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My wife has a subscription to a bunch of school administrator journals. It’s not the best of reading, but I like browsing through to see what trends may be emerging on the horizon. It’s like peeking around the corner with spy gear. I am always surprised by the amount of canned curriculum being advertised in the pages of these journals — the claims that everything can be fixed with a simple software tool, or box of leveled books, or the new device is both interesting and appalling at the same time.

I was reading a column in the latest edition of District Administration by Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway (who write a column called Going Mobile) when something jumped out at me that I had to respond to. The column was about the impediments to technology in schools these days, and Norris and Salaway outline a number of obstacles. They make some good points, including the need for more professional development opportunities for teachers, a viable infrastructure that supports technology, and the need to do more work around assessment of student work with technology.

Another impediment is curriculum development and this is where something they wrote had me fuming a bit. This is what they say:

“… administrators can’t expect to be successful on the back of teacher-generated curriculum materials. Teachers are not curriculum producers; teachers are, well, teachers.” — Norris/Soloway, District Administrator

Excuse me? Condescending a bit or what?

I guess as a teacher, I am not talented or smart enough to develop a rich curriculum that engages my students in learning while also anchoring that learning to whatever state curriculum is in the mic? I don’t have the tools to be thoughtful about development of activities with end-goals in mind? I don’t have the wherewithal to integrate technology in a meaningful way for a meaningful purpose for meaningful learning?

Come on! These two need to get immersed in the work of organizations like the National Writing Project, where the heart and soul of curriculum development is with the teachers. All I could think of is that these writers may represent a majority of administrators (not all, but many) who don’t value teachers as leaders, and so where do they turn for curriculum?

That’s right. To the advertising pages of journals like District Administration, where they can spent gobs of precious money on canned curriculum that gets shoved down the throats of teachers, stifling not only the creative abilities of teachers but also taking away much of the individualized approaches to student learning that we know is most effective.

What Norris and Soloway are saying is: Trust the experts when it comes to curriculum development, and the experts are not the teachers.

If ever a statement needs push back, this is it, particularly as we shift towards Common Core standards and the major companies like Pearson are no doubt  gearing up canned curriculum and textbooks for states and school districts to purchase and pat themselves on the back that they are now in the running for Race to the Top money that comes with alignment. Administrators, look to your own teaching corp for expertise and find a way to bring us teachers into the equation, too.

Peace (in the push back),
Kevin

I want to share this growing list of “Obsolete Skills” that folks are constructing at a wiki site. Inspired by a blog post by Robert Scoble, the site seeks to document things we used to do but no longer know how to do.

Go to Obsolete Skills site

Or

Check out a small list of obsolete skills:

• Dialing a rotary phone
• Putting a needle on a vinyl record
• Changing tracks on an eight-track tape
• Shorthand
• Using a slide rule
• Refilling a fountain pen
• Operating a dictaphone
• Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriter

I can imagine using some of this in the classroom by having students go through a modified version of the main list and noting the things they know about or can do, and the things they have never even heard about. (Although I would need to read through them to make sure they were appropriate.) Our Social Studies teacher does some of this already during a unit on Culture. He brings in a turntable and rotary phone and other objects from the, gulp, distant past.

The ones on this list that stuck out for me are:

• Making a Mix Tape: I know we have playlists and all that on our electronic devices and I love the way we curate our own music. But there was something about passing along a cassette of music to someone else, or getting one from a friend, and being forced to not only listen to the songs but also listen to the songs in order. There was love in the placement of songs. We don’t get that with playlists.
• Pulling off the Tabs on Aluminum Cans: Bad for the environment, obviously, because every kid who pulled off a tab then tossed it to the ground. Come on, you did it, too. But the act of the removing the tab, and the accompanying sound, is like a soundtrack for summer, sitting on the back porch with a Dr. Pepper. Of course, we also used to stab each other with the tabs. I guess it’s a good thing they were phased out.
• Inserting Game Cartridge at just the Right Angle: Many hours were spent trying to figure out the exact way the cartridge should fit into the gaming console. I guess it was good engineering practice. But I can remember yelling at my friend because he was clumsy and would bump into the console, killing the game when the cartridge got shifted. As if the game weren’t frustrating enough …
• Letter Writing: Not to sound like a Luddite, but I do miss the act of writing and sending letters in the mail. Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. But messages and emails and online notes have am impersonal nature, no matter how much voice we put into them. Receiving a letter with handwritten thoughts … that is priceless. I still remember writing back and forth to my grandmother as a child, and I wish I had those letters. (You could argue that if we had done is via computer, they would be backed up). There was unexpected pleasure in the arrival of the letter that you don’t get from an inbox alert.
• The Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature: You know you are an information geek when you miss this dinosaur. But when I was growing up, it was the mainstay of our libraries for searching for information. I used to periodically (pun!) scan through it just to see what was in there. It was a confusing tome of references. I don’t miss it on a practical level (I love search) but I do miss it because it represented the long hours I spent in school and town libraries, just wandering around. My boys don’t do that. I should get them one of these for the holidays …

What about you? What do you deem obsolete?

Peace (in the past),
Kevin

Not that friends and colleagues are not still suffering mightily from the great storm we had this weekend in New England that blanketed us with heavy snow, causing downed power lines and hardship all around. In the town where I teach, many are still without power. My family only got our power back a few days ago. It’s been rough all around and we realize that we are better off than some.

But with many people I run into around the town, the conversation has inevitably turned from riding out the loss of electricity (plenty of references to Little House on the Prairie, just so you know) to the loss of our connections to the various information grids that we are part of. For our family, we had almost three days of no electricity and no phones at all — no landline and no cell. We were in an almost complete information and communication blackout, relying on radio (which made us realize how bad our local radio stations have become when it comes to news) and the local newspaper (which valiantly drive its reporters and editors to another state in order to publish a barebones edition) and the word-of-mouth of our neighbors.

And yet … most of the neighbors, friends and people that I met say they needed that step back from the overwhelming world of media and technology. Comments such as “I didn’t mind as much as I thought I would” to “You know, it felt good” to “I guess Mother Nature is giving us a reminder” to “We played Monopoly — the board game — for the first time as a family in years” — all of which indicate that maybe we need to remember that we don’t need to always be knee deep in the Information Age, 24/7. It would do us all some good to unplug things for a bit from time to time, and reconnect with the people around us. There’s a quiet that can be comforting when all of our devices are silent, and we are left to our own thoughts, and conversations.

Yes, I missed my work here at the blog, and at my various writing spaces. I didn’t rush to get online when we had power back (I was too tired), but it wasn’t long before I had drifted over here. Yet, I appreciated the quiet. Now, if we could just do that unplugging without the weather event, we’d be fine. (You hear that, Mother Nature? I know you’re listening.)

Peace (in the disruption zone),
Kevin

Last spring, another teacher and I gathered up notes from our colleagues in grades 3-6 and began the work of creating a cohesive writing rubric for our school that could be adapted by teachers for various projects, with similar lines of focus. It was not easy, believe me.
It turns out that many of us have different focuses, and the way we word things changes drastically from class to class, grade to grade. The rubric project is a push to try to have us all speaking the same language our expectations of our young writers, and also, to provide a line of consistency from one grade to another for all our students.
And the two of us who were working to pull all of the various strands together felt a lot of pressure to represent our colleagues faithfully and not impose our ideas on the school.
We’re still in the process of implementing these ideas but here is what we have so far:
Writing Response Scoring Rubric Grades 3-6

Peace (in the process),
Kevin