Avon Maitland Web 2.0 Experts at ECOO – Second String Steps-Up for PD Day

Tomorrow I'm giving a presentation on using Jing, Bitstrips, Google Apps and Glogster in the classroom. This wouldn't be an issue if I felt confident about it. But, it's a board PA day, our Web 2.0 experts (like @msjweir) are at the ECOO conference and teachers want PD that fits with 21^st century learning (surprise). When I expressed my concern about the level of my knowledge with these programs I was told (by a few teachers) that teachers don't want to hear from an 'expert'. They want to hear from someone who is learning and closer to understanding the challenges that teachers face with using technology (the truth is, their choices are limited this week).

Is this true? I began thinking about the people whom I admire for their use of technology in the classroom and to generalize about their characteristics and teaching styles.

Our tech adopters are willing to take risks. They are reflective practitioners, so when something does not go as planned with their teaching, they are able to problem solve and try again without any major blows to their egos. They believe in the pedagogy behind 21^st century learning and work for inquiry-based lessons; collaborative learning; and the analysis and creation of media. But they would never call themselves experts. They see themselves as continually learning and they have a genuine interest in doing so. If a challenge arises, they would use their Personal Learning Networks (PLN) to tap into or co-create the expertise required for a given question or situation. They use the internet to access people, and people, collectively, offer expertise.

So, in the spirit of the collective, my PD day audience and I will explore Jing, Bitstrips, Google Apps and Glogster together, using my fake class wiki, new netbooks and the wireless access now available in many of our high schools. Words of wisdom and student work samples are welcome @kimmcgill

What Does Reading Look Like?

Literacy activities look different in subjects across the curriculum and I have done a poor job of modeling literacy strategies in subjects other than English or arts-based courses.

A few years ago I was invited to present the think aloud strategy to my colleagues at a staff meeting. A think aloud is a strategy where teachers model their thinking and decoding while reading aloud to students. For the presentation, I wanted the reader to be unfamiliar with the text they were reading, so I found an English teacher to perform the strategy for the staff. That part was easy. The difficulty was in finding a text that would challenge the English teacher and be relevant to non-English teachers. It was important that the text not be too 'Englishy'. My audience represented various subject disciplines, and therefore expertise in different types of texts. Since the high school I taught at had an amazing Technical Education program I decided to find a 'tech text' for the think aloud.

Transportation Tech Class

I approached the Transportation Tech teacher in his classroom, car on hoist, kids in coveralls, music playing and me in my high heels stepping over tools and looking concerned – a funny picture I'm sure. The teacher welcomed me and I explained the upcoming presentation. Then I asked him, "What does reading and writing look like in your class?" He walked over to an area of the shop with desks, a blackboard, and a shelf holding a class set of textbooks. He pulled one textbook off the shelf and opened it to a chapter.

"This is what we read," he said. I scanned the text noting that key vocabulary words were bolded and notated in the margins. I could work with this. "And this is what we write." He turned the pages to the end of the chapter to show me chapter questions, but as he did, the book cracked like the spine had never been broken in.

"How long have you had these books for?" I asked.

"4 years."

"They've never been used?"

"Yes they have. When the kids do something wrong I make them read and answer questions for their detention."

I found this funny and disheartening at the same time. So I asked, "Why did you tell me that the textbook was what you read in class?"

He confessed, "I thought it was what you wanted to hear."

Then, the teacher walked out into the shop and picked up a piece of paper from the floor. He looked doubtful. It had a footprint on it and greasy smudges. He handed it to me and I couldn't understand the diagram, the vocabulary or the instructions. I could make out the image of a tire, but all of the other items on the diagram meant nothing to me. "This is what we read. We download it off the database, print it and put it on the floor because we're working under the car. This isn't going to help your presentation."

But it Did

The teacher had provided me with a text that was authentic to Transportation Tech. Since then I have learned about other literacy activities that Transportation Tech teachers use, like work orders, log books and diagnostic trees. These are all texts that students would never learn from me, an English teacher.

Personally, I want to understand what communication looks like in disciplines other than my own (History and English). Literacy activities look different in subjects across the curriculum and I have done a poor job of modeling literacy strategies in subjects other than English or arts-based courses. It's no wonder some teachers resist the idea that they are teachers of literacy. Many have never seen themselves in the examples provided and often secondary school literacy coaches and literacy consultants are former English teachers who are not comfortable modeling instructional strategies in subjects outside of their own disciplines.

Back to the Think Aloud

Admittedly, the think aloud did not go well for the poor English teacher who did not have any background knowledge that would allow her to decode the text used in the Transportation Tech class. But the discussion with the whole staff was incredible. We talked about background knowledge, making meaning and the importance of subject area teachers in teaching discipline-specific literacy skills to students. Most importantly, we valued the literacy skills the Transportation Tech teachers possess and the fact that only these teachers can impart their subject-specific literacy skills to their students. We need to do more of this.

What does reading look like in your class and what is happening in your school to support all teachers becoming literacy teachers?

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/pfala/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

First Meetings with Writing Across the Curriculum Teams Underway

I am almost through my first round of visits with our school's Writing Across the Curriculum teams and, while it feels comfortable and familiar for me as a facilitator, most participating teachers did not take part in the project last year. This is an opportunity to bring job embedded professional learning to an entirely new group of Avon Maitland teachers and to build on the learning from last year's groups.

What do you need to know about our WAC teams this year?

1. Every high school has a Writing Across the Curriculum team.
   
2. Teams are comprised of 5 – 8 teachers representing different subjects. 3 of the teams within our board have cross panel representation (7-12 teachers).
   
3. Each team has a Science teacher, Tech Ed teacher and Canada World Studies teacher.
   
4. Although we call ourselves Writing Across the Curriculum Teams, teachers explore written communication within the context of their discipline.
   
5. Teachers develop an inquiry question that focuses on improving student writing. This question may change in second semester as timetables change.
   
6. The work is integrated into to what the teachers are already teaching and where they are in their curriculum (content).
   
7. The focus in on the 'how' of teaching and assessing.
   
8. Teachers focus on one of their classes, so the work is manageable.
   
9. Teachers will select 3 students for whom they will collect a continuum of work. This work, with student names removed, will ground our discussions at inquiry team meetings.
   
10. Teachers will try new instructional strategies and differentiate instruction.
    

Goals for the first meeting:

1. Establish an understanding of the kind of work we will be doing.
   

   Inquiry-based; critical friends; developed from real needs/dilemmas in our classes; focused on writing; examining records of practice.
   

2. Broaden our definition of literacy, reading, text and writing and establish a common understanding of these terms.
   

   Teams have decided that reading is decoding, understanding, interpreting and making connections. Text is anything a student has to decode, interpret and understand. Text could be a novel, handout, film, plans, a map, art, dance, etc. Writing can occur to help students acquire information (input), such as note making. Writing can occur when students process information (we call this 'writing to learn' or writing for learning) and writing can be a product that reveals what the student knows and can do (output).
   

Teachers will spend the remainder of October

1. Honing their inquiry questions and direction.
   
2. Developing and implementing diagnostic assessments that relate to their inquiries.
   
3. Collecting work for their selected three students.
   

More Process Writing (I’m Writing to Learn)

I'm still stuck on the writing process question: does the changing nature of text alter the writing process, or does it merely alter how we teach the writing process. Today I grabbed a copy of Because Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Our Schools (by National Writing Project and Carl Nagin) from the bookshelf at work. The following three excerpts (quoted directly from the book) stood out for me.

Excerpt One
The writing process is anything a writer does from the time the idea came until the piece is completed or abandoned. There is no particular order. So it's not effective to teach writing process in a lock-step, rigid manner.
- Donald Graves

Excerpt Two
Most research today supports the view that writing is recursive, that it does not proceed linearly but instead cycles and recycles through subprocesses that can be described this way:

1. Planning (generating ideas, setting goals and organizing)
   
2. Translating (turning plans into written language)
   
3. Reviewing (evaluating and revising)

Excerpt Three

A mark of the writing process movement was that it grappled with the messiness of composing itself. Many writers don't know their subject well until they've written a draft. . . As author Tracy Kidder has said, "I write because I don't know what I really think about anything until I get it down on paper."

Perhaps the writing process hasn't changed with technology, but the way we teach it should. I'm flooded with a wave of ideas for modeling the writing process, for explicitly showing how ideas evolve and focus narrows with each piece or revision. As that focus becomes a clearer, language and word choice change. . . I still wonder about what needs to be at the heart of a writing assignment for this process to be authentic?