Blended and Online Learning Class Reflection Week 2

This week's readings and videos all centered around the theme of Mindset and were very engaging to read and watch.  The materials started with  videos by Will Richardson and Ken Robinson speaking about the education system, and then had articles around adopting technology,  homework policies, giving students zeros, and how to start and online class.  The reflection for our blog post this week was to answer the following question:  How could you adapt or change one of your current courses/course policies to reflect a moving mindset?  Is this a change you are willing to make?  Why or why not?

As a high school administrator I thought that I would focus on a policy that I would change for it to reflect a moving mindset. One of the changes that I hope to make next year is to incorporate the VIA Survey of Character Strengths as part of our school discipline program.  The program already is centered around conversation with students who violate school rules in which we discuss what happened, and then have the student reflect on what occurred and what they can do differently in the future.  The foundation of our discipline program is based on a growth mindset, that being to not merely discipline the student, but rather to help the student to grow and make better choices in the future.

It is my hope to have students who have been assigned a suspension of any length to complete the survey as part of their discipline assignment.  They would then submit their top 5 strengths via a Google form, so that we can have a record of each student's strengths for when we meet in the future.  After submitting their strengths they would meet with an administrator who would then discuss what occurred for reflection, but this time through the lens of how they can utilize their strengths to avoid this situation in the future.  In addition to discussing how they might utilize their strengths differently in the future, if needed the idea of how sometimes strengths (like humor) can be used as a shadow strength that is in reality utilizing that strength in a way that is negative or harmful.  Finally, I would want them to reflect on the idea of self regulation, as exemplified by Dr. John Yeager (who co-authored the book Smart Strengths upon which this approach is based) in this article on self regulation.

With this change in approach, to helping students realize what their strengths are and how to better utilize them, but also to begin to move from autonomous responses within their environment, to those that are more reflective, as Dr. Yeager points out when discussing how being in a bakery can assault our virtue.

This is a change that I am more than willing to make as I believe that one of the primary functions of being an educator is to instill in our students the habit of life long learning, and a growth mindset is at the foundation of this belief.  Without the belief that we all can grow and develop new skills and habits of mind, then their is little point in continuing to work with students.

Blended and Online Learning Class-Reflection on my Responses

This summer I am taking an online course from Five-Star Academy on Blended and Online Learning, in addition to continuing my course work via EdX this time on Sabermetrics and Coding.  From time to time I will be posting reflections based on my learning through Five Star, this being the first.

For this week's introductory course we were introduced to the course software, learned about the expectations for our coursework and when assignments are due, and learned about the projects we will be doing.  I really liked the format for this introduction, particularly the use of rubrics to set the expectations for posts, as well as did some reading on the different standards for online educators from the State of Indiana, iNACOL, and ISTE.

I found this article about Online Discussion Response Techinques as that is something that I always struggle with when taking online courses.  Which leads me to today's assignment, an evaluation of how I did responding this week to the writing prompts and the writing of my classmates.  The three questions for this prompt were based on the rubric below:

1. Where do you fall on the rubric?
2. What qualities of your entries effective or exceptional?
3. What qualities of your entries were emerging or evolving?

In reading over my response to the question:  Which set of digital standards would you be most likely to use as a point of reference in your professional situation? What characteristics of those standards make them the best choice?   I believe that I fall predominantly in the Effective area.  I did a good job of understanding the readings that we were asked to write about and incorporate professional experiences in to both my response to the question and my response to my classmate's posts.  I also felt that I could be considered exceptional in the area of the presentation of my ideas.  That being said, I believe that my response to a classmate's post was a little too shallow to be considered effective, and thus I believe it is emerging.  While I did reference other posts that I had read, and also expanded on the topic by bringing in my beliefs about the standards as they related to our adoption of MacBooks in a 1:1 environment 3 years ago, I felt that my post was too much on the agreeable side of the scale.  

Another drawback to my post, is that I always find it hard to evaluate myself.  I tend to fall on the "too hard on myself" side of the scale, but when it comes to my writing, I think I grade myself too easily, plus it is always nice to get another perspective, so I have copied both my post and response to a classmate below. What do you think?

My Post:

As we are embarking on expanding our online offerings from 2 courses (Economics and English Composition) that were taught in a blended environment to a more comprehensive offering of core courses (we are adding Government and English 12) I believe that the Indiana Standards for Online Educators would be a great starting point. They are concise (11 pages long), easy to understand, and provide details as to what is to be expected when establishing yourself as an online educator. I believe that the interactions between the instructor and students is in many ways more important than the content that is being developed for these courses. Without great communication skills, the ability to connect with your learners, and the ability to engage them in the content, even the best lessons will fall flat. Thus I believe that these standards which give a nice overview of the process are a great place to start. 

I would back these up by using the other pieces as supplemental readings and discussions using the save the last word for me protocol established by NSRF (http://www.nsrfharmony.org/protocol/doc/save_last_word.pdf) or a similar text exploration protocol as part of a summer boot camp for online instructors as they offer more meet to grow from.

 Response to a Classmate:

Amy, I like your take on the ISTE standards being very well aligned to the goals your corporation has established for the coming year. I think that they can serve as a great guide for students to see what direct their digital learning can take them. I, agree with Kelly's earlier post regarding wanting to blend these documents into one final document that takes the best from all. I think incorporating the Indiana Online Educator standards does this in many ways, as she pointed out in her post, that it blends items from INaCol and ISTE to try and create a foundations document for teachers. I believe that having teachers understand the unique environment that blended/online learning is will be vital in making any technology change go beyond advanced power point and word processing. It is one of my biggest regrets from our transition to 1:1 that we did not access similar standards and discuss them as part of our teacher PD.

What I Learned from my MOOC Experience

As I wrote in my last post, I recently completed a MOOC class for the first time.  In my previous post, I wrote about what I had learned about taking online classes from this experience in learning about Alexander the Great.  The focus of this post will be what I learned about facilitating learning in an online environment by taking this course.

The first thing that I learned is to make assignments not merely relevant but transparent.  Each week in my course our professor, Guy Maclean Rogers, started the week with an overview of the topic we would be covering.  This included links to any readings that we would be doing as well as essential questions to think about as we did our work.  There were no surprises as to what was expected.  This no surprises policy even went to the courseware. At the top of each lesson was a menu bar that showed all of the elements that you would be completing during the unit, with symbols for different types of activities.

The second lesson I learned was to keep lectures short, and if using video have it transcribed so students can choose to read the lecture instead of watch it.  This was one of the best features of the class.  Each video lecture was broken into shorter segments of 3-5 minutes around a common theme, with a transcribed version next to it so you could read instead of watching if you wished.  After each video, students were asked to answer a reflective question regarding the video, often either analyzing what occurred or giving an opinion on what happened.  They were then asked to comment on the posts of others, but not required to do so.

The third lesson was to give weekly updates and pep talks.  All of the feedback that I received on the course came from auto graded multiple choice quizzes and the end of each unit or from peers commenting on my posts.  The first type of feedback was immediate and helped me to see what I was retaining, but was not very intellectually meaty-the quizzes were like fast food in that they filled you up, but were not always a sustaining meal.  The second feedback, from classmates, was infrequent as the number of posts to read from others were overwhelming and comments were infrequent at best.  The class lacked a sense of community.  All of this being said, the weekly email I received from our instructor was gold.  He commented on posts that he was reading and discussions that were taking place among the students.  He encouraged us to stick with it, while giving updates on assignments and telling us what the next topic would be in a preview.  In short he gave us weekly pep talks to keep us going.

The final lesson learned was to truly have a successful course, you need to create community among the learners.  This was hard to find in my course, and in some ways I found the class less fulfilling than live classes because of it.  In the course that I am currently taking on Online and Blended Learning we have to comment on the posts of classmates, and their is a rubric for those posts so we can make sure we are giving substantial feedback to them.  Additionally, the class is small, so you don't feel overwhelmed looking through the posts of your classmates to comment.  Thus, if I were to teach a MOOC style course, I would break the large class into smaller groups so they can foster a community of learners.

Getting Back to My Blog-An Update of the Past 3 Months as an Online Learner at EdX

With the end of the year in sight (4 More Days!!), I found my self with some time while at my daughter's gymnastics practice to catch up on my blog.  My last post had been about my starting a MOOC course on Alexander the Great through EdX, and I had every intention to update the blog with progress and insights.  That was on February 7, the best laid plans....

The course is over, and here is what I learned, beyond a great deal about Alexander, about online learning while taking the course:

1. Dedicate a Time to Learn.  The approach of "I'll do it when I have time" simply doesn't work.  This is the surest way to fall behind and have to scramble to catch up.
2. Avoid Playing Catch Up. When you stay on top of your lessons you have more time to fully engage with the material, and thus deepen your learning experience.
3. Online Learning Must be Active Learning.  While on your own, this can not be sit and get learning.  You need to engage with the material, and reflect on your learning.  Whether this be through taking notes on lecture videos or readings, actively participating in class chats/discussion boards, or through journaling about you lessons you need to do more than simply watch videos or read the material.  The first few weeks of the course I did this, and found as I took the tests that I really was not internalizing what I was learning.  When I created an Evernote Notebook for the class, my learning deepened, my retention improved and I had a much richer experience.  When I fell behind, and got into catch up mode the last week of the course, my learning dropped and I felt that while I was doing well on the quizzes, I was not learning as much.
4. Engage with Other Learners.  This was my most difficult struggle throughout the course.  I am not a great discussion board conversationalist and I found engaging with others to be very difficult.  There were a couple of reasons for this, beyond my own dislike of text based discussions.  The first being the sheer number of posts, most of them very well done.  With several thousand people taking the course it was impossible to read all the posts and comment on them.  The second reason was I did not budget enough time to engage with my fellow learners.  I while I enjoyed writing my posts, I often did not have enough time each week to read the work of others, let alone craft a meaningful response. 
5. Don't Worry about your Grade, but Worry about your Grade.  While I was not overly concerned about my grade, this was learning for learning's sake, it was definitely motivating to try and not only complete the course, but do so in a manner that would allow me to earn a certificate.  I am proud to be one of 1039 who successfully completed the course for a certificate, I am also proud that I am listed on the course honor roll.  Finally, I believe that caring about earning the certificate, and the percentage at which I passed each assessment, helped to deeper my learning.

Tomorrow, I'll take a look at what I learned about teaching an online course by taking this course.

Moving into a MOOC

I started my third MOOC course today, this one from Wellesley College via EdX, on the Greatness of Alexander.  As always my goal is to find the time to finish the course and expand my learning, while thinking about how these types of courses can fit into our school and help students pursue their educational passions.

The first observation that I want to make as I jump into this course is one that astounded me when my professor-Guy MacLean Rogers-mentioned it in his introduction to the course.

You come from more than 100 countries, including all the lands through which Alexander campaigned in the Middle East, the Near East, and Asia.
You range in ages from your early teens to your late 80s.
Some of you are still in middle school.
Others are senior professors or even emeriti of very distinguished
institutions.
Many of you have studied some aspect of classics or ancient history, though
the vast majority of you have never taken a course before on ancient history or Alexander the Great.

  The possibilities to learn from, and hopefully view pictures taken by students from these areas just amazes me.  As does the diversity of the learning environment that has been created and knowledge base we can all draw from.  Now I just need to learn how to better foster relationships via discussion board.

Back to my Roots

I spent yesterday morning having pancakes at my old Junior High School, McClure in Western Springs, IL.  I walked the halls that I was able to, entered through a new expansion of the school, looked at the theater area where I got my first concussion, and ate pancakes in the cafeteria where as a 7th and 8th grader I tried to learn not only how to grow academically but to survive socially those weird years known as junior high school.  I also came across the sign above the door to the south end of the school that immortalized our Principal Mr. Johnson who retired following my 8th grade year, "Have a Good Day and Pass it on".

Every morning for two years I heard that message at the end of our morning announcements, and I like to believe that hearing it motivated us to do that and helped us all to have a better school environment.  It is also one of the few reminders of my junior high years that has survived to future generations, the records that were set by my classmates, the trophies we won, and the achievements we had were not visible anywhere that I looked in the school, but this great reminder of how to live carried on and continues to motivate those who were influenced by it to do as we were instructed so long ago.

While waiting for my family to wake up so we could go eat pancakes, I spent some time reading John List and Uri Gneezy's The Why Axis:  Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life which brought me back to another part of my life, thinking like an economist.

As an Econ teacher I fell in love with the idea of thinking like an economist particularly the idea that people respond predictably to incentives and that they make rationale decisions to improve their lives with the choices they make.  Unfortunately, school administration has shown me that many of my students are not rational actors.

In learning and thinking about Economics, I have been particularly enthralled with the work of Steven Levitt and his Freakonomics Blog which has been featuring the work of Mr. List and Mr. Gneezy in small article since the release of the book.  One of those articles, and two chapters in the book, deal with field experiments in education in the Chicago Heights School District. 

During these experiments students were paid for improving their grades and attendance.  Each month students who met their educational goals would receive $50 and be entered into a lottery for a ride home in a Hummer Limo.  After one year of doing this with freshman students, they found that the grades of students on the border of failing and dropping out of school could be impacted.

In a second experiment students were given $20 prior to taking a standardized test.  They were told that if they could beat their score from the previous spring, then they would be able to keep the money at the end of the testing period, but if they did not improve, they would have to give the money back.  Students were given a $20 bill that they could see during the test, and were asked to sign a receipt acknowledging that they had received the money.  They then were able to find out at the end of the hour, if they had passed and could keep the money, or if they would have to give it back.  They also had a treatment where the students, if they met their goals, received the money after the test only, where they received the money a month after the test was over, or where they received a $3 trophy.  In all cases student achievement improved over the previous years tests.  Overall they saw gains of 5-10 percentage points on a 100 point scale.

This lead them to conduct experiments with incentives for teachers, parents, tutors, and to design a pre-school program within which to conduct experiments with young learners before bad habits, lack of growth, and the jadedness of being a 14 year old set in.   In all of these cases, the experiments showed growth.  The lasting part of this reading though came at the end of the Chapters on these experiments where the authors wrote:

We must all realize that our public schools are not just knowledge-pumping (or, at worst, babysitting) institutions dedicated to teaching our children how to learn how to become functional citizens.  In reality, they are laboratories of learning for everyone researchers, parents, teachers, administration, and students too.  Just imagine how much we could all discover if more people began running and participating in field experiments to discover what works."-The Why Axis:  Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life page 106-107

 This has me wondering what incentives can we put in place at PHS.  How can I experiment with incentives and our most troublesome students when it comes to attendance?  What would schools that are systemic in pursuing excellence in education look like if scientific method became the basis for our innovation, as opposed to marketing campaigns from education companies?  What new insights might we discover that will push our students to greater heights?  How might we, like Mr. Johnson, make our schools and world a better place?

You Play How You Practice

Yesterday we had our monthly administrative cabinet meeting which involves all of the administrators at each level of our school corporation.  During the meeting we were discussing ways in which we could define our win that go beyond state mandated testing.  During this discussion, one of the items discussed was student attendance.  This is a complicated topic for me, because I spend a lot of time calling parents, speaking to students, and yet it also something that I feel is vital to the success of our students.  It along with tardiness are my pet peeves, and also my most frustrating issue, because the remedies often mean that students who do not change their ways end up missing many days of school, and my remedies give them permission to do so, which is often what they want.  The frustrations of this reality are material for another post, psychological counseling, and hopefully some helpful hints from others.  It is also bizarre because our attendance rate, while not perfect, is consistently at or slightly above 95%, but I digress.

It seems this week that many of my students are channeling Allen Iverson, except that they are not "talking about practice" but rather "talking about school".  I many of the conversations, it seems as if they are merely replacing his use of the word "practice" with the word "school".  A typical conversation goes like this:

"Billy (all people examples in my life have always been Billy and Suzie, so these are not real student names) you have been tardy to your first hour class 19 times this year, out of 32 days."
"But Mr. Olson, it is only like 30 seconds each time.  Are you really telling me that I have to stay after school for 2 hours for being 30 seconds late, that is ridiculous!"
"I agree that it is ridiculous that you can't manage to be in class on time.  If this were a job, you would be fired by now."
"But it isn't a job Mr. Olson, it is ONLY SCHOOL.  If this were a job I would be here everyday because I would be gettin PAID!"

Here is where the practice line comes in.  See in the minds of my students, and maybe yours as well, school is merely practice, a job is the big game and when it is time for the big game, I will show up ready to win, even without practice.  Problem is, this more often than not isn't the case.

When I was a swim coach, we consistently told our swimmers that you play how you practice. We won a lot of races and meets not because we were the most talented team in the pool, although we had great talent, we won because we played the way we practiced and we emphasized doing the all important little things correctly every day, and if we were not doing those things we started over.  The mundane of swimming, turns and finishes, are often the least practiced parts, but often win the biggest races.  We practiced these daily, not by doing special sets to practice them, but by insisting that our swimmers do them at race pace and as if in a race every set.  Sloppy turns where they would breathe in and out of walls were not tolerated, slow turns did not happen, and finishing a swim with any style of finish that did not jam your outstretched fingers into the wall was unacceptable.  

In swimming, as in life, it is often the littlest things that propel us to greatness or keep us from the prize.  We play like we practice, because if we can not sustain excellence in practice, we will fall short when it counts.  For proof, ask Milorad Cavic if he wishes he had finished hard all the time.