Karl Fisch
I’ve been an educator for 19 years. I have taught both middle and high school students (mathematics) and am currently the Director of Technology for Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. Director of Technology is a fancy title for building-level technology coordinator. I try to keep all the technology “stuff” up and running and – more importantly – try to help staff and students use the technology to facilitate teaching and learning. For the past two years I’ve been heavily involved in staff development exploring the use of technology to facilitate a more constructivist, student-centered approach to teaching and learning in order to help prepare our students to be successful workers, citizens and human beings in the 21st century.
Current Work
In August of 2005 Arapahoe High School received a grant in support of a proposal for staff development on the topic of constructivism and the use of technology to foster student-centered classrooms. At about the same time, our school board set aside $1 million district-wide for "innovative grant proposals." There really wasn't a whole lot of restrictions placed on what we could propose, simply that they be innovative, forward-looking, probably include a technology component, and not be "education as usual." We wrote a proposal that piggybacked with our original grant and - somewhat to our surprise – our proposal was accepted.
The goal of both grants was to improve teacher and student use of technology to achieve curricular goals, to help transform our school to a more student-centered, constructivist approach, and to prepare our students to succeed in the 21st century. While technology was certainly a big part of this proposal in terms of dollars, the heart of our proposal was staff development. We felt that what our teachers needed most was the time and opportunity necessary to transform instruction to meet the needs of our students and utilize the tools of the 21st century. They needed the time to work together to explore new technologies and techniques, the time to discuss and collaborate with each other, and the time to transform their lessons to a more student-centered, constructivist approach.
These grants allowed us to provide teachers the time - and the necessary technology - to accomplish these goals. The teachers selected for staff development (16 teachers the first year, an additional 31 teachers in a second cohort the second year funded by our district grant - each cohort will meet for three years) meet formally about every two to three weeks (with the grants paying for the sub coverage when they have to miss class). In addition to the staff development, the grants allowed us to put a mounted LCD Projector and a fairly recent computer in all of our classrooms, so that students and teachers have access to the resources of the Internet and other materials to practice "just in time" learning. Finally, we have three classrooms with wireless laptop computers. These are designed to be "model" classrooms where students and teachers will have the tools necessary for a 21st century education, where teachers and students can really explore what education looks like when these tools are omnipresent, and where teachers can demonstrate the most effective uses of 21st century technologies to the rest of our staff.
(If you really want, you can read the entire grant.)
We then created a blog called The Fischbowl as a way to support our staff development effort. In the beginning, the blog was simply a place to "continue the conversations" we had in staff development every two to three weeks, to extend the discussions beyond the time we had face to face. As we progressed, I started to post more to the blog about relevant educational issues, new technologies, and whatever else I thought might be related and thought-provoking for our teachers, even if it didn't directly relate to what we had just talked about in staff development. In addition, each of the participating teachers created their own personal blog, where we asked them to reflect on their own learning and teaching, on their thoughts and ideas about the topics we covered, and on any changes they implemented in their classrooms. (You can find these blogs by looking on the right side of The Fischbowl under Personal Blogs - underneath those you'll also see some of the Class Blogs that some of these teachers created for use with their classes.) As you might imagine, some teachers took to blogging and reflecting (in a public forum) more than others.
What we are asking our teachers to do is to examine all of those assumptions they have made about education, instruction, and their classes and really think about what they feel is important and what the best ways are to achieve their goals. For many teachers, they really haven't thought about a lot of these issues since their methods classes in college. Once they were actually in the classroom, it was survival mode at first and they naturally did many of the same things their more veteran colleagues were doing. After a while the focus was often just doing those things better when what was needed - sometimes - was to question whether those were the right things to be doing in the first place.
We explore what the latest research has to say about how students learn (theory), how to implement that in the classroom (pedagogy), and how best to use technology to facilitate this process. My role is to get them to think about their instruction, to "push" their thinking and make sure they are not only doing the best job they can, but that what they are doing not only reflects the latest research, but also truly aligns with their beliefs. In the end we will hopefully do a better job of working together to achieve our common goals for students. And we will discuss freely and openly the issues facing our students in a time of rapid change.
As far as what’s most distinctive about our efforts, I’m not really sure. I guess it would be how open and transparent we are about what we are trying to do and how we are doing it. For a variety of reasons, The Fischbowl has attracted a large number of readers and we continue to share our questions, our approaches, our successes and our challenges via the blog (as well as their own personal blogs). And we receive a tremendous amount of feedback, ideas, thoughts and suggestions from our “learning network” of readers around the world. A primary focus right now is how best to help students and teachers create their own “personal learning networks.”
I also believe our staff development efforts are attracting attention because – regrettably – this kind of staff development is somewhat rare in education (at least public K-12 education). Rarely are teachers given the time and opportunity to do this kind of work, and rarer still for it not to be “top down.” We believe a strong component of our success is that it is teacher driven. It is teachers teaching teachers. Teachers being given the time to learn, explore, question, collaborate, challenge each other and themselves, and share what they are learning with each other. It is our pretty intense focus on what’s best for our students, throwing out (as much as possible) the politics and the money and all the other “yeah, buts” we hear so often in education, and really, truly focusing on the needs of the students, not the needs of the adults. We are by no means 100% successful in that regard, but we continue to strive to reach that goal. And it is our willingness to acknowledge that - despite being considered an excellent school already - we have a long way to go to truly meet the needs of our students in a flatter, rapidly changing, globally interconnected world.
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