Serendipity35

Every K-12 teacher in New Jersey needs to create a professional development plan each year. Teachers pick the types of professional development opportunities they want to take part in. They are required to add at least 100 PD hours every 5 years.

When I was teaching in K-12, it was called the PIP - professional improvement plan. What's in a name? I'm a believer that when teachers improve their skills, it transfers to the classroom. Some of the best activities I participated in were at least partially "personal" improvement.

One of the best programs I became involved with over those years was the poetry program for teachers offered by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

The Dodge Poetry Program was begun in 1986 with a series of poetry in-service days for New Jersey teachers. Those evolved into the idea for a Poetry Festival. The Poetry Program’s Founding Director was James Haba (who was my professor at Rutgers as an undergrad) created the first 1986 Poetry Festival. Since then, there have been twelve biennial Dodge Poetry Festivals, which now routinely attract audiences of 17,000 to 20,000. The Festival is the largest poetry event in North America. (see dodgepoetry.org/festival-2010) The Foundation expanded the poetry offerings to include poet visits to New Jersey high schools and professional development for teachers.

One of the opportunities for teachers offered was called "Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain." Small groups of teachers across the state met for a number of weeks to read, write and discuss poetry. The first year that I participated, I asked Jim Haba why there wasn't more discussion about "lessons" to take back to the classroom. Jim was pretty adamant that he didn't want that in the sessions. He believed that if the participants were really involved in poetry as readers and writers, it would enter the classroom naturally. I believe he was correct.

But when we read reports on professional development for teachers at all levels, the assessment of it always points to one goal: improving student achievement.

A post on the blog A Plethora of Technology asked the same question that I ask in this post: Are we wasting our time (and money) with professional development?

A report on how teacher professional development affects student achievement released in 2007 by the Regional Educational Laboratory (U.S. Dept. of Education) contained the disturbing statistic that by their standards only 9 of 1300 professional development programs studied had any value.

The study did show that quality professional development raised student achievement by an average of 21 percentile points.

The conclusion from the report is that professional development is worthwhile, but quality professional development is lacking.

What isn't made clear is what works. What are the components that make for effective PD?

Having spent the past ten years offering professional development for teachers (mostly for higher education), I'll admit that measuring the effectiveness of the transfer of PD to the classroom is difficult. I believe the PD works, but it's hard to provide good evidence beyond anecdotal evidence. I don't believe that any surveys or matrices will give accurate evidence for or against professional development.


Resource: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT:LEARNING FROM THE BEST (pdf)

Next week I will be involved in doing our first High School Connections seminar as part of  Passaic County Community College's Writing Initiative. We are in year three of this five-year grant from the Department of Education’s Strengthening Hispanic Serving Institutions Program (Title V). The grant itself is aimed at increasing achievement and program completion rates of students by integrating critical thinking, information literacy and technology into writing.

A component of the Writing Initiative is to make connections with the area high schools that send students to the college, and next year to connect with the 4-year colleges where our students often matriculate after completing their Associate degrees. It's what I think of as part of sending out more ripples from the center of the Initiative. We are looking to collaborate with teachers from area schools to introduce writing assignments into classrooms across disciplines.

We want these connections to work both ways. PCCC already has dual enrollment programs in English and other subjects in place. We want to explore improving student success by providing a learner-centered environment, and provide faculty professional development opportunities that support student success.

There's a lot of research that shows that the integration of critical thinking and writing skills into all classrooms helps student performance and understanding of the discipline being taught. We are interested more in the idea of "writing to learn" than the typical English classroom "learning to write" model.

These two-day seminars are full of collaborative activities designed to strengthen the integration of critical thinking and writing skills, and are based in some of what we have learned in redesigning 20 of our General Education courses as writing-intensive course sections the past three years.

We ask each teacher to bring to the seminar on day one a writing activity "greatest hit" - a lesson that always seems to work. It can be anything from a prewriting activity to a follow-up to a larger assignment. It should be something that can be done in 1 or 2 class periods (not a long term assignment such as a research activity).

We also ask them to bring a writing "lesson-in-progress" that they have used less successfully but believe has potential, or a lesson that you are hoping to develop but need some help creating.

We have lots of questions, including:
What are the top 5 things should PCCC know about what your school and students are doing in regards to writing?
Does your school have: a writing center; writing across the curriculum program; portfolios; or writing magazine?
What would you like to know about the expectations that PCCC has for entering students?
What might a college (PCCC and others) offer to your school that would improve your ability to use writing?

From the applications we received, it was clear that teachers were interested in using technology to teach writing - but it was also clear that the public schools put amny restrictions on their ability to do so. We asked them "What technology works and doesn't work in your classroom?"

One way to answer that question before the seminars is to have them just try out a series of web links from their school computers to see what works and what is blocked. I invite anyone of you in a school setting to try the links and leave a comment about the results. It's an informal survey about access issues in K-12 schools.

This week on Serendipity35, I will concentrate on posts related to high school connections.

The past few weeks I have been reviewing sites, services and apps that high school teachers would be able to use for writing assignments. As part of our Title V Writing Initiative grant at PCCC, this summer we are running sveral seminars for area high schol teachers in different disciplines. All of those that have applied have expressed interest in using technology to teach writing, but have also said that they are limited not only by budgets but by the school or district blocking access to sites and applications.

In the "Classroom" category of this blog you'll find these most recent posts on lesson-oriented tools. The last half-dozen have been things out of Google Labs. That virtual workshop of projects offers services that are "beta," but you can use them, and some projects (like Gmail) remain there for years before they actually get officially released or dropped.

Today it is Google Sets. Suggest two or three similar items and Sets attempts to predict other items in the set. I think it's a nice tool for creating comparisons or suggesting a variety of subjects. I can see it working as a prewriting activity for brainstorming and idea generation whether you are looking for a research topic or something for an idea for a poem.

It's still a work in progress, but that might halp with the more creative idea generating. I put in memorial, soldier, peace, and war and it suggested army, statue, tour, and action which all make a kind of sense. But it also also indie, travel, sky, fall, autumn, ghost and pinkfloyd which leads me in an entirely other direction.

Throw this tool into the mix with Image Swirl, Fast Flip and the News Timeline and I think you will get some interesting brainstorming sessions. Thankfully, everything generated in these search results yields a link so that with some more (fairly painless) information literacy work (preferential term to research with some classes), a student might make a connection between my search terms and Pink Floyd such as their song "The Dogs of War."


http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Image Swirl is another service from the Google Labs that organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarities and then clusters them into related "swirls." It uses metadata and is similar to Bing's VisualSearch.

It would be a good tool to illustrate lessons and build presentations. It's a new service  At this stage, there are a limited number of these swirls. You can see a demo on impressionist paintings at http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/html?q=impressionism#

Students can use the Wonder Wheel feature for some brainstorming on a topic.  There's also a Timeline feature that allows you to scan historical references to a topic and then focus on a specific date(s).

Like other services in the Labs, this one could disappear at any time - but there always seems to be something new.

http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com