resources – Navigation North

The volume of webinar invites sent to our inboxes has escalated considerably this week due to October being touted nationally as the month of the connected educator. Amidst 4 competing presentations being promoted yesterday, our interest was drawn to one entitled State Online Communities Bloom with Robust Resources as being promoted by SETDA (State Educational Technology Directors Association). We’ve worked with lots of the SETDA folks, and they’re fun to be around. I’m serious. And, we’ve been tuned in to all of the talk about innovative curriculum development being generated due to Common Core creating common efforts and areas of need across adopting states. We’ve listened intently to myriad state leadership teams espouse the methods by which technology was reshaping professional development into repositories of best practice that can move ubiquitously to teachers in need and across state lines. So it was with genuine interest we elected to pay attention to a presentation billed as…

State leadership can help provide robust resources for teaching and learning and unique professional learning opportunities for educators. Representatives from two states who have led the gathering and dissemination of these teaching materials, Texas and Oregon, will showcase their efforts and how they got to where they are.

I find myself trying to organize just a few more sentences to set up the four people who read these occasional postings (rants). I want to pose an examination of the terms Robust Resources and Unique Professional Learning Opportunities. I want it to be witty and frame out what one might expect when given a moment to ponder Robust and Unique. What might that look like and sound like and work like when you’re left to let your imagination run prior to being shown by those who made the claim. Instead, I will just share what I saw and dispense with the lead-up.

When browsing Oregon’s OETC portal (Organization for Educational Technology and Curriculum) I went to their Lesson Plans Repository and searched for Common Core, the first return is a lesson on Aligning to Common Core State Standards reportedly appropriate for ALL grade levels and ALL subject areas and accomplishable in a single day of training. It promises to assist all teachers on how to design CCSS aligned lessons and bring about “systemic change”. Pretty tall order…well, your order is up:
http://teach.oetc.org/lessonplans/aligning-common-core-state-standards

And I really hope you watched the video because it is awesome…and you should know how video is touted as transforming the archaic “professional development by poster and post-it note” approach. So take 1 minute and 25 seconds of your life and prepare to be marveled by their first example of CCSS PD in their directory:

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuTS3irp2zc]

Now let’s move to the lone star state’s Project Share Texas portal where “Knowledge has no boundaries” according to their tag line. Right on the very first page, they promote the option to Search for resources by standards. Click on standards and you get subject choices of Mathematics and Science (hmmm, seem to have already found a few boundaries in the way of omitting all other topic areas, oh well). I clicked on Math and then

Screen Shot 2013-10-07 at 10.20.44 PM Grade 7 (or what they deem 111.23 Grade 7… ahem’ your database is showing) and get a return of 43 standards. And of those standards only 1 has any resources aligned to them. 42 standards have no resources, but 1 of them has 2…for all of 7th grade. And they look like this:
http://www.projectsharetexas.org/resource/reflections external_1=23&external_2=452&external_3=All

So I opted to go to the Full Resource Index for Math and Science and use their Keyword Search as they suggested to see if I could shake loose a few of the boundaries I was obviously up against. I went with some softball terms sure to strike resource-gold like Circle, Tangent, Linear Equation, Ratio, Exponents, and even good ol’ Pythagorean Theorem. All of these searches yielded 1 (one) resulting resource. Mind you, I am not saying that each one of those terms yielded a result, I am saying that all of them combined yielded a single result.The terms Circle and Ratio rendered the exact same resource, all the rest were a bust. That’s it. For the record, the resources for direct or guided student use were not bad. And Science did have more resources, not a bunch, but more for sure.

The month of the Connected Educator is a new event. And I guess that is fitting. However what is not new is the impetus to devise uses of technology that authentically help more educators share what they know about guiding student learning. We should be much, much further along than this. And in many smaller, isolated pockets, some projects are further along and many teachers have created exceptionally transformative uses of technology to enrich learning. But we are certainly not as connected as we could and should be in that work. I am thankful for the focus and the push; I am disappointed in what we care to showcase however. It is definitely going to take more work to unseat a 10,000 year old mixed religion/pagan holiday and the pink ribbons in the race for top billing for the month of October.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

We obviously believe that digital resources, online learning environments, and data-enabled technologies can significantly increase the level of instructional materials, the universal availability of exceptional resources, and the opportunity for students from anywhere to see and experience what lies everywhere in the world far beyond the isolation of their own classrooms. Somewhere along the line though, many software and learning teams working on new tech-enabled learning tools and environments have disproportionately emphasized the discoverability and sequencing of resources over the creative formation of learning exchanges. This is typically pursued with talk of assessment instruments (quizzes) and achievement monitoring (badges) and reporting (integrating with existing school SIS). I do see these things as a part, a very small part, but yes a part of the educational process. Beyond that however, are many more wonderful and intricate processes that truly engender a rich learning experience when conducted at the hands of a master practitioner.

First, effective teachers take any and all instructional materials (Published, OER, Digital, or otherwise)

text books,
news articles,
activity guides,
worksheets,
experiments,
games,
art,
music,
gardens,
videos,
digital content,
field trips,
guests,
maps,
stories, etc.

and weave them together with activities designed to draw their students into authentic engagement with those resources in ways that build upon existing student knowledge, initiate intrigue, generate hypotheses, and move students through a process of exploration and discovery as part of skill-building and knowledge acquisition.

Second, good teachers know that students need opportunities to not just know materials and the concepts they convey through direct, basic consumption, but must also move to doing, showing, producing, and creating applications of their new knowledge. Learning experiences do not end with a quiz, or a battery of valid, calibrated test items, or scores, but should finish with students…

attending a museum of their choice,
participating in a community-event,
volunteering,
publishing a written piece,
publicly displaying or performing an art piece,
attending and speaking at a civic engagement,
interviewing family or community members,
building a bike, solar panel, water purifier, model home, engine
designing a garden,
planning, preparing and serving a meal,
programming a game,
creating a fictitious business, creating a real business,
arbitrating a grievance between peers,
designing and implementing their own personal health plan,
creating a public service announcement or making a documentary

101013-N-8863V-460 Finally, strong learning provides students with deep opportunities and supporting structures and activities to reflect on their learning. Reflect on the changes that have occurred in their own knowledge, their perceptions, and their awareness of a world that inevitably grows to be more diverse, more complex, and more consequential as a part of the ongoing development of a growing, diverse, complex individual. Teachers aware of this ask students to write reflective pieces, keep a learning journal, map their progress in terms of self-discovery, share their experiences with their peers through debriefs, share their experiences with adults through writing groups, discussions, or structured defense of learning presentations that include experts, community members, parents, and educators.

These are not the conversations I hear as a central piece in the enthusiastic rush to generate “individualized online learning tools” and “data-aligned resource aggregators.” Instead, the tools I observe are largely tailored to generate student assessment scores as predictive and/or remediated elements for the eventual state assessments. These types of features and resources are easy to automate, easy to deploy, and unwittingly address the fear-based needs of schools and districts struggling to address large populations of historically disadvantaged learners that desperately seek a digital, if not mystic, panacea to low test performance. The more we engage and empower teachers with tools that help them engage and empower students, the more we will meet the needs of students natural instinct of inquiry and teachers innate ability to guide it.