Responsibility Travels

While traveling over a 2-day period, I witnessed several individuals demonstrating responsibility under various circumstances. I continue to be encouraged when I see others being responsible in their circles of influence.

• A Starbucks barista willingly promoed my two hot beverages since their in-store WiFi was not working and prevented me from accessing my Starbucks card on my phone. The barista indicated that their malfunctioning WiFi should not cause me to use cash since I had a prepaid Starbucks card. She couldn't have been any nicer.

• Eric was the gate representative for our JetBlue flight. The flight was changed to leave from a different gate, delayed since the pilot scheduled for our flight had not yet arrived from his prior destination and the new pilot and co-pilot had not yet arrived to the airport. Eric did everything in his power to clearly communicate to everyone waiting for this flight. He was factual, clear and incorporated a healthy sense of humor. Eric was instrumental is creating a calm atmosphere while this sold out flight was waiting to depart for Tampa prior to pending blizzard conditions in Boston and at Logan International Airport. Eric maintained a level-head, a smile throughout our 3-hour delay and offered assistance to anyone needing it. I commend JetBlue Airways for hiring, training and keeping such a fine representative. 

• While waiting to board our JetBlue flight, I has the pleasure of speaking with Jake. He was an engineering sales rep headed to Tampa with his wife and twin teenage sons. During our 30-minute conversation, he conveyed a great deal of responsibility about coaching his son's team, his alignment with his company's mission and his commitment to his wife and sons. His attitude, respect and communication was uplifting and encouraging. I immediately could see why his wife and sons followed his leadership.

• When the co-pilot for our JetBlue Tampa-bound flight arrived to the gate, everyone applauded his arrival. He was gracious, responded with an award-winning smile and briefly spoke with us with a sense of humor. He assured us he and his pilot would do everything possible to ensure our safe and comfortable flight to Tampa as soon as our pilot arrived. His brief interaction with us added to the calm situation that Eric has previously established. 

• Upon arriving to Tampa International Airport, my driver was immediately helpful, respectful and polite. He, too, incorporated a sense of humor into our conversation. We conversed during our 40-minute ride to my home in Florida about times in our lives where we were grateful for the responsibility demonstrated by others. He even shared with me details of the time he flew on an SST Concorde and the unbelievable thrill that it was!

In closing, I continue to be encouraged by individuals choosing to accept responsibility for their attitude, actions and dealings with others! 

Strategic Confusion

I recently watched an hour long video from Robert Duke about learning and how to create exceptional learning environments. He caused me to reflect on the learning environment that I aim to create daily while facilitating mathematical thinking at the high school in which I teach. Robert has helped me to realize that how I teach has very lttle to do with the learning that our students experience. The learning that is significant is how our students deal will confusion, uncertainty and misunderstanding. Through his talk, I've come to realize that real learning stems from learners knowing how to optiminally navigate confusion. Our students' learning can be much more effective if we learn together how to handle "strategic confusion". The following big ideas I extracted from his talk and I highly encourage you to provide yourself the opportunity to challenge the learning that you offer to your learners.

• Retrieving what we know requires various types of practice.
• We need to practice getting content out.
• If nothing goes wrong during our learning, it's unlikely we're going to learn anything.
• Learning requires much more doing on the part of the learner.
• Teach how to be optinally confused.
• Two central ideas of learning: a) You're a learner, too. b) Learning is error correction.
• Learning is not efficient. Learning is chaotic.
• "Because I'm an excellent teacher, I'm going to wait a few moments while you figure it out for yourself."

After you've experienced the shift in thinking that provides for real learning through strategic confusion, I look forward to sharing thoughts with you. 

Dance of Change Initiation

First, thanks to David Culberhouse for his insightful post on Designing Systems of Change. David offers a consistent and informative flow of thoughts that cause me to ponder and reflect about my learning and teaching. His post influenced me to bring Peter Senge's "The Dance of Change" back into view and I've resumed my reading that I barely started years ago.

Second, the following except in "The Dance of Change" is causing me to consider yet another shift in our learning:

     "Sustaining any profound change process requires a fundamental shift in thinking. We need to understand the nature of growth processes (forces that aid our efforts) and how to catalyze them. But we also need to understand the forces and challenges that impede progress, and to develop workable strategies for dealing with these challenges. We need to appreciate 'the dance of change,' the inevitable interplay between growth processes and limiting processes."

     "This requires us to think of sustaining change more biologically and less mechanistically. It requires patience as well as urgency. It requires a real sense of inquiry, a genuine curiosity about limiting factors. It requires seeing how significant change invariably starts locally, and how it grows over time. And it requires recognizing the diverse array of people who play key roles in sustaining change - people who are -- 'leaders'."

This post marks the begnning of my new journey as I seek to better understand my growth and limiting processes as well as those of our students. As always, I yearn for your feedback.

Better Than I Thought...Not!

We just ended our second marking period, Midyear Exams and I had the opportunity to reflect on the progress we were making toward becoming proficient on our Standards or Learning Outcomes. I'm dismayed to realize that we're not doing as well in two of our classes as I had hoped. Our second marking period was focused on five Standards. I consider Proficient to be 3.0 or better. The following table represents the percentage of our students that demonstrated proficiency on each of our Standards during the second marking period.

Description	CCSS	B4	W2
Complex Number Operations	N.CN.2	30%	25%
Polynomial Operations	A.APR.1	55%	45%
Factoring / Roots	A.APR.3	40%	50%
Remainder Theorem and Syn. Division	A.APR.2	55%	40%
Solving Radical and Rational Equations	A.REI.2	50%	30%

I can now see that Operations on Complex Numbers presented a challenge to both classes as those percentages are the lowest. Therefore, I'm planning to incorporate more Operations on Complex Numbers in the spiral review portion of our daily learning. In addition, the Blue 4 (B4) class needs Extra Practice on Factoring and Roots, where our White 2 (W2) class needs Extra Practice on Solving Radical and Rational Equations.

After reflecting on this analysis, I am more aware that I need to work more effectively with our students to raise their Proficiency Levels for all our Standards. I'm planning to offer more differentiation during our class time to provide the opportunity to work with our students. During this time, students will have the opportunity to ask questions and complete Extra Practice on the skills on which they have not yet demonstrated Proficiency. They will also have the opportunity to work through Extra Practice (HW) outside of our class time.

In addition to the above analysis, I'm examining how each student's Proficiency Levels during the second marking period compares to what they demonstrated on our Midyear Exam.

I certainly welcome any comments or feedback that might improve my effectiveness, deepen our understanding and increase our Proficiency Levels. 

"First Class" Learning After Vacation

As students and teachers head back to the classroom after having been on vacation, I'm mindful as to how we might smoothly transition back to a more empowered learning experience for all.

Jeff Zoul (@Jeff_Zoul) recently shared a tweet entitled "11 Habits of Effective Teachers". I found the post by Carrie Lam (@Cs_Teaching_C) to be encouraging and inspirational.

After reading "Universal Design for Learning:Theory and Practice" by Meyer, Rose and Gordon and starting to read "Disrupting Class" by Christensen, Horn and Johnson, I became more aware of the need for a student-centered learning environment with variability built in to accommodate all learners. With this in mind, I'm considering starting our "first class" back in each of our courses in the following way.

We'll start our 84-minute class with a Proficiency Ticket, Formative Assessment (FA) to guide instruction and learning. Once each student completes our 2-4 question Proficiency Ticket, they will individually compare they work to mine. I'll have mine copied and available by the windows.

• Mastery (4.0) - If they demonstrated Mastery, they'll move on to our newest topic with minimal guidance. 

• Proficienct (3.0) - If they demonstrated Proficiency, but missed some details or minor processing, they'll have access to some Extra Practice for just that concept. That Extra Practice can proabably be worked on independently, though they could ask myself or any other learner in the room to offer some assistance. When they complete their Extra Practice, they'll also be able to check their work and receive feedback to guide their learning and encouragement to prompt them to reach even greater heights. 

• Approaching (2.0) - If their understanding indicates that they're Approaching Proficiency, they will also have access to Extra Practice after they've had the opportunity to have a brief conference with me about where their processing or thinking might have gone astray. After we've had the opportunity to guide their thinking, I'm suggesting they work through some similar questions to those initially missed. Again, solutions will be available to them so they can check their refreshed thinking and learning. 

• Beginning (1.0.) - If the vacation potentailly caused some memory lapse or they're just in need of a refresher, students will have the opportunity to get some additional guidance from me or one of their peers to help align their thinking. They too will have the opportunity to work through some Extra Practice. In this case, I'd be available to work through the first couple of new Extra Practice questions with them to hopefully shed some new light on their thinking. As mentioned above, they will then have the opportunity to check their thinnking with mine already made available. 

Once students have had the opportunity to self-assess and get any needed guidance, we'll assemble to transition to our next, but related concept. We have only 3-4 classes left before our Midyear Exams start. 

I'd welcome your thoughts as we venture back together to our learning environments! 

Thanksgiving Thoughts

While everyone I meet can contribute to my becoming a more effective lead learner, some individuals or groups deserve special recognition.

God - God has equipped me with compassion for others, a passion for learning and influencing learning, and a perseverance to always be improving. I am eternally grateful to God for the heart and talents with which He has blessed me.

Twitter Chats and our Professional Learning Network (PLN) - Our #ChristianEducators on Thursday nights are a dedicated group of believers, educators, administrators and caring individuals that continue to encourage us to always serve God and others with all we have. I am so grateful to God for allowing me to have a part in moderating this sacred fellowship. I am also thankful to Dr. Bill Ziegler (@DrBillZiegler) for trusting me to partner with him in leading this fine group. Our #COLchat or Culture of Learning chat on Monday nights encourages participants to initially build relationships to develop an interdependence that fosters a mutual respect and a love of learning. Our #SBLchat or Standards-Based Learning crew on Wednesday nights continues to show how genuine learning can be developed by focusing on standards or learning outcomes and creating an environment that is conducive to creating lifelong learners. I am thankful for the dedication of our co-moderators Darin Jolly (@drjolly) and Garnet Hillman (@garnet_hillman) for always focusing on what's best for our students, their parents, our teachers and administrators. Our #LeadWithGiants crew on Monday nights is always an assembled group of individuals that strive to bring leadership to the forefront, develop the leader within us and empower us to develop enduring leadership qualities in our students. Our #EdChatMA are educators primarily from Massachusetts gather on the first and third Tuesday nights to discuss how to best integrate the diverse components that can aggregate to create sustained learning and the love for it. I'm grateful to our founder and co-moderator David Hochheiser (@DavidHochheiser) for his commitment to the furtherance of our efforts and influence.

Family - Finally, at Thanksgiving, I chatted at length with a family member who provided several healthy insights into empowering learning, providing an environment where all learners are valued and encouraged to reach or exceed their potential and especially to develop the needs of individuals rather than those of the class. He reminded me that courses or classes are made up of individuals with varying backgrounds, interests, tolerance levels and abilities to focus. He defended his position by explaining how he struggled with school leaders who expected him to fit in, be compliant and just "play school" until graduation. Unfortunately, due to many challenges in and out of his control, he chose to withdraw from secondary school prior to earning his diploma. He has since earned his GED, become an entrepreneur and is maintainng a multi-million dollar company. He reminded me to not ignore the individuals in our classes that struggle to fit in as typical learners since those students often see learning differently and many are not willing to just comply with the requirements of "playing school".  I expect that integrating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into our learning environment will significantly help in this endeavor. He thanked me for being an educator who is focused on the learner, rather than on the currculum. He instilled in me a commitment to identify those atypical students and provide them with the resources and support to enable them to develop into contributing members of society, even though they struggle to comply with the rules of the road in our schools. I promised him I'd spend more time and energy on our student outliers to help them reach their potential. Will you join me in this commitment?

Top Twelve Observations from Our Day of PD

Several teachers in our school had the opportunity to observe classes in another district today. We left that district discussing that today may have been the best Professional Development (PD) that our district had provided in ten years! We have so many fresh ideas to bring back to our classes!

1. Some students may be lost or daydreaming even when others are very engaged.
2. Students can use their electronic devices appropriately when trusted.
3. Students can be at various levels of understanding at any given moment in class.
4. Using colors well during learning can highlight, differentiate and ignite learning.
5. Student desks arranged in groups work much more collaboratively than arranged in rows.
6. Announcing transitions is important to student connections and the flow of learning.
7. Students explaining and asking questions clarifies the understanding for many in the room. 
8. When students ask questions, we must verify that they really understand the answer.
9. The more student-centered the class is, the more engaging it is for students.
10. When teachers speak for more than 5-8 minutes without student intervention, student engagement decreases.
11. When students sense that teachers are approachable and trustworthy, learning ignites.
12. A Culture of Learning that is safe and engaging is required for retention and application.