White Session (10) What is in your principal's mind?

The reading for this week comes from one of your Principal's books.

Procedure
(1) Ask to borrow a book
(2) Ask your principal to suggest a chapter or a page to focus on.

Questions for discussion
What questions do you think your principal will ask you about the reading?
What questions are raised in the reading?

Pink Session (6): Eighth Grade Internships

Eighth Grade Internships

The reading from Big Picture:  p. 127

No matter how many successes we have at The Met, there are still a lot of critics who don’t see how focusing a student’s entire curriculum around internships is the right way to make learning real. The criticism comes from people who are caught up in the word “academic”: Intern- ships don’t seem as academic. What they mean is, internships don’t involve kids sitting quietly in a classroom vigorously staring at approved textbooks, which is some people’s definition of the “right” learning environment. Critics, too, focus on the inevitable “downtime” in an internship, forgetting how much downtime kids experience inside schools every day. If a kid is interning at the zoo, yes, she might observe the animals for hours before she starts to record data. It might take a week for a kid to figure out a computer program he needs to start his internship project, and it might take him an hour by bus each day to get to his internship site. Our critics focus on the lack of “seat time” in a class. For some reason, though, they don’t seem to factor in the value of the seat time at the internship— at a hospital, at the State House, at a violence prevention program.

The work we do at The Met is definitely more amorphous than what you find in traditional schools, but rather than see it as “truly integrated,” some see it as “soft.” What’s funny to me is that what we do is very similar to how medical schools use internships and residencies to train doc- tors. I’ve never heard anyone condemn those programs as being soft.

Of course, another kind of resistance to internships comes from the big schools that can’t imagine setting up internships for all 2,000 of their students. Because I don’t believe in big schools, I would reply that the first step is to personalize the place and break it down into small schools. Then, I would point out that my hunch is if you’ve got a school with 2,000 kids, you’re probably in an area that has plenty of places where kids can do internships. When we first started The Met, we were told we’d never find 50 internships for our first 50 students. Good thing they weren’t bet- ting. By June 2002, 310 students had come through The Met and more than 900 businesses and organizations had served as internship sites. All anyone who is concerned about a lack of internship possibilities needs to do is look at the statistics. According to the 2000 Census and Kids Count, in tiny Rhode Island there were 500,731 adults in the workforce and only 40,651 high school–age students. That works out to 12 potential mentors for each kid!

For Discussion

1. Why do so many students describe their educational experiences as boring?

2. If you could have an internship in any area, built around any interest, what would it be and who would you want to have as a mentor? Why?

3. Tell about a time when you (as a student or a teacher) were working on or teaching an assignment that you now realize was “fake real.”

4. Name five people and five resources in your community that the schools could tap to help make students’ learning and work real.

Indigo Session (5): Exhibitions

End-of Year Exhibitions

Exhibitions

Most teachers ask students to complete a test at the end of a course.  The Final Exam.  This process works well for students who like writing.  Is there another way to find out what a student knows?

What role could exhibitions play in our learning?  How can students show what they understand?

There's a movie called Stand and Deliver.  It stars Edward Almos.  He plays a teacher who asks his students to stand and deliver what they know.

Please read the reading from the Big Picture and think about the questions below.

The reading from Big Picture:

P. 165-167

Schools that use exhibitions as a method of assessment need to make sure that the students, staff, and parents understand the requirements and purpose of exhibitions. They also need to maximize exhibitions’ incredible value in building relationships in the school.

First, exhibitions are an amazing opportunity for parent involvement. Parents get to see their kids in action and get to actually hear them talk about what they’ve done and what they’ve learned, rather than just guessing about it based on a report card grade or assuming it’s happened because the kids are walking across the stage at graduation. An exhibition is a chance for every parent to see his or her child perform, a chance to be proud. It is also a chance for them to question their child about school and not have him say, “It’s fine,” and then walk away and go to his room. Our Met parents say things like, “I loved seeing my son’s autobiography—I was so proud to see how he’d written more than 100 pages analyzing his life and his education,” and “I was amazed to watch my daughter take her love for marine biology and develop her own curriculum so she could teach it to the other kids at her school.”

Second, exhibitions are a great opportunity for teachers to really work together as a team. By sitting in on exhibitions given by their colleagues’ students, individual teachers become part of a community that is invested in helping to teach each child. This opportunity to witness another teacher’s struggles or successes with individual students also helps all teachers become better equipped to provide the kind of collegial support that is vital to a healthy school.

Third, exhibitions are an opportunity to include the outside community in education by inviting others to come in and watch: local leaders, college students, professors, mentors, school board members, everyone. Every time I watch exhibitions at The Met, I’m reminded that I’m seeing our most sophisticated student-adult conversations. The interaction between the student and the audience creates a whole new level of communication where the student is at the center but is also receiving input from everyone about his or her learning.

Fourth, exhibitions promote rather than inhibit growth. This means that when an exhibition isn’t that great, or when the kid really isn’t prepared or hasn’t shown progress on his work, it is still an opportunity for others to see and applaud growth in other areas. In situations where I don’t feel students did a great job on their exhibitions, I have to remember to ask myself, “Not great compared to what?” Even after a “bad” exhibition, I have heard parents say things like, “My son has never talked like that in front of a group before—I can’t believe he did that!” One of our students started her exhibition by warning the audience that she had a stutter. As it turned out, she didn’t stutter once during the entire presentation—but if she had, she would have been showing us her courage, her determination to keep going and to make herself under- stood. With every exhibition, there is always an upside, always some- thing learned. When you fail a test, you just fail, end of story. There is no end to the story with exhibitions. The learning keeps on happening.

Fifth, exhibitions completely eliminate cheating. In a 1998 survey by Who’s Who Among American High School Students, 80 percent of college- bound high schoolers admitted they’d cheated at least once.  As a Met student once said, “You can cheat your way through other high schools and you can cheat your way through elementary and middle school, but here you cannot cheat at all. It’s impossible. When you have to stand in front of everyone and do your exhibition, you’ve got to have something.”

Sixth, exhibitions encourage students to go deeper with their learning by requiring them to create and present a portfolio of their work. Where studying for a test may involve students looking at class notes and rereading textbooks, preparing a portfolio requires students to look at and define the many layers of their learning. This can mean sharing successive drafts of a paper, showing photos of a project in various phases of construction, and all sorts of other things. Deep learning is so important, and such a thrill to do and to watch.

Tests can do a lot of damage to a person who really wants to take learning further, branch out, learn more. I saw it myself back in college. My roommate and I were taking the same English course and had to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I read the book eight times (and ended up hating it) because it was going to be on the test and I knew I had to “know” it. My roommate loved the book and went on to read every book Conrad had ever written. I got an A on the test. My roommate got a D.

Clearly, deeper learning was not valued in that course. I got the “good” grade, but I knew my roommate had learned more than I had and that he had gotten more out of the book. And I envied the way he pursued his passion.

Finally, exhibitions allow, and require, students to set high standards for themselves. When they don’t do well at an exhibition, they know it—immediately. They don’t have to wait for a test score to come back to tell them they need to work harder. And if they have a personalized learn- ing plan (like all Met students do), they help determine what constitutes “doing well.” Exhibitions force students to become accountable for and take control of their own learning. Isn’t that what we’re striving for?

For Discussion

1.  What advantages would there be to you if you could hear your students give a verbal presentation instead of a written answer?

2. Do you remember a particular grade you received on a school assignment? Why do you remember it? What significance did it hold?

3. Why don’t teachers traditionally give students other kinds of feedback besides grades? 

What other kinds of feedback would you have liked to have received as a student?

Introduction: Professional Development for Teachers

Let's start with these observations:

(1) Many teachers don't appear to have time for training during a busy week.

(2)  Training sessions in many schoools are usually given every 90 days.

(3)  Don't we learn better "a little each day"? 

(4)  Many teachers go to a training session and receive a large 3-ring binder.  That binder remains unopened on a shelf ... six, ten, even 12 months later.

(5)  We tend to learn what we want to learn.  
Procedure:  Select a reading that you want to read.  You don't need to complete the sessions in order.  There is no need to study these questions in the order set up.  That's why each session has a color as well as a number.


This blog is a place to find items for on-going professional development.  "Take the session when you are ready."
Please add to the collection by suggesting topics that you want to talk about or articles that you want to discuss.

Procedures:  Read and Call

1.  teacher reads a short article

2.  teacher thinks about "How could I change my procedures in my class to apply this information?"

"What will students do differently if I apply this new information?"

3.  teacher calls me and tells me what was learned and discusses how to apply the information.

4.  I listen and ask some questions and we agree on a time when the teacher will take photos or videos before and after (showing with and without the new procedure).

5.  I follow up with the teacher 2, 7, 14, 30 and 90 days to check to see how the new procedure is being used. ... 

This series of training sessions is 
a) free:  volunteers designed these materials.
b) available with videos with feedback 
c) flexible:  you can read the article and make your comments when you want to.


Send your comments and questions to:  TheEbookman@gmail.com
(954) 646 8246 mobile

Professional Development  one person at a time...  

on the side

one on one

how to change the behavior

getting into intuitive beliefs

...creating lifelong learners..

This series of sessions is dedicated to the parents and children of River Cities Charter School.

The time spent by the trainers and the teachers will benefit them, but ultimately, the benefits will come to your children.