The Schoenblog

Today is June 1 and there are 23 days until my school year officially ends. But as most teachers will tell you, having summers “off” is the big misnomer of the teaching world. Whether it’s summer jobs, lesson planning and reflection, professional development, or the millions of other ways that teacher spend the months of July and August, vacation isn’t always the best descriptor.

For me, this summer will be spent learning. A lot of it will be enjoyable. Some of it will be by choice. Much of it relates to my many hats of student, teacher, and coach. Most of all, though, I want to make it meaningful, and for that I need your help.

I want to--and need to--spend my summer learning and growing in positive and reflective ways. I want to evolve my teaching and thinking about education next year. I have questions, and I need your suggestions. I want to rethink a lot of my classroom policies--late work and student accountability, in particular. I’m also struggling to wrap my head around a shift in grading and what grades mean, with the idea of moving away from the point-value economy that dominates too much of education. These are just two of the big ideas on my mind.

I want to do more to innovate, build, create, and disrupt--on my own, with and for my students, and my teachers. And to do it right, I need to read, to learn, and to reflect. I need to read and do things that make me excited about education.

Summer Reading

This isn’t really an article about must read education or professional development books. If that’s what you’re looking for, I recommend Summer Reading List: 5 Books on Professional Development from Ross Cooper on Edutopia and The Top 8 Professional Reads for Educators 2016 (plus more) by Craig Kemp. They are great lists that I hope to come back to again and again.

This article is about my goals and inspiration. Maybe it'll inspire you and hopefully you can inspire me.

I’m a collector. Part English teacher and part nerd, I have a compulsive habit of buying books, and so many of them sit unread. This summer, I’m going to change that with the goal of reading books that help me rethink my professional practice and work with positivity. I want to get excited about education and my part in it.

To start off, I plan to order Kids Deserve It! by Todd Nesloney and Adam Welcome and Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student by John Spencer and AJ Juliani. Both are new releases that have me excited.

In no particular order, here are some of the books in my current to-read pile:

• The Innovator's Mindset by George Couros
• Ditch That Textbook by Matt Miller
• Teach like a Pirate by Dave Burgess
• Uncommon Learning by Eric Sheninger
• Start With Why by Simon Sinek

I’ve read articles and posts from these authors, been in Twitter conversations with many, and explored some of the books, but I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t read them fully. This summer, I’ll change that.

I also want to explore some of the books from the Hack Learning and Corwin Connected Educator serieses (check out the Corwin bundles from Fall 2014 or Spring 2015).

I Need Your Help!

Will I read all dozen-or-so books listed above? Maybe. I hope so. But I find that writing about it here creates an expectation in my mind and solidifies the intent--when I share it here, it’s more likely to happen.

Add this reading to my doctoral research and classes, administrative internship hours, a few conferences, and my regular reflection and planning on my school year, and it adds up to quite a summer.

My goal is to grow my passion, evolve my practice, and focus on the positive in the world of education, edtech, and innovation, so that I can come back next school year better prepared to make change and to be excited to do so.

Every week or two, I’ll share my thoughts on what I’m reading--whether it’s scholarly research or some of the books listed above--and ask for your thoughts, too.

I hope you’ll join me on this adventure, or at least help steer me in the right direction.

What are your plans for summer reading and growth? Where should my reading and learning begin? Share your ideas and recommendations in the comments or on Twitter @MrSchoenbart

This year is my first as a technology coach in my school. So far, I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve been able to help plan and facilitate professional development for a large staff and to have a hand in shaping the plan and vision for technology integration. I also spend half of my day teaching 10th grade English, so I’m able to tie my coaching and PD into my own classroom instruction. So far, so good--I thought. And then came the words that have been playing back in my head for a day now.

While discussing a plan for future technology PD, my friend Tina reminded me: “There’s more to instructional technology than tools.” Duh. I know that. If you’re reading this, you likely know it, too. But she was totally right--for whatever reason we weren’t talking about that. We were focusing on tools, resources, and sometimes skills, not shifts, pedagogy, or transformative learning. If I want to be a catalyst for change so badly, why weren’t these the conversations we were having? Why wasn’t I contributing to the bigger picture?

Maybe (and probably--I hope), I’m being hard on myself. I’m generally happy with the impact I’ve had so far. Teachers in my department are using technology meaningfully, purposefully, and regularly like never before, and I see change happening right now. But in planning the big picture, these ideas have been fairly absent. In August, I wrote a post titled 5 Big Shifts for My Classroom in 2015, explaining how I wanted to focus on student-centered learning, creation, connected learning, communication, and communities of learners. And in my classroom, I think I’ve had success. Now I need to apply the same goals to the big picture; 21st century shifts in my classroom are great but only affect my students. Shifts in teachers’ mindsets and practice have an exponential impact.

Change is hard. And it’s scary. Maybe I subconsciously shied away from what I know I know so well: change is uncomfortable but necessary. Good leaders help lead transformational change with buy in and payoff. Sometimes, that buy in will come from a tool that can save a teacher time or make their online work more effective. But that won’t prepare our teachers or students for tomorrow on its own.

The struggle to engage and empower students in authentic writing and peer response while teaching form and structure...

In this week's scholarly article pursuits, I read the March and July 2015 issues of English Journal. I've been a member of NCTE for a while and have a stack of these fantastic journals to catch up on, so I'm dedicating some of my reading to keeping up to date with research and practice for secondary English education.

An article that stuck with me in this batch is "Peer Response, Remixed: Authentic Peer Response through Audio Technology" by Michael Hoffman in the March issue. Hoffman posits that most peer response is too scaffolded and automated, to the point of being "student proof" and "manifestly free of investment." By focusing on structure, grammar, and mechanics, often through checklists, students (and perhaps teachers) "do not address the heart of writing: the message that students seek to impart through their text."


One solution Hoffman offers is the remix, a concept which fascinates me. Instead of a canned and automated peer response, students create something new by augmenting the original text with something else. He compares this to the Beastie Boys' album, Paul's Boutique, which samples from TV, movies, music, and sound effects. "The remix in the classroom becomes a means for students to explore meaning and to create meaning that is their own. The anchor text remains in the possession of the original author, but that cannot be said of the remix. It is now a joint production, in which the student as reader and interpreter shares creative authorship and authority." Basically, the responder uses audio clips and additions to remix a recording of the original work. The writer records a reading of the piece, which the second student remixes.

While this ideas fascinates me, it doesn't really serve the same purpose as a typical peer response or evaluation. Creation is essential but so is editing, revision, and evaluation. I've used a variety of peer review strategies over the past few years, ranging from checklists and conferencing and Google Forms to collaborative Google Docs editing and unstructured free responses. I agree with Hoffman's conceits, that these strategies often lead to a narrow and closed response, I'm not sure the remix addresses the real goal of most peer review. However, it still sounds like a lot of fun and a worthwhile act of creation. Instead of responding to mechanics and ideas, the students are truly creating something new. That said, I wish the article had links to some of the audio products his students produced through this work.

Beastie Boys' "Hey Ladies" from Paul's Boutique samples from over a dozen songs and has nearly the same number of allusions, according to this list. Hoffman mentions the band's work on this album as an example of a successful remix. Album art from Wikipedia.

What really interested me in this article are the questions that Hoffman raises and hints at regarding student writing and peer response. He argues that peer response efforts should focus on the "most essential question for an author: Does this text achieve what I intended?" I'm wondering about the balance between teaching students to write in approved forms and structures versus allowing them to choose the form to follow function. But how often do our students truly understand their function or purpose? How do we help them get to this metacognitive point?

I found his article really interesting but it left me with a lot of questions to consider moving in to next school year:

• How do we teach students to understand their purpose and intent as writers?
• Don't students often have the same overall intent? If all students are writing an argumentative essay, the intent is the same. Is this okay? Should the form and structure be the same, too?
• How do we balance the need for student empowerment, voice, and freedom with structure and scaffolding? How much freedom should we allow in writing?
• Is it better to start off by offering students freedom or restriction in writing? Where do we begin?
• When and how are peer responses most valuable? How do we teach students to make positive and authentic contributions?

I typically teach by students writing acronyms to help them structure their writing and find that it helps most students stay focused and organized. These acronyms tend to limit digression but not the development, unless the writer chooses to use them exclusively. It's an understand the rules before you can break them approach, and while it's been successful for me, I'm not sure that it's the best strategy. It may not be broken but I'm not sure it doesn't need some fixing.

I want to think about these questions and issues and write about my answers one day, but for now, I'm purposefully leaving them unanswered. If you have comments, ideas, or answers, I would love to hear them. Please comment or reach out on Twitter!

This week I began my more scholarly reading and writing by reading the April 2015 issue of the ISTE publication, entrsekt. I enjoyed many of the articles and found a common theme between a few: students' online lives. One article, "Social Media Presence is Modern Day Resume" by Patrick Larkin, posed the question in the image above: are our students receiving the support they need to put their best digital foot forward?

Larkin discussed the role of social media in schools, arguing that "social media presence is modern-day resume." While I'm not sure that the traditional resume is going away, an individual's online presence is increasingly important. Last year, I focused a portion of my SAT/ACT Review course on #futureready lessons. In one lesson, I asked students to Google themselves after watching the TED Talk from Juan Enriquez, "Your Digital Life, Permanent as a Tattoo." A handful of students proudly proclaimed--look, there's nothing on me! Which, in my opinion, might soon be as bad if not worse than a negative online presence.

Our students use social media--see the ASCD infographic at the bottom of this post for some statistics--and need to learn how to have a productive online presence. Larkin writes, "students will be judged on their ability to use these tools proficiently enough to leave a mark that will allow others to find them, see who they are and determine what they are capable of doing." While I agree with this assertion, whose job is it to teach this?

Clearly, students need to learn how to use social media responsibly and develop a positive online presence. I believe that all teachers should be teaching digital citizenship as technology and web 2.0 is integrated into more and more instruction. If students' (and our) digital footprints become our resume, how can we better prepare them in our classrooms for this challenge. While I have a few ideas, for now I'm pondering and questioning. Feel free to chime in with your ideas in the comments.

Challenge: Google yourself and see what you find. What kind of digital footprint have you left? What kind of impact does it have? 

Larkin continues, "It is our job as educators to ensure that when potential suitors start looking for background information online about our students, they find impressive creations." This might be my favorite quote from the article; he pushes for effective online portfolios and students creating meaningful content. I'm a huge proponent of these ideas and focused a lot of my school year on promoting student creation. In fact, I blogged about it first in April with "Students Must Create!" and again in June with a guest post for the site FreeTech4Teachers, titled "Transforming Learning Through Student Content Creation." Check out those posts to see my experience and perspective on these ideas.

I constantly tell my students that I want them to leave my class with more than essays they will probably forget about and books they may not have really read. Instead, they should be studying content and applying skills in ways that are meaningful to them. They should be creating things that can leave the classroom with them and help them prepare for their futures. To this end, I plan to utilize portfolios next year to document student growth and progress. Not only will my students create, but they will have a record of that creation, along with the process and reflection throughout the year.

I want to start off my school year by making Twitter, Blogging, and Google Communities a regular and essential part of our classroom and to leverage the power of social media in my teaching. But more than that, I need to rethink how to use these tools to teach responsibility, digital citizenship, and to help students develop positive online resumes, portfolios, and footprints. As ready as I am to use these tools, I don't want to forget that using technology or social media well, and using it well for learning and futures are very different things. Thanks entrsekt, for making me think critically about the role social media has and could have to move my classroom forward.

This infographic from ASCD is from 2011 but the trends are clear. Students use social media and want it to be a part of their learning. I hope schools are finding more ways to overcome the cautions listed at the bottom.