Take time to...

Today was an open house at my school, which is a private school which has suffered, in part, because of the troubles in the economy. I've been crazy-busy of late, but, like all the staff, I was asked to take a turn giving tours.

I ended up giving one tour to two very lively visitors and a former student of mine, presently a senior and a student tour guide at our school. We spent much of our time in the Upper Elementary part of our school, which follows a Montessori curriculum. I might mention at this point that I am Montessori trained myself, and taught in the same room we visited today for seven years before moving on to Middle School.

It was a marvelous thing to see - lots of students working independently, the visitors very impressed, and teachers giving individual lessons. It reminded me why I went into teaching in the first place. And, although we don't have all the cool-looking materials, much of the Middle and Upper School, although not Montessori, hews to the same idea of 'follow the child.'

I haven't gotten out of my own crazy-busy routine since school began, but it was an encouraging thing to see other areas of the school. It didn't hurt that we had the most families visit us during this open house that we've had in some time.

So, if you're working in a place where you like to work, my suggestion is to get out to areas of your school you haven't seen for a while. It just might remind you why you came to your school or to teaching in the first place.

It's not about you (or me either)

It's the start of a new year, and I find myself this year collaborating with a lot more teachers in presenting courses than I did last year. A lot of our collaboration has taken place over such shared files as Google.docs, as well as emails.

One collaboration that I especially value is with a younger teacher who has not taught Humanities before, but who has a lot of energy and good ideas. It would be easy to fall into some sort of 'competition' as to who had the most kid-friendly, or tech-savvy class. It would be easy to take the casual email a bit personally, but it would be a serious mistake. What she's reminds me is that there is much I don't know, and I need to be open to it, whether it comes from her or from elsewhere.

One of my former administrators once said 'you can't take what goes on in school personally'. The more I teach, the more I find that I'm a better teacher if I don't let my ego get in the way.

Photo "No Ego, but 'Go' by Janice Frasier, clevergirl used under Creative Commons copyright.

Older but still good

For a variety of reasons, I've been spending much of my 'summer vacation' home doing a variety of school related tasks. One of my aims was to read or re-read books that touch on middle school learning. and one I just finished was Rick Wormeli's Meet Me in the Middle.

Wormeli's enthusiasm for middle school students come across on every page. I especially appreciate his section in Chapter 3 on "Teaching Young Adolescents to Reason" and his chapter on "Games in the Classroom." This is one guy I would have loved to have as a teacher when I was in middle school, and I'd love to have him as a colleague, if only for the inspiration he gives to encourage those around him to do better.

[For those of you who have trouble getting into books, think of it as a long hard-copy blog that you can read during a power failure, such as we had in our county recently :-) I sometimes find it easier to read for 10 minutes a day...this gives me a chance to think about some of the information involved. ]

(Picture: "Reading table" by Bob Esty)

Summing up the Year, Part 2

Last year, when I asked students to evaluate my class at the end of the year, I received a lot of good and some bad comments, but the one that stuck with me was "You talk too much." I found it interesting because, that year, I had made a real effort to talk less. However, it got me thinking, and I ran across an intriguing book called "Never Work Harder than Your Students" by Robyn Jackson. I also had started working with a class wiki.

So, I tried a system where I would give out questions, and the students would research the answers on their own for the factual portion of our history units. It worked out very well. Now, instead of bored faces listening when I lectured, my students did their own research, and posted the results on the class wiki. Each student answered a question, and added his or her own name and the page numbers in the relevant textbook. The wiki page became the study guide for the test. And I talked a lot less, and students got more practice in using the index and looking up information for themselves. That's probably the thing I'm most proud of this year.

And what about this year's evaluations? Largely positive, but the thing that stuck in my mind was "Can we act out more scenes from history." Now I have some ideas for next year....

Image: Pearson's Falls, near Tryon NC, Photo by Maureen Esty, my daughter

Summing up the Year, Part 1

This year, I invested some time and energy to work with ePals and found two classrooms, one in France and one in Spain, which agreed to exchange emails with my class. We spent a lot of time in the beginning just trying to get the logistics down, however, and didn't start exchanging emails until January.

My students were excited about the exchange at first, but, as time went on, and we didn't hear very often from our email correspondents, the enthusiasm waned. Between conflicting vacation times, and lack of time at each end, I'd say we had a total of four 'exchanges' with our French class, and but two or three with our Spanish class, which started later in the year.

I take some lessons from this. One is to start earlier. The teachers I worked with have tentatively agreed to work with me in the coming year, so that shouldn't be difficult. Another is to organize the emails around a theme or joint project. We did this a bit with the French class, where we would ask the students to talk about their families in one series of emails, to talk about their towns in another, and so on. More could be done with this.

I also wonder if we couldn't get more of a joint project with classes who have a better command of English. I know how difficult it is to express concepts in a language you're just learning, and my students this year, with the occasional exception, just knew English. I'm thinking of trying to come up with a joint story on some theme. Something for me to look into this summer.

Photo: View of Périgueux, France - Photo by Christine Lécroart

Change or die!

Needlessly dramatic? Actually, not. I went to the emergency room last Monday for some tightness and pressure on my chest, and finally was released from the hospital last Thursday after an angioplasty and stent implant on an artery to my heart. How did this happen? The most likely villain is a cholesterol count that is not extremely bad, but clearly could stand some improvement.

So now, despite the fact that I eat a reasonably healthy diet, exercise some, and am only overweight by some 20 pounds or so, I'm confronted with the reality of coronary artery disease, and the fact that what I'm doing is not quite good enough. I'm now looking at my diet, my weight, my exercise routine, and (toughest of all) my overall level of stress. I'm going to have to learn some new vocabulary, such as 'partially hydrogenated vegetable oils' (these are bad), HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (bad cholesterol). The choices won't be easy, but I've got some time and, if I start now, I should put myself in a much better position in the future.

This episode strikes me as a metaphor for my professional life as well. I am a reasonably well-respected teacher at my private school, and I have taken some steps, as you can see in earlier posts of this blog, towards incorporating Web 2.0 technologies and other innovations in my teaching. I'm glad I have, and my teaching has definitely improved as a result. But is a visit to the 'emergency room' of teaching careers in my future? Do I need to do more? How do I strike a balance between incorporating the truly useful in a timely fashion and wasting my time, and, more importantly, my students' time, in chasing 'the latest thing' that turns out to be a dead end?

These are the questions I'm going to be struggling with in this newly re-titled blog. I was trying for something a bit more attractive than the 'label' I had previously (Bob's Middle School Web 2.0 Journey). Maybe you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but, hopefully, this fox is a bit smarter than that.

(fox picture by arudhio, used under Creative Commons license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/arudhio/)

Brain Rules

I'm a bit behind in my professional reading, to put it mildly, but I'm almost finished John Medina's Brain Rules and I highly recommend it. Although not written specifically for teachers and not specifically about chidrens' or teenage brains, the book has a number of recommendations ('rules') that specifically apply to teaching. I especially appreciate rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things, and rule #7: Sleep well, think well. If you've read some of the other literature on teenage brains, such as Barbara Strauch's The Primal Teen, you'll see some familiar territory, but what I like about Brain Rules is that it is a good but fairly easy read, with enough documentation to assure you that John Medina knows what he is talking about.

Great teachers and attractive Internet - all we need?

Having just gotten back from a brief vacation in West Virginia (see picture for some cool geology near Seneca Rocks) , I scanned the Outlook section of last Sunday's Washington Post and found two articles that intrigued me. One was What Makes a Teacher Great by Marc Fisher, in which he describes a day sitting as part of a group interviewing prospective teachers. The interesting bottom line was that, with guidance, even an non-professional, albeit well-informed one, such as Marc could pick out people likely to be good teachers. He found that the candidates he favored by and large reminded him of great teachers he had in the past. He also quotes Aleta Margolis of Inspired Teaching as saying that"many, if not most educators can be taught to turn away from an authoritarian approach and adopt values and methods that can help children become active, involved learners.

And what better way to get children become active learners than to offer courses on-line, where students spend much of their time anyway? That's the question asked by Katherine Mangu-Ward in her article on the same page called "Traditional Schools Aren't Working. Let's Move Learning On-line." For those who follow such bloggers as Vicki Davis, David Warwick, and many others, the arguments here are not new, and, in my opinion, the author is a bit too quick to write off all efforts in 'conventional' education (as in the "Traditional Schools Aren't Working" statement in the title), but she does quote some interesting statistics from the Florida Virtual School, which has some 100,000 students. According to the article, the students who enroll in AP courses on-line here average a higher score than those who enroll in AP courses in public school.

But I still remember my daughter trying to take a on-line course in Japanese when she was in high school, and eventually giving up because the technology was complicated and our cable service Internet couldn't keep up. I also remember several students in the school I teach, who, despite teachers as supportive as anyone could wish, refused to learn and disrupted class for other students. I certainly applaud the steps away from the "one size fits all" educational models, and I agree that the more 'great teachers' we have, the better we are. I think there are some students I know that could flourish in an on-line environment. But there are some that won't, and there are some that need a bit more structure in their learning lives than teachers who are merely supportive can give. We need a mix of alternatives because the kids we teach are not, in fact, identical. My own experience suggests that there are better ways and worse ways, but there need to be many ways, so that all kids can prosper.

Dropping back for a moment to the point of 'good teachering can be taught', I'm quite excited about an upcoming book "Teach Like a Champion" by Doug Lemov. I've heard a lot of good things about this book and have just ordered it. I"ll let you know how it is.

Andrew Carnegie Rides Again!

Last Friday, I put on my 19th century fancy outfit (why is it that I even have a 19th century fancy outfit? Long story here, another time perhaps.) and came into my class as Andrew Carnegie. As some of you may know, Carnegie came to the US as a poor immigrant from Scotland and ended up as the richest (or maybe second richest) American of his time.

I had asked my students to prepare some responses on the the proposition of "What is good for business is good for the US," and I gave them the opportunity to debate Carnegie, more or less in the flesh. Everyone seemed to have a good time of it. After a while, my students started asking the questions you would expect students from a upper-scale liberal background to ask, and I gave them the answers that someone who was a businessman in the latter half of the 19th century would give.

I think it was a good exercise for my students to debate someone who they clearly didn't agree with, and it certainly held their interest.

Granted, not much to do with high technology here, except that I was able to download a copy of Carnegie's essay "The Gospel of Wealth" (available here ) in a matter of minutes and a bit of an Internet search. That certainly made my job easier.

Feeding the Elephant

I was amused by Dane Peter's post on Dane's Education Blog which related a story in which a teacher from India asked a teacher from the United States whether the US did a lot of standardized testing. Upon receiving a confirmation, the Indian teacher noted. "Here, when we want the elephant to grow, we feed the elephant. We don’t weigh the elephant."

I am fortunate to work at a private school that receives no Federal funding at all. This means we also don't have to abide by Federal mandates, including those about standardized testing. We used to do one set of standardized tests a year, in part as a 'sanity check' on how our students are doing both for ourselves and our parents, but we've stopped doing that, and I can't say that I miss it. Neither do many of my students, who, having come from the public schools, complain long and loud about the tests they had to take when the subject comes up.

One of the sillier mandates I positively enjoy ignoring is the one put in by Senator Byrd of West Virginia which mandates that all schools receiving Federal funding teach about the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day, which I believe is September 24th. Don't get me wrong; I believe in teaching about the Constitution, and spend two weeks on it in my US History course for 6th graders that I teach. But I teach it where it fits in chronologically, after the American Revolution, which, this year, I got to some time in November. I did not have to interrupt my presentation about the Salem Witchcraft Trials to devote an out-of-context day to the U.S. Constitution.


It would be nice to think that, with No Child Left Behind coming up for revision/renewal, that we'd get off this emphasis on testing, but I haven't heard much to indicate that this will be the case. In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy my 'bubble' existence free from Federal mandates as I feed the elephant as best I can.

Picture by Oso, published under a Creative Common license. http://flickr.com/photos/oso/5890418/

Yeah, about this blogging thing...

I follow a number of blogs, including Vicki Davis's Cool Cat Teacher Blog and David Warlick's 2 Cents Worth (both of which I recommend, by the way), but when it comes to writing my own, I can't seem to muster the patience or even the time, to put the obligatory picture on top, and to wordsmith what I have to say to something pithy and wide-reaching, and I certainly can't find the time to blog as much as these folks do. When we had the 'snow siege' in our area two weeks ago, I made myself a promise to say something weekly, which I've tried to do, but I'm not sure that forcing myself to write that often has resulted in that much added wisdom.

But, to continue from my last blog, I did have my students use the discussion feature on our class wiki to start a discussion on our current historical literature book, Ashes of Roses. It's just the first go-round, and I can see, even from my own inexperienced eyes, that this will be a work in progress for some time. I can see that I'll be tinkering with the format for a while before I hit upon something that works. What I do find is that I can launch only so many new things at one time...otherwise some fail simply for lack of attention.

On the bright side, however, I did get the idea of using the discussion feature from the English Companion Ning (which I also highly recommend). For much of my day-t0-day needs, I find this Ning answers a bit better than some of the blogs I follow. However, I find it a challenge to just keep up with the modest amount of on-line reading I do, much less add to my blog even once a week. How some of these folks find the time to read widely, which they clearly do, and blog at the pace they do is beyond me.

Bumps in the Road

Ah yes, it is always fun to imagine that life goes in an ever-ascending spiral upwards, and that projects once begun, will take on lives of their own. Sadly, reality, just like the economy, is full of ups and downs, and sometimes it does come to 'two steps forward, one back.'

Our ePals exchanges seem to be at a pause point. About half of my students sent out emails to their penpals during our 'snow week', but we didn't get any student responses back last week, and now the French class at least, is on break until March 8th. We're not sure why, but we haven't heard anything from our Spanish class this month. Some of my students are getting a bit frustrated at the lack of response.

Our class wiki continues to move along. Right now, the most active part is our book review section. This quarter, the students seem used to the idea of regular reading and posting book reports. We had our last batch of posted "Find Outs" for our US History unit on Reconstruction, which turned out to be very handy when our first date for the test was snowed out. Interestingly enough, I haven't gotten much in the way of reaction from parents when I made the wiki public except for one or two offhand comments about "gee, it's nice to see what you're up to."

I'm trying something different tomorrow. I'm going to use the discussion feature on the class wiki to talk about our current book, Ashes of Roses. Right now, I'm just requiring a post some time this week. We'll see what happens.

Snowed in? S'no problem

Our school has been closed since last Friday due to two snowstorms, and it won't reopen until Tuesday at the earliest. By email, my administrator asked us as a faculty to suggest things to do for our students that would allow them to work at home. For my students, I suggested that they write their French and Spanish epals, and I set up a place on our class wiki for them to share what they found out about the French and Spanish schools. I'm rather looking forward to the results!

Man proposes, nature disposes

We in the DC area have been hit with three snowstorms in the course of eight days. The first two were ordinary, about 5" each, but the third, christened by some the "Snowpocalypse" dumped 23" on an area generally unused to storms that big. Now another storm is forecast tomorrow with 10" or over.

During our last storm, we lost power, and it was amazing how most of our time that powerless day was spent in shovelling snow, eating, and trying to keep warm, while the temperature inside the house gradually dropped. Fortunately, our power was restored before our house temperature got below 50 degrees, but it made for a very pleasant evening sitting around the fire in our fireplace.

Not much to do with web 2.0 on this post, although certain of the high-tech stuff, such as remote terminal connections, has made it at least possible for me to do some work. If this keeps up, certainly there are possibilities for distance learning.

Update for January

Well, if anyone were following this blog, they'd be mighty disappointed, since I've been posting at the rate of one post per month! Outside of being busy, as we all are, with various school duties, I'm somehow reluctant to post unless I feel I have something to say. Another issue is that I come lately to the entire Web 2.0 world, and I've never gotten into the swing of either checking or commenting daily. There's a part of me that is turned off by the concept of Twitter; yet I can certainly see that it has been useful for some people.

My email exchanges are moving along. My students and I have gotten a number of responses from both our French and Spanish classes. I have a picture of the town, Perigueux, in Aquitaine, in which our French correspondents have their school posted on our class wiki. I'm thinking of some kind of summing up exercise for my kids, in which they combine information they've received from their French correspondents to try and get a picture of what their school is like.

Meanwhile, I'm moving ahead with a version of my 6th grade Humanities course which features very little lecturing at all. As I've mentioned before, I've tried to be very specific on what I want my students to get out of a particular section, and have institutionalized this in a list of "Find Outs" or short points for identification. For my current unit, Reconstruction, I've put in for each item a "identity" and a "significance" header, following what the 7th grade teachers do at my school. I split up the "Find Outs" among the kids, each researching one and posting their answers on the class wiki. I also include some broader questions, some of which I also assign as homework. When I write the test, I have them fill in the identity and significance of some of the "Find Outs" and write answers to one or more of the questions I've put on the wiki.

So far, I'd have to say that it's been a screaming success. The students are engaged, and all of them do at least passing on the tests and most do very well. In the meantime, they're actually reading the textbook, or at least parts of it, using chapter headers and the index to find subjects, and synthesizing what they know in their own words.

One of my colleagues pointed out, however, that taking notes during lectures is a skill that is needed in upper school and college courses. Hmmm...have to think about that. Got some ideas already, but let's see what happens. When I ran that idea by my students, however, they were almost unanimous in their lack of enthusiasm for lecture, and my sense of some of them is that they are too restless or too distracted to pay attention during a lecture of more than, well, five minutes. At least, that's my impression judging from when I give instructions....

Two steps forward

I've always found December a frantic time for teaching. It's a short month because of the Christmas break, and there are plenty of interruptions in it because, for all practical purposes, it marks the end of the fall semester. In my school, we also give semester exams, which means that our regular schedule is thrown out the window for the week before break. Nonetheless, I made some progress this month in getting my international exchanges going.

Yes, international exchanges. I found a classroom in Spain through ePals that was in our age group and was willing to email in English. We just sent off our first emails to them before the break. I'm going to keep my exchanges at two for the moment and see where they go.

We've also now had two exchanges with our French school. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that our correspondent French school is not in Brittany, as I first thought, but in Aquitaine. I eventually found this out by doing Mapquest searches on towns mentioned in the student emails. My French counterpart did send me a copy of the school's web address, but I haven't been able to pull it up. Perhaps this has something to do with the electrical failure in the computer lab at their school. In any case, it gives us a lot to talk about.

One lesson that I have certainly learned is the necessity for patience. There always seem to be bugs in the system to work out, and, although the tech base in my school is far from extraordinary by US standards, it seems to be better than either of these schools. I just hope that my students can be patient as well.

My second strand has been to turn more of the learning in my class over to my students. As you might recall from earlier posts, this was inspired by things I read over the summer, most notably Never Work Harder Than Your Students by Robyn Jackson. What I've done over the fall is to turn over researching facts, group paper outlines, and finally individual paper outlines to the students and posting them on our class wiki. One big step I took in December was to make the wiki public. I had worked with our school administration to get this approved, and approval came some time ago, but I waited until I thought the wiki was ready. I finally realized that I was waiting for me to be confident enough to throw the switch, which I finally did the first week of December. So far, the reaction I've gotten from making it public has been positive, if somewhat minimal.

I suspect that where I'm heading with this approach is some sort of inquiry-based learning, but I would have to make myself a lot more familiar with what inquiry-based learning is before I would claim to be going there.

I've been trying to keep up with various blogs in my Google Reader. Most of the people I follow seem to be light-years ahead of me in the tech stuff they use, which I find both inspiring and a bit discouraging at the same time. I guess that's another patience lesson; to run the marathon at one's own pace and be comfortable with one's own achievements while being aware of what else is out there.

We have an exchange!

We just received our first emails from our sister class in Brittany, France. I'm very excited about this, and I know my students are looking forward to getting these emails, which they will reply to in the coming week. Another small step, but we've come some distance now.

Another small step

Last week, my class sent its first emails to our class in Brittany, France. We used some stock French phrases (Bonjour, Je m'appelle...) and wrote the rest of our introductions in English. Our corresponding class is a English class in a French school. I'm curious as to how or when they will respond.

Today, I took another small step towards making the class wiki public by inviting my supervisor to be a member. She was favorably impressed by it. I was hoping to get some pictures from our French correspondents and put them on the wiki before taking it public, but I'm thinking now of turning it public after the Thanksgiving break, and adding the international portion later.

My last group project on the wiki was group reports, in which each group posted its sources (from a limited list) and main points of information on the wiki before writing the paper. This seemed to work well on a number of levels; more than one member of the group could access the information, and it gave me an easy and paperless way to check their sources. For my next project, I'm asking my students to do individual reports on the same model; post their sources and main points on the wiki, and then write their paper off of those.

Also for this unit, I have come up with my usual list of questions, which I call "Find Outs," for my students to research. This time, I've assigned each student a "Find Out" question, and I've made it one list between my two classes. I guess we'll see what happens.

Everyone on our faculty was asked to suggest a topic for a workshop for our local AIMS convention next year. My topic ended up as "Evolution of my class wiki." I like the term "evolution," because it suggests a step-by-step forward movement, which is how I've been working in incorporating Web 2.0 in my teaching. I'm sure others have done more, and more quickly, but given the lack of a computer technology person at my school, and the lack of other tech-savvy role models at my school more skilled than me, step-by-step is how I feel comfortable working. Besides, I do have an outside life.

Almost ready to begin international exchange!

Life is still pretty busy. Last week was our Middle School retreat, and I was frantically trying to get this week set up so I wouldn't have to work over the weekend (well, except at the Renfaire, as I explained earlier). This week we get to meet new candidates for the head of our school. Life happens.

The technical issue I had to resolve was that my original epals account would let me create sub-accounts, but they could not send to the Internet as a whole. I took the question of how to get that access to the epals folks, and they set me up with a type of account called SchoolMail, which made me an administrator, which then gave me the power to change the access of my accounts. Sounds complicated, but, after a lot of back and forth, I believe I've finally arrived at where I want to be. I do want to say that the epals folks have been very helpful and prompt in answering my emails.

I have two classes abroad that I contacted this summer, and I've been keeping up with each of them. One is in France, and the other is in Belarus. I'm hoping to exchange our initial emails with the class in France next week. I hope my students don't get confused between the two classes!

Oh, yeah, and somewhere in all this I have classes to teach. In fact, I was asked to develop a 'new' class this year. Up to this point, our middle school has taught US History over the course of two years. We've decided to change this, and, as I am the only 6th grade Humanities (combination history and English) teacher, I was given the job. Actually, so far, it's been a lot of fun, because I've combined the re-writing of the course with some ideas from my summer reading of Robyn Jackson's Never Work Harder than your Students. The end result is that I did a lot of planning for the new course over the summer, and that is really saving me now. The actual number of students I teach is small, which is one of the blessings of teaching in an independent school.

However, one of the curses of independent schools is the present economic environment, which has made it tougher for independent schools to hold their own. Btw, there was an interesting article on this in the Washington Post a few days ago. The article, "Losing the Jacket and Tie for Jeans and a T-shirt," noted that transfers from private to public schools in the county I live in doubled last year. That's probably a better topic for another post, but I must confess that it keeps me looking over my shoulder...

Yeah, been a bit busy, but moving ahead

Okay, so I haven't posted in a while. Sorry to disappoint my legions of fans :-)

Call it an excuse, but I will note that I work all weekends in September and most of October at the Maryland Rennaissance Faire . My wife and I sing and play harp. We're listed as Esty's Harp and Voice under Entertainment - Musicians and Dancers. We enjoy doing the Renfaire, and it does pay a tuition payment or two for our daughters' colleges, but the result is that I work seven days a week from just about the beginning of school until the end of the first marking period, so some things just don't get done as quickly as they might.

On to school news! I've been going through the process of getting parental permission to set up monitored email accounts on epals, which is something they require for students under the age of 13. It took me about a week to send those permissions out and get them back, and I created the accounts today. So far, so good, but there is a technical detail or two still to work out. Right now, I'm hopeful that I can exchange my first emails next week. I also gave an overview of the project to my students and asked them to find Brittany (the area in France where our correspondents are) and Belarus on the wall map. I've sent a list of my students to our correspondents, and hope to get similar lists from them soon. Right now, I think the take-home lesson is that these projects just take a while to set up, and one needs to be patient. After all, we've got all year, and it's a marathon, not a sprint.