All I Ever Wanted to Know about Dieting I Learned at Work

I have learned so much about Weight Watchers, dress sizes, plus sizes, counting carbs, fat grams, and points this year at work that I wont ever have to watch Oprah again.

Not that I'm opposed to learning, Im just not so sure dieting should be the number one topic on a high school campus. Not even moaning about administration overtakes diettalk for the #1 spot. Now what kind of school is this?

In addition to dieting I was lucky enough to listen to teachers booking travel plans over the phone, getting tickets to hear a political speech, and planning their party/outing tonight. What I didnt hear was one teacher calling students and discussing how they can do help them do better in their courses in the 2nd quarter. hmmm,

Yes, I know, Im whining. This is a HS after all.

Accessibility in Online Classes

There are some fundamental accessibility problems at our online school. High School students, and students of all ages for that matter, have trouble navigating online courses. So, if we know that, why don't we make it easier for them? Are we trying to trick them? Are we trying to exude power by playing guessing games? It's simple, they will learn more of the actual content if we take the time to include some fundamental basics when constructing our courses. Below are 5 tips for making your online coursework more accessible.

1. Lesson Introductions - Most of our online teachers do not include this basic part to a good lesson plan. The introduction, or what I call the hook, has to somehow connect what kids are about to learn to what they already know. Building your lesson to connect to their background knowledge is the first rung on a ladder to creating schema organization in long term memory. It also gives the lesson relevancy and motivates students by tying into what they already know or like.

2. Be Brief but Organized - We have all been to a website where you scroll down further and further, seemingly never coming to an end of the webpage. If you do that in an online lesson the kids are gone, done before they ever begin. Lessons have to be constructed in small, organized parts without including pages worth of material on one webpage.

3. Requirements - Tell the students what you want them to do. For example, if you are sending the student to a link outside of your webpage then tell them what to do once they get there. Be specific, tell them exactly what to read and sometimes what to ignore. Also, when the student is completing a project or written assignment, you should include the exact requirements of what they need to understand for that assessment.

4. Student Samples- Try to provide student samples. We do this in a regular class, why wouldn't we do it online? All of my courses utilize a wiki that my students have created and host to show off quality work.

5. Don't hide things from our kids- If you want HS kids to find what you want them to learn, put it right in front of them. Don't make them go to one page to find a password or another to find what you are going to assess them on. Don't get me wrong, it's okay to have links that shoot the kids off to content, but don't make accessing the content a labyrinth they have to navigate. Its difficult enough for kids to just complete the assignments in an online course, don't try to teach them how to be successful scavenger hunters to do that.

Many of us believe the way we have set up our courses is spot on. Are we paying attention to the signs that student's are giving us that tell us they aren't?

Alone

The weirdest thing happened to me this morning. I was driving to work, listening to NPR as usual, and I hit the magic BBM spot. Behind Black Mountain. Around here that means NPR goes out for a few miles, no other station does, but NPR does, maybe because its public. Anyway, I switched over to the one other station in Vegas I dare listen to, the pop station which has the #1 morning show. It was a commercial. I looked at my radio, gasped, took a deep breath and pushed the power button. It was about 6:45 in the morning and when the radio went off the only sounds I could hear were the ones coming from my tires bouncing, pot holes and all, along these desert highways. And the whoosh of cars passing me at 80mph. Then something interesting happened.
I started to get panicky and wondered why. Then, in a split, mind numbing moment of clarity I realized where my anxiety was coming from. It was the first time I had the radio off in 4 years of driving this route. Maybe longer, cant remember the last time I turned the radio off and just listened..... just.....thought.
Well, for the first 10 minutes I tried to convince myself I could make it through this new experiment. The anxiety was overwhelming, whats wrong with me? I tried to focus on something to help me get through the silence. I kept thinking about a thought I hadn't finished from last night, how Podcasts could help my kids?
I couldn't focus, couldnt come up with anything. All kinds of thoughts went in and out of my mind, but nothing productive. I took a couple deep breaths, tried to envelope the silence, and then just went with it. Go with the flow Cheech and Chong always said, or some unproductive person, cant quite remember who. Anyway, I went with it. All of sudden swarms of clarity came to me. Thoughts of making my classes better, posting on blogs, communicating with at-risk students, all these thoughts hit me. Of course the only thing I didnt think of was another way to use podcasts in my courses besides students making audio essays, but I did come to one clear resolution.
Monks are smart. Take time to meditate. Its almost impossible for me but the unnerving silence of this morning was the only point of relaxation I had all day.

Opposing Forces

My school made several commitments to dramatic change this year. Since we are a charter school, have missed AYP every year, and are on the verge of losing our sponsorship from the district, we had to make some HUGE changes. The two biggest changes seem to be opposing forces though and that is making the teachers lives very difficult right now.

The first major change is the new Learning Management System we use to host our online courses. It was never made clear why this system was brought in but it has proved to be the opposite of what we needed at this junction in our school. You might be thinking, "its so early in the year, how can you make that judgment right now." Well, there are two really good reasons. One, this system is not designed to communicate with high school students, and in an online school filled to the max with At-Risk students, communication is a major factor to success. Two, this system takes a lot more time to operate than our previous system and right now time is not one of our luxuries. This is where the second major change comes in.

We have shifted our focus as a school, hopefully as an entire school culture, to promoting the success of our lowest achieving students. We are supposed to be better mentors, better student advocates, better instructional designers (in order to motivate production of course work), and better communicators. As stated earlier, the nature of our new LMS demands WAY more time. So if the system forces us to take more time to grade, more time to input quality assignments, more time to communicate and more time to operate the basic system components than we are losing more time to call the students, losing more time to visit them when they are campus, losing more time to work one on one with both our online and mentor students, and losing more time to track their progress.

Opposing forces: How do we better mentor and communicate with our students, as demanded for the success of this student population, when so much more time is lost due to a system clearly not designed to fit our high school right now?

Ive Made a Decision

Ive been trying to decide how I wanted to best use my student blog The First Day of Kindergarten. Ive been promoting it as a place for them to get help with research and project alternatives. Since almost all of the blog entries are based on Web 2.0 applications, they will get to learn those tools on top of having choices for assignment completion. A couple weeks ago I realized its not enough that they know the options are out there, I have to give them incentives to use these Web 2.0 tools that Ive been promoting. So, Ive made a decision.

Im going to run weekly themes. The theme this week is SlideShare. I will post an announcement modeling the theme for the week (see below). I will link them to a blog entry about how to use that tool. And, here is the incentive part, I will give them additional points for any work that they turn in that week using the tool. I think this might work.

Individualized Instruction Online

To steal a saying from Oprah who probably stole it from someone else, yesterday I had an "ah ha moment." Usually those moments come for people when they hear others speaking or see something inspirational. My moment came when my own words were leaving my mouth. Sounds a little arrogant so far, dont worry, I'll knock myself down in the next couple sentences to balance things out.

Im not really good with labels. I rarely set a course and say here is the name of the course Im setting. For the most part, I just start doing things because I feel something is right, not because of a label or category it fits into. Sounds vague so far, okay, let me clarify.

Back to yesterday. A handful of thoughtful teachers stayed late on Friday to be part of a new Restructuring Committee at our school. Our principal got the idea out of the Model Schools conference he went to this summer. During the meeting we were bouncing around ideas and my principal said something that I felt needed clarifying. Im usually fairly heldback when it comes to these situations because I have a little bit of spotlight fright, but I spoke up. As I was speaking I heard myself saying, "Well, my goal is to provide individualized learning for all my students" or something to that effect. At that moment I realized I had finally found a label for an idea Ive been working hard at developing the last 6 months.

I feel blessed to be part of a charter school, and online distance education, and this is just one of the many instances why. If I say I want to provide individualized learning for all my kids, I can actually do it. All I have to do is be willing and flexible. Here is how it looks right now in my online classes. 3 of my 4 courses are essay and project based. The lessons are written up as projects, but for the most part they are assessments where kids write out their ideas. Beginning this year, Ive told my kids that anytime they see the words writing, essay or review than they have carte blanche how they want to handle it. Ive created a blog where Im posting lots of methods for completing projects and research to help them with options. The only stipulation is that kids have to meet the requirements I post in the lesson, but they can show me they have learned almost anyway they want. See, Im confident in my lessons enough to know the kids are going to get all the literacy and content that I want them to have, I just want them to have options for how to show it to me. I just want them to get excited about doing work because they have found a method for doing it that stimulates them. Does the method matter all that much or does the fact that the student learned something and can prove they learned it the most important requirement for my evaluation?

My Favorite Time of the School Year

"Are you crazy, this is your favorite time of the year? The end of the year is every teacher's favorite time, whats wrong with you?" I've asked myself those questions 3 years in a row now and each time I come up with the same answers, yes and I don't know.

This is my 4th year teaching and my 4th year at the same charter school. When I began here I was a new teacher and I felt scared, anxious, excited, and really nervous on the first day of school. After making it through the first year I had a fantastic summer. Drove up to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, camped with my wife and dog for 9 days in the wild. It was fantastic. The last thing I wanted was for the new school year to start; I was loving my summer. Then something fascinating happened.

At our charter school we do orientations, uhhhh, "shared learning sessions" for the first week of the school year. It was during that week, 3 years ago, that I realized something. I was really hopeful. I met with a lot of kids and their parents that week, talked with them, helped them get prepared to begin working on their online coursework, and even saw a few sparks in the eyes of some students., That's when it happened, hope began to grow inside me. I was overcome by it and was giddy for that whole week. I remember saying to myself, the kids did horrible last year, what is going to be different this year? I couldn't answer, I knew I was evolving, but had no idea if the kids would be doing better as a result. I just began to believe they would and as a result hope lit a fire in me. The same thing happened two years ago and then last year also.

Now its the eve of our first shared learning session and I can feel it building in me again. This year is different though, its more powerful. Ive learned more this summer than at any point since I left college. Im extremely excited to share what I learned with my students and see if it can make a difference in their learning. The key to our school is just to get the kids to do their work. Im hopeful that they will, really hopeful, and still a little crazy.

3 Goals

Ive put a lot of thought into what my goals are for this school year, and Ive narrowed it down to 3 things.


1. Be persistent- Drive the kids crazy with communication. Yes, utilize the face time as best as possible but more importantly, talk to them when they aren't on campus. Many kids in our model dont reply or dont read their emails, so I have to call. Call often , email often, track them down on campus, be persistent!

2. Be resourceful- This is multifaceted. First off, I need to learn a lot more. I need to engulf all the possible resources out there for teaching kids online. Secondly, I need to get my students to use the resources I give them. I want them to create, imagine, construct, be engaged. Maybe if I can get them to find a few methods that interest them then they will use those to complete more of their work. I don't really care how students turn their projects in to me, I just want them to do some work. We can only go up from there.

3. Be Positive- This is the hardest one for me, 1 week into the school year and I already feel it being beaten out of me. I don't want to complain as much. Well, sort of. I question authority, its in my nature, but I need to learn how to do it in a constructive way. From another angle, I need to be more positive towards my kids. Simply meaning, I can't give up on them. Ive given up in the past but Im learning. Setting this goal is the first step, and I think its a big step, to promoting student success even when it is REALLY hard.

Not sure if this can be a meme, but I will tag a few people to see if they have any goals for this year:

Mr. Moses
Kimberly McClain
Belinda Shllingburg

Charter School Staff Development vs.....

I am now entering my 4th year teaching at a large charter school. The school is a distance ed, online curriculum based education model with a hybrid component(which involves one-on-one mentoring). I will talk more about that later on. Tonight I need to rant about staff development.

Staff development in traditional schools is a joke to almost everyone Ive ever talked to. In my school it's not, not normally. Our school prides themselves on shared decision making between administration and teachers. Normally teachers have a say over the type of staff development we do. For example, when we were really frustrated with a speaker who came to our school 3 times in a year to help us work together better, even though their weren't many problems with that, we voiced our complaints and she was taken off the schedule for the next year. Our admin team, Principal and AP, are very cognizant of not wasting the staff's time, I love that about my school. What made me bring up this topic is what happened today.

1. We start school next Monday. Our school is incorporating an entirely new Learning Management System, which is software that integrates all of the teachers curriculum and courses onto one platform for the students to use. Its brand new to us, we have had 1 full day to work on it since we came back to school this Monday and most of us aren't ready to start teaching kids in this new system.

2. Our school is radically shifting its focus this year. First of all, I love radical, and I love change so I'm all for everything that is happening in our school right now. We are shifting our focus to helping At-risk students become successful learners. Prior to this, most teachers, myself included, gave up fairly easily on students who didn't show much motivation and effort to complete their course work. Maybe giving up is the wrong phrase, but we didn't persistently accost them, we didn't persistently motivate them, we basically said "this student isn't right for this learning model." This year we are changing that, at least I know I am, and admin is pushing the rest of the staff to do the same. "Every student can learn in an online environment" is a belief that has overcome me after watching most of my kids fail the last 3 years. That's quite a turnaround. So, I have a high at-risk population with a high dropout and failure rate, how do I get that to turn around. It starts with me, but I need some tools. Our entire staff needs some tools, so today we spent an entire day of our coveted pre-student time to get staff training in working with At-risk students.

3. We start school in 2 days, kids will be in our classes in 2 days, and we have an entire new platform to learn in order to present students with the material for their best possible education. We also need to get some tools for mentoring students because that will be the key to getting these kids to do their work. If we build relationships with more students, more of them will do their work, and more of them will take and pass the HS proficiencies and our school will live to breathe another year. We are on probation through NCLB right now, really bad probation. We had a guest speaker come in today to give us strategies on how to build those relationships with AT-RISK students, to give us tools to help them, to keep them in school, to get them to pass their classes, to get them to learn something. At least that is how the guest speaker was billed, that's the only reason she would of been brought in to take a full day of our very important first week time, because we really need to learn how to work with these kids.

Conclusion: What did we get? We got a lady who came in and spoke for 6 hours. She did not once mention the words: online, distance education, or At-risk (or any of the alternative terms that mean the same thing). She didn't even recognize the uniqueness of our charter. Her presentation did not apply to our service delivery model. She gave strategies for working in a traditional classroom that maybe applies to 1/4 of the teachers in our k-12 program. It didn't apply to the HS, yet the HS faces the biggest risk of closing down next year. She spoke on fundamental first year teacher ed stuff like Gardner. What did we get? another day of lost opportunity to make our classes better for our kids. Not only that, a little bit of hope is gone. I really wanted some staff development that would help me to become better at my job, especially in communicating with our student population. Motivating our student population. So the key question is, if we are a charter school and can do pretty much what we want when it comes to staff development shouldn't we be avoiding the types of development that cause the staff to say, this is a joke? I was pretty mad when the day started and one of the older teachers said to me "you got to know how to play the game," aren't we in this to change the game?

Why I Started this Blog

Tonight I received a meme from a colleague and was asked my opinion about some fundamental school beliefs. Thats a great topic for me to rant about, especially because I am a teacher and teachers need to rant. However, the blog I had set up is designed to be a resource center for my students, and I didn't find it a valid spot to spout my opinions about education, my school, or my philosophies. For the first time since I started blogging, I thought, well I need a place to do that. See, I also have a family website and blog where I talk about my life, my wife, my baby boy, and other things in a well mannered, not to offend, not to philosophize, not to leave the little nest of vanilla family imaging. So I need this place now, mostly just to talk about my views on education, and what is happening in my life at school. But also to philosophize, question life, question life at my school, question life in education, and question my ideas.