Cultivating a PLN

When I first began learning about a PLN, I was worried.  Not because of I’m afraid of technology but because I feared I would get sucked in and lose track of time.  After playing and getting more comfortable with Diigo, Twitter, and YouTube, I had to make the conscious decision to learn the art of time balance.  While I do see that these components of my PLN can be used to learn more about my work, they could not take priority to preparing my proposal and completing the many tasks of a school administrator.

Don’t get me wrong, I very much see the value is using a PLN.  I am hooked and I will continue to use it.  As a matter of fact, at last month’s staff meeting, I showed all  of my teachers how to use twitter, tweetdeck, diigo, and igoogle.  I also shared Jeff’s idea that he has learned more since using his PLN than the time prior to his PLN use.  This quote resonates with me because I can easily see how this can be the case. There is so much valuable information being directed to you. In addition, you can take an active role and share your knowledge with others.

I took the initiative to start a #homelessEd hashtag because I saw this focus missing on twitter.  I am hopeful that with proper cultivation, that hashtag can become a rich source of information for educators serving students experiencing homelessness.

Another area of personal growth has come from the exploration of the world of Google.  I am seeing that google is the key to the world.  There are some many applications that I started using because of this class: docs and forms, YouTube, calendar, music, igoogle, and google+.  The beauty is that every single one of these has an application of for my workplace.  I can directly use each of these in my role as a school leader.  Moreover, teachers could certainly integrate these applications with their more direct work with students.

I’m excited to see how technology will evolved in the next coming years and decades.  As an educator, the key will be to continue to stay up to date, dedicate time, and learn from and teach others.  

Reflections of the journey toward cultural proficiency

Lessons Learned

I learned two valuable lessons from conducting my interviews:  1) there can be a significant difference on particular topic depending a person’s cultural experiences and 2) in general, people are willing and comfortable talking about sensitive topics such as race, religion or faith, ableness etc.  

I interviewed a couple of family members for this project.  While interviewing them was fascinating, I was more impressed by the stark differences of perspectives on issues such as gender roles, religion, education, etc.  I was really struck by this because I also had some areas that were very different from my family members.  Logically, I suppose I know that but I guess I expected something different when I looked at my own family members and all of our experiences.  This reinforced the message that Dr. Lindsey shared in class: “There is diversity among groups.”

Next Steps

At Monarch School, there is much work to be done in the area of cultural proficiency.  I believe we need to continue having discussions about race and the achievement gap but we also need to include other components of culture.  Although my current school site serves students experiencing homelessness, we do not currently offer formal training on how to effectively work with people from this socioeconomic group.

When I think of our school’s work, I truly believe we are committed and dedicated to serve our students.  However, commitment and dedication may not be enough if we are not reaching stages of cultural competence or proficiency.  Specifically, I want to look closer at how to best serve our students and their families.   Jonathan Kozol wrote a book titled Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America.  In the next month, I will read this book and assess the possibility of using it as a book club with our staff and board members.  It is critical we change our paradigm from “our kids are underperforming and how can we ‘save them’” to recognizing that our students have so much to contribute and valuing and using those resources they bring.  Equally important will be to advance on the cultural proficiency continuum and identify areas where we are not serving our students effective.  We need to become more self-accountable.  

Need to go to Legoland...

Not providing access to A-G courses is a huge inequity at Monarch.  Not doing so, makes it more difficult (not impossible, but considerably more challenging) for our graduates to a CSU/UC school directly after graduating from Monarch.  Currently, our students must take college courses at the local community colleges (under a dual-enrollment program).  At the colleges, students take foreign language and lab science coursework. Although none of our core courses are A-G certified, students who take the language and science classes at the community college, become A-G eligible. Of course, they have to meet the minimum GPA requirements

As I have shared with my colleagues, providing A-G courses in the traditional manner is near impossible at Monarch. This is because we enroll about 40 high school students.  Among this group, students will be working toward different goals: credit recovery, GED prep, college prep.  Having a small group of students working on diverse goals makes for quite a challenge schedule-wise. 

The plan at our new campus is to expand to about 120 high school students.  With a larger group of students, providing an expanded curriculum (including A-G courses) will be more do-able.  In the meantime, we can begin to work on solutions to this problem using online  courses.  We tried this in the past but it has been a while.  Maybe it's time to try it again?

The phrase that resonates with me from Wednesday night's presentation is "providing more legos."  When the young mention shared this metaphor to explain the idea of access to resources, it really made a lot of sense.  To use the same comparison, my student oftentimes are not born with as many legos as other students.  Other times their legos are taken from them because of big change in their family's circumstances.  A critical job that we have, as educators at Monarch, is to provide/replace those legos for our students.  By doing so, we can begin to level the playing  field.

Preparing for the Future

While researching futurist ideas in education, I came across an online article discussing experiential schools. The author explained that in this type of a school model, experts from across all sectors of life, come and present on their area of expertise.  For example, a statistician from a research firm comes and teaches about surveys and statistics, etc. A nutritionist would be a guest lecturer for PE courses.  The author explained that traditional teachers, as we know them today, would still be an integral piece of the educational system but the role would somewhat change.  They would be responsible for facilitating groups and helping reaffirm what the "experts” taught.

I think this idea is a step in the right direction but I would modify it.  Instead of the experts visiting the school, I would envision a school where the students visit the experts and their working environment.  This could mean taking more meaningful and purposeful field trips and learning from museum curators, artists, and scientists.  It could also be that it makes more sense to use technologies such as Skype or Google chat to visit places not readily accessible like a hospital operating room, or a theater across the globe.  A school model like this could be appropriate at every grade level to show the relevance of subject matter taught in the classroom to various workplaces.  At the high school level, this model could be used for vocational training and apprenticeships.  

The real world relevance is extremely important for students. I currently have an eighth-grade student who is quite the animal lover and doing an internship at a neighborhood dog walking business.  I asked her yesterday how she was enjoying her internship and she said, “I love it!  And did you know that I have to use math there?”  I asked her for more information and she shared that she has had to measure the medication and food and track walking distances etc.  So now, this real-world experience has reinforced to Alicia (not a math lover) the relevance and importance of learning fractions and decimals and comparing information over time.

1. If you were to implement this practice, strategy, idea today, what specialized skills, resources, and dispositions would you need to obtain for yourself, your colleagues and staff?

My colleagues and I would need to become well versed in various communication technologies.  We would also need to stay up-to-date as these technologies improve.  Another area would be public relations.  I think we would need to learn how to sell this idea to community members and professionals and create outcomes data to justify ongoing efforts.  We would also need to adopt the mindset, or disposition, that providing relevant and engaging curricula is important for developing real-world skills.

2. What skills will your colleagues and those you supervise need in order to be successful in this scenario? Of those skills, which ones are currently being supported through resources such as professional development in your setting? Which ones are missing or minimal? What is currently being supported in your setting that would likely be obsolete in 2020?

Skills that are currently being supported through resources in my setting include basis collaborating with one another and community members, facilitating peer collaboration, and promoting higher level inquiry.  A skill that is minimal includes curriculum design.

Individual standardized assessments, as we know them today, is something that I think could be/should be obsolete in 10 years. Instead, assessments should test real world problem solving skills, collaboration, etc.

3. In what ways are we unprepared, lacking in resources and staffing, or to what degree are our strategies and underlying values unable to respond effectively to the conditions this scenario represents?

We are a bit unprepared because we currently do not engage in deep or meaningful partnerships outside of the school environment. Technologically, we would also need a better platform to make communicating across town or across the globe seamless.

4. What could we be doing now to leverage this trend to our advantage?

In order to leverage this trend we could take advantage of the technologies currently available.  We could also begin working more closely with experts in the field.

5. What would need to happen internally and in the external environment for preparing yourself and those you lead to navigate in this strategic vision? What changes should your organization begin to make? What should it start doing? What should it stop doing?

I would need for all actors to buy in to the idea that  you this experiential learning model is important for our students.  If people do not see the importance of providing students this experience, this scenario will be difficult to accomplish.

At the present moment, we could begin making changes by creating more opportunities for our students to intern in the community.  This is a great opportunity for them to build job skills and earn high school credits. 

On the other hand, we'll need to stop posing only the simple/basic questions to our students.  We need to get to a place where students learn how to question deeply and independently.

On Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovation is defined by Christensen as a two-stage process.  In stage one, the innovator makes a product much more affordable and simple to use than what currently exists. In the second stage, additional technological changes in the industry make it simple and affordable to build and upgrade the product.

In his book, disrupting class, Christensen used student centered learning as an example of a disruptive innovation. In the fifth chapter of the book, the author explained that some early applications of student centered learning would take place outside of formal education.  He argued that those applications would be made on an individual basis by teachers, parents, students, and school administrators. These applications would be decentralized and not require "central bodies of authority such as school boards and teachers unions.”   On the contrary, earlier cases will happen in spite of a lack of approval from these bodies.

As Susan shared in her blog, one example of disruption in education within our school district (JCCS) is currently taking place and has to do with blended learning.  I agree with my colleague that it is imperative for our school district to adopt an online learning platform.  Doing so allows JCCS to remain competitive and provide a much-needed coursework option for our students.

Much like Christensen described the early applications as being decentralized and taking place on an individual basis,  we (at the school site level) have experimented with online coursework through community colleges, National University’s Virtual High School.  The results have been mixed.  The virtual high school platform was explored a number of years ago and was not effective for our students.   Last year, a couple of my students took blended lab science courses through the community college and had much better results.   The advantages of having district-wide adoption of blended learning are that we could provide a wider variety of coursework, A-G approved courses, and professional development for our staff to deliver instruction.

Don't mind me, just visiting!

Am I a visitor or a residence on the Internet?

When I first read this question, before watching David White's video, I thought I would only have two options: visitor or resident.  After watching White's video, I am now more familiar with this idea and understand that it is not binary.  Rather, it is more of a continuum.

One idea David White made that resonated with me had to do with distinguishing his personal and professional life.  As you may recall, White mentioned that professionally, he likes to "put himself out there.”  He does not mind being videotaped conferences, blogs actively, etc.  Moreover, he also mentioned that personally, he does not want to put his family's private life on the web.  I have very similar thoughts, or principles, when it comes to using the Internet.  Professionally, I enjoy "putting myself out there."  Don't get me wrong, this is still a work in progress but I’m getting “there.”  For example, I use LinkedIn on a regular basis—updating my profile and reaching out to others.  Although I wouldn't say I am a full on resident, professionally I am further along the continuum that I am in my personal life.

 In my personal life, I am extremely private. For this reason, I don't use Facebook-- much like White I don't want to put my family's private life on the web.  If you'll notice, the picture in the "about me" page of my blog has a picture of my family but is more of a silhouette-- and I had a tough time even putting this picture up!  So, in my personal life I am very much a visitor; I am very confident using the web as a toolbox. And, when I log off, I don't think I leave too much of a "digital footprint."

 In my future life on the Internet, I  see myself becoming more of a resident with my professional life but not in my personal life.  I'm enjoying learning and cultivating my PLN (as time allows). And I very much see the benefit of a PLN to my professional work (there's the goal-oriented trait of a visitor White talked about). 

Project tomorrow resources

What if a program existed that  allowed high school students, tomorrow's leaders, and opportunity to explore teaching as a career?  What a concept!  Students get a tremendous education gaining real-world experience.  Project Tomorrow's YouthTEACH2Learn is that program. 

High school students earn college credits and gain practical experience by observing classrooms, creating lesson, learning the art and craft of teaching, and participating in service learning projects.  As students consider a future career as an educator, they have the opportunity to meet and interact with educators and  visit college campuses.  Other student benefits of the program include developing  professional skills of leadership, collaboration, and public delivery of information. 

click here to find out more about YouthTEACH2Learn!

While you're there, you may want to check out the program's roadtrip.