Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

I sat in Logan Airport (yet another delay) trying to grasp what made this conference so powerful for me. My head reels with ideas for September, the stuff I need to learn or do better, and the people I need to follow through their sites and blogs.

For me, this conference was heavily about establishing new relationships, expanding my learning circle to include others–many of them nonlibrarians–from around the world.

On the first night I met librarian Barbara Jansen whose work on information literacy and Big 6 I long admired. I suspect this will be a lasting friendship.

If you’d like to peek at my presentations, you can download them here:

• http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/november.ppt
• http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/landscape.ppt

You can read Steve Dembo’s post about one of my sessions on his Teach42 blog.
What I learned and loved:

Random ideas: Several speakers mentioned WikiYa a wiki for discussion of young adult literature. They recently lost their database and are in the process of reloading content. I plan to visit and contribute there. Wikispaces seems to have more features and a simpler interface than the wiki software I am currently using. I may make a switch. Wikispaces share 42Ways, strategies for using wikis in the classroom. Combine that with Bernie Dodge’s Design Patterns for EduWikis for enough ideas to keep you going all next school year and the year after!

What is the right channel? Marco Torres’ students’ work with videos. Marco noted that teachers have three options: quit, complain or innovate. He chooses to innovate.
Marco’s grandfather recently passed. Before he died, he told Marco that his was the most important job of all his many cousins. “The secret to curing the disease that is killing me may be resting in the head of the shy kid sitting in the back. You have the power to unlock that secret.”

Marco is using media to engage and create with his largely Latino California teens. For many of them, for many of their learning situations, says Marco, “it is the right channel.” The fifteen page term paper is not always the “right channel.” Though I believe students need to learn to create in a variety of channels, the concept will resonate as I consider the right channel at the right moment for the right learner. Marco’s students’ authentic media productions were clearly the right channels for their tasks and learning needs and powerful enough to grab the attention of the folks at CNN and George Lucas, to name a few.
 

Sara Kajder, University of Louisville, also teachers 11^th grade “on-level” English. Visit her website: Bringing the outside in designed to accompany her book Bringing the Outside In: Visual Ways of Engaging Reluctant Readers. I attended two of Sara’s workshops and came away with some very practical ideas for inspiring and improving reading and writing.
About classroom blogs, Sara suggests they should:

• Have strong and clear purpose
• Be reflective, involve metacognitive writing
• Have a recognizable and well-informed point of view
• Offer semi-structured opportunities to experience and emulate expertise
• Incorporate quality of presentation + multimodality

Bottom line—Classroom blogs need to produce the same conditions in which genuine affinity spaces can emerge and be supported. Most classroom blogs are not authentic—the blog is not an artifact born out of genuine interest. You want the blog to be the place they go to everyday because they are so charged by it!

Another issue to warn students about regarding public writing. MySpace profiles and postings are not just an issue for employment, university admissions committees regularly look at applicants’ Facebook and MySpace presence.

I look forward to trying Sara’s “open mind” strategy in which students create a visual representation of text and their own reading of it.  Using tools like Photoshop Elements, students create a visual interpretation of a reading, adding reflection and argument to explicate their images.

Andy Hargreaves does a mean Tony Blair. More importantly he presents a much-needed rallying cry for reexamining the direction of education through sustainable leadership. I plan to share his new book with my very forward-thinking administrators in the fall.
Hargreaves presents a number of ideas designed to get folks on the leadership bus: America is “colonizing the sinking sands” of strategies that other countries have left behind. (The UK experienced a spectacular and calamitous failure in this same arena.)  

Imposed short-term targets (adequate yearly progress) transgress every principle of sustainable leadership and learning. American people are beginning to understand that we need to equip ourselves–to be ready for the moment, when that “nonsense on stilts, adequate yearly poppycock” will be gone.

How can we be part of the high stakes, NCLB effort without losing integrity? We lose integrity compromising with small adjustments to insane systems and suddenly we find ourselves in a place we never meant to be. For instance,we witness “the artifice of improvement”—progress related to making test items easier.
Hargreaves believes we can prepare for life beyond reform. Sustainability is also about social justice and responsibility. Initiatives can be developed without compromising the development of others in the surrounding environment, now and in the future. If you improve by robbing the best capacity of the teachers around you, it is not sustainable.

Reform has changed us into little “Enrons of educational change.”

• If you’ve narrowed the curriculum to focus on just English and math. . .
• If you focus only on the bubble kids and cast the other kids to the wayside . . .
• If you find rates of literacy achievement go up while rates of reading for leisure go down. . .
• If you get better results by searching for better students and keeping others away when testing occurs . . .
• If you are a principal and you see immigrants coming into your school and look for a new job before your numbers go down

. . . you are becoming an Enron of educational change

Hargreaves identifies seven principles of sustainability:

1. Depth—it matters—

Learning to achievement to testing

NOT

Testing to achievement to learning

Data driven to distraction—You should be the driver, not the data

If we work together with clarity we’ll see the results, but those results will not happen the first year. Things get worse before they get better, like getting used to wearing bifocals.

Statewide assessment is reaching a plateau because it is running out of tricks. You have to think of longterm learning. You have to pay attention to the other parts of the lives of poor people, educators are not wholly responsible for the problems.
2. Endurance—it lasts. It doesn’t disappear when the charismatic principal goes away. It lasts beyond the individual leader. It preserves and advances the most valuable aspects of that leadership. Few things succeed less than leadership succession. All leaders, no matter charismatic or visionary, eventually die. People will not face the end of their leadership, it’s like talking about death.

The best legacies are in principles, practices, and people. All school improvement plans should include succession plans. We need to conduct conversations about where the school is now, where it’s going, what it’s leadership needs are, and what they will be. We need to establish leadership development plans. What if principal is knocked over by a bus tomorrow?

3. Breadth—it spreads—shared across community.

There are three cultures of teachers—

• Veteran dominated
• Novice oriented
• Blended

4. Justice—it does not harm the surrounding environment—not without thought for those around us

5. Diversity-in promotes diversity and cohesion—strong ecosystems are diverse

6. Resourcefulness—it conserves expenditure

7. Conservation—it honors the past in creating the future
We should work toward innovating into the future by building selectively on the best of the past. We need to use both mapquest and a map, we can overcome the male chemical imbalance that prevents us from asking for directions.
Rather than data driven practice, we should be guided by evidence informed practice; it’s a right and better term. We should use what we know from practice, put learning first.

Thank you for inviting me, Alan! I loved this event and hope more librarians will attend and share next time around.