After All These Years!: Lee Sattelmeyer’s Blog

Dear Folks,

Our beginning of the year assessments window has closed. Our district requires a battery of assessments at the beginning of the year for all students in a classroom. On my grade level, second, that works out to be six different tests: three in language arts and three in mathematics. That’s a lot of tests. The Dibels Benchmark test and the sight word recognition test require me to do each child individually. Even though the others can be given in a group testing situation, that still calls for a great deal of time to grade them and then record all the scores electronically by hand.

Our district requires that all students be enrolled in Pearson’s SuccessMaker suite of computer guided instruction. Every child has to be enrolled in Math Concepts and Skills 2.  It is left to teacher discretion to enroll students needing reading support in the reading components of SuccessMaker. That’s a lot of computer time on a weekly basis.

Two weeks ago, our annual Parents’ Curriculum Night took place.

Wow! All this had to take place in the first four weeks of school.

It is no wonder teachers in my building don’t take advantage of the professional development programs in technology use and integration that I put in place. It is no wonder that they don’t take advantage of the various professional development opportunities that are available at the various on-line subscription services we have, like Discovery Education. It is no wonder I find it hard to think up creative professional development opportunities that draw the teachers in my building like sweet things draw the hornet population around our school.

I find my “planning” time for technology fractured into very small time periods. Waiting in my doctor’s office, yesterday, I managed to get about 15 minutes of planning done. I got up early this morning to input some of my assessment data on-line. I was efficient in doing that, so now I have a few moments before leaving for work to think and plan again.

The one theme I keep coming back to is that technology should not make my job more difficult. I can’t “sell” that to my teachers who are struggling just as much as I am to complete assessments and to get the data put on line and into a couple of different spreadsheets that administration requires. These requirements are time consuming, tedious, and distracting.

All three of those conditions will kill any initiative, especially learning to integrate technology into everyday instruction. The required assessments and recording of data leaves a “bad taste in the mouth”. The experience generalizes over into teacher attitudes toward technology in general, “Technology means more work for me.”

It is no wonder that I feel like I’m swimming upstream every time I want to provide technology support through professional development opportunities!

I’ve decided that this year, that I’d try to focus more on integrating. We now have projected learning technology, sound systems, document cameras, and projectors, in every classroom. Some classrooms have SMARTboards, also. Instead of opportunities to learn SMART Notebook software or how to search for subject matter on Discovery Education, I want to incorporate all of these tools together so that teachers get a feel for the richness of educational opportunities that they can offer in their own classrooms.

I’ve got my job cut out for me. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do it or where is an appropriate place to begin. I still have to juggle my own second grade classroom, and our K-4 building has a mind boggling array of variables in the needs of the classrooms, grade levels, and technology proficiency levels of the teachers.

What I do have this year is a different focus, “integration”. There won’t be anymore professional development on specific use of whatever. It will all have to be designed towards making technology use simple, enriching, and rewarding. If it makes teaching hard by creating more work or things to have to think about, It won’t be useful.

Technology should and can make our jobs of preparing young minds easier, more successful, and require about as much effort as we put into everyday things, like choosing whether to use your fork or spoon.

Yours,

Lee

One of the most memorable books I’ve read about technology and the change process is The Children’s Machine by Seymour Papert. I’m giving away a hint of my age by admitting to having read this book when it first came out. It wasn’t a book giving “how to” tips or describing the latest tools coming to a monitor screen near you. It is much more timeles considering it was first published in 1993.

Instead, this was a “BIG” ideas book, a philosophical book looking into the benefits of technology to the next generation and examining the change process involved in giving technology to our children.

What has stuck with me over the years has been Papert’s analysis of the change process. Why do so many “good” ideas seem to flourish for a little while only to whither and die? Why do so many teachers cynically say if you teach long enough you’ll see it all come back into vogue again.

In my own district, I’ve watched numerous incentives become the hot topic of the day, lived through a lot of staff development, only to see us move on to something else. Years ago a lot of us were extensively trained in TESA (Teacher Expectations & Student Achievement – here’s a link to a summary of what TESA is http://www.hotchalk.com/mydesk/index.php/math-matters/537-teacher-expectations-student-achievement-). After the push to train us, time, energy, expectations, and resources gradually dwindled away.

The younger teachers in our building have never heard of or know what TESA is. But the new hot topic is a peer observational program called a Walk-Through which bears a remarkable similarity to TESA.

Papert inferred that this kind of change process where “new” ideas are embraced, encouraged, and gradually left to whither and die was like an immunological response to the change process.

Nowhere have I seen this pattern repeated more often than in bringing technology innovation to our children.  Why is this?

I suggest that it is a lack of vision that is the culprit.  People have trouble articulating a cohesive vision as to how technology is more than an add-on to an existing curriculum. It is not visualized as a critical tool for thinking, creating, and learning. It is more like the frosting on a cake in most classrooms.

Some might like to suggest that this is the fault of the Trail-Blazing, Pioneer folk in the building. They aren’t vocal enough to encourage the rest of us to leave our safe, comfy havens that we’ve acquired through years of teaching.

I listened to a number of really intelligent presenters at eTech Ohio talk about publicizing what you do with technology. It is not enough to just “tell” your building administrator. I think you have to push them out of their comfort zone.

If you’ve been around as long as I have, you know that administrators are the real “gate keepers” in a school district. Funding for equipment, software, and supplies is non-existent unless your request somehow fits into the administrator’s idea of where the building should be headed. Sometimes, even small grants from your local PTA or school foundation must be vetted first by the building administrator.

Administrators are also the people who will make or break technology professional development in a building. If technology professional development is not an integral component of whatever the PD plan is for your building or district, it just doesn’t happen expediently in your school.

Administrators are not the only obstacle to technology PD in a building. Let’s face it, teachers own part of this problem. Teachers tend to not attend PD if they are not required to do that. We’re all busy, have too much to do, and keep getting more paperwork required by the state or national government. A teacher’s time is finite, and most of us are not looking for anything else to do.

However, the building and district administrators are responsible for encouraging technology use and for facilitating the professional development that will stimulate integration of existing technology resources into teaching and instruction.

So, how do you effect change in a system that tends to surround technology development with a great deal of “antibodies” waiting to engulf and divert the change process?

Well, I believe it has to begin with the one with a vision, whether that is the local tech guru, a group of teachers who find inspiration working together, or the teacher that just happens to attend some conference and was exposed to an idea that might transform her teaching through the use of the technology currently found in her room. Whoever that is, he or she has to get the word out to the rest of us.

I appreciate DE revising and broadening the idea of what an “event” is that qualifies for Star Educator certification. The changes addressed what is the real secret and power behind the change process, the power of informal communication among the educational staff. The sharing of ideas for technology use over lunch or within the framework of the teachers’ common planning time is a powerful tool in the change process.

It would be an wonderful world where every administrator embraced new ideas and understood how valuable integration of technology is in instruction. I would, indeed, believe I’d died and gone to heaven if technology integration was a permanent part of each professional development session I attended. Real world concerns, however, sometimes makes that impossible. In the pursuit of meeting state and federal mandates, administrators sometimes have to balance between what might be helpful with that which must be done.

 That is what I believe is the real “antibody” that continues to surround the idea of technology becoming an integral part of instruction. My job is to not give up hope but  to continue waging guerrilla warfare on those pressures by finding ways to encourage teachers to confront their comfort zone by providing resources and timely support.

The day of  having a mandatory PD session solely devoted to using technology with students is gone. Instead, new ways to change teaching practices must be explored. Thanks go to DE for recognizing this and allowing its STARS to find their way in their buildings with their administrators.

Sometimes, the change process starts with one individual.

I’ve spent a good part of the summer making the Grand Tour visiting our children and their families. While away, family was the focus of my days. I dabbled occasionally with research on the Web and planning for the upcoming year. “School” pretty much was on the back burner. Who wants to work when you have delightful grandchildren who giggle with when you’re being silly?

 We’ve been back a couple of weeks. Despite the summer coming to an end, I’ve been lazy, as if there would be no end to this season of low stress and no deadlines. You could say I’ve been like the lotus eater. I didn’t work on all those things I’d promised myself I’d do when I had the time. Lessons weren’t created. Information and resources weren’t researched. Staff development plans never got past the initial dream stage.

 Like Odysseus, I now must gather my focus and lash my attention to the spar lest I conspire to remain in the land of the lotus eaters.

The farther I distance myself from the joys of the summer, and the nearer I get to the shoreline of the new school year, the more I feel the pull of excitement of discovering new things and rethinking what I want to do over the next year. I’m clear that I don’t want to continue with the same lessons that I can practically do in my sleep. I want to challenge my thinking and explore new directions with my students. I want my students to find the same joy and excitement in learning that I do.

 I’ve been exposed to a number of new concepts in the last couple of days that have challenged my thinking. I’m still trying to fit them into some kind of framework that affect my teaching.

First, my 32-year old son criticized my e-mail. We’ll he didn’t exactly criticize. It was more of a casual statement that I’d stayed in my comfort zone and hadn’t moved ahead with technology. To understand his comment, you need the background on his statement. I tend to send long e-mails. Not just long, lengthy. More like tomes, except sometimes I really can’t claim the “learned” part of the definition. My youngest son calls my e-mails “SPAM” and has threatened to list me as a spammer in his e-mail software. My middle child sometimes responds with the comment that I should “get a life”.

My e-mails are carefully constructed, being read, reread and revised until I’m positive that I’m communicating my ideas. I spend a lot of time crafting my message.

According to my kids, that is so last century. Their e-mails are so brief that sometimes I’m not sure that they understood what I sent. They are into text messaging. If I want to communicate quickly, I have to text them. Days might go by before e-mail is checked. Yet texting continues as part of the fabric of their daily life. Without skipping a beat or missing a syllable of anything while I’m talking with them, a quick glance at their phone tells them who just communicated with them through texting and what that person wanted. A deft flick of the wrist, casting eyes downward, and the message is received. A few swift pecks on a keyboard not much bigger than my index finger, and the response has been sent without missing a beat of our conversation.

I have to admit being a bit defensive when son #1 told me people don’t want to use e-mail as much anymore. Quick queries and immediate responses is what today’s generation wants. It also explains why days may go by before I hear back from my 16-year old grandson. Text messaging is beginning to replace e-mail, just as e-mail began to take over snail mail.

A week after our conversation about my e-mails, AKA SPAM, I happened to find an article on an educational blog discussing this same growing dichotomy in communication strategies. Interesting enough, age appears to be the predominate determining factor for preferences in communication medium. 

So what does this have to do with education? I’m not exactly sure. My best guess hypothesis is that younger brains than mine hunger for information in faster, shorter morsels. While I love to lavish time upon each piece of information, savoring the meaning and connections, today’s learner wants to acquire and utilize information in a shorter time frame.

 Discovery Education videos have already anticipated that change in paradigm. Many of the full-length videos have been divided into video segments or clips, creating a “video byte” around a specific concept. I have to admit I tend to think in terms of complete movies rather than “clips”. This year, in light of my rethinking how younger people communicate, I want to do more with the video clips in instruction. I want to see if it really makes a significant difference in  my students acquiring concepts. I think it may.

Professional Development is a part of me. It is what I like to do.

As I’ve been thinking what could or should be done for the next year, the opening scene of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man echoes through my head. The music salesmen are singing about an interloper, Professor Harold Hill, who has managed to make their job difficult by selling uniforms and instruments and then skipping town before following through on his promise to create a town band. There is one character whose line is to say, “But he doesn’t know the territory…”

I had to think awhile before I could figure out what my brain was trying to tell me. I really can’t plan anything without knowing what my staff wants to know. I’d be like Professor Hill promising a “band” when I didn’t know anything about music.

My problem is I really don’t know what my staff wants to know. I’ve asked. I’ve put out e-mails. I tried to entice. And I’ve tried to bribe, to no avail. I’ve been left with the odd sense that my staff either is smarter than me, don’t want to know about any new things, or they don’t know what they want to know.

Since I manage a number of district technology resources in my building, I know how little use is being made of resources being made available by our district and paid for out of my community’s taxes. So, “smarter” can’t be it, otherwise the resources would be utilized more successfully.

I could certainly make a case for the “don’t want to”. I know how often people in the building look at my name on an e-mail and defer opening the e-mail until later, sometimes really too much later. My last building walk-through for the summer, showed me that most of the staff in the building didn’t follow through completely on the summer tech shut down procedure e-mail. Only three people in the whole building had everything shut down, document cameras covered, amplifiers turned off, and microphones and remotes stowed away safely.

However, I’m a “born in the wool”, honest-to-goodness liberal, optimist. So, I chose to believe that my staff really doesn’t know what they want to know or learn when it comes to technology integration in the classroom. I got absolutely no response from anyone in the building about their interest in some one hour professional development sessions in our building prior to the beginning of school, not even a “no thanks, I’m busy that week.”

This coincides with an almost total lack of interest in our district for a 1-2 technology mini-conference in our district. I was getting really excited about the topics. The goal was going to be to show staff what they could do with our existing technology not present some ivory tower version of what education could be if we had the money, if we invested in new technology, or if we subscribed to some additional services. Practical and doable now were to be the theme. We got six inquiries from the whole district.

I keep hearing the music waft through my head. Before I go deep into planning technology professional development this summer, I need to find a way to stop thinking like the music salesmen on the train. I need to be more like Professor Harold Hill and help our staff dream that now that they have the instruments, they can become a “band”.

I love Delicious! I don’t know how I ever got along without it. It simplifies my work by being only a URL away from my bookmarks. No longer do I worry about what I saved and on which computer it got saved on. Sure, Yahoo! will keep my bookmarks for me, but I can’t log into my Yahoo! account at work. So, Delicious really works for me.

What I can’t figure out is why I can’t seem to excite others about the site. I know in professional development sessions that others have been impressed that I can quickly and easily pull up a Web site to reinforce some concept. But the amazement stops there. In about six months of proselytizing, I’ve only inspired one convert!

Does this say something about me? Am I singing along with John Hancock in 1776 “if I’m the one to do it, they’ll run their pen quill through it…”?

Or does this speak to nature of human beings that we have a comfort zone and tend to stick to it? Or that you can “lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”? Or that we all have too much on our plate?

I don’t know the answer to this, but know that it isn’t isolated to just my building in the district. We tried to put together a mini-tech conference in August showcasing the existing technologies and resources we have in the district. We got just six responses back from the whole district indicating that the person was interested in attending the one-day conference.

Meanwhile, I keep adding to my Delicious account. Ask me to come up with resources for our IB Planners. Within a few keystrokes, I have a number of them ready to share. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

Yours,

Lee

I’ve acquired  quite a bit of new knowledge lately about using technology. The problem is that it is pretty much “pieces”. I picked up new information at a conference that led to learning new skills. Searching for IB resources for our grade level Plans of Inquiry led to some more. Our son and new daughter-in-law gave us a gift of a really nice web cam, and another skill was added to my repertoire. One of my least tech savvy teachers introduced me to Tokbox, and I taught my kids how to do video conference calls that we couldn’t do on Skype. My oldest convinces me I need a Facebook account, and I find me posting comments about the things I’ve read, family history, and generally poking fun at myself.

I’ve become a Renaissance Man of Technology of late, a regular “Esperto di tutto, maestro in niente” (Italian for “Expert of everything, master of none”).

That has begun to concern me a little. Sure I know a lot more about utilizing technology than most teachers in the district, and am smart enough to realize I don’t know enough. What has begun to be apparent is that while I know a lot of “things” I’ve not had the time to develop a gestalt integrating all that I know and can now do into my vision for technology in education.

A dear boss, instructional leader, and friend used to annoy me at times with his incessant admonitions to stop thinking of all the minutia that everyone tells us we have to teach, and think about the “Big Ideas”. Anyone who thinks there isn’t a lot of minutia that teachers have to teach hasn’t looked at the state standards recently. I can’t quite remember what I read I’m supposed to be doing/teaching from one page to the next. It’s the “Big Ideas” Larry used to say that captivate the learner and keep them moving forward.

So somehow, somewhere I’ve got to find the time to tinker with these new skills, experiment with them with my students, and allow their responses, enthusiasm, and ideas help me formulate how technology can transform education. It isn’t enough to just teach 2nd graders how to do something with technology. That’s the old paradigm. I’ve got to capture the essence of the “Big Ideas” here and pass it on to my students so they don’t see these fabulous resources as discrete skills to learn how to use. Instead, I’d be happy to know that I’ve communicated they are all just tools in their toolbox to facilitate their becoming “master of all”.

Yours,

Lee

P.S. There is a similar phrase in Cantonese, 周身刀,無張利 (“Surrounded by knives, none is sharp”). My own children could have written this about their Dad during the Dark Ages of their Adolescence. Wait, I think they did!

I found this statement in an article I was reading on eSchool News about the effectiveness of 1-to-1 computing (http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/02/16/11-programs-only-as-good-as-their-teachers/#comment-334).

 “Similarly, a study of laptop use in 21 high-need Texas middle schools noted that “teacher buy-in … is critically important, because students’ school experiences with [the] technology are largely dictated by their teachers.”

 I didn’t find this statement shocking or unrealistic. It pretty much sums up my experiences.

Seymour Papert, in The Children’s Machine, wrote that initiatives often experience an immunological response to change where the initiative is welcomed at first, swallowed up by rules, regulations, guidelines, etc., and eventually smoothered/killed so that the status quo pretty much remains the same.

Papert suggested that the reason change process initiatives tend to fail is that change is often driven Top-Down. I think that is true for us here in Shaker.

It is not difficult to identify the emphasis testing has had on technology innovation in our district. SuccessMaker, which is a really good tool, has become the emphasis for computing in the elementary grades. We get a list periodically from our building administration indicating which children in our rooms aren’t at a certain arbitrary point at a specific time of the year. We are expected to remediate that by increasing time on the software and intensifying support in the classroom. SuccessMaker, the instrument/tool for learning, in itself has become the evaluating test indicating Pass/Fail.

 The data from the software has slowly begun to drive instruction, teaching, and learning. Available class computer time and lab time become focused on only this one goal of providing enough time on the software. Innovation, constructivism, and preparing children for the 21^st Century have little room in the school day.

 No wonder, despite my best intent to engage teachers in learning new technology skills  and developing a vision for technology in their room, I get so little buy-in.

Yours,

Lee

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