Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Unprecedented time for collaboration

It’s a phrase I’ve both heard, (and felt), for decades: “If only I had more time!”

Well this is the time! With educators working from home, and with some autonomy over their schedule, the idea of having something like a common prep time, daily or weekly, with colleagues has never been easier!

The idea of doing something cross-curricular has also been opened up.

The idea of extending the learning beyond the school walls has taken on a whole new meaning.

This is still the early stages for many, and trying to figure out ‘remote learning’ while take some time. But that time will go much easier with collaboration. And as you figure out a schedule, now is the time to figure out when it’s best to collaborate with peers and mentors. As things settle a bit, this could be the time that teachers have always hoped for, and seldom got… time to collaborate, learn, and dare to try new things that was never time for previously.

The tech won’t always work… and that’s ok.

I’ve been ‘playing’ with digital learning and technology for a while now. My first blog post was in 2006 and my first podcast was in 2012. It’s Sunday night and I published a podcast over an hour ago. It usually takes a while to get onto iTunes, because first it has to go to a podcast hosting site called Blubrry. I did this a week and a half ago, and it went to Blubrry and then to iTunes pretty quickly. But tonight the new podcast won’t move to that first step, and I have no idea why? Even after I ‘ping‘ the website, (even though that should happen automatically), my post won’t go to Blubrry. That’s the frustrating thing, I don’t think I did anything different but somehow it won’t work. It might need time, and everything will be fine in the morning by the time this is published. It might not and I’ll have a whole lot of troubleshooting to do.

I do podcasts for fun. I do podcasts to learn. I’ll learn from this, but right now it doesn’t feel like fun.

Educators, as you head into the new world of ‘remote learning’, while we cope with social distancing, empty schools, and COVID-19 continuing to keep us physically separate, please realize that the technology doesn’t always work as planned. It doesn’t always work for the neophytes, and it doesn’t always work for the people like me that think they know what they are doing. When you get frustrated, and you will, remember this: Remember a time when you were really excited to teach a lesson. You stayed up late figuring things out and setting up the handouts for kids. Then you got to school and the photocopier jams horribly. You have no time to get your printing done. Dang! Your whole plan is done and needs reworking. At that point, you didn’t say to yourself, “That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again!” That would be silly.

You’ll try using some technology for the first time and it won’t go as planned. You’ll try doing a video conferencing lesson and it will flop. You’ll have students doing things you didn’t expect them to do. And you’ll work it out. You’ll connect with your students. You’ll laugh at yourself and they’ll laugh too. You’ll get a lesson or two from a student that knows more than you. And soon, you’ll feel much better about the technology and the strategies you are using.

Oh, and even then, there will be times when the technology doesn’t work… and that’s ok.

Expecting appropriate student behavior online

14 years ago was the first time that I tried blogging with students. Here is a quote from a blog post about the rules I created for this new online space:

There is one thing above all others that significantly impressed me with this experience: Students owning the learning, asking the important questions, and helping each other to learn. They showed an incredible willingness to contribute/share their ideas. 

I wasn’t sure what rules I should give around ‘Safe Blogging’ so I pared it down to some basics. In our school we have been slowly rolling out the ideas of Restitution and we have developed 4 basic beliefs: Respect, Safety, Inclusion, and Learning. So I thought why not use these beliefs as the guiding principles for the blogs and communities? 

The idea was simple. What rules and expectations do we apply to our school community? Those also apply in our digital spaces.

Now more than ever, we are going to see issues of behaviour in online learning spaces that are inappropriate? Why? Because we have students and educators who are new to these spaces who are learning as they go. It is important to talk about appropriate use and expectations, if you want to be proactive rather than reactive. But creating draconian rules and conditions won’t help. When I see this happening I always go back to a quote I first heard from my colleague, Dave Sands, “Laws create outlaws.”

Instead, think about what the underlying behaviour expectations are in classrooms and in schools? Then ask, how do these same expectations look online? The idea here is that digital citizenship is just citizenship. Digital spaces might be new frontiers for some educators and students, but they are frontiers in classroom learning spaces that have been around for a very long time. If we know how we want students to act in our classrooms, we also know how we want them to act in their digital classrooms.

When schools start in September, teachers create expectations for their class. Often this will involve conversations and even participation by students in determining what a good learning environment looks like. The same should apply to entering new online learning environments. The choice is simple, be proactive and explicit about expectations, or be reactive when things don’t go as expected… because the expectations aren’t clear.

One final thought, even when you lay out all the expectations, students will make mistakes. At this point a decision needs to be made: will the response be punitive or will the response be a learning opportunity?

Positive shifts

Recently I’ve seen a lot of companies giving away resources and services for free. There has been a significant shift in thinking about how we are all in this together. This has been spurred by the now over 1.1 million people who have been struck with COVID-19, and the realization that this number is going to rise significantly before we see a slowdown in its spread.

Community members are helping each other. Birthday wishes to strangers are spreading like crazy. People are helping elderly neighbours. There is widespread appreciation for health care workers, and custodial workers that support them, and for people working in grocery stores and jobs like delivery drivers.

When I’m out for a walk, people are politely keeping there distance, but also looking up and acknowledging me. I’m not saying this didn’t happen before, but it’s much more obvious now.

I think things are going to get a bit harder before they get better. I think more than ever we need to be a society that supports the most vulnerable. I think we need to invest more in social services, and find ways to make basic needs more equitable. We have a lot to do to make the world a better place.

But maybe, just maybe, there are enough positive changes happening to shift our world to a better place, after the concerns about the virus decrease and the economy rebounds. These aren’t small things that need to happen, but I like to think that some positive shifts will eventually come from this globally unifying experience.

It’s not a failure if it leads to success

I love this video:

It reminds me that the path to success isn’t always easy, and failure isn’t failure when it leads to success.

On a personal note, I started a 30 Day Challenge to do a 30 second freestanding handstand.

Progress until last night was pretty good:

https://twitter.com/datruss/status/1243331006767210497

https://twitter.com/datruss/status/1245227496930340864

But last night didn’t go as well as I hoped:

But here’s the thing, I’m pushing myself pretty hard. Also, I just want to handstand for 30 seconds but I’m actually doing the training to walk on my hands. On top of that, I’m trying to do a 5 step plan in 30 days, and 1/3 the way through I’m on step 3.

I need to slow down. The videos show me that my core is a weak spot. My shoulder no longer hurts, but it isn’t fully recovered from an injury. I’m going to hit my goal if I’m smart, and don’t rush, and if I do every step really well before moving on. Back to step 2 I go.

Meanwhile at work, I see similar things happening. With Covid-19 shutting down schools, we have educators scrambling to figure out how to teach students online and from a distance. All around me I see teachers trying to do too much, too fast, and getting frustrated. I shared this on Twitter recently:

When everything is so new and so challenging, mistakes will be made. Those mistakes will not be seen as failures in the long run if we learn, grow, and improve ourselves along the way.

Having Back Channel Support in an Online Video Class

I don’t think this is a word, but I’m going to use it anyway: Backchanneller.

There are many educators using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Adobe Connect for the first time. These educators are learning that it is very hard to be presenting with these tools and also pay attention to the chat, and what is happening in the digital room, while also delivering instructions or a lesson. One thing that can make this easier is to have a back channel helper, or a backchanneller.

People who run Twitter Chats understand this. They use a team of people to help welcome people to the chat, retweet, and like good responses, while the main moderator pushes out the questions and engages with individual tweets. A single moderator struggles to do it all.

For video-based classes and lessons the teacher/presenter will often struggle with:

  • Following the chat
  • Picking out good questions
  • Helping to orient latecomers
  • Finding the person with their mic on, causing a distraction
  • Keeping the chat on topic, or at least monitor the chat for people causing a distraction.

It’s hard to do these things while also trying to be engaging and/or creating an interactive lesson.

The primary role of the backchanneller is to monitor what’s happening in the chat in the background, and to assist the teacher/presenter. These are the main roles:

  • Look for good questions
  • Respond to simple questions
  • Choosing the right time to interrupt, if the question warrants it… and avoiding questions that would interrupt or derail the lesson, or that can wait for an appropriate pause in the lesson.

There are other things the backchanneller can do, as mentioned above, but the moderation of the chat is key.

It’s hard to run a lesson and watch a chat conversation at the same time. It’s easy to unintentionally let the chat take over the lesson. Having a backchanneller, who can be a student, who understands the responsibility of the role, can help a lesson go considerably better. A backchanneller reduces the cognitive load on the teacher/presenter and lets them focus on the intent of the lesson or presentation.

It’s great when a participant, a student, can take on the role of backchanneller. It’s empowering. Explicitly explaining the importance of this role, and reflecting on the person’s effectiveness can also be a useful thing to do, to help the audience or class understand the value of this useful teaching assistant. And that’s the ultimate role of a backchanneller, an assistant, someone who monitors and manages a conversation stream while the teacher pays attention to the lesson or presentation.

Gears aren’t aligned

Have you ever ridden a bicycle when the gears aren’t aligned properly and so every full cycle of the peddles ends up with a jarring ‘clunk’ that breaks the flow of your peddling? If you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, imagine walking and every second step with your right foot it feels like someone tapped your knee with a finger. At first it’s uncomfortable, then you just kind of accept it as the norm.

I feel like March was a long month of the gears being misaligned, but we just got used to it. Now the Match break is over we are back at school and we have to adjust to a whole new misalignment with students staying home and the reality that Covid-19 will likely impact us for months to come. So April begins with a new misalignment that we need to adjust to, and while we know the ride won’t be smooth, we know we will get used to it.

I am excited about how this year will change the dynamic of teaching and learning in the future. In 2011, I wrote that ‘the future of education will be open and distributed’. In this post I said,

“Within 5 years, every student from Grade 6 or 7 right up to Grade 12 will be involved in some level of distributed learning.”

I was wrong. Things go much slower than I envisioned. In 2014 I wrote about ‘flexible learning opportunities‘ and I shared this graphic:

I said in the post:

“I think we are only 5-7 years away from the term ‘blended learning’ being obsolete in the same way that the term Distance Learning is now.  Here is an analogy to think about: The move from ‘Distance’ to ‘Distributive’ learning was the switch from having a ‘phone extension chord’ to the cordless phone. The switch from ‘Distributive’ to ‘Blended’ is the switch from a cordless home phone to cell phones. Now, the ubiquitous use of data-rich phones everywhere is similar to the leap we will see.“

It looks like we might get there.

While I think that teaching students, who are not coming to our schools daily, is going to finally catapult us forward in ways that I thought would have happened years ago, I also think it will take some time to get over the feeling that gears are misaligned. In fact, for the next while, it’s going to feel like we are riding up hill in the wrong, clunky gear.

I’m excited about where we are headed. I’m just feeling like the ride to our destination will be a bit uncomfortable. Hopefully by May we feel like our gears are aligned.

Transforming Exponentially

It’s 15 minutes to midnight on the first Monday after March break, and I still haven’t done my ‪#SDFitnessChallenge‬ exercise yet today. I will work on my handstands after writing this and I’m not waking up early to workout and finish this post tomorrow morning, like I usually do. I’ll sleep in a bit later. Today the work day just kept going and tomorrow is already a busy day.

My fitness progress is incremental. My commitment to daily writing is a marathon, not a sprint. Even my dedication to transforming education moves slowly… but the school closures for Covid-19, and the Provincial commitment to a ‘Continuity of Learning’ is promising to be exponentially transformational.

I wrote a post a while back called Isolation vs Collaboration, and in it I said,

“Educators who work in isolation improve incrementally, while educators who collaborate transform exponentially!”

Kathleen McClaskey posterized the quote, and shared by in a Tweet and on the Personalized Learning website.

Recently Michael Buist also posterized this quote and shared it in a tweet:

https://twitter.com/buistbunch/status/1244352249947660289

With almost every educator in the province looking to connect with students digitally, many are quickly realizing that trying to do this alone is overwhelming. They are connecting with colleagues, and district support teams who are developing resources to support them.

With endless resources available online, educators are realizing that information is abundant, and students developing literacy and numeracy competencies, and skills, are more important than just focusing on content.

With an inability to proctor tests and supervise exams, teachers are rethinking assessment and evaluation.

Doing this all at once can be a bit scary and overwhelming, but working with colleagues and mentors can help. Collaboration will be key. This is not a time to try things on isolation, it is a time to work together. For now changes have been forced upon us. These changes can lead us to rush and just do small incremental changes in individual practice. Or we can be slow and thoughtful and ensure that these changes lead to a collective, exponential transformation in the way we look at content, skills and competencies, as well as our assessment and evaluation practices.

Let’s commit to working together, sharing openly, and transforming our practice exponentially.

Break in routines

It’s Monday after the March break and the week ahead will be far from routine. I’m starting my work day in less than an hour but students won’t be walking in the school doors and I’ll only see my teachers digitally. I’ll start the day reviewing emails I’ve flagged that remind me about new procedures and expectations around dealing with Covid-19, and the ‘new normal’ that will be far from normal. Next I’ll join a district team in a digital meeting to discuss supporting administrators and teachers. After that I have two meetings with two of my different school staffs. After that, communication to students and parents.

Usually, returning from March break means going back to a normal routine, but this year there is nothing normal about what I’m returning to. Yesterday I wrote that the quick answer isn’t always the best answer, but starting today I’m going to have many people wanting immediate answers from me. Some will understand my need to find out more and ask more questions before responding, some will get frustrated with my lack of answers. Some will approach me with resilience to handle the abnormality of our new situation, some will feel frustrated, nervous, and even scared. Some students or parents won’t engage in asking questions even if they have them.

In general we are creatures of habit and we like routines. Not all the these routines we have are positive and healthy, but routines help us cope with challenging situations and help us stay calm and resilient. When routines break, some of those coping strategies are lost. This is a time when we have to be supportive to those that do not handle changes and breaks in routine as well as others. This is a time to remember that we are dealing with human beings going through a challenging time. This is a time to remember that we ourselves are going through a challenging time.

This tweet by Dean Shareski really hit me this morning:

We need to focus on the needs of those we work with and for. We need to remember that that students, parents, and educators can struggle with new routines. We need to put people’s well being ahead of concerns about curriculum and learning. As we navigate the new teaching and learning routines we are creating, we’ve got to put people first. The rest will fall into place as long as we don’t rush and, while going slow, we show that we care for one another.

The quick answer isn’t always the best answer

Tomorrow marks the first day back from March break in our school district. Teachers will not be returning Monday/Tuesday, and can schedule a time to come in to collect resources etc. after that. The continuation of learning plan will evolve over the week in response to schools being closed to students due to COVID-19.

I know that students and families want to know what things will look like after that, but no one is rushing to give answers, and for good reason… This is all very new to us and our approach moving forward deserves thoughtful planning.

We need to consider:

  • Ministry expectations and requirements
  • District plans and protocols
  • Capabilities of staff & technology
  • Capabilities and needs of students and families
  • Fairness with respect to expectations across the district and province.

This last point is interesting. At one my schools, Inquiry Hub, we could almost run everything the same. Every class already has shared digital spaces. We could have students meet on Microsoft Teams during class time and students are only in class 40-60% of their day, so they could still have large parts of the day to do school work, and inquiry projects, and have free time. But how fair is it for us to expect this of them at home, when no other school is expecting this? How fair is it when we don’t know how equitable home situations and supports are?

We need to go slowly. We need to ask a lot of questions. We need to think about expectations at the provincial, district, school, and home levels.

A quick response will not be as good as a slow, thoughtful response. The pandemic has everyone thinking in ’emergency response mode’. What we need now is long term thinking and planning. We can’t treat a continuation of schooling like we are in a constant crisis with immediate response time required. We have to remember that the school year ends at the end of June, and quick responses now, without thinking and processing time, will not help us get to the end of June in a thoughtful and supportive way. We need to slow things down, think things through, and put the long term well-being of our students first.