Monday, November 30, 2009

2 1/2 Months Later...

It's been about two-and-a-half months now that I have going to a local middle school once a week to provide professional development sessions on integrating technology into their specific curricular areas and the district's new lesson structure model. This experience has definitely been eye-opening! As a whole, the staff was pretty comfortable with using technology for themselves but were not very comfortable allowing students to use technology, which is the intended goal for the massive amount of money spent on classroom technology. I am glad to report that both teacher comfort allowing students to use technology and actual student use of technology went up in this very short time frame! A few things to note:
  1. While more teachers were allowing students to use technology in class, the number of classrooms using technology did not go up. In other words, the same amount of classrooms had technology use occurring, but more of if was student use rather than teacher use.
  2. I feel a large part of this success is due to the fact that the instructional coaches jumped right in with both feet on integrating technology into ALL professional development.
  3. While survey results would lead one to believe that student engagement went down, I don't believe that is actually the case. During the course of this semester, the definition "actively engaged" was clarified to the staff members. I believe this is why the results showed a drop in students that were actively engaged, as all conversations with staff members indicate that students were more engaged in the learning. 
Teacher Survey Results
View more presentations from Erin Misegadis.


Overall I think that the work done this semester was beneficial to all involved and I hope that the coaches will be able to continue to support technology integration into their professional development sessions and that the students will benefit from this experience.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

What's the "Right Answer"?


This morning I read a post on David Freeburg's blog Epic Epoch about differentiating and his thoughts about whether the process or the product was the most important component of the learning experience. This of course got me thinking about our students today. One of the comments left was that his students are more concerned about getting the "right answer" than they are learning from the process. But how did they get that way? Are we born that way? Or have years of education where you must have the correct answers on the test in order to pass made students that way? I've even been in professional development sessions where teachers have asked "You've shown us a lot of ways to teach this concept. Which is the best way?" That to me leads me to think that the problem is not with students, but that the problem is with the system.
If you give a group of primary aged students some "crafts" supplies and tell them to build a model of a house, they'll dive right in and start building. They won't even think about how their teacher thinks it should look nor will they worry about "right way" to build it. They'll simply dump the supplies out and start working to build a house. But, if you give those same supplies to a secondary level student and tell them to build a model of a house, it is almost guaranteed that they'll start asking questions. "How many points is this worth?" "How big does it have to be?" "Is there an example I can look at so I can get it right?" 
What happens between those early elementary years and middle school that students are becoming disconnected from the fun of learning? Even further, what will happen to those same students when a grade is no longer attached to a product? As educators we need to recognize the fact that learning is much more than "getting the right answer." It is about learning to learn. If we as educators do not start to focus on the process, students won't either and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves when our students fail. We've got to acknowledge that we are the ones that need to implement change, and only when that happens will our students' enthusiasm for learning grow. Only then will our students truly become life-long learners. 

Image courtesy of Flickr and jason03yingling.