Joel Zehring

Free public education doesn’t come without cost to families.

I’m not talking about tuition or tax dollars.

Students and families only have so much time and energy. Why should they spend these precious resources at your school? What explicit or implicit outcomes does your school promise?

If I send my son to your school for the first seven years of his education, I am investing in your school. Every year that my son attends your school is another year that he can’t attend a better school, presuming that one exists close by. What are you willing to promise us to offset our opportunity cost? Are you willing to put it in writing?

If you’re not able to put a promise in writing, why should I consider your school?

What would it take to get every employee in your organization to buy in to such a promise to the point that they will do everything in their power to deliver?

My district is shopping for a student email solution, and I think Google Apps Education Edition should be at the top of our list of possible tools. The following is an email draft that I’m planning to send to the members of our district technology advisory board prior to their next meeting, where I’ll give my Google Apps presentation. Cold-start meetings waste a ton of face-to-face time, so I’m hoping this email will give us some runway to launch into discussion about the best tool to meet the needs of our students and employees.

First, I’d like to frame the problem: We need a tool that engages students and employees in online collaboration. There’s a cost to using any tool, including time investment or financial investment. We need a tool that delivers extensive benefits to students and employees with minimal investment of time and money.

Next, the pitch: Google Apps Education Edition is the best solution I’ve seen for our problem. The suite includes applications for email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and website design. It’s all web-based, so users can access the full-featured tools from any computer with internet connection.

Google Apps are designed around collaboration, rather than just providing individual productivity. Conversations over email are threaded to show the back-and-forth dialog. Multiple users can edit a single document or spreadsheet simultaneously. Internal and public publishing is built in to every application for quick, secure sharing with a class, a school, the whole district, or the whole world. Best of all, Google regularly updates its applications with new features and improvements, so we know that we’re investing in a tool that will grow as our needs grow and change.

I’ve included a few links below if you would like to learn more before our meeting:

Information and examples:

• Google Apps for Education – Free email and apps for schools
• Google Message Security for K-12 Powered by Postini
• My class blog (created with Google Sites)
• IDEAL portal (Teachers can try Google Apps for free through Arizona’s Department of Education.)

Video links:

• Why Google Apps for Education? Overview of Gmail in Google Apps
• Share a Calendar Google Apps Education Edition
• Google Docs in Plain English

If I’ve missed anything, make sure to straighten me out in the comments.

I just finished talking with a student teacher who is wrapping up her “take-over” time in second grade. Now that she’s off active duty for a few weeks, she’s checking out other classrooms before finishing out the semester. Of course, I welcomed her to visit, with one request.

Give me feedback on my class, my lesson, my interaction with my students, and anything else you observe.

Constructive feedback based on empirical observation is hard to come by in elementary education. I’m going to request it from whomever I can. Plus, this teacher-in-training may have some insights and suggestions that are new to me. The trenches of teaching aren’t always conducive to researching new practices.

As a bonus, the student teacher gets to experience a little bit of real professional learning community. Instead of being talked down to, she gets to flex her collaboration muscles and contribute to my students’ learning by helping me to run a better class.

Democracy is a brutally efficient system for stamping out less-than-popular ideas. It’s far less useful for making wise decisions that perpetuate improvement and renewal.

For a professional learning community, consensus beats democracy left and right. Here’s what I mean by consensus: if one member of the community can’t live with a choice and it’s consequences, then we don’t move forward. We take more time to listen, discuss, and persuade, or we find an alternate option that everyone can approve.

Consensus-rule values all members equally, all the time. There is no majority and minority. There are no winners and losers. No one gets left behind.

Through consensus, every member is consulted, and every member enjoys veto power. We don’t move forward unless “we” includes every single member. Bonus: later on, when things get tough, no one can say “I never wanted to do this in the first place,” because each member had a chance to stop the train before it left the station.

Consensus honors the spirit of Galileo in the community. At some point, the future of the community may depend on a lone voice of reason among the choruses of “we’ve always done it this way” and “trust us, this many people can’t be wrong.” How many times in history has the pivotal realization been championed by a single person or small collective of dissidents? How many times in history has the ruling faction actually worked to suppress sanity and reason to preserve the status quo?

If my first allegiance is to the community, and my community is committed to consensus, then the best and most sane answer will almost always win out. It just might take a lot longer than the five minute slot on the staff meeting agenda.

I’ve just finished the book that started it all; the PLC Bible, if you will. Professional Learning Communities at Work feels like the education version of Good to Great. It’s not quite up to par with Jim Collins’s canonical business success book, but PLCs at Work is very good. Some points that stood out to me:

• A school is a PLC (p.23). Previously, I was informed that collaborative teams and teachers in grade levels were PLCs. Calling a collaborative team a PLC is a like saying Arizona is the entire United States.
• “Shaping culture is not a task to complete; rather it is an ongoing commitment” (p. 148).
• Professional development should develop organizational capacity, not just individual teacher skills (p. 261).
• PLC is a passionate, non-linear, persistent process.

I wonder what percentage of teachers and admins currently working on PLC roll outs have read this book? How many educators have received the Good News of PLCs second-hand, from a well-intentioned district leader or a one-day-wonder inservice speaker?

I don’t see why this book shouldn’t be the subject of the first book study that any school staff completes as they begin to develop a PLC. I know I would have jumped on the PLC bandwagon a long time ago if someone would have just handed me this book.

Students love good video games for two reasons:

• They present contextualized, actionable problems.
• They deliver immediate, logical feedback based on player actions.

I wish I could say the same for the typical public school class. Too often, students wait  days or even weeks  to get feedback on assignments that are standards-based but devoid of any context or over-arching story.

Two questions:

• How can I incorporate these core characteristics of good video games into my classroom?
• Are there any educational video games that incorporate these core characteristics? Do these games allow teachers to track student progress simply and authentically?

Scot McCleod had some insightful points about the value of video games in this post: Video games and learning: Individualization, simulation, and complexity.