity, learners need just bring their curiosity and a desire for the world’s most comprehensive, richest resources.

Welcome to your Smithsonian Learning Lab.

Sincerely, Navigation North

Career and Technical Education Digital Learning Design Education Educational Leadership STEM

College & Career Ready Doesn’t Come Easy in LA High Schools

Post author By North Navigation
Post date October 12, 2015

Increasing access to educational opportunities that are truly College and Career Ready is a tall order…particularly in the nation’s 2nd largest school district.

However, for those prepared to roll up their sleeves and wade deep into rooms of teachers looking to legitimately analyze and examine their curricular approaches from basic assignments to key assessments, good things can happen. Coaching teams of teachers over the course of 3 full days, and utilizing online collaboration and authoring tools created to specifically structure an effective approach, teachers unlocked the best they have to offer students aspiring to go far beyond high school.

Navigation North was invited to lead another intensive curriculum series in which we worked with teams of STEM and CTE educators from some of the nation’s largest high schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District. Two cohorts of educators labored to re-design and submit their courses of study to the University of California’s meticulous A-G approval process with the hopes of getting them reviewed and approved as rigorous, university-level coursework that also provides students 21st century STEM/CTE programs across diverse career pathways.

Working exclusively within our online collaborative platform to help manage the work flow of the teams with outline development, creation of key lesson plans and projects, and sharing of course models and authoring strategies, teachers were successful in developing and submitting a whole new list of approved coursework for students across some of the nation’s most diverse secondary campuses. These STEM-rich, career-ready courses will now not only provide students access to hands-on, experiential, career ready learning BUT will also satisfy key requirements necessary for students wanting to qualify to enter one of nine University of California campuses or any of the California State University campuses as an incoming college freshmen. Now that is increasing access!

Hi Brian, you guys helped me and my colleagues re-develop and write the Foods and Nutrition G-elective curriculum. I just wanted to thank you and let you know that the class has been UC APPROVED! GO US! Thank you so, so much for all your help and coaching.

-Stef Kelly, Carson Senior High School Culinary Science Program Lead

Due to the hard-work and diligence of the devoted teachers we met, the courses below (and their related Industry Sectors or Pathways) were designed and approved as new CTE focused, UC preparatory programs for LAUSD students giving them both high-quality CTE programming while also gaining them valuable University of California approved coursework. This is what true College and Career Ready looks like!

Agents of Social Change – Entrepreneurs in the 21st Century – Marketing and Sales
The Business of Music – Marketing and Sales / Arts, Media, and Entertainment
Engineering Dynamics – Engineering Design
Experimental Photography – Arts, Media, and Entertainment
Family Structure: Teen Roles and Transitions – Education, Child Development and Family Services
Food Science, Technology, & the Modern Pantry – Food Science, Dietetics, and Nutrition
Food and Nutritional Sciences – Food Science, Dietetics, and Nutrition
Formulating Statistics for the 21st Century – Information and Communication Technologies
Graphic Communications – Information and Communication Technologies
New Media A/B – Arts, Media, and Entertainment
Principles of Accounting – Business and Finance
Screen Printing and Design – Graphic Production Technology
Architectural Design 2 – Engineering and Architectural Design
Digital Photo Design – Design, Visual, and Media Arts
Empowering Professional Literacy – Business Management

We are proud of the work these dedicated teachers performed during their summer break, and even more proud of the results they garnered from the UC High School Articulation Office and the opportunities it will provide their students moving forward.

Navigation North Personnel Leading the Training Program Included:

Brian Ausland & Jodi Halligan

Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources School System Reform

The American High School Is Still Far From Operating as a 21st Century Institution

Post author By North Navigation
Post date September 20, 2015

I loved my time teaching high school. I watched my own kids’ largely enjoy their time in high school. I always look forward to working with high school teachers and being inspired by their passion. But I bristle whenever I have to contend with some general, grandiose statement applied to a high school wether it comes during a principal’s well-intentioned Back to School Night welcome to families, or as the moniker emblazoned across the school marquee daily. Regardless of these loosely assigned assertions, the American high school can not be a 21st Century Learning environment, nor can it be any other single thing given the fractured culture and dysfunctional design by which it is operated. Where good occurs at a high school, it almost unfailingly occurs despite the system, not because of it. And where mediocrity happens, because of the system, it goes largely unnoticed, unchecked, and unexamined in almost all instances.

So here we are again at the beginning of a school year. We have two teenagers currently participating at our local high schools. One is my son who is a Junior, the other is my step-son who is a Freshman. For the record, these are respectively kids # 4 & 5 that I am personally getting to usher through their last stop in the public education system. They both have Spanish I this year, but with two different teachers. In our Junior’s Spanish class, he came home the first week and said, “I have to create an account on Quizlet.com to get to my teacher’s digital flash card sets for numbers 1-100 and days and months in Spanish.” As educational technology enthusiasts, my wife and I said, “That’s cool.” And off he went. His teacher (20+ year veteran) had all her digital sets of vocabulary, verbs, and phrases loaded in their class account for the entire year broken out by month. I noticed she had not made all of them herself, but had copied some existing sets from other educators that made theirs available to the community for sharing purposes. Smart. I know her professionally, and as a teacher of my kids; she’s good at what she does.

A week later, our Freshman came home and said, “I need to make flashcards for days of the week, months of the year, and numbers 1-100.” My wife and I said, “Makes sense, this is what Zach was doing last week in his class.” So he went on to ask us if we had index cards in the house. We both looked amused at his request since he had been using Quizlet with his middle school teachers for over two years.”Of course we don’t.” we replied. “How about you just have Zach share a copy of his set in Quizlet and use the time to study the terms instead of making your own?” Now is the point in the story that I will disclose the fact that these two kids couldn’t be more different in how they approach school. Our Junior has always required some extra “motivation” to stay on top of stuff. Our Freshman however, only requires our intervention when we have to finally pull him away from over-studying and over-preparing for every assignment and test, for every class, all of the time. He’s been this way since 3rd grade. So, it was no surprise to us when he hesitated and wondered whether we thought it would be acceptable to do his notecards on Quizlet instead of on index cards. So I asked these questions:

Did she specifically ask for paper index flash cards or show you an example? – No
Have you done flash cards in this class yet? – No
Isn’t this one of the teachers that lets you use your phones in class to look up information online? -Yes

We also reminded him that at the recent back to school night, she referred to her love of technology in the classroom so long as it helped the kids be more efficient and aid in their learning and was not being used as entertainment. We couldn’t have agreed more. Given all this discussion on the topic, true to his nature, he deiced to use Quizlet BUT insisted on making his own set from scratch so he wouldn’t get dinged for short-cutting that process. I told him, “That’s reasonable.”

And off he went on an hour of making his own set and then studying. The next morning we reminded him to share the link for his set to his teacher so she had a copy…he already had, of course. The next day, we received this text from him at lunch. “Guess what, my teacher didn’t accept my flashcards and I received 0 points for the assignment since they weren’t on paper index cards.”

He went on to share that his teacher told him that she understood he did the actual work, but because they were not standard flash cards, he wouldn’t be able to partner with another student and go through the drilling activity she had planned, thus the 0 credit. He shared with her that he could share his stack to another student with a phone, and because they were allowed to use phones, they could go through the activity just like the rest of the students and also could have the words pronounced by the app on their phones, and play other similar games as well with the selected vocabulary. She told him that it was not acceptable, and that he had one day to make all of the flash cards and turn into her if he wanted to gain back at least half of the credit for the assignment. He was crushed, and I felt compelled to email his teacher. It went something like,

“I’m partially to blame for his decision to use Quizlet. The other teachers are using it for the same assignment. Please note that he did all the work. It seems that he should get credit in this instance and we will make sure to have plenty of index cards the remainder of the year if that is how you prefer to have the students create their study aids. etc…” She did state that she appreciated my “respectful tone”, and was concerned with kids cheating on the use of Quizlet, but that he could print up his cards as sheets of paper, and then cut and tape them to index cards in order to receive credit this one time. So he did. I told him, “Don’t be discouraged. In life, in most instances your boss, your colleagues, your team, will welcome you using tools, resources, technology to try to get your part done more effectively or more efficiently…in this instance, your boss wanted something else, so that’s what you do and you move on.” He understood, but he finished with this observation: “Over my last three years in middle school, we were asked to use technology and help figure out ways to do things without paper…my first three weeks of high school, the one time one teacher had Chromebooks checked out for our class, at least 2/3 of the students didn’t even know what they were or how to use them. One teacher had us using Snapchat, which was fun but I’m not sure what it had to do with English. And now I lost points for using Quizlet.” His mom said, “Ya, I know…that sucks.” And given the nature of the middle school he attended where the 4 core teachers worked diligently to coordinate their instructional approaches, curriculum, and student expectations, his response wasn’t surprising, “So why do all my high school teachers have completely different rules for how we are supposed to do things and learn when the principal said at orientation that our school leads in innovative instruction, access to technology, and high expectations of both students and staff?”

Good question, but tough to answer on a Wednesday night at 10:15pm when a bunch of flashcards still needed to be made.

For the last 20 years, I have come to observe the American high school from 4 distinct perspectives; classroom teacher/department chair, professional development coordinator in every type of high school imaginable throughout the state, educational researcher and analyst focusing on curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and technology, and finally as a parent. Through these perspectives, I have come to one conclusion about the American high school…It is broke. And despite that, I do know that students can still find meaningful experiences with one another during high school. And thankfully they can also find given teachers in given moments that can help them grow and connect their learning to their lives. And if they choose to take advantage of extra-curricular programs, they can extend their experiences beyond the classroom in ways that can create lifelong lessons and memories. But as an institution, there is currently little to no way to recognize how the system helps to regularly enable these engagements and ensure their value as the norm, not the exception. Beyond creating mission statements and various slogans accompanied by some sheepish accountability plan that regresses within a month to a check-box exercise, the real work of ensuring a quality, unified learning environment at the high school level requires a persistence and structure that does not exist. The heavy lifting required to identify different and effective instructional strategies occurring on and beyond a campus, the communication and leadership required to support genuine, constructive collaboration amongst staff, and the creativity and willingness to let go of existing practice and protocol in order to examine cross-curricular, authentic assessment constructs that draw students into engaging, imaginative real world application of skills is rarely the outcome of these pseudo-reform campaigns.

As a teacher, I spent my fair share of time with colleagues and leadership laboring over the formation of these endeavors for my school. As a county office of education and regional coordinator, I have been asked to design and shape similar efforts for other schools and districts. As a researcher and analyst, I have been asked to help both state and federal education agencies understand the overall impact and outcomes of these initiatives. On all levels, I’ve been complicit in this process. And finally as a parent, I have now seen with 4 of my own children, what I knew all along as a teacher. No matter what anyone claims about a given high school, at the end of the day, the school is, for better or worse, a composite of the individual decisions that each teacher makes in his or her own classroom with little to no real operational connection to the school’s mission, vision, SMART goals, ESLRs (expected school-wide learning results), site-based master plan, school-wide program, single plan for student achievement, or now the LCAP (local control accountability plan).

There is only one member of the high school community that participates in all elements of what the school is, what it offers, and how its collective culture is translated into exchanges and expectations each and every day…and that is the student. And for students, and their families, it is clear that each and every class and program they rotate into an out of daily throughout the year operates primarily according to the inclinations of the teacher running that class. I believe strongly in teacher efficacy and academic freedom to make good decisions based on the needs of learners. However I also strongly yearn to see environments where professionals work together to regularly and transparently examine, define, and promote effective instruction and ensure common practices that foster learning. I have seen the transformative nature of environments where the courage to question and challenge antiquated processes and approaches is welcomed not seen as a threat. And I have been able to participate on the rare occasion with teams of teachers who hold critical both what they teach and how they teach and use that exploration to seek out other educator’s methods and share their own. But across hundreds and hundreds of experiences spanning 15 years, I can count on one hand the number of times a high school team collectively engaged any one of these types of deep assessments of their own craft and culture. I have only seen a few sites that have realistically moved their school into a position to make any kind of unified claims about the nature of their coursework and their instructional approaches.

Somewhere under the steadily waving banner of “school improvement”, you can typically find a process that merely takes one-dimensional snapshots of learning and then creates a set of “rigorous” yet vague expectations. From there, improvement ends up being a checklist of content to be covered, a timeline for administering common assessments, followed by loosely structured meetings where largely mis-informed assertions are made about the resulting data. The hard work required to build collegial expertise and move staff collectively towards defining mastery and then supporting their individual journey towards improved instruction, increased access to diverse content, and the creation of a comprehensive assessment approach that combines standard exams and project-based learning is not the outcome. And in the end, it was easier for me to write this post than to explain to a freshman why moving forward from middle school to high school has in fact seemed to move backwards in terms of a cohesive, thoughtful educational environment and experience.

Company News Digital Learning Design Education Educational Leadership Professional Development

New Online PD Tools Beg for New Content Approach

Post author By North Navigation
Post date July 6, 2015

Today we’ve launched an exciting new set of online professional development authoring tools within our education platform Cartographi. That was the easy part; the program content on the other hand presents a more complex set of issues.

It is always exciting to move from the initial project planning on the whiteboard to then months later launching out a whole new set of tools and a program. In this instance, the modules represent a model of teacher induction specific to Career and Technical Educators that come directly from industry with the intent of bringing their vast career experience to the classroom as new teachers. So consider a long-time ICU nurse, who is transitioning his love of the profession to come teach Health Careers Occupations to high school Juniors and Seniors, or a recently retired Civil Engineer, who wants to come teach two sections of Beginning and Intermediate Engineering Design drawing upon many of the skills she knows to be requisite to that industry sector.

These two examples, and thousands of others like them, often have little to no teaching experience, but all of the desire and energy to step into a classroom to expand students’ understanding and access to both Career and College pathways tied to their respective career fields. Instead of engaging in a local teacher induction program (if one can even be found in their local area), they can participate in a series of 6 online modules covering everything from:

policy and regulations, to
lesson planning and design, to
classroom management and assessment

Because the modules were certified by both the California State Board of Education and the California State Commission on Teacher Credentialing, modifying the content itself was not permissible. However in transferring the content from an older, linear model PD framework, to a new environment and set of tools that allow for online learning approaches such as differentiated pathways, formative assessment cycling, meta-cognition activities, packaged with shorter bursts of content, embedded media, and granular scaffolding around key resources.

So, when it comes to deploying content not initially designed for these features nor designed to be presented to the learner within such a framework, you stand to seriously expose or illuminate specific gaps in instructional flow. When an agency looks at the work as being a matter of merely replicating their existing content, they should instead consider rethinking delivery and learner experience as an opportunity not an obstacle. We are working with the program leads now to take a look at including a specific line of inquiry when asking a learner to watch a video, or having learners create a specific cognitive map showing points of personal and professional relevance across research sources, or integrating existing curriculum mapping tools when asking the learner to create common curricular artifacts such as course outlines, lessons, or activities for students. It is exciting to discuss the prospects of creating diverse pathways for the learners based on the existing knowledge they bring to the course, or allowing them access to specialized resources tailored to the career field they came from originally. When a tool allows you to see your content in a new light and then do something better with that new information, you know you’re on the right track. So far about 300 new learners have started in on the modules and are moving through their activities and competencies.

While many talents went into re-developing this program content and the eloquent system in which it now resides, we wanted to make a point of identifying Dan Krieger for his system architecture prowess on this project, and Jodi Halligan for one month of dedicated re-design of all the instructional content and activities and the young Frank Quinn for ongoing testing, content and user migration, and client support. Incredible work team!

Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Shifting to Digital Learning Requires a Real Shift in Tools

Post author By North Navigation
Post date February 12, 2015

Blended learning starts with moving learning activities into a digital environment where students can access independently from the regular classroom delivery process. But that’s just the beginning.

For years, we have been examining the steps by which effective teachers organize, construct, deliver, and support learning through the process of selecting viable learning objects, materials, creating supporting instruction, verbal guidance and clarifying expectations via formative and summative exchanges.

The lead image to this post is a series of activities I developed and used with students in 1997 (Arthurian Legends – English 12) and then published as part of a statewide online curriculum sharing program…yet, about every 3-5 years since then, a new band of EdTech Evangelists enter the scene declaring the dawn of online learning resources and need for sharing communities. Sadly their message, if not new, is almost entirely necessary.

What often goes unexamined in these reoccurring swells of interest in this space, is how teachers plan and design and how various models have learned to support that process in existing and ongoing online communities of practice. There are many pieces at play when a “good teacher” is spinning up his or her craft. There are just as many models that try to define or quantify what makes for effective instruction through a process of clock_works disaggregating, defining, and typically ranking or relationally justifying those pieces.

Having spent some time in the classroom myself, and experiencing the very “organic” flow of implementing a lesson or activity where kids are connecting, comprehending, and engaging, it has always been a curious exercise to watch that moment broken down into component parts and analyzed. It often feels like the process of marveling upon the mechanics of a spring-loaded watch, only to open it up and pull it apart into its most granular pieces and lay it all atop a table. At that level, it is easy to see all the pieces and to determine what goes where, but until you put the pieces back together and get them synchronized, the watch doesn’t work.

Of late, we have been testing, designing, and developing tools that better support an effective educator in finding, organizing, constructing, and delivering learning activities online to students. Typically, those engaged in the use of digital authoring tools that approach the process with a background in developing and/or delivering instruction directly to learners (teachers, curriculum designers, professional development specialists, museum educators, etc.) are not included or significantly considered in how the tools operate or work to create and orient instructional content, learning objects, or assessments, let alone, pacing, segmentation, layering, differentiation, or metacognitive cycling. In the EdTech space, most of the heralded technology and innovation being focused upon education has been primarily invested into refining and honing steps around searching and discovering resources, organizing and exposing machine-readable metadata, recording and analyzing paradata, collecting and reporting out student data. Everything EXCEPT the creation and orchestration of the learning exchange itself. And it makes sense, being that most of those people involved in creating these tools have not spent significant Screen Shot 2014-10-17 at 12.17.52 PM amounts of their time teaching and reflecting on how to mix up the best learning concoctions through repeated trial and error as an average educator does hundreds of times a week. So people, teams, agencies, and companies unwittingly focus on tackling more tangible items like helping teachers find resources, save them, drop them into a display view,and solicit some direct student reflection about the items or respond to a simple-structure question. And yes, powerful learning can be aided by a well-developed and timely resource, but rarely do resources independently instigate and support a sustained learning experience that moves the learner through a series of inter-related cognitive cycles requisite to deep learning and connection with the content.

So in designing a new series of resource assembly and annotation tools, our focus has not been on the resources, but on the master watchmakers, the tinkerers. We have intensely paid attention to those with an intimate sense of how to precisely assemble learning exchanges that tick and tock in the ways that structure and support learning. The tools we are creating do not look like simple content management solutions that direct the educator to “build” out their content as a page or block of text. They do not exclusively refine a student response to a singular quiz-type application (Mult. Choice, T/F, Open Response, File Submission) as the method by which students “demonstrate” comprehension. Creating content and soliciting a simple response is not synonymous with creating learning and assessing understanding.

As is the case in many walks of life, the sciences, and human relationships, it is not the pieces that make up the whole of learning, but instead it lies in the assembly, sequencing, relational orientation, and synchronicity of those pieces as connected to a need to learn and grow. Subtle elements such as affording the learner a sense of progress and achievement visually, or creating intentional formative processing points that build upon each other cognitively, or lending differentiated learning pathways that affords the learners optional types of information or means of demonstration…assembling these types of exchanges do not come embedded in a Screen Shot 2015-02-12 at 2.24.47 PM WYSIWYG editor tool bar and are not rendered as a playlist of slides.

We will be doing more testing in the next few months, and a lot of building. We are excited to be in a position to apply much of what we are exploring as part of the soon to be launched Smithsonian Learning Lab (coming fall of 2015). Until then, feel free to get ahold of us if you are interested in this conversation or are working on similar fronts. We see this as a global need and one that affects learning and the potential of individuals whether they are 11year olds in the 5th grade at Copperopolis Elementary, or a 54 year old diversifying his career skills in Zakopane Poland.

Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources School System Reform

Can We Please Put the Digital in Digital OER Finally?

Post author By North Navigation
Post date January 6, 2015

Testing Digital Resources with 6th Graders - Fall 2014 (Brian Ausland)

A call for more advanced thinking in the development of digital curricular formats designed to capture the way open learning objects and resources are organized and framed by educators to create quality instructional experiences for students.

More regularly now, we are asked to look at and provide feedback to various agencies and projects that are forging the tricky waters of developing digital curriculum tools and resources for public education. From small start-ups to the U.S. Department of Education, we are asked to draw from over a decade of work in this field, and our ongoing proximity to classrooms, teachers, and students to give feedback, assistance, and guidance. We love looking at new approaches to increasing teachers’ access to rich, digital content. Ultimately we tend to get our hopes up in anticipation of reviewing a given team’s digitally-enhanced curricula that’s being promoted by a statewide curriculum sharing project, or being marketed via an agency’s big roll-out of their awesome, new curriculum authoring platform.

So whether the curricular item is referred to as a web-based project, an online lesson plan, or a digital learning resource, our imagination makes anticipatory leaps envisioning the promised innovation. However, I am always burdened by my own history in this space. In 1995 I started teaching. Because of some of my “home-grown” online curriculum at the time, I was invited to be part of a statewide project in California that brought 100 teachers together to learn FrontPage and Composer to make online versions of our best units to publish on the World Wide Web. Sharing ideas and coming up with imaginative projects and activities with other teachers was awesome, but taking those ideas and making them then conform to the old Bernie Dodge Web Quest model was not fun. They referred to our units as CyberGuides in true late ’90s web-parlance and one of mine was on the Arthurian Legends. The S.C.O.R.E project-site has long since been abandoned (I had to use the Way Back Machine to find the horrible image of my actual CyberGuide), but copies of it still persist on various teacher’s pages even today like Ms. Davis’ in Wichita Falls…http://www.wfisd.net/Page/8242. Not pretty to look at today, but hey, it was the 90’s, and I was just an English teacher with a GeoCities account and some savvy 10th graders willing to teach me some basic html and help me download CoffeeCup FTP. So I was off and running and posting up my projects for students to access online. This was all of little interest to my immediate colleagues on campus at the time. Strangely enough though, across the country, emails started appearing in my inbox from more and more teachers saying thanks for sharing, or how they had modified pieces of my own instruction for their own classes, or even asking for samples of student-work to show their own kids. Again, this was 18 years ago.

So today, when I’m asked to look at any number of new digitally-enhanced curricular authoring tools or lesson creating and sharing environments like the AFT’s Share My Lesson site, or meet with the University of California to see how they’ve convened 450 educators to produce model online integrated curriculum, I am always hopeful. I consider all the time that has occurred since the late ’90s, and how data, collaboration tools, and app-based innovation have transformed the ways in which we can access, manipulate, annotate, combine, and distribute objects, information, and ideas. Its exciting to consider the possibilities all of this presents to re-inform our old print-based, copy-righted, rigid, curricular models. I prepare to review things like:

interactive, in-line resource aggregation,
feedback mechanisms for coaching and collaborative annotations between the authoring educator and project leads, coaches, and subject area experts
design elements that frame curricular activities for independent access or in-class presentation both
metadata directing me to similar instructional items, common assessments, and models of effective use through an intentionally and intelligently integrated learning object repository,
standards alignments that not only show the specific skills being supported, but their context within other related skills found in the same domain,
options for collaborative authoring across a team of educators and visual connectors showing me the linked nature of their learning activities, materials, objects, and resources,
options allowing a user to make a full digital copy of a curriculum item for personal modification, differentiation, and specific use-cases as pertains to other instructional settings,
formative and summative framing with resulting student work samples, etc, etc, etc…

However, more times than not, I am directed to a list of PDF’s or videos. Instead of being mesmerized and drawn in by rich resources, thoughtfully organized by skilled educators, I find myself looking at none of those items listed out above, let alone a combination of many of them. And the real tragedy is in the amount of time and effort that goes into bringing together teachers, having them consider and articulate their practice and instructional approaches full of dynamic and fluid ideas and strategies, we end up modeling up very traditional, unimaginative, one dimensional frameworks. Rather than work to innovative the use of the very digital environment in which these derivative, digital learning objects are stored, the resulting content is most often published in simple digital document formats or single-perspective, lecture-based videos. The platforms themselves are often elaborate, the communication tools are robust, the group utilities are feature-rich, the overall design is thoughtful and responsive, but when you get to the OER objects, we end up browsing through tired collections of PDFs, embedded Crocodoc files, passive html pages, or simple play-lists of materials where teachers might have not even developed much of the material, but instead were merely asked to assess it’s instructional value, subject-focus, and standards alignment. The curriculum or key learning assets make little to no use of the rich, digital, database supported environments in which they are hosted. So while it seems that programs often afford their web site and auxiliary functions and marketing content far more UI and UX considerations, the actual instructional artifacts the program is designed to solicit, build, develop and deploy get stuck with antiquated design models. After all the work that goes into these types of programs, and we know the work well, this should be the easiest part to get right…right?

We endeavored to work on this issue over the past year as part of supporting a number of programs that assemble teachers together and ask them to combine their curricular thinking and instructional approaches and integrate those with rich learning objects to create curriculum that can serve as a point of collaboration and sharing.

I like to think that what we’ve been working towards harkens back to that small community of early adopters from back in the mid 90’s. The tools were so much more limited, but the audience was clear and tangible, and those of us having to figure out how to FTP our simple pages and directories were the very teachers who had an intimate understanding of how learning occurs. What we lacked was the technology to adequately capture and replicate our innate sense of instructional scaffolding. Now much of that technology exists, but a rift has developed between those that develop the tools and those that know how learning happens. We are trying to bridge that divide with various programs we are supporting. The work represents a decade of designing and implementing online curriculum authoring and professional development programs. Creating the platforms, the tools, designing the outreach, conducting the trainings, but most importantly, wading deep into classrooms regularly to implement with teachers and students in all types of situations and settings is the real work. The resulting models don’t look like traditional lessons and projects, nor should they in many instances. They are however designed to help educators make best use of online learning objects, capture and coordinate their instruction singularly or in teams, and ultimately focus on how real learning sequences and exchanges occur for students when being guided by quality teachers and field-based research taken directly from the classroom.

Title: Epic Epidemiological Examination (Project-Based STEM Unit)
Team: Biomedical Teacher, History Teacher –
Summary: Dive deep into a journey that examines basic characteristics of viruses, introduces the concept of index cases and patient zero and elicits the importance of ELISA testing in case identification. It illuminates human tragedy and the impact of an array of public health epidemics that transformed approaches in disease prevention and intervention commonly used in the 21st Century.

Title: Exploring the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Lesson Plan with Integrated Coaching Annotation)
Team: Susan Carle is an English teacher in Long Beach Unified School District, Sheri Coburn is a curriculum and instruction coach with San Joaquin County Office of Education.
Summary: Using the controversial and captivating, historical medical biography of Henrietta Lacks, students will learn how to closely read, paraphrase,interpret and evaluate science essays. This lesson focuses on non-literary reading as emphasized in the California Common Core State Standards.

Title: The Presidential Experience Project (Online Blended History Activity)
Team: Smithsonian Educator Specialists, Navigation North Digital Curriculum Specialists
Summary: In this blended History activity, students research various aspects of a selected U.S. President and work to search and use the historical objects and artifacts associated with the man and his tenure in office as compared to the top issues of the era in which he led to create a Presidential Exhibit. (Prototype)

Title: Introduction to Circles (Blended Learning Activity – Gr. 4-6)
Team: 6th Grade Math Teacher & District Library Media Specialist
Summary: In this math exercise on parts of a circles, students learn the basic terminology of circles, formulas for determining how to calculate area and circumference and practical applications of this knowledge.

(These samples are pulled from projects ranging from a statewide CTE/STEM model curriculum initiative where teams of teachers work online to create integrated Academic and STEM-based, career pathways projects, a statewide CCSS lesson share program, and a series of curricular tools that provide teachers the ability to craft authentic, differentiated instruction.)

While some of these tools have already been implemented with success across various online educator communities, we are even more excited about those that are being designed and tested for direct student use in asynchronous and synchronous implementations (ie. blended learning). Running comparative analyses between identical online student learning content framed out in similar structures as above and then implemented against a cohort of existing resources such as Blendspace, Pathbrite, Gooru, and Versal, we have found repeatedly that the student response data has shown increased ability to use, navigate, research, and demonstrate learning gains. We believe some of this is attributable to implementing tools that better provide a given teacher a clear method to replicate and communicate their instructional decisions and scaffolding in a unified way along with the sequenced learning objects/resources they’ve selected. In and of themselves, playlists of objects, videos, and quizzes aren’t structured to perform in this way and don’t provide enough spacing for subtle, but key cognitive reflection points nor room for learner differentiation based on those “formative forks” that occur when a good teacher is guiding students. More testing is occurring now, and the data is supporting our inclinations. We are excited to be moving the conversation and the focus of back to the learning process itself, and ultimately welcome more projects, programs, agencies, and firms to do the same. We are not trying to abandon paying homage to traditional curricular formatting which is designed to document and record static instructional models. We are merely more interested in creating new models that are designed to capture and publish fluid, organic, strong learning exchanges crafted by practitioners each and every day in classrooms across the nation. Platforms that are making resulting student data more readily accessible and usable for teachers, that are presenting diverse ways for colleagues to coordinate and communicate, and are enabling up-stream agencies to track and monitor assessment data across large systems for strategic long-term decision making are all good things, but only when they are also paying attention to the heart of the matter.

For us, the heart of the matter is found in that place where student curiosity and interest intersects with a given teacher’s ingenuity and creativity. We welcome others to join in making sure we are ultimately making decisions, building tools, and channeling technology to support the efficacy of that exchange, and helping to enhance, capture, illuminate, and share it wherever possible.

Communities of Practice Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

An Invitation to Dream; an Imperative to Act

Post author By North Navigation
Post date November 8, 2014

As part of a work-related project, I was reading the Smithsonian’s Strategic Plan entitled, A Smithsonian for the 21st Century. Under the heading of Broadening Access, I was inspired by the following excerpt:

…we will leverage the power of technology using new media and social networking tools to deliver information in customized ways and bring our resources to those who cannot visit in person <via> next-generation technologies that speak to “digital natives” who expect to be reached online.

The Smithsonian sees itself as a “holder of remarkable and scientifically important objects and home to world-class expertise, to expand knowledge and add meaning to our world.” and as such, uniquely positioned to Revitalize Education. The Smithsonian is quite possibly the world’s single largest collection of informational assets and expertise, consisting of 19 museums, and 9 research centers containing 138 million physical objects of which nearly 9 million are digitized and published online. In 2013 alone, 30 million people traveled to one or more of the Smithsonian’s sites while 140 million visited the website. Consider learners and educators gathering, in a classroom, in a library, at an after school program…consider a young mind wanting to know more, curious to know why, struggling to know how and parents working to support and foster that sense of inquisitiveness around dinner tables all across the country on any given night. Then consider the expansive value of tapping all the items, information, knowledge, and expertise collectively known as the Smithsonian.

(Video from the Smithsonian: http://www.si.edu/About)

We are in the midst of beginning a year-long journey with the Smithsonian’s Center for Learning and Digital Access starting next week. We will be considering the classrooms and dinner tables described above. We will consider teachers and students and families and institutions of learning big and small, formal and informal alike. This week we have been preparing for our first visit and planning meeting in Washington DC with our partnering team from Philadelphia and our education and research colleagues from the Smithsonian itself. We have taken a look at their existing educational materials, content, activities, and outreach methods and will spend the first few months dreaming and prototyping new approaches to help innovate and revitalize the role the national treasure known as the Smithsonian plays in the educational process.

We have distilled over two years of research, findings, and data and combined it with over 15 years of experience working in this field with and alongside teachers and students the entire way. However, our biggest challenge will be to balance 168 years of the Smithsonian’s work with the needs of a single learner. Both will need to be held equally reverent in our processes if we want to do this right. We will be calling on many of you to help us this coming year. Together its time to let the DREAMING begin…but only as a precedent to ACTING. Talk soon…

(This is a sample of one of the prototypes we have been working on this week to capture and redeploy an existing Smithsonian Learning Quest for students)

Career and Technical Education Communities of Practice Education

Making the Term “College and Career Ready” Real for Real Teachers and Kids

Post author By North Navigation
Post date October 23, 2014

Today I am experiencing a sense of great pride and sincere sadness as a transition occurs for me and a project I started, led, and grew over 5 years. Mostly I’m happy though that, once again, some of the state’s top Career and Technical Education Teachers and their STEM Academic counterparts are joining together to show that there are incredible ways to teach academics AND illuminate diverse, exciting careers and career-ready skills to kids.

Enclosed is a picture of what I will guess is probably about the 18th CTE Online Model Curriculum Institute as it begins today for a number of teacher-teams from across the state of California in Sacramento. All the pieces are familiar, tables with laptops, notes, materials, hovering instructional leads (all current or former classroom teachers by design), and the CTE Online site up on the screen. While I don’t see it, I am certain there is coffee and danishes and fruit in the back of the room, and with any luck, a variety of flavored creamers. (which always seemed like one of the most difficult and absurd things to secure given all of the other technical moving pieces to this puzzle)

However, I am not there this time around as I have been asked to help aid similar projects now with the USDOE. After growing and leading this program in CA since 2005, I have placed it in the capable and caring hands of good friends and colleagues that have worked with me on this in various capacities over the last 5 years. Today, they take it forward without me, and for that I am proud. But as I write this, and work on other projects now on my plate…I do so missing the excitement of meeting new teachers, the exhilaration of hearing their project plans and instructional approaches, sharing a cup of coffee and discussing students, resources, and how frustrating and promising technology can be in the classroom. Mostly I miss the incredible projects these folks put together for kids beyond a text-book, and often time beyond the confines of the classroom itself.

In 2005 we dared to consider using an online lesson authoring tool integrated with high-end digital resources and then state academic and CTE standards to allow these great teachers to create and share the detail of their best lessons and projects. The first pilot we performed was in Chico CA and involved about 25 educators working independent of one another, all autonomous in their disciplines ranging from Auto Teachers and Early Childhood Educators to Culinary Teachers and Engineering/Architecture Instructors. They each created what they considered to be their 4 best lessons in the online environment and were guided by the tool and a small team of me and two technical support staff. Once we published those 100 or so lessons to CTE Online, the site’s access immediately grew from an average of 10-20 visits a day to 200 in the first 3 weeks. Over the years we expanded the program to include institutes all over the state, and involved up to 145 teachers in a given year. We also started soliciting teams of teachers from academies and programs where academic core staff and CTE/STEM staff worked together to create project-based units of multiple lessons. We paid the teachers for their curriculum, we treated them like professionals, we selected some of them to serve as specialists and instructional leads to support future teams and groups in our program. We did dinners together, and convened in hotel rooms to work through ideas late into the night. We made lots of friends amongst these teachers many of whom I call on and connect with regularly to this day. (below, growth of users per month on CTE Online from 2010-2014)

As the culture grew, the site grew. So in addition to friends, we also inadvertently made some people very uncomfortable. In part, introducing a statewide professional development and curriculum training model that took some new approaches seemed to challenge and threaten various existing models and systems:

Compensate: Pay teachers for their time away from their own homes and families and for their expertise as almost all other professional industries do.
Respect: Dispense with the cult of expertise that castigates teachers to the role of sitting and listening to the purported wisdom of experts, and instead place teachers in the role of sharing and leading and learning with one another from one another.
Disclose: Be open, transparent, and forthright with your budget. Openly discuss where and how the dollars are used, how much money you’ve received, and the diligence you afford to being responsible custodians of those dollars.
Cover: Make participation in the program cost-neutral for teachers by covering their travel, hotels, meals, incidentals and for the districts/schools that send them by covering substitute pay. Make it inclusive by engaging teachers from all over the state, at all levels of teaching experience and topic areas/disciplines.
Invest: In order to afford much of the above, resist sinking significant percentages of the budget on full-time positions within the agency receiving these project dollars, instead invest in authentic activities and measurable outcomes tied to the project’s objectives.
Produce: Take on a production mentality that allows you to objectively demonstrate the deliverables and artifacts created and published as invested in by the funding. Collect and report measurable, objective data to account for all expenses and outcomes. (For $1 million dollars, we work with almost 200 teachers annually and produce over 400 lessons that are then used by nearly 2,000 educators each day across California and conduct definitive entry and exit surveys to identify the exact skills gleaned during our direct support components of the program.)

For a few years, I was under the impression that we should aggressively document and share these approaches and offer our strategies and methods to assist other statewide program agencies and their leads at the department of education. We could help many of them stop running afoul of many or most of these tenets. I was naive in that belief.

Instead of pats on the back, we were primarily marginalized as a technology project that replaced rigorous curriculum examination and experts with computers. We weathered apathy that ranged from polite disinterest to completely ignoring our data and in some instances, active dismissal and direct undermining by other projects and their leads when we suggested all programs should minimally collect and disclose performance data tied to their objectives and their budgets. Perhaps our legacy was not meant to be one of systemic change.

However, along the line we did find those few leaders at the state department, and amongst local agencies that saw our approach and our data for what it was worth. They waded into the bureaucratic tangle we caused and pushed beyond the rhetoric to lend us support and shield us when the barrage became the heaviest. They have the scars to show for it. I thank them for that, and the teachers who were brave enough to bare their curricular thinking and planning and trusting us to not critique or judge but instead to ask questions, guide, coach and always collaborate in bringing out their excellence and allowing us to help tell the story of their effectiveness and commitment to students. (See Projects Here)

Last week I listened in on an exciting planning session led by the wonderful woman who took over the lead position. Afterwards she sat and reflected with me about the incredible teacher-teams that had signed on to attend their first institute and concluded by sharing, “I just keep telling everyone, I have the best job in the world now with this project.”…and another colleague then sends me these pictures today of all the teachers starting their process, and one of the instructional leads I recruited two years ago who is there now leading other Engineering and Math teachers text me, “This is going awesome. The new website and tools are so cool and the teachers love it.”…

I am clear on the real legacy of this project in the minds of the people that count. Yet, I bristle at the fact that each and every year, we have to fight aggressively to qualify the effort, time, and investment in getting this project supported, while the state continues to throw millions of dollars at projects led by university-based agencies on behalf of high schools that assembles professors and “curriculum specialists” from various universities and agencies and then subjugates a handful of teachers to these “experts” to create, not projects or lessons or activities to use in the classroom, but instead, mere administrative outlines for courses that focus on UC math, science, english, and lab requirements to the detriment of legitimate CTE/STEM skills and career exploration for students. Given $3 million a year, and operating for 4 years now, they produced 35 pdf-based outlines. What does a $342,000 outline look like you might ask? Here ya go…UCCI Outlines. Our project received $850,000/yr. and produced 56 outlines, 500 Unit Plans, 4,000+ Lesson Plans all with embedded activities, materials, and assessments that can be used as published as a fully digitized resource or modified for direct implementation in the classroom. And are accessed over 2000 times a day by teachers. Ultimately, I’ve had to put all that in the ol’ bucket of “things I can’t control” for my own mental health. I guess if I am honest, our project has some hurdles too that we struggled to overcome. For instance, one of the participating teachers emailed me a few moments ago and said, “I must admit, the workshop is going great, even without you here…sorry. But if it is any condolence, they did forget to get flavored creamer for the coffee again.”