A few books to read over the summer.
Power Up by Neebe and Roberts: This is our elementary school’s summer reading book. The book is skewed 6-12, but I think there are some good lessons.
The Achievement Habit by Roth: Bernard Roth is one of the people involved with Stanford’s d.school.
The Checklist Manifesto by Gawande: It has been on my list for a while.
It is the second to last day for the students and I am tired. I collected computers and organized the lab and had a few hard conversations.
But thinking about it, I don’t think they were the hard conversations that mattered. It was honest, and it was the truth, but it didn’t move things forward. No teachers are better teachers because of it. No students are going to have a better year next year because of it.
The important conversations move the art of teaching forward, and nothing I did today moved either my art or another teacher’s art forward.
I love this math video showcasing Sarah Dietz sharing a Three-Act Tasks. I think the Three-Act Task is fascinating, and with the Internet there is a wonderful scale that can enable teachers to share. It is something I need to learn more about.
The thing I love is sharing the video. There are so many wonderful things going on in each of our schools, but we don’t share them with the larger educational audience. At least that is a area of growth for my school.
One goal for next year, sharing the inside view of our school.
I have a tumblr where I save things online things I want to come back to later. It is hard sometimes. I find it easy to get caught up in the now and putting out the fires. And I forget to reflect.
I need to make it part of my practice. End of the day might work, but by then I am a bit drained and don’t know if I would give it proper focus. Maybe lunchtime? Maybe tweet the ones I really like or share them with the staff.
Something to work on.
and the truth is most people don’t.
Steven Spielberg planned on having a shark that worked. And, he didn’t get what he wanted, so he had to figure something else out.
I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark. So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock: ‘What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this?
-Steven Spielberg.
You are not going to get what you want, the better question is what can you do with what you have.
I’ve played the whine game a lot recently. This year I meet with all the kindergarten classes for a weekly tech time in the computer lab.
Except this is SOL season, we got kicked out for testing. And there was not a mobile cart to borrow, as they were used for testing.
How do you do tech time without tech?
How do you make a shark movie, without a shark?
Take a step back. Work the problem.
Today was the first pyramid wide meeting about next year’s digital transformation initiative. It was a day talking about the why. The information age is on the way out. A computer can now beat anyone in Jeopardy. Google can tell me the area of any circle. Anyone who is paid to follow directions and doesn’t need to think will eventually be outsourced to another country with cheaper labor or a machine.
We need students to think and solve problems. We need students who can take initiative and innovate. We need students who are metacognitive and can manage their own learning.
The first step? Get a team on board and empower them to make decision. This is a movement and movements need to grow.
In 1887, Charles Garnier, the architect behind the Paris Opera House, knew the Eiffel Tower was a terrible thing.
In 1958 the President’s Science Advisory Committee knew that “It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science.”
Your idea can’t possibly work and they have the background that you don’t. So why do you presume that you know and they don’t?
Faith? Sometimes things move forward even though “they” know better. Don’t forget, the Eiffel Tower is a national treasure, and the US put a man on the moon in 1969.
Sometimes, they are wrong.
So next year my school is part of a pilot program to leverage computers to improve education. A lot of this work is shaped by Project Red and Modern Teacher.
One of the points Project Red makes is the difference between first order and second-order change. First-order change tries
“to make what exists more efficient and effective without disrupting basic organizational arrangements or how people perform their roles. (Cuban, 1988)
Second-order changes
transform the familiar way of doing things into novel solutions to persistent problems (Cuban, 1988)
This transition is difficult, because you need to break out of the habit of what you did, and imagine how things could work based on what your new tools can do. Tim Harford talks about how factories moving from steam engine to electric did not increase productivity until factory owners redesigned the factory based on the advantages the electric dynamo had over the steam engine.
Yesterday I started creating a plan on rolling out the new computers. It was essentially based on last year’s plan, when each classroom only had 4 computers.
Last night I realized they were all first-order plans. I was not creating novel solutions. I need to think about Why Should’s and What If’s.
I need a list of Why Should and What If.
Resources Mentioned
The Shock of the New by Tim Harford (2007)
Notes For Kevin 