Educational Disruption

Almost a year ago, I wrote a little post about the Future of Education.  Ever since reading Clayton Christensen’s book Disrupting Class and even prior to that, I have been watching and waiting for public education in this country to come around and catch up to what I had been thinking about and doing.  The salient components were creating, collaborating and distributing ideas, lessons, materials and then having students do the same.

Back in 2010, these ideas were not welcome in public schools and to a large degree, sharing things publicly is largely discouraged, which includes teacher blogs.  Teachers are highly discouraged from being active in public media, forums and discussions on an individual level.  And heaven forbid there is anything posted that might be construed as dissent or dissatisfaction.   Schools fear transparency for a pretty good reason.  If parents really knew what was happening in classrooms, they might react with shock and horror.  We need more transparency in our schools, not less.  And attempts made by systems to censor through fear and intimidation need to quashed.

Despite or perhaps because of the negativity in education nowadays, th disruption predicted by Christensen is coming closer and closer to reality.  As budgets become more strained and as dissatisfaction increases, new opportunities are beginning to appear and technology is becoming a very key component to that.  When I start thinking about what I see in schools and look at what can be offered in a virtual environment, the traditional factory modeled schools become a tougher and tougher sell.

First of all, I think about the benefits to the students.  First off, physical bullying is nonexistent in this setting.  Bathroom graffiti; nonexistent. Pink slime in the lunches: nonexistent.  Need a pass to use the bathroom?  How about being interrupted by a fire drill?  Then there are the issues around riding the bus.  Some might argue that students will miss out on valuable social skills from the interaction with classmates.  I have seen and experienced these ‘social skills’ which include learning how to curse at adults and each other.  Or how to sag your pants and show your butt.  Or how important having the latest designer clothes and gadgets is to social status.    I could do without a lot of the social lessons that are being passed around in todays schools.

There are benefits to teachers as well.  not having to take a lunch count, not having to supervise halls and lunchrooms and playgrounds frees up time to actually work and interact with students.  If a student gets unruly or disrespectful in an online session, it is all there and recorded and they can removed with a push of a button, denying the offending student an audience.  A teacher in this environment does not have to worry about being assaulted or having their car vandalized in the parking lot.  While some online sessions can have many more students, many more can be accommodated through watching recordings of the live sessions.  Why should a teacher have to present the same thing 6 times a day when one recording can work as well?

The single biggest downside to the virtual learning environment is that it involves a significant investment by the parent.  Not necessarily in money as most homes already have the technology and connections necessary, but in time.  The parents have to take over the custodial role for their children, instead of the school.  And this is significant especially if both parents are working in full-time jobs.

The disruption is already taking place all over the country and it remains to be seen if or how positive the impact will be on the education of our students.  But times for traditional schools are getting tougher all the time with school budgets tightening around the country causing increased class sizes and decreased number of days in schools.  With the shortening of the school year, parents are already having to find other ways for their children to be looked after while they work.  And herding more students into smaller spaces brings the task of control to such prominence as to totally overshadow the supposed main goal, which is education.  It forces the culture to have more in common with prisons than with places of learning.

Preventable IEP Anxiety

I don’t have any IEP’s to write this year, which might be the best and only good thing about being underemployed.  Well…actually I do have one IEP to write; my son’s.

And this year it has been enough of a headache to make up for not having 10 others to write and schedule.  This one has been rescheduled at least 3 times.  Right before the original IEP date, I submitted a letter of parent concern that sort of threw his case manager into a mild panic.  I admit, that this sort of violated about half of my own rules for avoiding the long and ugly IEP meetings.  So I was not too concerned about delaying the meeting a week to enable people to get their legs back under them, and to address my concerns in a thoughtful manner.  But then another delay ensued and finally she wanted to delay until after the CRCT results.  The CRCT, for those who don’t know, is Georgia’s Criterion Referenced Competency Test, which is the state-wide high stakes test.  I decided to go along with this, but each and every time and during each and every communication I asked for exactly the same thing: a draft of the IEP.

And now I am absolutely convinced that failing to receive such a draft in a timely manner is the single greatest cause of preventable stress during IEP season.  This is why it is such a critical part of my aforementioned rules.  Procrastination and surprises do not serve anyone well.  It does not serve teachers well, because they are deciding and writing in a hurry.  It does not serve parents well, because their anxiety mostly comes from not knowing and the fear of the district ambushing them.  It does not serve the system well, because when parents feel ambushed, they tend to become contentious and litigious.  And yet, I witness this time after time after time, year after year after year, the same exact thing.  The worst was when I was the high school representative at a middle school IEP meeting and we were already an hour behind.  We were all in the meeting room, waiting for the case manager. When I asked the SLP where she was, I got an eye roll “She’s upstairs, writing the IEP draft.”

If you are a teacher with an IEP tomorrow morning and have not completed the draft yet, you should consider another career.  You are probably already on some sort of blood pressure medication.  Being a special education teacher is stressful. But this is one source of stress in your life that you can minimize by simply moving your own deadlines up a week.  I used to be like you.  I would wait and then scramble to get my drafts done, and then worried and ended up with all sorts of mistakes as I hurried and rushed.  I finally had enough and began writing my drafts further ahead of the actual meeting dates and got them to parents over a week in advance.  And guess what happened to that stress?  It disappeared.  And here is why:

Being a parent of a child in special education also consists of a stress, only this is one that rarely ever sleeps.  Although I knew this first-hand, it took me time to translate that into a practice that actually minimized worry for the parents as well as myself.  Having a draft in their hands a week in advance allowed the parents to think and consider what we were doing.  And it instilled a sense of trust. You have no idea how precious that is, until you realize that you have attained it universally and fully.  And it shortened my meetings by almost hour.  Parents could talk about what THEY wanted, because we had agreed on most things ahead of time.  Most of the heat fell on the itinerant providers who failed to submit their reports and recommendations in advance.  They were also procrastinators.

Having a draft written also diminished the effects of having to reschedule meetings.  I HATED rescheduling, but on the few occasions where it was absolutely necessary, it did not impact me significantly because I already had the draft written and distributed to the parent.  I used any extra time to talk to the parent some more, making sure everything was okay and it was just the way they wanted it.

It took some SERIOUS arm twisting to get an advanced draft this year, even though it should have been completed 2 months ago.  And what I got was something that was barely written at all, with no mastery or goals and objectives.  This means that this is going to be a very long and drawn-out meeting because we have to hammer out goals and objectives.  Fortunately I had already done some work on a few that I wanted, but I’m seeing some other concerns that have come up that will have to be addressed.

I’m going to challenge all special education teachers to set a goal to get their IEP drafts completed 5 days in advance of the meeting and get them in the hands of the parents at least 3 days ahead of time.  Of course it is a little late for most of you this year, but if you take the 5 day challenge I guarantee you will lower your own stress as well as the stress level of the parents.

Accelerated Reader: Undermining literacy while plundering library budgets

A recent report about the lowering of reading scores is making news in educational circles. 

Sandra Stotsky, holder of the Twenty-First Century Chair in Teacher Quality in the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, says American high school students do not read challenging books, whether they are assigned by their teachers or chosen for leisure reading.

The report is put out by the same company that sells the Accelerated Reader, more commonly known as AR in a school near you.  Basically, AR is built for data.  Books are rated and organized according to reading level and length and then quizzes are given to students after they read the books and awarded points based on how well they perform on the quizzes.  The quizzes are all computerized thus facilitating the data driven instruction favored by the leaders in educational reform today.

Here is a great article by Gary Stager on the shortcomings of AR and how it drains schools of scarce resources while creating and exacerbating a problem that it is claiming to address.  What I want to add to the conversation is first-hand experience with how AR, and its implementation has had a detrimental effect on reading in our household.

In my youngest son’s 4th grade classroom, he is assigned a sort of individualized reading goal of a certain number of points per month.  Making this goal is a substantial part of his grade.  The goal is fairly well-written, in that it is precise and can be efficiently measured, since AR is a like a dream for people who are data driven. Plus it can be individualized based on ability.  You would think a behaviorist like me would love it.

 

My 4th grader has the dubious honor of being able to read on about the 6-7th grade level.  So the grade level he is restricted to is at the 5-7th grade range.  If he reads anything at too low a level, he doesn’t get enough points.  If he reads to far above, he can’t comprehend enough to pass the AR test.  So AR should be aiming at his sweet spot of about the 6th grade level.  The problem is, is that my quest student has a goal that makes him read a book about every week.  In 4th grade.  On top of the rest of the homework he is being assigned.  So right away, we are digging into his non-homework time at home, as the school day is extended 2-4 hours every afternoon and night. 

But there is another problem with this AR system besides the bone-numbing reduction of reading into data points.  It is also expensive and it creates additional and needless drain on resources while at the same time  it decreases accessibility and options.  The true limitations of AR didn’t really hit us until we decided to buy a Kindle Touch with our own scarce financial resources.

The idea was that eyes strain from staring at a computer screen for long periods for just reading might be alleviated by the more natural experience offered by the Kindle.  And that we could have more access to more books, free books, using the Kindle.  And indeed there are free classic books to be had.  Most of them freely available through the Gutenberg Project.  And they are classic literature, time tested and things that many of us might have read when we were kids and our kids might discover and are completely appropriate for school. 

The first book I downloaded on our brand new kindle was a book called Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus.  It has some pretty heavy themes but there is no bad language and there is a less on to be learned.  The book is slightly on the low side for my 10 year-old at about a 4-5th grade level.  But I thought he might enjoy it.  But he will probably never read it because if you search the AR book finder, it is not there.  And neither are several free and classic works of children’s literature.  Basically, we are totally limited to those books that have tests because he has only a limited amount of time and he has high expectations for himself and will push himself to reach certain goals including getting straight A’s.  So AR books, and his grade, have a much higher priority than reading for enjoyment. It is NOT enjoyable to read for him, it is a CHORE.

His less conscientious classmates choose books from the AR list, but compare that list to the Netflix/movie list in order to “finish” a Harry Potter book in about 2 hours.  They basically game the system as much as possible.

Let’s talk a a bit about the less motivated brother who just turned 13.  He likes to read, but his interests are so restricted that they hardly even appear on any AR list at any reading level.  Titanic, trains, and….that is about it at the moment although we are gradually working on expanding the list.  For awhile he was interested in entrepreneurship and read books about the founding of Coca cola and McDonald’s which I think I enjoyed reading more than he did.  But those were each only worth one point despite being on a 7th grade reading level just because they were relatively short.  Getting him through a novel is a LOT of work.  We had to work overtime to get him through the book Where the Red Fern Grows which included having him watch the movie more than once.  And he has developed a fixation toward getting coon dogs now.  This is a fine story, but it was SO hard getting him to read the book.  But we also didn’t want to add the expense of an audio book on top of the book and the movie we bought. 

One thing about the free classic works of literature, is that they are available in audio as well as free electronic book form though Librivox.  So now a person can listen with their Kindle Touch while they read along.  Every book can be made into a read-along-book.  And it is free.  And these are challenging books.  these would be a much better choice for both of my kids because they are presented in multiple formats and widely accessible.  Being in the public domain also opens up all sorts of possibilities for manipulating these stories and putting on plays, doing illustrations and basically having fun without the worry of copyright and cost restrictions.  This would be leveraging technology properly, although it does not lend itself especially well to the data driven approach favored by the education czars of both Bush and Obama administrations.  And I see nothing that convinces me a new president will make any positive changes. 

AR is an expensive program that limits and saddles a school with only certain books that happen to have quizzes in them.  The entire idea of reading as an enjoyable endeavor is abandoned in favor of turning both my kids into data points.  It is not cost effective to limit its use to only those students who might benefit from the point system, so everyone has to use it.

I happened to witness another casualty of the AR system.  It encourages cheating, which turns the poor librarian into a sort of guard who has to make sure that kids are not looking over another’s shoulder and getting answers.  I saw this while substituting in a 4th grade classroom.  The lone librarian (she had no aid as those positions had been long cut) was exasperated with trying to monitor my class, the AR test takers plus check out books and organize the huge stacks behind her.  I’m sure when she entered the field she many idea of how she might promote literacy and a love of reading to children everywhere.  I have yet to meet one that had anything good to say about AR.

 

 

Thirteen Years Ago…

Saturday, my oldest turned 13 years old.

The pregnancy was almost absolutely normal, and I remember going through the childbirth classes with several other couples, sharing a lot of anticipation.  Finally, the day came.  I came home and my wife let me know that it was time to take that trip to Tallahassee.  I remember giving her a stopwatch and told her to hit the splits button whenever she felt a contraction.  All the way down, I could hear a “beep” every time she hit the button.  The watch was rather high tech, and would keep track of the closest and furthest contractions as well as the average time between them.  It’s the nerd in me that wanted to know such things!

We were doing pretty well, but it was a pretty long night.  When he was born, I remember cutting the umbilical cord and I also remember a swarm of nurses coming into the room.  I had no idea what was going on.  As it turned out he had a pneumothorax which caused one of his lungs to collapse.  He was rushed to the NICU, and I went with him, leaving his mother who was also in some distress of her own, unbeknown to me.

I remember him wiggling around as they attached the wires and tubes and needles.  He spent 4 days in the NICU, before it healed on its own without any medication, surgery or other interventions beyond oxygen. I was in a total daze.  I had no idea of what was happening at the time.  Or that this was just the beginning of a long journey.

In my wife’s words:

“[He] was born on his due date. As he struggled to take his first breath, his left lung collapsed. Within the following day, his lung had healed without requiring a chest tube. He spent a total of 4 days in the NICU. When he was 2 weeks old, we was back in the hospital with aspiration pneumonia. He was diagnosed with moderate reflux. When he was 4 months old, he started having seizures. At 15 months, he lost the ability to speak the words he had acquired. At 20 months, he was diagnosed with autism. I often asked, “God, why me??”

My wife was always a step ahead of me as far as recognizing when there were problems.  But it was my own background in special education that enabled me to recognize that we were seeing something akin to autism.  The when I asked him, the neurologist admitted that it could be some form of developmental delays and gave him the PDD-NOS diagnosis.  Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified.   Back then, they seemed very reluctant to give an autism diagnosis, especially to someone as young as my son was.

Our story follows a similar trajectory of many other families as we experienced the ups and downs of life with autism.  We had the assistance of many good and competent therapists and teachers.  And there might have been a few less-than-good ones along the way.

He has generally been a happy child, but the teen-aged years are starting out very rough for him.  He has been changing into a young man for the past couple of years with his voice changing and then the attendant mood swings that goes along with this transition.  And typical middle school behaviors of his peers have not helped matters as other kids make fun of him, and he is unable to ignore or handle the name-calling and criticism like he could when he was younger.  There was a time when he often could care less what people thought of what he did or said, but today it is far different.  He is very sensitive about what his peers think or say and of course it is the negative things that get amplified.

In a lot of ways, he reminds me of Daxflame, a teenager who became somewhat notorious on youtube for his meltdowns on camera.  But if you watch (and they ARE hard to watch for those of us close to autism and Aspergers) you can see him struggling to control himself, to be understood and to make friends.

As hard as the videos are to watch, the comments are even more hideous. He exhibited a lot of courage putting himself out there like that.

So as difficult as the first 13 years have been, we’re entering some entirely new territory. In some ways this is much like all parents of teenagers, but with an added complication that makes the conformity demanded by teenagers all but impossible for my son. How does one “fit in” when almost everything they say or do makes them stick out?

It’s getting to be that time again…

Time to think about annual IEP reviews.  I know many teachers are still working on their GAA’s, but you need to be finishing those up and turning your sights on your next big thing which is IEP annual review season.

I don’t always agree with everything she posts, but Carol Sadler is definitely someone that is worth following on Facebook.  And she recently posted this:

Advocates Advice – We are quickly moving into “IEP Season”. Time to get your year end IEP meetings scheduled and on the books. Better to get scheduled in advance to make sure you have time to invite your help. Be sure to notify the school you will tape record the meeting and ask for a Draft copy of the IEP “that has been updated” with their proposed PLOP’s, accommodations and goals/objectives. Take the time to compare the Draft line by line to last year’s IEP to see what they changed and what they are proposing and make sure it is appropriate.

If you are a teacher and reading this, your hair might be turning a bit white or falling out.  Or you might be tempted to start pulling it out.  Let me tell you that what she is suggesting should be a matter of best practice for competent teachers.  Getting the meetings on the calendar early serves everyone well, and knowing who all is going to be attending will help secure a place that is big enough for everyone.

Tape recording the meeting (or using an mp3 recorder) is not a big deal.  If you are a teacher, bring your own to the meeting as well.  Both the parent and the district should be recording at the same time.  There is no presumption of privacy at these meetings, even though they are confidential.  You can’t podcast the meeting.  But by now teachers need to be getting used to being in the spotlight,  being recorded at any time, any where.  Transparency is our friend.  Stop being hostile to it, and open up your records, your mind, your intentions and your heart to the parents of the children you teach.  You might discover a wealth of rewards await you as the relationship transforms from confrontation to cooperation.

The idea of having a draft prepared a week ahead seems to always trip up teacher case managers. They can not seem to wrap their minds around the idea of moving their entire time table up one week.  You have to write this thing one way or another.  Stop the procrastinating and the excuse-making and just do it, and get it done.  You send it out a week or so ahead of time, with “DRAFT” written by hand in big letters, and attach a note “Please look over the enclosed proposed IEP DRAFT.  Please write down any concerns and/or suggested changes that you might have on the draft and send it back to me so I can include them and make sure they are acceptable to you before the meeting.”

Imagine an IEP that is less than an hour long, and everyone leaves the room smiling, and pleased and relaxed, feeling good about what just occurred.  If you have several annual reviews that are NOT like this then you should probably consider sending out your drafts well in advance so parents can look at them.  But aside from pleasing a parent, there are also other good reasons to move your time table up a week.  Remember you HAVE to write the thing regardless.  Why not do it well in advance when you can actually THINK about what you are writing instead of having that deadline looming over you?  You will discover that you make better choices and decisions when you are not rushed and pressured.  And if there are problems looming ahead, you have some time to begin addressing them before the meeting with the parents and the rest of the team.

I always did this as a matter of regular practice.  I always tried to get the draft done and out at least 4 days ahead of the meeting regardless of who the parent was.  If I get a parent making a request like Carol, guess what?  I move my time table up TWO weeks!  I want to swap IEP drafts, ideas and suggestions several times in advance of this meeting if at all possible.   If the parent is bringing an advocate, then I would rather the advocate look over my IEP, mark and bleed all over it with red ink and send it back however many times before the meeting, rather than rip me to shreds for hours in front of the rest of the team.  The advocate will have plenty of fodder for bloodletting at the meeting from other members of the IEP team but not me if I can do anything about it.

This is because the other members of my team balked at writing their portions in advance.  The occupational therapists, physical therapists and speech language pathologists have HUGE caseloads and I understand that.  BUT the workload is exactly the same whether you do it now or later.  I put all members of my team on notice as to the day the draft is going out.  It is up to them if they are ready or not, and 95% of the time, they failed to meet that deadline.

IEPs are exactly the same as alternate assessments that way.  If you procrastinate, you will end up under a huge backlog, and it will seem like a dark pit that you forever are trying to dig yourself out of as each deadline comes and overwhelms you.  You have got to get ahead and try to stay ahead.  Give yourself some wiggle room.  Waiting until the night before is a terrible choice that invites mistakes and trouble.

I actually attended one middle school meeting where everyone was there except the caseload manager.  When I asked the SLP where she was, I saw an eye roll and she whispered “She’s upstairs trying to write the IEP!”  This was a meeting that was already an hour late.  It was a good thing that parent was not paying Carol’s hourly rate!

Mightybell: PLN

Previously, a PLN was a “Professional” Learning Network: a somewhat fixed group of people that you join or are asked to join for your professional development. Now PLN is being used instead to indicate a “Personal” Learning Network: a very personal (individual) set of people you choose to follow or communicate with for your professional development, usually outside of any formal requirement.

Today’s Mightybell, like many of the other ones, consists of something that I have done somewhat naturally without necessarily doing it with the explicit purpose of building the network.  The main point of today’s exercise was using the RSS feed in order to subscribe to various blogs and websites, and then using some sort of service or tool to aggregate this information.  I actually do use both Google Reader and iGoogle to gather and organize my RSS feeds and information.  iGoogle is my tool of choice because the layout is more appealing and I can pick and choose what I want to read much easier.

I also use RSS to subscribe to various podcasts and use iTunes or another open source program like Banshee in order to subscribe to podcasts.  Podcasts are actually slightly better for me because I often find my reading time at a real premium.

In fact, te single biggest complaint or concern from fellow Mightybell travelers is pretty much the same: having too much information and sifting through it all.  I almost always get behind on all of my subscriptions and end up only reading or listening to a fraction of what I have coming in.  I’ll talk a little more about this overload in the next exercise, but it really is a concern even though I am not even using all of the tools available.  I have lots of interests, it is just a matter of managing them all!

For me there also has to be some balance between reading and writing.  Reading more makes me a better writer for sure, but I need to find a balance in order to continue to be part of the network and environment that I choose to participate in.  The two go together for me, so the PLN is a crucial piece.

The biggest weakness for me, at least at present, is how to leverage this network into something that has a more tangible benefit professionally.  I have interests and enjoy pursuing those through reading or writing.  But it is only recently that I have been concerned about these pursuits having some sort of monetary value.  I have always seen the reading and writing as a sort of sideline hobby, but it IS something I enjoy doing.  I still scratch my head when I consider that people would actually pay to read something that I write.  The Thinking Person’s Guide To Autism is at least a step in helping me see some potential in that direction.  But generally the biggest satisfaction for me is derived from helping other people  which is what I think underlies most of the content and people in my PLN.

 

 

 

Mightybell: Being Public Online

Today’s Mightybell deals with online behavior and possible obstacles to having a personal web presence.  One of the concepts mentioned was the idea of habits and attitudes, which was coined by Angela Maiers as “habitudes.”  So I wrote a brief comment on the Mightybell’s site and decided to post it here with a link or two and extend it a bit.

I have enjoyed contributing online and for the most part have enjoyed my fellow travellers.  The biggest hurdle I have faced, and still face, is administrators who are scared to death of content that they can not control.   Add a few stories like the ones about Ashley Payne and Dr. Talvatie-Siple and it  puts a real chill on social networking and sharing anything!  And this is where the habitudes kick in.

As content creators we have to own what we put out.  This takes a lot of courage.  When I was blogging anonymously, I was able to write much more honestly but I was not able to really help the people that mattered most to me.  Or help anyone outside of the blog.  So now I write with more sensitivity and more responsibly.  As an anonymous blogger I could hurl out ideas, even some very good ideas, but I didn’t take as much responsibility for what I was saying as I do today.

The best example of the worst sort of online habitutes cultivated by anonymity is Youtube comments.  Dial up any popular video and read the comments.  That sucking sound you hear is civility being being sucked out of the universe as people leave stupid and hateful comments.  And this happens as well in the blogging world,but for some reason Youtube had a bigger population of degenerate haters.  However, sometimes the feedback is brutally honest.  When I have posted a video that was kind of crappy, people did not hesitate to tell me exactly how crappy is was.

As a professional, I can’t afford that same level of honesty without being willing to back it up in some way.  But I am also more conscious of the person on the other side of the screen.  They had the courage to put something out there for others to see and comment and even if it isn’t the best, they did create something original.

And that is something that we need to do with our students; all of them.  Encourage some risk taking and creativity, while at the same time making sure that the feedback we offer is constructive and honest.