District Achievement Contract feedback

Feedback for Senior Admin/Learning Team on the SD57 District Achievement Contract 2013-2014

“We hope you will take the time to read it. We also hope you will provide us some feedback by sending your input to: dacfeedback@sd57.bc.ca”

- retrieved from http://www.sd57.bc.ca/ June 17th, 2013 

To begin, a thank-you is in order to senior administration for seeking feedback on the District Achievement Contract (DAC). This was unexpected but long overdue. It is a positive development to see the DAC offered to stakeholders for input -- this has not happened in the ten year history of school district “Plans for Student Success” and Superintendent Reports on Achievement. As our superintendent pointed out earlier in the year, these have largely been compliance documents which are written for a very general audience, and have not been subject to intense scrutiny, editing, or statistical analysis. PGDTA president Matt Pearce and SD57 Trustee Kate Cooke have raised concerns about this at public board meetings over the last year, so I know this is not news to you.

So, with what seems to be a somewhat “fresh” DAC, and the first to go public for input, I have to say this is a good start. We need many more opportunities for open feedback on school district directions and decisions, just as we need more opportunities for reflection and celebration. This feedback needs to take on the characteristics of a dialogue, something that can lead to change or renewal. We had mechanisms for this in the past that, while not perfect, at least provided for some collaborative decision-making between stakeholders (like teachers) and senior administration. These structures dissipated over a four of five year period ending with the big cuts in 2010. Job action in 2011-2012 kind of sealed the deal, and we are left with a communication problem in our district, and a paucity of co-creative work being done between stakeholders. Seeking input on the DAC is a small but praiseworthy step towards a more dialogue-based set of relationships in the school district. I would encourage senior administration to work with trustees and partner groups to design more opportunities for exchange of ideas and collaborative decision-making, particularly in the areas of educational technology, shared professional learning, school reform, and student interventions. I would also encourage senior administration to turn each significant area of the DAC into a corresponding interactive webspace so that organizational change and support for students can leap out of the yearly report format and become something that invites dialogue and ongoing opportunities for involvement.

Comments, questions, critiques of the DAC.

First, a quick bio and some biases to declare. I teach secondary Social Studies, Humanities, and Geography at D.P. Todd Secondary (my school home for 10 years) in School District 57. I have been student of organizational culture throughout my 17-year career, and have served in a variety of formal and informal leadership positions. My wife is a school trustee and my family has been filled with teachers for at least four generations. I am an active user of social media and educational technology, and over the last eight or nine years I have written on my blog and elsewhere extensively, both in celebration and concern, about school district directions, decisions, and philosophies. Education is in my bones. Next year I will be serving as the PGDTA Pro-D Chair and Fund Administrator and I look forward to working with district staff on shared projects and common goals. I am not completely comfortable submitting this feedback, as it is necessarily critical and covers much of the same ground I’ve covered elsewhere, but there is a season for everything, and I would kick myself for missing the opportunity to respond to a request for input on a topic I feel qualified to discuss.

Introduction (p. 3) 

“The concepts and initiatives within this document have been created through a collaborative process”

It would be useful to know how the process for developing the plan actually works. There used to be an official “District Planning Process” that is no longer used; this is understandable as it involved many steps that were never realistic, e.g. the district plan was meant to support school plans, to synthesize them even, yet the two levels of plans were written simultaneously and the district plan had no way of resolving incompatibilities. The current DAC describes a feedback loop within senior administration and the senior learning team, but this is quite far removed from the frontlines, from the scattered leaders in schools and classrooms. Admittedly, it is difficult to take the pulse of such a large and diverse organization, let alone set common goals, but this does not excuse the need to engage stakeholders in setting district agendas.

“the Senior Learning Team has consulted research documents including the work of GELP (Global Education Leaders’ Program)” 

It is troubling that the only explicit mention of an external influence on the DAC is GELP. This organization is entwined with corporations that advocate the increased privatization of educational services. GELP is an influential player in the education reform agenda, and, while championed by many who have guided the BC Education Plan, should be balanced with broader influences, especially those that do not undermine public education with corporatization. Please list the other research that influences district agendas. Here are some resources on GELP that explain these concerns: 

1) http://bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/Public/Publications/TeacherNewsmag/archive/2012-2013/2012-11/index.pdf
2) http://thetyee.ca/News/2012/10/05/BC-Education-Plan/
3) http://www.staffroomconfidential.com/2012/10/origins-of-bcedplan.html

“In order to reach our vision, we know that it is important to examine our organization through a systems-based approach”

What is this systems-based approach? How exactly is this system examined or reviewed, and by whom? Simply having community partners does not equal a systems approach, unless perhaps they form part of the “examination.” Does the system in “systems-based” refer to organizational function, capacity, or hierarchy?

District Context (p. 4)

This description has improved over previous DACs and definitely brings home the reality of vulnerability in our district. One question -- 684 FTE teachers -- this figure does not match the one used at the PGDTA office for their calculations (closer to 705 I think). Is the number in flux? Also, these numbers are in contrast to the ones that appear on the district website http://www.sd57.bc.ca/index.php?id=493, and are different yet again from the numbers used on external job postings published by our district in the last year. Is it too much to expect the same office to use the same data set?

District Strengths (p. 5)

"Our district is decentralized in terms of financial and educational decision making”

I think this refers to a change in accounting that took place many years ago, whereas this statement implies a deliberate attempt to flatten hierarchies. We still have plenty of those -- key centralized controls still exist that prevent principals from advocating for public education and working with school staff to innovate, particularly in the area of technology and collaboration. What can we do to reconcile the declared "character strength" of decentralization with more support for site-based innovation?

District and School Connections (p. 6)

“moving towards seamless pre-K to 12 systems”

We need to see more evidence of this; our secondary contact with elementary feeder schools is minimal and has not changed in many years: some work by the counsellors, music program, and student leadership activities.

“School Plan is connected to the Family of Schools plan”

Our staff has never heard of a Family of Schools Plan -- what is it and where can we see it?

“School Plans are reviewed by a team with feedback...” 

This has been highly inconsistent, for example, our school has only received feedback on its plan once in the last five years, and the review was conducted by a team, not an individual. If any additional feedback was offered, it has not been shared with staff.

“School Plans and Family Plans are informed by the District Achievement Contract” 

This has not been the case -- school plans are written independently of the DAC and typically record school-based initiatives based on department goals or school-sponsored inquiry. The Family Plans are an unknown -- I have yet to hear from anyone who has seen one.

Enhancing Learning Through the Use of ICT (p. 10/11)

“Encourage use of the recently implemented Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) public wireless networks”

Effective BYOD programs need some kind of policy, a co-developed plan, and a complimentary purchasing strategy (we have none of these). All we have is a cumbersome public wifi that drops connections, restricts access, and works slowly. It does not differentiate between staff and student users who each have distinct needs.  The implementation forgot to include the communication part -- many staff do not know what BYOD involves and only experience the frustration of a wireless network that does not work as well as the ones we have generally had access to over the last six years.  I won't list the frustrations that have beed expressed to me from various schools because I'm quite sure you are already aware of them.

I've talked with tech analysts and systems managers at Northern Health and Canfor, and used the wifi at UNBC (not to mention coffee shops and fast food joints) -- why has everyone else figured out how to offer a secure/unsecure choice with a variety of functions (based on a needs assessment) that satisfy users and provide top-rate service, but a teacher can't even use a BYOD device to teach on SD57 wifi?  I'm sure board office discussions have described network wifi access as "mission critical" and "necessary for moving forward" -- they have been for some time, so put the budget and time into serving up a system that meets staff and student needs, please.

Whether it is cloud apps, wifi upgrades, server function, tablet pilots, tech planning, etc., our district seems to have a 3-8 year cycle for moving from design to implementation.  1-2 years would be more appropriate.  I'm still waiting for some remote access commitments to be fulfilled that were discussed by the District Technology Team in 2004. It borders on the absurd to wait nine years for a basic tech service (offered at other institutions) in an era where the landscape changes every few months.

In the 1990s, we had a free-for-all with technology and created many of the innovative practices (and needs, problems, positions) that are still with us now. In the 2000s we moved into standardization, inventory management, and decision making based on cost-benefit. It is 2013, and we need to learn from both decades and embrace support for district-purchased mobile technology regardless of platform or vendor. The systems management technology already exists to manage a variety of devices and cloud services in a secure and stable environment and in a cost-effective manner. The quiet district move to restrict tablet purchases and stifle attempts at school-based purchases, for example, reflects thinking locked in place during the last decade. The world has moved on; it is possible to have your cake and eat it, too.

“Develop a repository of web browser-based, device-independent applications”

Does this exist? Something like used to be part of what was called the “District Tech Standards” but the current status of this document has not been shared with teachers for a few years. Tech representatives from each school (“KTCs”) used to meet twice a year to share ICT progress and learn about new district supports; this practice was discontinued in 2007, along with the tech coaching program.

“Continue to work with the Provincial Learning Network (PLNet) to fast- track upgrades of Internet connections at schools.”

More bandwidth will be useful, but will not resolve underlying issues regarding access and lack of educational technology planning in the district.

“Develop a collection of inservice resources, and improve collaboration opportunities for staff through upgrades to the district's ICT infrastructure”

Infrastructure upgrades and improved collaboration are not mutually assured. Our district has lost capacity for tech-related inservice and professional development over the last 8 years (that was the last time we had a district tech plan, incidentally). What are you doing to restore this capacity and reboot the conversation on technology that used to be a high priority for senior administration? I have documented this extensively elsewhere, e.g. http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2012/10/the-forbidden-ipad.html, so I’ll leave it at that.

“Continue to provide support for innovative, ICT intensive projects through Learning Team Grants”

These are a mystery to most employees of the school district. The LTGs need to be more public and the results shared more effectively. Flexibility is also needed; to illustrate, consider the case of the recent LTG looking at screencasting. This group volunteered their time (as opposed to using release time) in exchange for inexpensive software licenses. The group started with this understanding, but was later denied the software, so the LTG ended up being freebee “non-grant” and the participants were left frustrated. Where are the truly innovative Tech LTGs? The “buzz” around ICT-intensive projects has not been the same since the end of TLITE, the cancellation of district coaches, the end of the District Technology Team, elimination of tech leadership positions, etc.

“Support teachers with interactive whiteboards with professional development on lesson design and instruction”

Interactive whiteboards have some excellent uses, but they are far from innovative. This technology was introduced to our district in 2004 and is still being used largely as very expensive overhead projectors. If you want to lead change with innovative technology, putting your money on smartboards is a bad bet.

Reach out to teacher and administrative leaders in the district and ask them what they would like to see to transform learning spaces with technology. Look through the feedback gathered in the wake of the 2011 “Enhancing Learning” meeting and ask how many of the concerns have been recognized as legitimate problems and addressed. Talk to principals and teachers who have had technology proposal rejected in the last three years what effect this has had on their desire to put new ideas in to practice. Ask individuals like Ian Landy what he has been able to do with technology in his new school district that he was not able to do in ours. Read what Chris Kennedy has to say about BYOD programs and the support and complimentary strategies needed to pull this off. Read what Chris Wejr, Cale Birk, and so many others say about social media for educators and the need for leaders to flatten hierarchies with open, public, and frank discussion. Dig deep and ask why so many devices are quietly listed as banned purchases without discussion with the educators who have shown passion for their use as teaching and learning tools. Follow what most BCED leaders say about the real commodity when it comes to educational technology -- the passionate, supported educator is the most valuable asset, not the equipment or devices. How many teacher and administrator dreams have to die because schools are bound by district technology restrictions and the impasse created when the district won’t discuss the topic?

Engage and Action: Other District Initiatives (p. 19/20) 

“Learning Team Grants... we moved from collaborating only within the school, to collaboration between schools and across the district”

The idea that collaboration across the district is a new trend is problematic. This is a quality that has ebbed and flowed over the last 15 years (since email and the internet began to link us together in new ways), and involves a great deal of informal collaboration that is generally off of the district’s radar. Formal collaborative efforts have also suffered from ineffective top-down implementation of “Professional Learning Community” concepts. LTGs represent a promising form of collaboration and professional development, bottom-up in many cases, but a number of issues remain. I have commented on these issues already at http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2012/12/effective-professional-development.html.

“We have invited teacher candidates to participate in many professional development opportunities and continue to strengthen our relationship with UNBC by partnering in research projects and programs”

Teacher candidates have always been invited to district pro-d events; this is not new. Similarly, Curriculum & Instruction has been approving post-secondary research projects in our district for decades. Is there some new protocol we should know about? What has changed?

“While the value of collaboration is clearly evident in our schools, it was not until 2010-2011 that the Central Administration Office began an initiative to share a vision across the departments in our own building”

This is quite surprising, for it implies that prior to 2011 there was no collaboration at the board office. While this might explain a few things, it does not seem likely. Let’s have a peek into this think-tank, a look at the ongoing work. I’m sure you share progress with each other, and publish the briefest of summaries in documents like the DAC, but if this work is important and impacts the school district, why wouldn’t you make it public and share with all stakeholders? This is an excellent opportunity for district leaders to model “21st Century Foundation Skills” -- communicate, host talks, tweet and blog about it, visit schools and attend staff meetings to share the vision as it shifts from year to year. Although teachers are notorious for feigning ignorance about what goes on at the board office, most of us actually care about what our district staff do on a daily basis, we care when it is done well and we especially care when it is not. Such is the nature of a school district. 

“[The Senior Learning Team is] implementing projects which include: utilizing personal electronic devices in classrooms, building online communities, developing professional growth plans”

The BYOD “program” has substantive issues (see comments above). The “57 Online Communities” project was not successful -- very few district staff want or need an employer-monitored and controlled social media forum that is closed off to the public. The whole idea of social media in education is to connect beyond the familiar environment and breathe new life into one’s practice, or share expertise. Professional Growth plans... whose? Teachers? Principals? Senior Administration? Can we see some examples?

“[The Senior Learning Team is] reinventing rural education. Our rural education initiative has begun as a learning team of educators and principals who will exam how to build school communities when the population of the school does not sustain a traditional- style classroom. The work is in its beginning stages, and we know it is vital to our District.” 

This sentiment has been stated in one form or another for about five years. It would appear our district has a strong desire to do something for rural schools, but is not actually going about it with any vigour. Part of the problem no doubt rests with our broken distributed learning model, and part with lack of funding, but even within existing structures we should see more progress on this issue.  The Rural School Initiative that included many district staff and teachers is a good example of "the work is in its beginning stages." That was 2005 -- surely we have moved past the beginning stages in the last eight years?

The Essential Eight (p. 22-28)

“Through the collaborative efforts of schools, departments, the senior learning team, and global research, we have begun the work of embedding eight essential learning strands”

This “collaboration” has taken place for the most part outside of actual collaboration with teachers (or students, parents, trustees for that matter).  Although it is not unexpected that the jargon in the DAC resonates with the BC Education Plan, there are far too many generalities in the “Essential Eight” to inspire confidence. At any rate, it will come down to implementation, and this presents four significant issues: 1) a literal reading of the “Essential Eight” would suggest that implementation would be expensive. 2) implementation would require a shift in the priorities assigned to administration, e.g. a greater emphasis on instructional leadership -- this will be difficult at the secondary level. 3) implementation requires a higher degree of communication, collaboration, and shared decision-making between employee groups, namely teachers and administrators -- if this sometimes dysfunctional relationship is not addressed then the “Essential Eight” will fare no better than other troubled initiatives we’ve seen come and go over the years. 4) the district needs to determine which the “Eight” are actually essential and desired by teachers, or at least which interpretation of the categories can expect mutual agreement and shared priority. Some of the “Eight” contain language with contract implications, for example, and should be subject to review by affected partner groups before suggesting they are valid solutions to problems (e.g. 1, 2, 7, 8).

2. Data-driven Evidence for Learning (p. 22) 

“Improve staff understanding, knowledge, skills related to utilization of data/evidence” 

Use of data for planning has been problematic for many years. A survey in 2011 of past school plans and district plans for student success reveals a few problems: 1) a general confusion of correlation with causality, 2) a tendency to mash up bits of educational ideas or data types with the hopes that they are congruent, 3) comparison across cohorts with expectations that the underlying factors are the same, and 4) use of backwards-engineered goals to describe ordinary activities in the school or justify existing practice. In other words, we’ve tried to use data to support decisions but we’ve often had a poor understanding of how to select, gather, read, interpret, and respond to appropriate data. A goal of improving this situation is valuable, but only if we recognize that current methodological practices are largely invalid.

“We would provide in-service and professional development opportunities... (release, supplementary service, online). We would hope to move towards a coach for each school” 

We don’t have the professional capacity for this without significant changes to PD funding models, and a change to the culture of collaboration on educational technology in the district. Also, see comments above on the four issues related to implementation of the “Essential Eight.” Are these coaches actually data analysis positions? Voluntary, paid, or release based? Which employee group?

“Move from pilot to district-wide implementation of the Assessment Management System”

More work is needed to discuss AMS with school staffs before assuming that this is something that will be valued by the people you expect to use it.  Increased use of student profiling carries some professional and privacy issues, and could also be a duplicate effort with the replacement to BCeSIS. Like so many other ideas in the DAC, communication is important. Most secondary teachers have never heard of the AMS (even at the one high school that is apparently using it) and there does not appear to be anything available on the district website in terms of examples or rationale.

7. Enhanced Learning Through Technology (p. 25)

“Develop the processes of integrating technology into the learning environment (communication, research, graphic organizers, presentation)”

This is particularly troubling as our district used to be a leader in technology-based professional learning and we’ve let it slide for the last eight years. Do you mean to revive, renew, or replace the structures and relationships that used to create partnerships and shared projects across employee groups in our district? This is hardly an elephant in the room -- our district has ignored its technology leaders’ repeated request for dialogue and action, and the result has been disengagement and resignation. Site-based technology innovation and integration continues in fits and starts, happening despite the restrictive policies and a lack of discussion at the district level. I applaud the effort to get something going again, but the work will be difficult if conducted in isolation of teachers and shared decision-making. An example to illustrate: when the district moved to single-platform computing in 2010, the board (Management and Finance Committee) and senior administration were informed that this would come at a significant loss to innovative practice and teacher enthusiasm, and a request was made to put a plan together to support specific innovations that would he affected. The board committee chair hearing these concerns assured the presenters that the district does not move without a plan, and that a plan would be forthcoming. That was over three years ago and there is still no educational technology plan. In fact, we have also seen the loss of virtually every other structure that used to support cross-district collaboration on edtech, with the exception of a handful of LTGs which are not generally public or shared. If the school district means to live up to the “learning empowered by technology” aspect of the BC Education Plan, it needs to repair some bridges and rethink how it is handing the technology portfolio.

“Enable more self-directed learning – students construct their own understanding”

What does this mean in the context of technology? An improvement to our distributed learning model? If so, this is long overdue and needs a shift in both culture and funding, e.g. http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2013/05/tipping-points.html. Perhaps this refers to blended learning initiatives? Without an increased capacity for district-wide dialogue on educational technology, all we can hope for is school-based exemplars that happen to catch on. If for no other reason than to get going on rural education reform, this statement needs to be fleshed out and matched to some goals for an improved district relationship regarding educational technology.

Personalized Learning (p. 28)

“Continue work on personalized learning at the August District Principals’ and Vice Principals’ meeting... follow-up with sessions on personalized learning at our monthly District Principals’ Meetings.” 

What does this work involve? Clearly many of our administrators (and teachers) are not comfortable leading and discussing on this topic, so some professional learning is in order, but it would be good to know what staffs can expect from their administrators re personalized learning.

“In conjunction with school-based administrators, develop and implement sessions on management competencies as well as personal and professional growth for administrators. We will align the sessions to the needs of the Principals and Vice Principals’ portfolios.”

Where can we see the management competencies our district uses? Are the same as the BCPVPA Leadership Standards? How are administrators kept accountable to these competencies? Does senior administration actually guide the personal growth of administrators or highlight moral stewardship? How is this done? Will administrators make their portfolios public, and invite interaction regarding their goals and progress related to competencies? Will they be encouraged to make better use of social media? This is expected if we want our leaders to model personalized learning, at least the way it was been framed by the BC Education Plan. Here is a related tool for leadership self-evaluation: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t307ah9lxyzzx4n/21stC_Leadership_Assessment_Tool.pdf

“Our rural secondary schools are exploring online resources to meet the unique needs of their students.”

As mentioned earlier, our district has talked about renewing rural education for a long time but the progress has been unacceptably slow. A variety of proposals were touted as a result of the rural schools initiative about five years ago -- what has come of this?

Appendix A: 21st Century Foundational Skills (p. 30)

“Reading, Writing, Numeracy... Caring for personal health and planet earth [sic]” 

What makes these skills endemic to the 21st Century? Regarding care for planet earth, what kinds of green initiatives and incentives are underway in SD57? What is being done to replant the many trees (and carbon sinks) that were removed due to the pine beetle? Over the last year our secondary school libraries have been discarding thousands of books as part of their “learning commons” renovations. Do you think the district decision to send these books out for shredding is commensurate with principles of sustainability? Why was no effort was made to find a home among students or the public for these books? Recirculation of “ex-libris” books is certainly not new idea and meets guidelines for appropriate use of public funds -- I would suggest this practice has been one of expediency and not sustainability.

Appendix B: Superintendent’s Report on Student Achievement (p. 31)

“Six-Year Completion Rate [etc.]”

Most of the charts use five or fewer years of data. Our district has collected at least ten years of data for most of these categories, so why not use a more statistically valid set? Many of the trends raise questions of confidence given the small sample size and comparison of different cohorts. My wife has more patience for combing through stats than I do, so I trust she will continue to provide better feedback here than I can.

Targets, Programs, Performance, Results and Intervention (p. 39/40)

“I am required to comment on the effect of interventions and programs with specific reference to goals and targets set out in our last achievement contract”

A couple of things appear to be missing regarding interventions in the DAC -- the issue of illicit drugs in our schools and problems with student attendance. These two factors have enormous influence on student performance, morale, and school culture. These problems are largely understood as school-based issues, and yet our principals look for district direction when setting policy with their staffs and enforcing existing rules and laws. These are also two issues that nag at teachers and beg for improved expectations for the school-parent/guardian relationship. We need more attention to these problems in order to quell the common perception that we are excusing drug use with minimal consequences, and that we have given up trying to make attendance compulsory. If we have successful intervention strategies for either of these two growing problems, they are not well communicated between schools.

Intervention for homophobic bullying is also missing from the DAC, but it is noted that this topic has been on the school board’s radar for some time and is partially addressed by the “inclusive communities” work currently done (e.g. p. 20).

Leveraging the District Parent Advisory Council and their web-based parenting, drug awareness, and anti-bullying resources would be a good fit for inclusion in future DACs. In fact, why not embed the DAC within a dynamic webspace that includes submissions from all partner groups and community stakeholders, including their feedback on the “central” DAC? Why should senior administration have all the fun?

“teams of teachers, facilitated by the Curriculum and Instruction Department, will develop rubrics to measure the use of formative assessment strategies and differentiated instruction strategies in each classroom. The work... is a stretch goal we will be hard-pressed to attain. The nature of teacher professionalism will both enhance and inhibit this target.”

This is quite ambiguous, and I have yet to hear of any teachers working on this. Where can we see the work in progress, so we can judge for ourselves whether it crosses lines of professionalism? Again, communication is an issue. If we have creative, important work going on by district staff, administrators, or teachers, it should not be so darn hard to find. Too much mist and mystery in our school district -- closed-door meetings, opaque reasoning for key decisions, teachers finding out after the fact what’s good for them... maybe fear of their “professionalism” inhibiting all the “moving forward” going on?  Let’s open the doors and let the light and air inside.

Respectfully submitted,

Glen Thielmann

P.S. For future invitations to offer feedback, please add a deadline and also an indication of what will be done with the feedback. Having no date or timeline attached suggests raises some flags -- is this feedback being collected for a reason?  Who will read it?  Will it be publicly available?  How will it be reviewed and how will a decision be made to respond to challenges?  I have only relevant past experience to suggest why this might be an issue. The last time district employees were asked to provide feedback (2011 "Enhancing Learning" presentation on technology changes), no indication was given as to whether the feedback had made any kind of impact. The Senior Learning Team issued a statement by email about the nature of the feedback (that did not actually match the feedback) and a description of the next steps that would be taken (but did not actually take place).  The dozen or more teachers and school technology teams that offered feedback were understandably cynical in the wake of this "show" of soliciting feedback.  I hope for a better outcome this time.

As with anything I post here, please feel to comment, make suggestions, correct errors, or ask for evidence to back up my claims. Again, I applaud the unique request made by senior administration for feedback on a district document and look forward to seeing how our school system evolves over the next decade.

Ekphrasis

Last week my friend, poet and PGSS teacher Al Rempel, helped put together a night of EKPHRASIS at the local Groop Gallery.

I'm no Stephen Lewis, but I think my vocabulary has some depth -- I know perfidious from penniferous for example (if you were both, you'd be untrustworthy and covered in feathers). Ekphrasis, however, was Greek to me... literally.

It is a word on that "Greek side of life's lexicon" that I tend to avoid. Words of singular or archaic use strike me as pompous or overly abstract, but are nonetheless puzzles that beg solving. The almighty Google tells me it is a description of a experience, the naming of a thing, or a "calling out" of what is being observed. Ekphrasis is used more commonly to refer to a work of art that evokes the essence of another work of art for an audience. Typically, this means writing or image-making applied to a specimen of the visual arts.  A photo exhibit on architecture could fulfill this definition, as could a poem about a dance performance.

In the case of the Groop Gallery, Ekphrasis was both the name of the exhibit and the nature of the closing night for a successful show that featured local artists and sculptors (see right column). The result was both dialectic and synergistic: "local visual artists present their works of art to invoke inspiration from some of Prince George's finest poets and literary artists. A closing night scheduled for May 31st will feature poems and literary interpretations based on the exhibited works."  The poets had visited the gallery at the exhibit's opening, picked a piece to "unpack," and spent a few weeks crafting a response.

On May 31st, A relatively large crowd packed into the tiny gallery on PG's eccentric 3rd Avenue. We had a half hour or so to study the artworks, and then a bevy of poets standing an arms length from us and a work that had inspired some writing, let loose with some spectacular verse. This experiment was a bullseye shot for my learning style or whatever it is that throws my brain into the focused-frenzy that I associate with learning.  When I had been observing the artwork, I posited my own silent verse and free associations onto the pieces. I imagined the sorts of things that the writers, particularly my friend Al, would be thinking, cringing at certain possibilities, excited for others (I must admit that I have a love/hate relationship with poetry).

When the poets spoke, I could feel a few of my predictions and personal viewer-responses burn up and float off into the crowd. What grew back in their place were the quirky, compelling, and insightful observations from some talented writers. Some seemed honest, straightforward, even vulnerable -- clear image making inspired by evocative art. Others seemed contrived, not in a bad way, but in the sense that the poet's voice was so strong they had a hard time giving/opening up to the power of the artwork. I could sense that the normally confident poets had soft hearts for the most part, quite cognizant of the fact they were commenting on someone else's work and that most of the visual artist were in the room.

I was immediately stunned at the possibilities for my students. What kinds of experiences or evidence can I present to them, or can they find for themselves, that compels this kind of synergy? How can students feel safe to explore their voice along the full range from simple "opening up" through to sanguine expression?  I happen to have a single class of English 11 next year after solid Social Studies for many years. I suppose as a basic start, I could take my students to an art exhibit (in our school or out in the community) and try some ekphrasis.  I think I'll try that, but I also want to capture the process somehow, and find other ways to employ the rich engagement that came from one practitioner valuing the work of another. This ain't a new topic for me, I've been preaching "identity" as the basis for student (and educator) engagement for as long as it has seemed obvious to me, but I've often ignored or forgotten the power of direct connections between a Self and a complex Other.

When the Other is both a person (in the room), with their identity as artist in the fore, and a work of art that conceals and reveals a variety of meaning, the possibilities are gorgeous. Ekphrasis is a great way of looking at how learning takes place, part imitation, part inspiration, requiring of discipline and motivated by the lifework that we do to affirm or develop identity.

tipping points: 12 ideas for moving from correspondence to relevance in distributed learning

Today I came across an intriguing blog post called Tipping Point by Doug Smith at http://physicsoflearning.com/edblog/tipping-point/. He highlights the issue of students ditching regular school to get higher grades through distance education via online courses (also called Distributed Learning or DL). After chatting with Janet Steffenhagen about this topic and putting voice to some ideas that have been floating around in my brain for some time, I thought I'd respond to Doug's post with a post of my own. With the BC Edplan pushing more online learning, I think it is important that we give this subject critical attention and not put the cart before the horse, so to speak -- let's get our online learning to meet ambitious goals and quality checks before we push it on students.

I would echo some of Doug Smith's concerns as I've seen them play out in Northern BC. Alongside my "normal" teaching job I've also marked correspondence for the Central Interior Distance Education School and have designed some Distributed Learning (DL) materials and an online course. While DL programs vary dramatically across our province in terms of quality and style, I can only speak about the one I know, and then only with the particular courses with which I've been involved. Students up here enrol for a variety of reasons, although I'd rank "because it was a better fit" and "because I'd exhausted conventional avenues" above the grade fixing motives mentioned in Doug Smith's post. We get many DL students who have failed at school and need the credit, have worn out their welcome in mainstream or alternate programs, live in a rural communities or attend small schools where a particular course is not offered, want extra credits to graduate early, are avoiding regular school for personal, health, or philosophic reasons (e.g. homeschoolers), use distance education to compliment a special program (like our PacificSport elite athlete school), or are adult learners looking to upgrade. And yes, we get a few who see DL as a quicker, sometimes better way to get a course grade that might be unobtainable at their default school.

Our success rates for students who register are not great, far lower than brick-and-mortar schools, somewhere in the 20% range according to the last info I got (anyone who knows, feel free to correct me), but higher for electives and higher for students who complete the first quarter of the course (they tend to keep on to the end). Having marked thousands of Social Studies correspondence papers over the years, there are definitely two camps -- students for whom DL is remedial (for both behavioural and academic reasons), and students who need the DL because they've designed an alternate path towards graduation. Camp A generally struggles, and finds the material boring or tricky to navigate. Camp B generally takes whatever we throw at them and finds a way to make it meaningful. There is probably a third camp of students who apply for any of the reasons above, try the registration assignment and maybe one or two more, and decide is is not their cup of tea -- this is likely the biggest factor influencing success rates.

The problem as I've seen it in my context is that many of our courses are out of date and lack pedagogical integrity. Most of the coursework is still delivered as stacks of paper -- volumes of hand-delivered reading and practice activities (that most students do not read or complete), and very thin assignments that are designed to be assessed in a few minutes by a contract marker (like myself), then couriered back to the DL school for checking, then couriered back to students. The marked assignments contain so many "freebies" -- fill-in-the-blanks, matching, closed questions -- that it is hard to fail, even when the work is incomplete. Most students skip right past the practice sections and rip through the send-in portions in a fraction of the time intended by the course designers. I routinely mark paper after paper where students have not really done anything other than complete worksheets and yet get full credit (high marks) for meeting learning outcomes. There is no differentiation in the marked work between tasks that sets the stage for deeper learning, and meaningful performances by students to demonstrate proficiency with learning intentions. These assignments are punctuated with tests that focus on recall and repeat many of the questions from the reading packages. Online courses, often set up on a "Moodle" platform, fall into the same trap, but now adding layers of logins, inboxes, file management, and self-marking tests to the basic idea of “correspondence, ” although they do allow the possibility of analytics and updating the course material (something done maybe once every 10 years with the paper packages). These courses nominally address prescribed learning outcomes, that is, they "cover" them, but would not pass any reasonable audit that looked at educational design, student experience, or a matching of learning intentions to assessed outcomes. In short, we've filled a gap, namely the need for some DL courses for special students, but we're not doing our best work.

The result? Too many of our DL courses fast-track the learning process, offering easy paths to completion, and have built-in barriers that prevent a fluid assessment of deep understanding. We’ve taken the worst part of “brick-and-mortar” education -- batch processing, piles of worksheets and textbook questions, transmission -- and made this the mode of DL delivery. We’ve taken the best of classroom learning -- interaction, give-and-take on the daily work, humour and personality -- and replaced them with dry digital tools or just dropped them altogether. The DL experience for most students is disembodied, impersonal, and unchallenging. This is not a criticism of our DL or Alt school staff, for I know and respect many of them and the work they do with students, many of whom are at-risk and marginal, and they often have intense caseloads with no allotted time for course revisions. Rather,  this is an analysis of our default approach to DL design, at least 30 years in the making. It is difficult to get the attention of everyone needed to make needed changes, and virtually no budgets exist for new course construction or project development. The teachers who have tried to make their courses more dynamic and interactive have done so largely off the sides of their desks. I believe the current paper and digital models are cost-neutral or even profitable (funding exceeds costs), so that will also hold up change. It seems we need a perfect storm at times to break the status quo. It should be noted that every teacher I have met at our local DL school would love to sink more time into course improvement, but the structure (time, money, mandate to wipe the slate clean where needed) is not there.

I think there has been wide recognition in BC that blended learning and certain kinds of flipped classrooms can take the best of online learning and face-to-face learning and create great learning environments. The problems is that there is still a need for distance-based DL coursework. Some schools and districts have even made these a requirement, e.g. offering the mandatory Planning 10 only as a DL course (thus easily bumping up their reported numbers of DL students). What we need in BC are new positive models for taking DL out of the correspondence paradigm and unleashing hands-on, personalized, embodied, inquiry and project-based learning. These are approaches that are difficult in regular classrooms where we are trying to "manage" 24-30 kids at a time, but they are naturals for students who have freedom of time, movement, and resource selection. We need to leverage the fact that students are not bound by classroom walls and teacher with very specific tasks at hand.

What would this take?

1. Design
- to start, it wouldn't hurt for our DL schools to actually read and assess the DL design documents the Ministry of Education recommends for course development. I've got reservations about some of the underlying assumptions, but they are an improvement over the design principles at play in most correspondence courses I've ever seen.  Naturally, if a DL school wanted to act on these design guidelines, they need time to sort this out and co-create new approaches.
2. Initiative - DL teachers could start replacing module packages with inquiry projects involving student design for field study, interviews, multimodal expression, and self-assessment. Our papers reflect the "transmission" paradigm, transfer of knowledge, and pre-judge that our students have limited ability to ask questions on their own or can structure research plan. This isn't for every DL student, but it should at least be one of the course paths they can take. 
3. Choice - students should not have "practice work" and "send-in work," they should have guided choices to make about how they want to explore learning outcomes and everything they do towards this end should either be placed in a portfolio or represented in some way for interaction with an audience (parent, teacher, marker, other students, etc.). We can certainly make suggestions, but the students should be picking the apps to see this through, if they want to go digital at all. Many do not want more technology -- they are already saturated. 
4. Interaction - we need more practice and support with safe and appropriate social media and collaborative Web 2.0 tools to better provide interaction for both students and educators, going beyond webquests and virtual field trips to actually explore what "voice" looks like in synchronous and asynchronous settings. Having a loaner program to compliment a BYOD policy also helps. 
5. Go Global - use TED, iTunes U, MOOCs, learning repositories, digital learning commons, and external online courses as a casual backdrop to more personal and focused connection with a local DL school could keep student-teacher ratios down and place the student in a learning space that acknowledges that knowledge is not confined to schools. Move from canned, text-based courses to learning plans that blend student inquiry, teacher oversight/formative intervention, and completely open resources. When online learning replaces real connection, the result is superficiality (just google Khan Academy criticism to find out why), but digital spaces are undeniably powerful and need to play a role... I'm using one now!
6. Orientation - we should be setting up face-to-face bootcamps for self-regulation and DL-appropriate study skills. The root cause of failure for most DL students is the inability to handle the isolation and unguided nature of the coursework. If we're going to turn the teacher into a case manager, the least we can do is shore up student skills at independent learning.
7. Multiple Paths - students should be able to cut straight to the critical thinking, to the embodied learning, to the application of skills, and skip past busywork if they show they are ready (we currently have no way of determining this in a DL course). Instead of students completing 4 modules out of 4 and writing 4 tests, maybe students should do 3 modules out of 6 and then move into comprehensive project-based learning or portfolio development.
8. Social/Cohort Learning - we should see more experimenting with staggered intakes and DL cohorts; maybe students take core curriculum in a class or online course, and then complete the rest of the course in a group that uses a DL structure to guide inquiry and provide virtual meeting spaces (this would technically be blended learning, but could accommodate strictly "distance" students).
9. Direct Experience - students should be able to skip the technology (or use different kinds of technology than we typically supply or recommend) and just try stuff out or learn by doing. I know the word "voucher" will make many readers clench up, but what's the harm in imagining a few learning spaces the way Christopher Alexander et al did in A Pattern Language. A DL teacher is perfectly poised to guide this process, vet the opportunities, and, alongside parents, ensure safety.
10. Scaled Spaces - this leads to the need for school sites that are in-between what we see now: DL hubs (that many DL students will not visit) and classroom factories (that still meet the needs of most students and especially parents -- it is an efficient model, after all). I'm thinking about guild-like spaces that allow or require students to drop in for regular check-ins with a caring teacher, formative assessments, guest speakers or itinerant teachers, and portfolio presentations. This might be a way to dial up or down the "blended" aspect of distance and online learning, and could be a school-saving model for small and rural populations that are forced to look at DL education systems due to our provincial funding model and their demographics.
11. Community focus - we need to rethink roles for parental involvement -- DL does allow parents to be more involved with students' work at home, but they don't get to celebrate the same way "schooled" parents to with recitals and open presentations. Getting teachers to blog about student success is also needed in the DL world... very tough when there is so little sustained contact. Students are already dialed in (often detrimentally) to a community that includes family, friends, and an entire community that peers in on their learning. Let's make that less dysfunctional and redeem real and digital spaces by wedging in family and community celebration -- turn some of students' angst-ridden energy into meaningful identity work.
12. Decentralize - we also need to see that DL courses need not be the purview of stand-alone DL schools. The best way to experiment with blended, flipped class, and online/distance learning reform is not to force a DL school to "get with the 21st century," it is to support teachers and administrators wherever they are and whenever they express an interest in trying out new ideas. You can't put a system price on that commodity -- willing educators' unique skills, expertise, and enthusiasm fed by real student needs in real contexts. This trumps all the top-down reform models I've ever seen. Giving a classroom teacher (or a small group of teachers) the chance to run one or two DL courses ensures sanity and keeps the experience fresh -- our DL teachers often suffer from the isolation and large caseloads that come with the present model. Spreading DL across a district means that the best pedagogy follows the passion, and that the leadership is distributed.

This last point reminds us that DL reform should not be done to save money or increase student-teacher ratios, unless the goal is sabotage.  It is also worth noting that most of these recommendations are not new -- our district, for example, had a working group on this topic from 2003-05.

Anyways, there are hundreds of ideas out there for making DL work, we just need to permission to try some out, a willingness to make mistakes (couldn't be much worse than what we are dong now), and some protocols around reviewing success so that it doesn't end up a gong show. We need to get better at celebrating and replicating practices that makes sense; I suppose I paint a gloomy picture but there are certainly some local and many provincial exceptions to the old-school "correspondence" rules. A few years ago I designed a whole DL course around the "unbound student" (interviews, field research, multimodality, portfolios, student design and choice, embedded inquiry, etc.), but having turned it over to other DL schools to administer, I have no idea how it is being used, if at all. I'm taking a second stab at it with a blended learning program next year, so I can test some of my theories with real students.

I would encourage our DL schools, local and provincial, to communicate more about what they are doing that is working and beef up the kinds of collaborations that are necessary for DL to step out of the "correspondence" shadows. I believe that DL (along with Alternate Ed programs) is one of the best places to experiment with 21st Century Learning. I'd love to hear from other DL teachers and administrators about their ideas and success stories for making DL engaging, challenging, and not an escape hatch for students looking for easy credit. Feel free to comment or email me about it. If nothing else I can pass on your insight to our local DL school principal.

Revisions:
I found another interesting post on this topic by BC teacher Brad Wilson at http://educationadvocating.blogspot.ca/2013/05/dl-credentialism.html. The article, DL Credentialism, describes how DL "pulls students out of an engaging and challenging learning environment into one that is perceived by the student as easier and less challenging." An unsettling and provocative read.

Through a great twitter conversation with the folks mentioned in my blog post, the topic also came up of auditing Distributed Learning schools and courses. Whether this is a BC-wide review or a series of local program evaluations, what would the focus be? To start, we should be inquiring about student experience (e.g. opportunities for interaction with other students and the teacher), teacher caseload & contract contexts, fidelity to curriculum (including ratio of higher-level and inclusion of domains), benchmarks (whether "pure" or related to face-to-face learning), basic questions about the goals, purpose, methods (and seeking stakeholder input on how these are being met), and finally, perhaps most importantly, do students get actual value in what they are learning & the assessment they receive?

I have also been made aware that there is, in fact, some ways for DL schools to be accountable for the quality of the course they offer. The BC Ministry of Education requires DL schools to adhere to a number of guidelines and makes quality reviews available. If these were applied to my local context, it would make a very positive difference. I'm guessing that at some point the Ministry signed off on what happens here, but I'm also guessing that was a long time ago and did not include a quality review.  Educators Michael Barbour and Bonnie Jeansonne are good resources on this topic.

mandate to govern

I've heard a few comments recently that Christy Clark doesn't have a mandate to lead our province considering only 23% of the eligible voters chose her party in last week's BC election.  I'm not thrilled about it, but Christy Clark does indeed have what passes for a mandate to govern in our society and is not to blame for voter apathy, nor the fact that we use the "first-past-the-post" system. Our electoral system is designed to favour a party that can win the most seats, but it has never resulted in a provincial or federal government supported by even 50% of the eligible votes. It is probably fair to say (in light of some excellent feedback via twitter... see comments below), that the term mandate itself could be questioned, as can the extent to which our system is actually democratic vs institutional hegemony that cloaks itself with populist shows every few years.

Canada’s first election in 1867 was won by John A. Macdonald with 34.5% of the votes. Although only about a tenth of the population were on the electoral list, voter turnout was still 73%. This means that Macdonald governed with a mandate from 25% of the electorate and only about 3% of the total population.

The worst turnout in the early years was 62.9% in 1896, when Wilfred Laurier won with 41% of the vote compared to Tupper’s 48% -- less votes but more seats. Thus one of our greatest PMs came to power in second place on a mandate from 26% of the electorate or about 7% of the total population. This has happened a few times... such as the 1979 federal election (Joe Clark beat Trudeau), or BC in 1996 (Glen Clark beat Gordon Campbell) but in each case the winning party had less votes than their main opponent.

Borden, who led Canada into WWI, won the 1911 election narrowly against Laurier with 34% of the electorate behind him.

Mackenzie King lost his own seat and lost the election in 1925 with 39% of the votes (26% of the electorate) compared to Arthur Meighen’s 46% of the votes (31% of the electorate), but he still became PM with the support of the Progressives.

Our best federal turnout was in 1963, with 79.2% voting. Pearson beat Diefenbaker with 42% to 33% of the vote (or 33% to 26% of the electorate).

With the support of 31% of the electorate in 1980, Trudeau claimed a mandate that enabled him fight separatism and patriate the constitution.

Stephen Harper first came to power in 2006 with 23% of the electorate. He gained another minority mandate in 2008, where the turnout was our worst ever at 58.8%. He won with 22% of the electorate behind him.

As far as I can tell, the PMs with highest percentage of eligible voters were Borden in 1917 and Diefenbaker in 1958, both at 43% of the electorate (57% and 54% of the vote respectively). The "best mandate" for a BC premier in modern times was Gordon Campbell in 2001. No wonder Christy Clark felt emboldened as Education Minister to wreak havoc in 2002.

Just like the federal scene, provincial mandates to govern are also settled by a minority of the electorate, as seen in Figure 1.1 below (source: http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2010/Wesley2.pdf 2nd p. of appendix)

Note that the winning parties gained power with an average support of 32.2% of the eligible votes, roughly the same as the percent of people who did not vote during this period. The highest eligible voter support was Campbell’s first win in 2001 (41%), lowest was his last win in 2009 (23%), about the same as the result for Christy Clark last week, a slightly lower than the NDP's first win in BC (1972, 27%) and similar to the mandate given to John A. Macdonald in Canada’s first election (25%).

academic honesty

http://www.toonpool.com/

My school, D.P. Todd, is discussing changes to its school-based policy on academic (dis)honesty. I happen to have missed both staff meetings where this came up, and will not be attending the follow-up meeting to discuss, so I thought I'd add my two bits. My understanding of why this is on the radar is that we have disagreement between most staff and administration about how to handle serious cases of academic dishonesty, and that perhaps some policy renewal is needed to clarify the options and practices we employ around this topic.

So, with due respect to the variety of valid opinions on this subject, what I hope we are not confusing is:

1. ongoing assessment and attempts at learning (some successful, some not) which are aimed at improving students' competency and proficiency with course outcomes, and 
2. a breech of ethics and failure of judgement (destructive to the ongoing learning process) that is involved when a student cheats or plagiarizes. 

Student learning is part of a continuous spectrum from first attempts to final projects and exams. Likewise, assessment shifts depending on the intention behind student's demonstration of learning. At many steps along the way, students can make mistakes or failed attempts, but our assessment practice typically absorbs these as legitimate efforts to improve, often with marks attached. Cheating and plagiarizing are not "poor efforts," they are the ultimate rejection of the learning outcomes that carry academic consequences, increasingly serious with key assessments and repeated offenses. They are attempts to circumvent or sabotage learning, not merely an incomplete effort or false start. Additionally, there is a pedagogical factor that bears on the issues. The ethos at play is that students need to demonstrate proficiency with outcomes even if they don't get marks for them. This sentiment is present in virtually every academic honesty policy I can find in SD57 schools (see below), as well as BC colleges and universities. Therefore, I think the intention of our current policy has merit, although the wording could be updated. There is no District "policy" and there does not seem to be a rational basis for a District "philosophy" either -- opinions from a handful of colleagues at the board office at best, beliefs which may indeed be at odds with every school policy on academic honesty in our district. I can't be certain because I have not yet seen this "philosophy" -- can anyone point it out to me?

I think we need a policy, made for our school, that:

1. takes cheating and plagiarism seriously, including support for teachers who remove credit from the offending student's unethical work, 
2. allows both teacher autonomy and administrative flexibility for unusual cases, 
3. is not wildly disparate from other school policies in SD57 or the post-secondary institutions our students will attend, and, ideally, 
4. reflects at least some democratic approximation of what we believe about our students and their education. 

Over the last week, I've inquired about this topic at area schools. The most common policy in SD57 reads:

"Students at _______ are expected to apply themselves to their studies in a positive and honest manner. Copying other people’s work and claiming it as your own (plagiarism) or attempting to cheat on assignments/tests is serious forms of academic misconduct. Consequences for cheating or plagiarism will likely result in loss of credit for the assignment and could result in administrative action. Students will be required to demonstrate the learning targets of the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO’s) of the Ministry Curriculum, even if no credit is given."

This policy is used, with almost no variation, at PGSS, Duchess, and CHSS, as noted in their respective policy manuals, e.g. http://www.pgss.sd57.bc.ca/fileadmin/sites/pgss.sd57.bc.ca/Documents/Student_Handbook_2012-13.pdf, p. 15]. Ours (see p. 94/95 in our "SOAP" manual) is a bit different because, unlike many schools, our policies have been "made at D.P. Todd," many of them dating back to the school opening and the "visioning" that took place in 1977.  Of course, our policy manual and practices have evolved since then, although we have ignored policy development in recent years.

I would suggest we blend what we already have with some of this wording (possibly with consideration to the policies from KRSS and CLA; see below), but replace ILOs with PLOs, and indicate a typical series of consequences after the mention of administrative action, similar to what we have now.

Additionally, we need to ensure our Grade 8s and new arrivals are oriented to our policy (not sure what we do about that now), and we need to use instances of significant academic dishonesty as opportunities for learning, in addition to (not instead of) the consequences -- e.g. involve the students and parents in the debrief. Our orientation should examine the spectrum of how research is conducted and expressed, from single author to collaborative work, and how each one varies in terms of acknowledgement. We should also find new ways to guide students away from the copy & paste culture, and surf/skim/regurgitate tendencies that have become too familiar. Lastly, we should examine why students cheat or plagiarize -- e.g. for some it is because they lack integrity and think they can get away with it, for some it is because they are desperate and frustrated with self and/or school.

FURTHER NOTES

District policy vs philosophy: 
It seems clear there is no District "policy" on this issue other than support for schools in creating their own policies -- this is logical because the School Board generally steers clear of policies that supersede teacher autonomy, whereas School Policy is usually designed to walk the line between teacher autonomy and shared goals among staff and educational community. If school administration wants an "opt out" clause to offer leniency or flexibility, that is their prerogative, but our basic policy needs to retain support for the actions that teachers consistently take to address academic honesty.

As to a District "philosophy," I think we need to dig deeper. District-level credibility on this issue could be questioned for a variety of reasons, including their own track record on academic rigour, and perhaps a lack of experience in secondary schools by those articulating the philosophy. This is not meant to be harsh -- but is meant to show that our board office counterparts are simply fellow educators, as prone to difference and controversy as we all are, and not necessarily experts on this topic. They have valid opinions, but if there is an actual "district philosophy" it has not expressed in any official capacity (that I can find) nor has it been developed with any kind of legitimate process (e.g. involvement of teachers). If the board office want to move into policy-formation on this topic, then it is a different matter, quite within their purview to attempt, anyways, within contract language on teacher autonomy. I would suggest that the district's Teacher-Librarian Association would be a more reputable source for leadership on academic honesty; they wrote an excellent open letter on this topic last year. We should also consider other existing policies in our district, the post-secondary institutions our students will attend, and other recognized experts in the field.

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Here is a somewhat more developed policy from CLA (http://cides.sd57.bc.ca/index.php?id=4166):

"If a CIDES teacher finds evidence of academic misconduct the following consequences will be applied:

First Offense - A letter outlining the problem will be sent by registered mail to the parents of school aged students (under 18 years) or directly to adult students. This letter will be copied to students’ files. A mark of ZERO (0) will be recorded for the test or assignment. The student will not be allowed to redo or resubmit the test or assignment.

Second Offense - A letter outlining the problem will be sent by registered mail to the parents of school aged students (under 18 years) or directly to adult students. This letter will be copied to the student’s file. The student will be withdrawn from the course with no final grade recorded on his/her transcript. If withdrawn, a student cannot reregister in this course at any distance education school in BC for one year.

Students and their parents have 30 days to request an appeal of any decision regarding academic misconduct. Appeals must be in writing and addressed to the Principal of CIDES. Appeals will be heard by phone or in person by the principal and will include input from the course teacher, student and/or parents. Decisions by the principal may be appealed to the Assistant Superintendent of Schools of School District No. 57 (Prince George) who can be contacted at 250.561.6800."

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Here is the KRSS Academic Honesty Policy from the most recent version of the Kelly Road Secondary Staff Handbook

"Policy
Students are expected to demonstrate honesty in their academic work.

Regulations
These regulations cover, but are not limited to, the following types of academic dishonesty: 1. Cheating on quizzes, tests, exams, or major assignments
2. Submitting copied assignments (or portions thereof)
3. Plagiarizing from print or electronic sources.

The following consequences will be applied when it has been confirmed that a student has been academically dishonest:

Step One
1. The classroom teacher will notify the parents and submit the student's name to the Principal or Vice Principals where a record will be kept.
2. The student may receive a zero for the work in question.
3. If another student enabled the cheating to occur, that student may receive a zero on the work in question.

Step Two - When it has been confirmed through the record kept in the office that a student has cheated for a second time:
1. The student may receive a zero for the work in question.
2. The Principal or Vice Principals will suspend the student from school for two days.
3. The Principal or Vice Principals will refer the student and parents to the counselling department to discuss the problem.

Step Three - When it has been confirmed through the record kept in the office that a student has cheated for a third time:
1. The student may receive a zero for the work in question.
2. The parents will be called in to review the educational placement of the student. The outcome of this review will be a consideration of a new educational placement for the student. Options for a new placement may include, but are not limited to a new school, correspondence, withdrawal from the course or transfer to a different section of the course."

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For comparison, here some post-secondary regulations on academic honesty:

CNC - http://www.cnc.bc.ca/__shared/assets/plagiarism-faq-student3247.pdf
UNBC - http://www.unbc.ca/calendar/undergraduate/regulations see #45 & 46
UBC - http://vpacademic.ubc.ca/integrity/ubc-regulation-on-plagiarism/

Common themes for CNC and UNBC include option for instructors to assign zeros.

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Methods of research, communication, use of technology, learning styles change over time of course, but the basic ideal of "the rational, autonomous self" is a cornerstone of education, along with pursuit of individual virtue. This virtuous and autonomous "self" needs to progressively own their ideas, thoughts, and communications -- this includes learning about and adhering to basic principles of academic honesty. Instances of cheating and plagiarism are unfortunate, but they are also one of the few places where we have a high-stakes opportunity to reinforce the ideals of student autonomy and virtue. We are not merely introducing the idea of academic honesty in secondary school -- the students are very much aware of the concept when they arrive. In other words, they are far enough along the learning curve that direct consequences are expected. If we start tolerating plagiarism and cheating as if they are little "whoops" or "don't do it again" moments then we are eroding at a key framework in education, and betray the efforts of teachers and parents to build up honesty and integrity in our students.

Recent (postmodern) critiques of the enlightenment view of education question the very nature of the rational, autonomous self and the illusion of virtue (cf http://ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/pes/article/view/3247/1150). As well, 21st century learning emphasizes collaboration and team projects, sharing of ideas, and a shift from knowledge being deposited and held in the learner to knowledge being constantly accessible via technology. We should not confuse this view of self nor the rise of co-created knowledge as a change in student responsibility for rigorous thinking and expression of research. In fact, it is even more important in a 21st century learning environment that students sift their own work through lenses they pick up during research, think through what a crisis of representation might involve, learn how to cite sources, etc. An example of this is when students need to choose what kind of creative commons label to place on the constructions they place online. Another example is the "mashup" -- students combining existing pieces of media in order to tell a new story (think youtube); this can just as easily be a learning opportunity about sources and acknowledgement as it can be about students struggling to find authenticity in a cultural milieu saturated by "borrowing." The "21st century student" is not off the hook for academic integrity, but has entered a creative zone in which foregrounding the identity of one's work is a careful, complicated, and valuable pursuit. The boundary between honest and cheat, between original and copied, will always be a source of discussion and place of learning, but criteria laid out by teachers for assignments and assessments draws fairly clear lines, and needs to be respected and supported by a policy that a majority of staff selects and administration can enforce. Anything less, and we might as well not have any policies.

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It is also important to consider "degrees." An employee who is poor at their job might be given opportunities to improve; an employee that steals from the company would likely be fired. For our context, students copying each others' worksheets before a quiz would be serious for some teachers and part of group-learning for another teacher. A student who is sloppy with references on a poster or webquest might irk one teacher and go unnoticed by another. These are great opportunities for discussion, articulation of values, etc. -- teachable moments where a typical consequence might be a redo or a revision. I think that is where the District "philosophy" should at least be considered. A student caught cheating on a test or exam, or submitting an intact piece of work (like a research project or essay) that contains plagiarized work is a few degrees more serious. There can certainly be a discussion and opportunity to learn from this breech of ethics and academic integrity, but there is an obvious and purposeful role for significant consequence. Commonly, in fact with virtual ubiquity in any secondary and post-secondary setting, this consequence is the teacher's option to give zeros for the work and a referral to the institution's administration for further action, gaining in seriousness with subsequent offenses.

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There's plenty more that could be added to this discussion, so I hope others on staff join the discussion. How do other schools navigate serious academic dishonesty? Is the "21st Century Student," who learns in a different informational paradigm than previous generations, off the hook for rigorous academic standards?

teacher evaluation

I have been appointed to a new School District 57 committee to discuss what teacher evaluation might look like over the coming years. I'll edit this post once I get more information on what that process looks like (and once I get to the pre-reading!), but I'd like to start by soliciting some input from other teachers (and others in the educational community).  I assume the committee will include representatives from the employer (e.g. senior administration), principal/vice-principal association, and DTA exec with teachers (Debbie Page and myself), possibly a trustee and maybe others (?).

What issues do you see as we approach this topic? What questions do you want raised? Do you know of successful evaluation models we should consider?

Please leave a comment below if you'd like to register some input.  Our first meeting is Monday March 11th.

Here are some of my preliminary thoughts and questions as I give first consideration to this topic:

Issue #1: Diverse definitions, expectations, and competencies for professionalism

Standards exists, but how do we apply these to practicing teachers who typically define their own challenges and solutions? Within accepted standards, which goals and strategies take priority, those defined by the Ministry? School District? School? Teacher? How do we resolve stark differences that may exist between philosophies of education? What critieria should be used to assess competence? How important is mutual agreement on criteria when evaulation takes place? How important are the qualifications, skills, or experience of the person or persons conducting evaluation? Should the process be "blind" to the evaluator and evaluation subject, or should each bring something of their own skill-set and identity into the evaluation design and process?

Issue #2: Competing goals for professional evaluation

Is evaluation a means to identify problems that teachers are experiencing? Is evaluation a refocusing tool to bring classroom practice back to student development? Or to a position more in tune with a goal or philosophy (see issue #1)? Is it a means to identify opportunities for growth by the teacher (and on the teacher’s terms)? Is it possible to lay out agendas in the discussion process, or during the evaluation process itself? Perhaps we need more than one option for evaluation – a different tool for different evaluation scenarios -- for they are not exactly the same.  One can’t simply say the focus is on improvement vs discipline… if there is a role for both, this must be clear. We should also be careful to avoid educational cliches about "learners" or assume that we all agree as to the meaning and importance of terms like AFL, differentiated instruction, 21st century learning, etc.

Issue #3: Follow-up on evaluation and role of growth plans

What happens after an evaluation? Does something need to happen (and what would trigger this)? Is there an expected role for growth plans? How do we make this process positive, meaningful, and relevant? Is it important to make this process simple? How can instructional leaders model effective practice (e.g. through use of their own growth plans)? What implications does the evaluation process have on other aspects of our system? For example, if a problem is identified during an evaluation that can be traced back to the workplace (i.e. school or district contexts), is there an expectation that something will be done to repair the context that may be triggering a problem? How else might the evaluation process actually build a more positive work climate and culture of improvement in the school district?  For example, might teacher evaluations be paralleled with administrative evaluations?  Another example, could we use voluntary test or pilot evaluations to explore models and publicly celebrate the work done by teachers?

Please feel free to add to this or challenge what I have written.

Koyczan and the Pork Chops

Our school has a special memory of Shane Koyczan -- he came to D.P. Todd a couple of years ago in the wake of his performance at the 2010 Olympics opening ceremonies. He was funny, edgy, personable, and provocative. I loved that he gave us a raw outpouring of his art, from the stuff he was experimenting with to the finished work that he has published online. This was a great contrast to the slick productions and "heartstring" speeches we sometimes get for full-school performances. To each their own, but I found Koyczan and his unique slam-prose/poem style delightful because so many students were inspired to keep struggling through their creative writing process, keep struggling through their "being" and place in the school and world. Many students were affirmed in their belief that being different or original was something to celebrate, and that their unique qualities were something to develop, to get better at, not make slave to the ordinary. The personal appeal for me is not so much the style but the honed storytelling and Koyczan's focus on identity... both national/communal and individual/personal. This is a theme, or theme device, that I try to place at the core of curriculum and instructional design in Social Studies.

I am excited to see that Shane Koyczan has made a beautiful new piece called TO THIS DAY PROJECT. I found it difficult to watch -- so much to process, to weigh and judge. I'm not sure yet what I take from it, but it has stuck with me since I watched it last night and I'm thinking about the challenge embedded in the video-poem. Isn't that what at should do?  Great fit as an anti-bullying message and for use in a secondary Planning, Leadership, English, or Social Studies class: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY

or you can see the video with a bit of context:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/is-this-the-most-powerful-anti-bullying-message-youve-ever-seen/article8945123/

http://www.theprovince.com/Video+Shane+Koyczan+This/7994081/story.html

I think the discussion questions will arise on their own... feel free to leave a comment about how this video went over with a class.  I'd like to think more about how bullying fits into the larger social justice contexts we wrestle with as teachers.  There are definitely some connections to be made between how kids are treated in school and the culture of narcissism, violence, and porn that lurks on the edge of the student experience at all times.

Another good video I watched recently that challenged my thinking and relates to the anti-bullying and diversity week at our school (Feb. 25 - Mar 1) was "50 Shades of Gay"
http://www.ted.com/talks/io_tillett_wright_fifty_shades_of_gay.html

Board Proposal for Middle Earth 12

Middle Earth 12 Board Authorized Course from thielmann

Presentation (well... highlights, anyways) to accompany proposal for a BC Board/Authority Authorized Course. Middle Earth 12 is a senior Humanities elective course - an authentic, blended approach to the study of language and landscape. Middle Earth 12 is designed to work as a stand-alone course but will be implemented locally within a Humanities Program that also includes other students seeking credit for BC English 11 and Geography 12. Using diverse sources like fantasy fiction, regional environments, and work created or chosen by students, Middle Earth 12 is a Quest for deep connections to people, places and ideas, and powerful skills to interpret and respond to what we discover along the way. Tolkien's creations serve as both a metaphor and model for what we will do in Middle Earth 12 -- he fashioned a personalized landscape using the crafts of a writer, poet, painter, sketch artist, cartographer, medieval scholar, language origin expert, linguistic specialist, environmental devotee, historian, keen observer, and wanderer. He set an example of what relentless curiosity and collaboration can accomplish.

Board/Authority Authorized Course Framework for school trustees and district staff -- "brief" version: http://db.tt/yCrfoQ6A

Documentation on the project development, FAQs, philosophy, and the placement of Middle Earth 12 in the Language and Landscape program at D.P. Todd -- "full" version: http://db.tt/Uziz9EBU

Effective Professional Development

Our School District 57 Superintendent Brian Pepper recently posted a blog about Effective Professional Development. While his blog does not currently allow comments, he notes in an earlier post that "this blog, if you can even call it that... will not be interactive. I just don’t have time to read, respond and monitor the interactive comments... I am confident you will be able to make your views known in other locations!" I'm not exactly sure if this refers to views about what he has posted or just views in general, but I thought I'd go with the former and take up the challenge to respond to some of the observations in his recent post on Professional Development.

Brian discusses Helen Timperley's book Realizing the Power of Professional Learning and the knowledge-building cycle of inquiry that promotes valued teaching and student outcomes:

Timperley’s book certainly adds credibility to the process our district has been using for some time: learning team grants. The grants’ primary purpose is to support teams of educators working together on inquiry-based learning that will be utilized in the participants’ classrooms. In addition, the grants create opportunities for teachers to work together, to learn from each other, to create and to innovate. The rich discussion and sharing of successful practice is motivating, deepens understanding about the process of learning, heightens awareness regarding the critical nature of assessment, and often leads to improved results for students and improvement in teaching practice. This year over 150 of our teachers are working on learning team grants, in the areas of curriculum and instruction, technology, aboriginal education, play-based learning and assessment.

We need to celebrate and share this important work in a more effective manner moving forward. We need to direct more funding into inquiry-based learning initiatives. We need to expand the circle of involvement and influence beyond the school and district and into a province-wide professional learning conversation and interconnected professional learning initiatives that benefit our most important resource: children!

I'll respond specifically to the use of Learning Team Grants (LTGs) and the need to celebrate and share this work. Our district's use of LTGs started about 10 years ago with what were called Action Initiative Grants, essentially release time for teachers who wanted to work on shared inquiry. We also had something called Technology Innovation Grants that offered funding and release time for teachers who wanted to employ some new technology-informed practices with their students. The LTGs succeeded these grants and are now the default means for teachers to get time away from class to work on curriculum & instruction projects. The other means available are to seek release or lieu time from a principal or the Curriculum & Instruction department directly, or to seek an Inquiry Project grant from the Pro-D fund administered by the teacher's union. This idea of taking a bit of time to sort out pedagogy and hone our craft is not new, it has been going on for decades but has often been arbitrary... "please sir, can I have a day off" kind of thing. I think a more formal process like the LTGs is a good move, it provides the potential for accountability, collaboration, and student-centered action.

The part where LTGs are not working, as Brian suggests, is the celebrate and share part. I've informally polled a few elementary and many secondary teachers; there are clearly some misgivings about the quality and quantity of work being done. The majority of these LTGs appear to be secrets within their own schools, let alone the district level, and we have no established means of communicating either their presence or the results. Our staff email system, primitive locked-down websites, and limited social media presence are not up to the communication task, and as a result the LTGs live and die in small pockets of usefulness. A colleague recently told me that he thinks he is part of a Math LTG but is not quite sure. Is he one of the 150? The "best-kept-secret" problem reminds me of the S.A.L.T. group we used to have at our school. I think the S stood for Secondary but it became known as the "Secret Assessment Learning Team" because most staff had not heard of it, did not know what the acronym stood for, did not know how it was formed, or what it involved. Why are we so shy about professional learning? We do have an "All Around Our Schools" feature in the local paper; this gets into some of the fun events and student activities, but is not really scaled to delve into the "province-wide professional learning conversation." More deliberate and interactive tools are needed to make the connection. My wife had a good suggestion -- a searchable database that would allow teachers and others to scan past and present LTGs and other professional learning to find good matches for their own needs. Something between a list on a website and a wiki perhaps. In the olden days, educators working on curriculum projects would type up their reports and photocopy their resources into a booklet that would be stored at the District Resource Centre and at schools. My classroom bookshelf still has some of these now-dusty publications: local history, enrichment, critical thinking in Social Studies, student questioning techniques, etc. with names on them like Garvin Moles, Calvin Cosh, Keith Gordon, and my dad Walter. What astounds me is that 30 years later, in our hyper-connected digital world, we're still having issues archiving and sharing our professional learning.

Two further complications are the LTG criteria and format. The LTGs are limited to release time and won't cover other costs such as professional materials or technology, so the only way to take advantage is to prepare for a substitute and dodge class (which many teachers are loathe to do). One of our district LTG groups was surprised to find that their agreement to meet on their own time in exchange for some software related to their inquiry would not be met. That LTG, then, had a financial value of $0; a definite challenge in the "celebration" department -- might as well have stuck with twitter. The dilemma is that enrolling teachers (that have kids in seats everyday) have to incur substitute teacher costs every time they want to interact. 150 teachers using three release days costs the district about $135,000, more than the entire Professional Development Fund for the district's 900 teachers. How do we turn face-to-face professional learning from something one needs to escape their class to do into something embedded in our day-to-day routines? How do we schedule and fund that? Many schools have tried various schemes over the last 10 years to build "collaborative time" into the weekly schedule, but a variety of issues have made this divisive, especially at the secondary level. How might we listen and learn from the schools where formal collaborative models have resulted in "buy-in?" How do we remove the coercive elements (and major source of division) from collaborative models and shore up our capacity for mutual (peer) accountability?  Is there a role for the board to examine timetable/calendar adjustments to afford more paid time for professional learning?

The format can also be an issue -- it seems that all it takes to be approved for an LTG is that one frames a project idea in the form of a question... this apparently makes it an inquiry. Teachers and educational leaders often have the bad habit of confusing asking a question about work that is already firmly established and classic inquiry-based learning, where the outcome is less certain. Perhaps we've developed this habit from 10 years of writing school growth plans that muddle this process. We play a lot with data without a clear understanding of correlation versus cause, and almost none of what we write down in school or district plans would withstand statistical analysis. That's a problem outside LTGs, but I wonder if our notion of academic inquiry and action research is related to our lack of training and leadership in these areas (spoken by someone who failed a first-year stats course!). One way the district could improve the quality of inquiry is to provide facilitators, curricular specialists, or mentor teachers (different roles) that are available to meet with LTG participants. I have seen the value of this recently at Pro-D Rep training with a BCTF facilitator Teresa Fry (and our Pro-D chair Kim Rutherford) who guided us through the Inquiry Project model and a basic EdCamp. Adding experts to the groups would, of course, require an investment in more release time, part-time or full-time secondments, or other arrangements and appointments.

These LTGs provide nice little breaks for teachers to "work on stuff" and as a result are greatly appreciated, but do we know much more about them? A more thorough sharing of how they turn out is crucial for providing accountability for these projects; having a public audience for one's work is a very effective way of kicking up the quality of reporting and amount of professional pride invested in the work -- and helps ensure that the focus is on students success. If one digs around on the district website it is possible to find a list of the LTGs from the 2011-12 school year. To be blunt, many of them appear to be release time for teachers to do lesson planning, project design, and other work they would or should do anyways.  I can understand why that appeals to busy teachers -- this is a chance to work creatively with others and build some student activities that would be arduous without the collaboration and extra time... I've used release time for this "relief" before, so I am not condemning the process. We should be careful, though, to mistake this for innovation. Some of the LTGs appear to be replacements of district committees and ad hoc leadership groups that used to exist -- district-wide professional development and meeting time for core interests like literacy and numeracy. Among the LTGs from last year, there are a few that were probably innovative, but we have no way of knowing without the sharing and celebration part -- the lists do not contain detailed project descriptions or links to their work.  I also do not know of any formal invitations to share their work, although anyone can host a session at our annual Professional Development Conference (next one March 8, 2013). The LTGs will become less invisible as we make sharing habitual and not accidental. The tools and even the provincial network are already in place; many of our teachers and educational leaders are engaged at the district and provincial level through Social Media and their own channels of communication -- increasingly educational leaders in other parts of the province are interconnected and accessible. Our district has a lot of ground to make up -- an uncontroversial place to start is a concerted effort to bring the hidden success stories into the conversation. Much needed and more provocative work can follow.

This is also a great opportunity to forge a positive culture, to reverse some of the malaise that afflicts true partnership between the various employee groups in the district. We need to break the cycle with a few positive habits and narratives around professional learning that serve as a common "hearth" for us to hear each other and set new directions. To start, the innovative stories from among these 150 teachers should be profiled, posted, and praised -- tweet, blog, web, news media -- there has got to be at least one great story a month of how district-supported teachers are innovating and bringing benefit to students. I had a chance to drop in on a LTG group that was using a "critical friends" approach to review each other's designs for project-based learning. It was well facilitated, exciting for the participants, and had as an outcome the subtle turning of familiar designs for learning into innovative plans. I also had some lingering doubts and questions addressed about the value of the "project tuning process." This is what we hope for out of "co-creative" collaboration. How could this group's success be shared with others? How could we speed up the rate of "contagion" related to their excitement? We seem to be doing a good job with Timperley's knowledge-building cycle at the classroom level and likely within these LTGs, but are we serious about trying this openly at the organizational level? How often do our staff meetings capture this cycle?

Brian relays a good question: “What will it take for what we know to change what we do?” I would suggest that what we know is that some of our systems of communication and collaboration are broken and that we've known this for many years. The "sustainability" process of 2010 and last year's labour dispute exposed some wounds across all employee groups that have been long untended (or even unexamined) and as a result we deal with a high level of distrust and reluctance to engage at the organizational level. Knowing this has been a keen push for many teachers and parents to change what we do. I've seen the board of trustees (that includes my wife Kate!) and others make some strides here, but much of the change that needs to happen takes place outside of the board's usual gaze. The realization of broken systems and seeing the potential for positive change has spurred me to get more involved with educational advocacy and professional discussions over the last five years. Thankfully I am not alone in this. It has also been the impetus for thinking about what my own professional growth plan should look like and to consider how I can step up my approach to professional learning and leadership at the district and provincial level.  The "need to celebrate and share this important work in a more effective manner" also poses a challenge to the work of our district teacher's Professional Development Committee. We try to do a lot with limited funds, and much of the work is done in isolation of the LTGs even though the focus is very much the same.

I have seen plenty of vibrant "interconnected professional learning" in our district and elsewhere -- learning teams, personal learning networks, and individuals that keep being awesome regardless of what goes on around them. Maybe the informality of this work is what makes it work? But if we want to turn these into "interconnected professional learning initiatives" that are part of the "province-wide professional learning conversation" we first need to get out LTGs out of the closet, or look at other means of supporting and communicating professional learning. Too much of the best work in our district happens "underground" -- we need to be more deliberate about coaxing educators out of their bunkers. There are barriers that need to come down (I've blogged about that ad naseam), but more than that we need coaxing that is welcoming and progressive -- more freedom and means to speak freely about our issues and successes, more freedom and means to experiment wildly with improvements to teaching and learning conditions, and sometimes simply to temper wild ideas with actual research and planning. How do we do this? What does that look like? Where's the best return on our effort or bang for the district buck?

Challenge: What would you change about how our district celebrates and shares the work of teachers? What would be the most effective use of district funds to support professional learning among teachers and other educators that results in a benefit to students? Feel free to comment, share the success of your LTG, or relate your own experience if you are from another jurisdiction.