Our Most Important Mission

Flip, RISE, Common Core, ECAs, ISTEP+, High Stakes Testing, Race to the Top, Longer Days, Longer School Years, Blended Learning, Charter Schools, Online Learning, NovaNet, 1:1, BYOD, Design Thinking, Project Based Learning, Inquiry Learning....The changes and programs come fast and furious in the 21st Century, so much so that I think 21st Century Skills ultimately might come down to learning best to manage the rapidity and frequency of change.  With all of these programs, stresses, and attempts to transform our educational system I sometime fear that we are losing sight of what is has continually been proven to be our most effective methodology, relationships.

This was brought home to me yesterday when I read Adam Saenz's post at the Huffington Post titled From Jail to Harvard:  Why Teachers Change the World.  Mr. Saenz tells his story of how he fought depression throughout his youth, and then was inspired by two notes left in an old journal by two former teachers.  The notes, only a few sentences, spoke of the qualities two of his teachers saw in him.  They praised him for his work, and spoke of the future they believed that he had.  In short, two a young man struggling with depression, they gave him hope.  He utilized this hope to first take one college course, then another, and finally at the age of 27 to earn his college degree.  He then went on to graduate school and to earning a PhD.

As we begin the school year, it is my hope that all of us, despite the rapid and ongoing challenges and changes we face as a profession, rededicate ourselves to the methodology that pays off the most, relationships, even though most often we may never know how really impactful our kind words may prove to be.

What to Name a Blog

Never thought I would write a post on something like this, but this has been a question that seems to haunt me the more I dive into using social media for professional development and for my PLN.  When I first started using twitter, I really had no idea what it was-in fact I was basically a dormant user for 3 years prior to going to NTAC 2011 as part of the New Tech Network and I learned about Hash Tags and HootSuite-and thus did not really think much about my user name.  Thus the identifying, but somewhat boring and excessively long (11 characters) ken_v_olson twitter name.  There have been times I wish that I had gone with something a little more daring or related to my occupation, but my creativity creativity usually fails and I come up with nothing distinctive.

When I began my blog on Edublogs last year I settled on the name "Inquiring Minds" because it fit with the name of my school, The School of Inquiry, and it was what I have tried to have as a an adult learner, and inquiring mind.  When I decided to move to my blog to Google Sites, to model it's use to my students, I was able to keep the blog name, but I was disappointed that the comments feature would not work, unless I allowed readers to edit my words.  With this in mind I switched to Blogger this week, but the url www.inquiringminds.blogspot.com was taken.  To remedy this, I simply replaced the second "i" in inquiring with a "y" making it inquiryng.

I was worried that I would get comments about not knowing how to spell, and I did right away, but while I could change the name of the blog to the correct spelling, even if the url was different, there was a consistency about it-and a quirkiness-I liked.  Then I read this blog post by Todd Hurst from the University of Indianapolis' Center for Excellence in Leadership and Learning (CELL) on What's in a (School's) Name?.

After reading his post, I believe that our school's name fits what we hope to do, create learners who are active participants in their education.  Learner's who ask questions and seek out answers.  Who inquire about the word around them.  In thinking this though, I also believe that the blog name I have chosen fits me and how I approach my own education.  I seek answers from a wide range of sources, continually ask questions on how to improve my school and professional practice, and am a little quirky in how I go about it.  Inquryng may be a great way to put it.  What do you think?  What truly is in a name?

Technology, Change and Education

One of the major challenges that is facing education today is the impact that technology has been having on schools, students, and teachers.  Much like Clayton Christensen, who said that the coming technological revolution will create disruptive change in schools in his book "Disrupting Class:  How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns", I believe that schools need to begin looking at new models for how we educate our students.  Merely cramming technology into the current factory based model that we have utilized for the past 100 years is not going to create the environment for change that is needed. We need to look beyond the traditional format and begin to create new models that can personalize instruction, allow for greater student choice and voice, and create a community of learners.

This thinking was reinforced the other day when I read the following article from the Chronicle of Higher Education by Darryl Tippens (Provost at Pepperdine University) titled Technology Has Its Place:  Behind a Caring Teacher.  In this article, Mr. Tippens argues that while technology can do many things, it can not replace the environment of a residential college experience where students learn together.  He states, "People are social creatures who best mature intellectually in a particular social environment. At the center of an effective educational system is a vibrant community in which learners not only think together but also engage in learning practices together."   

As I began to share this article via Diigo to our administrative team, I began to think what the implications of this are for K-12 school corporations.   We do not have the residential environment that colleges have to create these unique learning environments for primary and secondary schools in a natural way.  Yet, research has continually shown us that relationships are one of the most important parts of creating a great learning environment.  Which leads me to my question: In what ways can we utilize technology to create more opportunities for teachers and students to develop learning communities that will engage students in the process?  

Google has the ability to render teaching obsolete, if all we concern ourselves with is the regurgitation of facts.  Traditional high stakes testing has lead to a more fact based approach.  The promise of the Common Core tests are that they will focus more on higher level skills and go beyond mere fact based testing.   These changes should lead us to creating more interactive relational learning environments.  The question is, can we turn the ship fast enough to keep pace with the changes occurring around us?

Putting Inquiry in the School of Inquiry

Originally Published August 6, 2012

One of the main drivers behind the name for our school, The School of Inquiry, came from an article  that I read in the summer of 2010 as my daughters were heading back to school.  The article was targeted towards parents and not educators and focused on Nobel Prize Winner Isidor I. Rabi.  In the article Rabi offers the following quote as to what made him become a scientist:

''My mother made me a scientist.  Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child 

after school: 'So? Did you learn anything today?' Not my mother. She always asked me a 

different question. 'Izzy,' she would say, 'did you ask a good question today?' That difference 

made me a scientist.”

This quotation started me thinking not only about my daughters' education, but also that of the many students I previously had taught.  This was the essence of what I wanted for them, to be active participants in their education, to ask questions rather than merely want to find the correct answer.  As we began to prepare to open a New Tech Network school it became obvious to me that if we are going to truly educate students for the 21st Century, we needed to instill in them the ability to be life long learners.  That meant they would need to learn to be the leaders of their education, which meant they would need to learn to ask questions about what they are learning.

With this in mind, we created the School of Inquiry.  This year as we begin our work with students we will be using Project Based Learning as taught by the New Tech Network and hope to instill this idea of Inquiry into our students in four ways.

The first comes from one of the foundational protocols of PBL is one in which students, after being given an entry document or witnessing an entry event, are asked What they Know, What they Need to Know, and Next Steps.  This at it's heart is an inquiry based discussion in which students are active participants.  

The second comes from a book that our staff read this summer.  The book is Make Just One Change by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana.  I first heard about the book through a Harvard Thinks Big Podcast and it just clicked that teaching students to ask questions is not something we do.  Most teachers spend plenty of time preparing questions to ask students, but not necessarily preparing students to ask the questions.  

To do this the authors having created a protocol they call the Question Formulation Technique.  The process begins with a QFocus, or focus topic that students will be generating questions on, and proceeds through students generating a list of questions, refining those questions to make them better, prioritzing questions based on what they want/need to explore, and then utilize the questions for extended study.  The authors describe several classrooms that have used the technique and provide a simple framework that can help you easily implement the protocol.

The third method will come from incorporating reflection as a daily practice within the school.  When we reflect on what we are reading and learning we make it more our own.  We solidify the ideas and thoughts we have.  With this in mind, reflection will be a large part of what we do at the School of Inquiry.  From student and staff blogs to portfolio projects we hope to incorporate reflection as a daily part of our lives.

The final area of focus is still developing, but it is based on this blog post by David Cox entitled Questions: Trying to Make it Matter.  In this blog post Mr. Cox establishes a way to get students comfortable with asking questions.  As a teacher I often told my students that I was not smarter than them, I just had a lot more experience behind the knowledge I had.  In his post Mr. Cox takes that one step further to provide a protocol to help students understand that asking questions does not mean you are unintelligent, but rather it is one of the keys to understanding what you are learning.  In order to truly create students who are life long learners and active participants in their education, we need to get them over the fear of asking questions.

So my readers, "What Good Questions Have You Asked Today?"

The Excitement of a New Year

Originally Published August 1, 2012

The two weeks before school begins have been my unofficial starting time for school for the longest time. It was during this time that I have traditionally flipped my mental switch of getting back into the school mode of things.  Not that I ever really turn it off completely, but there is more focus to what will be coming.  

This year two changes have occurred to this yearly pattern.  The first is my contract changed so that I was officially working in July this year, as opposed to unofficially as in years past.  The second is that this year will be the first year for The School of Inquiry to exist in reality and not just on paper.  This has been an incredibly exciting process, bringing this school into existence that has taken a lot of work from a ton of people.  I have been blessed to work with an incredible staff from the custodians and maintenance crew who have kept the building clean and made many last minute adjustments to our temporary how, to our technical support staff who put all our technology in through a flurry of work last week, to the staff in the traditional school that has answered calls and provided support all last year, to the donors who have enabled us to have an amazing space and outstanding professional development, to my staff who has been amazing in how they have embraced the changes we are undertaking.

The excitement for me really came home yesterday as I watched my staff interact with each other and our coach from the New Tech Network Beth Boetsche-Taylor.  These are my favorite moments.  When I can sit back and watch as these passionate and dedicated professionals debate, argue respectfully, ponder, question, and actively engage in learning how to be a better school, culture, and school.  This is inside teaching at its most intense and highest levels, and it always invigorates me to watch and participate in.  

When we speak of the cornerstones of a New Tech School; Culture that Empowers, Teaching that Engages, and Digital Learning that Enables, it is in these discussions that we lay those cornerstones to build upon.  It is here also that I feel most excited about what is coming.  It will not be all "seashells and balloons" as the late Al McGuire used to say.  There will be times that will challenge all of us, but watching the staff culture we are building, seeing them create the foundation we will build upon with our students, has me confident we will adapt, adjust, and manage those hard times and come out stronger for it.  

The Things Kids Can Get Us To Do

Originally Posted on July 29, 2012

I spent the past week in the Wisconsin Dells at Kalahari Resort with my family.  It was a great week and an interesting one as well.  I got to spend a lot of time reading while sitting by a pool-one of my favorite ways to relax-and I was struck by a great many things that I read.  On my last day at Kalahari I read a post by George Couros titled In Spite of Schools.  In this post Couros shows videos from two students who have created projects on their own, in one case in spite of her school's attempt to stop her, with little or no help from the education establishment.  His point was in what ways are we limiting our students by not giving them access and time to pursue their passions in school.  It was a great post that got me thinking a lot about the coming year, then my eldest daughter came to get me so I could watch her go down a slide.

This was no ordinary slide.  The slide was the Screaming Hyena.  It stood 60 feet above the waterpark floor, and after being placed in a tube, riders are asked "are you ready" and then the floor drops and they plummet at up to 25 MPH straight down and then into a sloping slide.  It is fast, scary, and tall.  It also is very much outside the personality of my eldest daughter.  She is quiet, not very aggressive, and studious.  It much more fits the personality of my youngest daughter the adventurous gymnast who will try just about anything, seems to have no fear, and loves to climb anything she can.  

Here was my eldest though, saying "daddy come watch me go down the drop slide".  It was an offer I couldn't resist, and captured (after 3 takes) on video.

The best part, beyond watch her conquer her fears, was her response to my question of how was it?  "Easy".  The next part is where I learned something.  I had no intention of getting up on that slide.  I had gone down the winding slide that is next to it earlier in the week and come up with a nose full of chlorinated water, and no desire to find out what a straight drop would be like.  It is not that I am afraid of speed, or heights, or falling, it's that I don't really relish all three at once.  But after watching my daughter go down three times in a row, how could I resist going.  Below is video proof, edited because no-one really needs to see me in a swimsuit.

While Mr. Couros wrote of the great things that kids can do in spite of schools and adults at times, and he is correct in his assessment.  I got to see what kids could make us do.  The lesson didn't end with my going down the slide, but continued into the weekend as I watched my daughters explore the Museum of Science and Industry and take me to interactive exhibit after interactive exhibit and show me what they had done and learned.  

If my daughter can get me up on a 60 foot tall water slide, what might my students teach me this year?  What would more of learning partnership between students and educators result in?  I can't wait to find out.

The Butterfly Effect

Originally Posted on July 25, 2012

Anyone who has seen the movie Jurassic Park is probably somewhat familiar with the butterfly effect as described by actor Jeff Goldblum playing Dr. Ian Malcolm in which a butterfly flaps it's wings in Shanghai and you get rain in Central Park instead of sunshine.  The Butterfly effect I am speaking of came to mind while I was reading an article on Evolllution.com by Dr. Kyle Peck who is a professor of education at Penn State University.  In his post, Replacing Educators: How Innovation is Changing the Teaching Role, Dr. Peck says about butterflies:

 "I don’t know what (if anything) a caterpillar feels* as it transforms into a butterfly, but I suspect it’s confused and uncomfortable. In a remarkably short time, the changes are massive, the product that emerges is VERY different, and most people would report liking the new version better than the old. The result is a thing of beauty and as a result of the transformation what once crawled is actually flying!" 

He then goes on to talk about how technology is disrupting higher education at a rapid pace.  He speaks of how this disruption will change higher education to a system in which delivery of lessons will become more and more facilitated by technology and that the role of the teacher will be that of assessing students knowledge.  He finishes with the following quote, which I find very relevant to what we are wanting to do at the School of Inquiry:

"As Stephen Heppel put it; 'In the 20^th century, we built big things and did things for people. In the 21^st century we help people help each other. Helping people help each other in learning is a whole different place than just delivering stuff to them. … We’re moving to a very different place in terms of learning. It’s a viral, agile, peer-to-peer, collegial sort of place that we’re moving to.'"

While this is the vision of the School of Inquiry-a collaborative place in which young minds are challenged through real world projects and learners are encouraged to pursue their passions with the aid of an expert guide (facilitator), the butterfly analogy he began with is what struck me most.  This is what this next year, and likely the three following them, will be for all of us involved at Inquiry.  

For students and staff the relationship of teacher and student that they have know for most of their lives and careers will be upended.  No longer will the teacher be the sage on the stage who holds all the wisdom (answers), but rather they will be a guide to help students discover answers of their own.  

For parents students may need more support at home than ever before.  They will be tackling a new way of learning, with a rigorous curriculum that will challenge not just what they know, but how they learn new content.  

For administrators like me it will require the willingness to step back, support teachers, and acknowledge that the process may be messy, but like a caterpillar  going through it's metamorphosis-the end product has the potential to be one of beauty if we, like the chrysalis, protect the butterfly during it's metamorphosis and give it the support to finally spread its wings and fly.  

I can't wait for the journey to begin, for our practice to change, and for our learners to fly.