Author Archives: David Truss

The future of conferences

In the past few weeks I’ve participated in Microsoft Teams and Zoom meetings with Jeff Borden and Dean Shareski. Both of them did a great job, but I look forward to doing face-to-face conferences again. Dean recently wrote, ‘The Future of Professional Learning Part 1‘,

“I do wonder if we’ll be more intentional about what constitutes and justifies a great face to face experience and what can be highly effective as a virtual option?”

This got be thinking about where we go with conferences post-pandemic? In response to a tweet about his post, I said,  “I was tiring of regular conferences, now I miss them. I think they will evolve to be more engaging (why travel somewhere for a PowerPoint that could be on Zoom) and I also think we might see more (online) pre/post conference engagement and learning.”

To expand on this idea, I don’t see things like pre-presentations or assignments and tasks being given before a conference (read as ‘not homework’), but I do see opportunities for conversation, interaction with the presenter, and with other conference attendees. I see icebreakers and teasers.  I see feedback to the presenter about what the attendees want. I see presenters providing clear learning intentions and a framework for their talk. I see presenters providing a personal introduction so that instead of the first 5-10 minutes of a 1 hour presentation slot being “This is who I am”, the presentation starts with an activity, engaging people with other people who have already connected online. I see interactive presentations that rely on participants being involved and engaged with the material.

Think about it. Why spend hundreds of dollars in flights, hotels, and food, to go to a room and get a PowerPoint and ‘talking head’ that could easily have been delivered to you at home? When I went to ISTE, my favourite memories are the blogger’s cafe, and meeting friends to do podcasts with (Shelly Sanchez Terrell and Kathleen McClaskey), and the people I went to ISTE with from my district. When I went to SXSW EDU, the people I went with and the podcasts that I did are the only things I remember (David Jakes, Jeff Richardson, and after the conference Miguel Guhlin). The future of conferences will need to be much more about creating experiences and making connections and less about presentations… this was already happening, but now that we have created digital experiences that will compete, the pull of conferences needs to be about enriching the experience and making it worth the effort to travel.

The act of writing

Twitter inspired my to write this morning. The first tweet is by Marcus Blair, but let me share some tweets by him before I get to the one that originally inspired me.

Marcus has become one of my favourite educators on Twitter. He shares tweets about what he does in the classroom and he reflects on his teaching and his interactions with his class. In a time when there is so much stress and anxiety, he shares tweets that I find uplifting, and that remind me why I wanted to get into education.

Here are 3 recent tweets by him:

The tweet that inspired me to write now was this one where Marcus reflected on his own writing:


I responded:


Then almost a couple hours later I read James Clear’s 3-2-1 weekly email and wrote this about one of the 3 quotes he shared:

The act of writing makes me a better writer. The commitment to this act every  single day is itself a reward, making me feel like I’ve accomplished something before I even start my work day.

Yes, some mornings it is really hard to get started. There have been days that I’ve spent more time thinking than writing. Yes, there have been days when I’ve had to rush or even postpone my morning workout because I was too slow to get my writing started, or too long winded to finish what I was writing in a timely manner. Yes, some things I’ve written should have been left unwritten. But sometimes… sometimes my writing speaks to me. Sometimes it is metaphorically a song I had to sing. Sometimes the act of writing is a form of expression that leaves me feeling like I’ve added something worth sharing with the world.

For those moments I write. Not for the actual contribution I’ve shared, but for the feeling I get sharing it. Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.

Falling fairies

It was meant to be funny, but it was mean. Not one of proudest moments as a dad.

My oldest daughter was three, and we were outside, playing in the fresh snow on a weekend morning. The snow was deep, but way too fluffy and soft for a snowman. I went over to the huge tree in our front yard, covered in snow, branches laden with powdered snow, and decided it would be funny to shake the snow onto my daughter. A harmless joke.

I called here over. ‘Come here’.

“Why”

I gently pulled a branch lower. “Come over here.’

“Why”

‘If you listen carefully you can hear the tree fairies sing.’

My daughter came over, trying to listen, and I shook the branch. Puffy snowflakes came falling down into her. This wasn’t a dump of snow, it was a powdering, but still, a solid covering of her toque and face.

And then the tears came so fast that I couldn’t even laugh. Thank goodness because that would have been meaner that it already was. I gave her a hug and she cried on my shoulder. I realized my mistake and hugged her tight. At this point I did laugh embarrassingly, but held it in, my body shaking as I held back the noise, still hugging her and hiding my guilty grin. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry sweetie, it was just a joke.’

My mistake wasn’t dumping snow on her, that would have been funny. It was the comment about the fairies that was hurtful. I played on the gullibility of a three year old who really believed she was going to hear a tree fairy. When I tricked her, it wasn’t just a prank by dad for the sake of a joke, it was a betrayal, and a disappointment that made the betrayal actually hurt.

She got over it pretty quickly, and we were back to playing and having fun a few moments after the tears. Now that she’s almost 21, I’m sure this isn’t a scarring memory that she’ll end up needing therapy for, but it was not a great parenting moment for me.

We don’t always realize the way we hurt people with the things we say. To us it’s nothing but a lighthearted joke, a little poke, a passing comment. But to the receiver it can be more. It was falling fairies, not falling snow, that really hurt my daughter.

We don’t always see how our words and actions can really affect others. We say ‘It’s not a big deal’, others feel it really is. We see misunderstanding, others see malcontent. We see honest mistakes, others see betrayal. What others hear and feel is far more important than what we think they hear and feel.

And sometimes a sincere apology, or even a hug, can go a long way in mending fallen feelings.

—– —– —– —– —–

A related story, “T’was two nights after Christmas… A story of lost innocence.“

When students own the learning

Last night was Inquiry Hub’s open house. I shared a post about our open house last year: A Place to Dream, Create, and Learn. A year ago we packed around 200 people into our gym and had a great night of presentations:

But with Covid-19 this year the event had to go digital. We held a YouTube Live event. Show starts 26 minutes in or you can watch topic-based sections here: InquiryHub.org/open2020

It is such a privilege producing something like this with these students. They worked so hard preparing the event. They created scripts, videos, music, and designed posters, (like the 16 individual posters that fit together to create a single poster below, used as one of our backdrops). And students learned how to use all the equipment along the way. We had 3 cameras and a slideshow presentation, and while transitions could have been a bit tighter, I’m so impressed with how this student-organized event went.

One neat thing that we did was that we had a question submission form that we advertised before and during the show, where viewers could ask questions. Then we answered them live, throughout the show. Our student producer fed the questions to our student MC, and she directed them to our student and teacher panel depending on who she thought should answer. This is a challenging thing to do well in a live show… especially having never done it before. Of all the questions asked, I think I offered one of the weakest answers (because I rambled a bit on what should have been a 10 second answer). Beyond that flub, we didn’t need to have an answer clarified by someone else.

We had over 180 live viewers at the start of the show and still had over 170 viewers 40 minutes in. To keep that many people watching for that long is a testament to how smoothly things went.

Through the night, one thing was clear: when students take pride in their school, when they feel they own the learning, they will step up and deliver a great product when called upon to do so. Students thrive when they own the learning.

—-

(Just dug up another similar post I wrote about one of our previous open houses, prompted by a Facebook memory,)

 

Logo Composite Design by Maddison D, Grade 10

A global community

One love, one heart 
Let’s get together and feel all right. ~ Bob Marley

I used to think that we would reach a time in my lifetime where we could all be seen first and foremost as citizens of the world. That people would eventually be able to get a global passport and travel with a universal identity as global citizens. It was naive, but I thought it would happen.

With the rise of social media, I thought we were getting closer. I saw how social media extended the reach of individuals to find others of similar minds and interests. The internet extended our reach and our ability to understand others, whether they thought like us or not.

But while understanding our differences can help us see that we really are more alike than we think, differences in core values separate us further. Religions divide us more than anything else. That’s ironic and sad. Faith in a higher being sectionalizes humanity into narrow groupings that undermine our ability to focus on the well-being of our global community.

What would it take to go beyond the divisiveness of religious dogmatism?

What would help us see that as a species we have more to gain from being cooperative rather than confrontational?

What could bring us all together as a global community of citizens that care for our species and our world?

I fear that people will try with tyranny before they try with love.

Salvador Dali - clock

Fast and Slow

How is it that time seems to go by really slowly day-by-day, but months and years seem to just race on? I recently celebrated my 53rd birthday. As a kid, 53 was old. Ancient.

My youngest daughter turns 19 in a couple months. How did that happen so quickly? It sounds cliche, but where did the time go?

I heard an interesting perspective on time recently: When you are 12, 4 years of your life is 1/3 (33.3%} of your life, that’s so long! When you are 52, 4 years of your life is 1/13 (7.7%) of your life… much less significant. The older you get, the less significant a set amount of time is relative to how long you’ve lived.

Time doesn’t just march on, it marches on at ever increasing speeds. It’s up to us to slow it down by making our days worth living. What will you do to enjoy life today, rather than just let that time slip by into an ever-decreasing amounts of significance?

Decision-making before retweeting

This is far from a comprehensive survey, but I asked and 83 people responded.

     Survey results are anonymous, so please be honest: I usually retweet/share links:
     If I like the title.                      3.6%
     If I trust the source.             25.3%
     After skimming content.    16.9%
     After reading content.        54.2%
     83 votes Total

 

I think that the people in my network probably slant towards more cautious thought before sharing, compared to a more random selection in a larger survey. That said, I’m often surprised when I see someone retweet something I shared in a shorter timespan than it would take to read the article I linked to. My guess as to why? ‘I like the message of the title and I trust Dave to share something good.’

Think about these results, what if anything do they say about the reliability of information being shared on social media?

the office zoo

It goes without saying, yet here I am saying it… This is a complete work of FICTION. No real people inspired these characters, and no animals were harmed in the making of this story. 

the office zoo

The Rhinoceros: You are grateful he isn’t your boss. He was definitely a gym rat or a football player in his youth but the majority of his bulk is now focused around his 47 inch waist. You aren’t convinced that his steroid use didn’t permanently damage his brain. He angers easily and nothing that goes wrong is ever his fault. You’d hate him more if he was incompetent but despite his bluster and blame, he gets enough done to never let any problems fall on him. But despite his average performance, he still finds ways to brag and be a bully. While he doesn’t bully you, you know it’s only because you stood your ground with him once, very publicly, and that was enough to scare this loud coward from trying again. The Sloth isn’t so lucky, he is teased relentlessly and accepts the taunts passively. You know Rhinoceros would be an ass to work for, and despite him not pointing his anger and mean-heartedness towards you, you are sure that your equal stature in the organization is probably the only reason he is tolerable to be around.

The Sloth: Everything he does is… slow… and… calculated. You sat with him at lunch once. Once. It took him almost 3 minutes to prepare to eat. First he had to remove his sandwiches from wax paper, wrapped with neater corners than a military hospital bed. Who still uses wax paper to wrap sandwiches? He slowly placed the four triangular, half sandwich pieces, crust neatly cut off, symmetrically on his plate. Then, from his 1960’s styled lunch box, he pulled out and opened his vegetable container filled lengthwise with exact-sized celery and carrots sticks, with a width-long row of skin-removed cucumbers on one end. He took a moment to move a carrot stick that had shifted over the stack of celery. Then he opened his flask and carefully poured out some hot coffee-stain-coloured milk. Next he lay out cutlery and a napkin. He used a knife and fork to eat his quartered sandwich pieces. You were done your meal before he was a third done his, despite your trying to slow down. As an employee, he works equally as slow. In the two years since he was hired, you have yet to arrive at or leave the office before him. That he has never been late to complete a job has simply been a matter of the extra time Sloth is willing to put into his work. You find yourself trying to remember what he is wearing at the end of the day, wondering if he even went home, or if he just spent the entire night working.

The Giraffe: The long neck is metaphorical. She seems to be able to extend herself into every conversation, and she grazes on gossip, constantly chewing on any new shrubs of information she can get a hold of. Wherever she goes, she takes the water cooler conversation with her. You know she talks about you, but you brought that on yourself. Fed up with her coming to you with gossip,  you intentionally fed her three tidbits of fabricated, juicy and cleverly vague scandals. After denying or clarifying ‘that’s not quite what I said’ for the third time, you proved to be completely unreliable and a waste of her time. You are thankful she no longer brings the water cooler to you, although you are certain that those conversations include some very exaggerated lies about everything from your sex life to your financial status. It always amazes you that anyone would ever share anything confidential with the Giraffe, yet somehow she’s always drawing a crowd, like flies to a dead animal.

The Mocking Jay: He’s gay. This matters less to those around him than it matters to him. If he had a name badge he would find a way to add this information to it. It’s his identity before you know his name. He is loud, flamboyant, and very funny as long as you aren’t the brunt of his jokes. He mocks anyone he doesn’t like behind their backs, and although you think he likes you, you aren’t certain he doesn’t mock you behind your back too. If he is anywhere near the Giraffe, you see others congregating, some out of interest in the gossip, others for fear of being the target if they are not present. You are convinced that his scathing sense of humour is a defence mechanism, and you are a bit sad for him because without this mask you think he’d be a genuinely nice Jay. He isn’t. He decides within seconds if someone is worth his time and energy and his version of a cold shoulder is so icy it literally changes the temperature of the air, so much so that it leaves others with goosebumps. You get the chills any time you see him with Peacock.

The Peacock: She is the definition of eye candy. She has a perfectly symmetrical, beautiful face of a movie star, hourglass body that does not look cosmetically enhanced, yet leaves you guessing because it is so flawless. She is so gorgeous she is hard to look at for men and women alike. When she meets someone she immediately puts them into one of three categories. First, a pretty female who can become part of her peafowl pride. Second, a handsome male that she can flirt with. And the third group she seems to put in to a generic ‘other’ category that’s simply not worth her time. You belong in this category and she pays you no mind. Mocking Jay and Peacock will exclude all others from time to time but pretty men and women desperately try to belong with them, to be in the ‘in group’. While part of you can’t stand the cliquey high school cheerleader/jock feel of this animal flock, another part of you secretly wants to be in it.

The Hyena: With an unmistakable laugh this lone Hyena is heard long before seen. He can’t even greet you without the laugh escaping his lips, “So how are you today-hey-he-he-ha?” He’s so damn jolly it hurts. His annoying laugh even came out when Giraffe told us about her father’s death. While it was purely nerves with no malice, Giraffe has scorned Hyena ever since. You know he’s lonely, no one can tolerate being around him for too long. It’s like Winnie the Pooh mated with the laughing Buddha and birthed Andy Bernard with a penchant for laughing rather than singing. He scrounges around the office looking for a conversation to feed on, but shortly after arriving he tries to feed on what was said, and his annoying laugh sends everyone away. Mocking Jay and Peacock have a standing agreement to phone each other as an excuse to leave the conversation any time they see the other talking to Hyena.

The Lioness: Sometimes Queen and sometimes King, the Lioness is a boss with a bipolar personality. She is at her best as Queen, ruling with her heart and exuding the presence of a firm but fair mother taking care of her pride. But then she tries to be King, and out come the teeth, claws, and ferocious roar. She doesn’t need these, and it seems she doesn’t like to show this side of her personality. Yet somehow, deep down, she believes being the boss demands the regular appearance of an angry King. It’s as if stress triggers a response that injects toxic masculinity into her frontal lobe and testosterone replaces serotonin. You’ve given up trying to figure out which ruler she’ll be at any given moment of any day, and so you always prepare for the angry King, while hoping for the benevolent Queen.

The Human: That’s you. A self-righteous, judgemental asshole who thinks they are better than every other animal in the office zoo.

The speed of change

Yesterday I was having a conversation with my colleague, Dave Sands, Principal of Technology Implementation in our district. He shared some good news that our 14th and final middle school in the district is becoming a BYOD – Bring Your Own Device school. This is a great accomplishment for our district. It starts with ensuring the infrastructure is in place. Next, teacher technology, capacity, and readiness are essential, and finally there needs to be support for families that can not afford their own technology. This takes time.

In the conversation I remembered a presentation that I did in 2009 at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston titled “The POD’s are Coming!”

In the presentation I said, the seed of this presentation started with a conversation and a blog post. Here is what I said in an October 2008 post:

“PODs. We are about 5 years away from most of our students bringing PODs to school, Personally Owned Devices. I’m talking about pervasive access to laptops and iPhone-like devices in our schools. Every kid coming to school with more capability in their pockets and hands than most teachers have on their desk right now.

So in the presentation in July 2009, 9 months later, I said that we were 4 years away from this happening. I was wrong. It took 7 years longer than I thought.

When I look back now, I can see that we weren’t ready for this in 2013. The infrastructure was barely there, there was a lot of fear around the use of technology in the classroom because of the distraction (and disruption) technology causes, and teachers were not ready to lead the charge.

I know many other districts aren’t where we are, and yet we were 7 years slower than what I imagined was possible. Progress and change happen slower than we expect in schools. However, in the world we live in now, 7 years is an eternity to be behind doing what’s possible.

We will need schools to be far more agile in the future.

What students remember

What students forget:

  • The Krebs cycle
  • Historical facts
  • How to solve quadratic equations
  • The homework they did
  • Answers on tests
  • Worksheets
  • Teachers who will forget them

What students remember:

  • Teachers who will remember them
  • Teachers who listened
  • Teachers that made them laugh
  • Teachers who were passionate about teaching
  • Teachers who didn’t give up on them
  • Friends
  • Engaging projects
  • Sports and clubs

These lists are not extensive… but they are the inspiration for a question: What will students remember about school during the 2020-2021 pandemic?

Teachers have it tough right now. Students too. More than ever teachers need to focus on teaching students, not subjects.

Yesterday I saw an article with a title like, ‘Study shows students are months behind in reading skills due to remote learning.’ Squeezing one more book into the year won’t change that. Showing students a passion for reading will.

Focus on students… and they will remember you, and what you taught them, for all the right reasons.