Flipping Professional Development

As we begin winding down this academic year and look to how to structure a Professional Development program for next year, this site on "flipped PD" and how it was implemented seems like fodder for good discussion.

Structured opportunities for professional development, organic personal learning networks, the use of tech to connect us to other educators, thinking about how design and priming work both in the classroom and in how we work as professionals, and looking at models for effective meetings and learning opportunities for adults all are on the agenda for the year ahead.

http://edudemic.com/2013/03/how-we-took-flipped-pd-from-concept-to-reality/

New Opportunities for Life-Long Learning

This is a great piece from the Sunday NY Times about the experience of online learning opportunities, like the Coursera classes that both Stacey and Hans have checked out.  While it doesn't offer any groundbreaking insight, I found it a particularly compelling advertisement for these content providers.  It seems like such offerings could be a tremendous addition to our individual Professional Development plans -- something that I hope to encourage many of our colleagues to develop in a more formal way in the year ahead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/grading-the-mooc-university.html?_r=0

Why You Never Truly Leave High School

This is an interesting article from New York Magazine highlighting the importance that experiences in adolescents play in shaping our lives.  Ms. Senior notes that high schools are arenas of 'social combat' that are 'almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents' for a variety of reasons, including the lack of contact with adults:  ''...psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse."  Because of this, adolescents establish their own set of rules for sorting or creating a hierarchy as the only thing they often have in common is age.  Ms. Senior points out that this non-mixing with people of a variety of ages is artificial and never occurs again in one's life.  She also cites various studies centered around the powerful emotion of 'shame' and how adolescent actions involving shame can stick with people their entire lives.  She also notes that high school might be the defining American Experience because just like a high school, we live in a world that is a 'box of interacting strangers'.  

I recommend it as worth the time to read as it raises interesting questions about how Blair is perhaps different from the larger public high schools that the studies focus in on, and whether even with our communities ability to overcome some of these obstacles there could be more that we could do as the adult members of the community to help our students navigate this important time in their lives.

Why Your Never Truly Leave High School

Influences on Student Learning by John Hattie

Blair brought this site to our attention at the last PDC meeting:

Growth Mindset

Teachers: Will We Ever Learn?

This recent piece from The New York Times is well worth a read.  Although it addresses public education, several of Mehta's arguments are applicable to the independent school world, and in fact, I would argue that independent schools should take a lead role as the incubators for several of the ideas Professor Mehta puts forward.

Teachers: Will We Ever Learn?

Can a Computer Grade Your Essays?

This article (link below) from today's NYT describes a new edX plan to offer essay-grading software on the web for free.  The software is a logical complement to edX's goal of providing free courses online, as it will allow those courses to use essays as evaluation tools.  Moreover, the software should provide students with quicker feedback on their written work.

Of course, critics are concerned about the software's ability to evaluate writing with a formula:
“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part.   “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

An interesting read, and the free software, once available, could be an interesting complement to what we already do in assessing student writing and providing feedback.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp

Furthermore, I know others (Hans and Stacey, for starters) have used edX or Coursera for online coursework, and I look forward to giving it a try sometime in the near future.

If Students Designed Their Own School

     This is an interesting pilot program that I learned about from 'The Learning Pond', the Grant Lichtman blog that Jason pointed us towards earlier:  http://learningpond.wordpress.com/ The 14 minute documentary, created by one of the nine students in the pilot program, discusses how these nine students created their own 'school within a school'.  The students choose/create a 'Weekly Question' to present to other students each Friday, develop a 'Personal Endeavor' that they pursue over the course of a semester/year, and work with the other students on a 'Group Endeavor' that also involves a long-term group learning project.

     The students emphasize the self-directed nature of their learning and how the program forces them to take ownership of their learning in a way that the traditional schooling model does not.  I thought this would be an interesting possibility to explore for a small group of our students next year as our own 'pilot' or the model could also be applied to professional development with a small group of faculty who could use the self-directed learning model to create their own personalized and group learning opportunity.

  

Check it out.