Author: Paige Couros

Below is a post by IMPress author George Couros about an Instagram Book Study for his book with Innovate Inside the Box written with Katie Novak.  To join the book study, click here!

I am excited to announce that Katie Novak and I will be starting an Instagram book study on January 22, 2020, on my co-authored book, “Innovate Inside the Box: Empowering Learners Through UDL and the Innovator’s Mindset.” There are three main goals of this book study:

1. To dig deeper into the ideas of the book and learn/model UDL learning strategies.
2. To encourage different multimedia creation to actively reflect and create meaningful learning opportunities.
3. To use spaces like Instagram to build networks with other educators who are interested in the top of innovation in education.

The book study will begin on January 22, 2020, and finish on February 12, 2020.  The hope is that participants would post 2-3 creations of their learning (photo, audio, video) from the book per week and/or comment on questions posed from the @gcouros account for the book study.  Katie and I will also be hosting a couple of Instagram live sessions discussing the book and interacting with participant questions.

Having a copy of “Innovate Inside the Box” is beneficial for the process but not necessary as the questions are pretty open-ended.  Other than the book, the process is free, and if you already own a copy, you are good to go!  If you are interested in previewing the book, you can get a preview of Chapter 1 by signing up for my email subscription list here.

Each day of the book study (or as you see fit), participants will be asked to share a reflection in some form on what they have read. It can be a video that they talk or share something, a visual they create, or whatever you can think of that can be represented through Instagram like a “Booksnap” (information on that from Tara Martin here).

There are many ways you can share your learning through Instagram, so please do not limit it to my suggestions.

I encourage participants to share in the following manner:

1. Share your post to the hashtag #InnovateInsidetheBox and the applicable chapter reading.  For each chapter, the second hashtag will be the following:

   Intro – #IITBIntro + #InnovateInsideTheBox
   Chapter 1 – #IITBCH1 + #InnovateInsideTheBox
   Chapter 2 – #IITBCH2 + #InnovateInsideTheBox
   Chapter 3 – #IITBCH3 + #InnovateInsideTheBox
   (Continued for all 14 chapters)

2. Each post should have #InnovateInsideTheBox AND the appropriate chapter hashtag. You can share any other hashtags that you see fit for the process as well.
3. Tag me (@gcouros) and Katie (@katienovakudl) on your Instagram post.  I will do my best to see as many as possible and comment. You are more than welcome to follow me on Instagram as well, but my account is open, so you do not necessarily have to do so.
4. Write as much as little or as much as you want in the subject line on your reflection.
5. Feel free to use the story feature to share your learning as well.  I will be sharing many of the creations to my own Instagram story from participants.

(*Please note that if your account is private only people that follow you will be able to see what you share.)

This process is something that I am still learning, but I learned so much from the group last time, and it was hugely beneficial. My ultimate hope is that this endeavor opens new and better doors for learning in the classroom that participants create for themselves.  Bear with me as I am growing through the process as well.

The dates for the reading are the following:

Date	Chapter
January 22, 2020	Introduction and Chapter 1
January 24, 2020	Chapter 2
January 27, 2020	Chapter 3
January 29, 2020	Chapter 4
January 31, 2019	Chapter 5, 6
February 3, 2020	Chapter 7, 8
February 5, 2020	Chapter 9,10
February 7, 2020	Chapter 11, 12
February 10, 2020	Chapter 13, 14
February 12, 2019	Final Reflections

 

As well, please sign up here so I can try to follow all of the accounts that are taking part.  This is the only place you will need to “register”:

Sign up here!

Thank you for your interest in this process.  I am looking forward to connecting with educators through the Instagram platform to push my own learning and connect with others.

Below is a post by Sunil Singh, co-author of Math Recess. The post was originally featured on Medium.com. Math Recess talks about bringing the joy and fun back to mathematics, where it belongs! In the below article, Singh reiterates the idea that awe and wonder should be something every student experiences in mathematics education.

The only past that math education seems to have is one that needs to be left behind…

Math education, in its noble attempt to be progressive and au courant , has discarded the past in terms of anything that was relevant in the 20th century. In terms of pedagogy, that definitely has been welcomed, encouraging deeper and more nuanced ideas of how kids learn mathematics. As such, the general tenor of math conferences and workshops is to mine the present to build the future.

The problem is that while pedagogy has definitely improved, the quality of mathematical content has taken a rather steep dive over the last half century.

Proof?

I have textbooks from the early 50’s all the way to almost the present. You can see the decline of attention to mathematics in the way the forewords were written. Forewords, especially starting around the mid 60’s, had a far more romantic and wider scope for learning mathematics. As well, the language used in these foreword pages spoke to a sophistication of mathematics that was assumed by the writers for the students they wrote for. Regrettably, through time, the vision of the purpose of mathematics as a human endeavor has been shaded more or less into obscurity, replaced by technical efficiency for STEM careers and practical endeavors.

Our teaching of mathematics might have improved, but why we teach it has been washed of any impractical notions that could stain the productivity narrative that has overtaken math education. We are left with a bleached curriculum, with any evidence of human awe and wonder left in margins — if even that.

There is very little collective attention to the history of mathematics, which then renders the currency of everything in our rear view mirror as dated. Being swept away in this general nose-up to the past is mathematical wisdom that grew up in this Golden Age of Mathematical content.

In my CMC-South Presentation, I realized that most of my presentation was rear view mirror stuff — content, historical mentions, elderly educators, and old problems.

The person that anchored my presentation was Peter Taylor, a professor at Queens university in Kingston, Ontario.

Over ten years ago, Peter Taylor was given the highest award for mathematics teaching in Canada. He was awarded primarily for seeing the subject of mathematics through an aesthetic lens. This was further fleshed out in a deep interview that involved drawing parallels between literature/poetry and mathematics.

In English, books are chosen first, and then curriculum is designed around these works of art. In mathematics, curriculum is written and then books are written after. And, as you read the rest of the excerpt, much of the alienation comes from this sterile construction of mathematics.

Peter Taylor wrote a great article about this a few years back.

We are currently NOT teaching mathematics in the spirit of its long evolution of awe and wonder. And, part of the reason for that is that people like Peter Taylor — giants in the field of mathematics/math education — don’t have the needed platform to amplify their towering wisdom.

The mathematics should speak for itself. The need for contextualizing and labeling to elevate its worth and attention is like giving students inorganic mathematics. Putting context in for context’s sake only shortchanges the mathematics.

We all have encountered enough ridiculous situations in where trigonometry has to come to some practical rescue. Have you ever wondered what the angle of elevation is when you look up at the top of flag? I haven’t. But, hey, let’s bring in a couple of kids, tell a story — without mentioning how they know the distance to the flagpole — and ask that burning question of angle of elevation.

Get rid of the story and stop putting mathematics as a supporting actor. And, stop asking it do things it cannot do — it cannot cut a pan of brownies equally into 8 pieces. Ever.

We are drifting away from our past. And, generally, as mentioned above, is a good thing. But, we have thrown the baby out with the bath water, and lost some beautiful and needed reflection from those that taught us.

Taught us to always put mathematics first.

Below is a blog post from IMPress author A.J. Juliani, co-author of Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning. 

It is a simple question, but one that leads to all kinds of reactions: “Did you ask the teachers?”

Often times in a search for innovative ideas and programs, we miss a ridiculously important stakeholder: Teachers.

I know it sounds crazy, but after working in three different school districts (as well as interacting with thousands of teachers and hundreds of schools in the last few years), it is more common than you might think.

I remember the first time I made this mistake as a school leader.

We were rolling out open education resources (OER) for a new Math curriculum in our elementary schools. I was excited about the possibilities for revisiting curriculum that was dated and out-of-place in many respects. We put a new five-year cycle that had touchpoints each year for revising and improving the curriculum to make it more of a living document that was not set in stone.

I truly believed that we could use the precious funds currently used for buying programs, to actually help pay teachers to develop the resources and curriculum.

Everything was ready to go.

Then we had our first committee meeting (more on why I dislike committees in a moment). The committee was comprised of principals, a few teachers, coaches, and some central office staff. We even had a few parents and students in the group during our after-school meeting.

The conversation was wide-ranging and “in-theory” everyone agreed on moving forward with the OER process. Most of the folks were pumped about our next steps.

We started a few OER curriculum projects in the high school that were going well, backed by a few teachers that were content experts and ready to shape the process. They wanted to go in this direction.

Then in our first writing meeting with Elementary teachers, I could sense something was off.

No one was talking (except me of course). The room had a sense of doom in it.

Towards the end of the hour, I finally asked the question, “Is there something I’m missing?”

The silence was palpable.

Then one of the veteran teachers spoke up. She said, “I understand what we are trying to do here. And I appreciate moving away from our dated curriculum and textbooks, but…”

She paused for a moment.

“Did you ask the teachers?”

The question caught me so off guard, that I couldn’t answer for a moment.

I swore I would never be the administrator or school leader that forgot what it was like to be in the classroom. And, here I was, asking teachers to do something, that I had never even asked if they wanted to do, or believed was the right path forward.

I stumbled through a few sentences referring to the committee (which was K-12 and only had two elementary representatives) and then stopped.

“No, I’m sorry, we never really had that conversation. I never had that conversation.”

The teachers were great, and I asked if we could set up a follow-up meeting to discuss how much time (which they didn’t have) and effort/research (which would take a while) it would take to develop their own curriculum and resources.

In the following weeks, I didn’t just meet with that group, I spent time meeting with every elementary teacher in our school district who taught math. I wanted everyone to have a say, and committees did not provide that opportunity.

In our short small-group conversations (we met with grade levels at each school for 15-20 minutes) so many great insights came from our teachers.

While their perspective was varied, there was one consistent belief: It would take a lot of time to write their curriculum, let alone developing/choosing every single resource. They didn’t believe a textbook was the right way to go but creating everything in-house also seemed improbable for an entire K-5 Math program. 

They were right. I was wrong.

It wasn’t about OER (we had very successful OER projects run by teachers in our district). It was about the process.

I was wrong for not including them much earlier in the decision-making process. I was wrong for not asking a simple question, “What do you think we should do?”

I learned this lesson the hard way and have tried to include as many teacher voices, opinions, and ideas as possible in these decisions since that wake-up call.

THIS IS A BIGGER PROBLEM THAN I REALIZED

The Hechinger Report recently shared an interesting piece on the U.S. Education Department’s $1.5 billion “innovation” stimulus:

As part of the federal recovery effort to boost the economy after the 2008 recession, the U.S. Education Department suddenly had a big pot of money to give away to “innovations” in education. Since then, more than $1.5 billion has been spent on almost 200 ideas because Congress continued to appropriate funds even after the recession ended.

Only 12 of the 67 innovations, or 18 percent, were found to have any positive impact on student achievement, according to a report published earlier in 2018. 

“It’s only a handful,” said Barbara Goodson, a researcher at Abt Associates Inc., a research and consulting firm that was hired to analyze the results of the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund for the Department of Education. “It’s discouraging to everybody. We are desperate to find what works. Here was a program that was supposed to identify promising models. People are disappointed that we didn’t come up with 20 new models.”

“That’s the dirty secret of all of education research,” Goodson added. “It is really hard to change student achievement. We have rarely been able to do it. It’s harder than anybody thinks.” She cited a prior 2013 study that also found when education reforms were put to rigorous scientific tests with control groups and random assignment, 90 percent of them failed to find positive effects. 

When I read this story, I dug a bit deeper into the programs and ideas. Looked at the funding and also how the research decided what had “positive” impact or ROI (as the business-world calls it).

Turns out there was a big missing piece to many of these ideas, programs, and initiatives.

No one asked the teachers what they thought. Most hadn’t even included the teachers in any form of discussion prior to starting the program/initiative.

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my time as a school leader, it is this:

New ideas started from the ground-up (with unwavering support from the top), are much more likely to have a positive impact than any other kind of initiative.

So, if this is true, how do we build this type of culture from the ground up? How can we empower teachers and students to share their ideas, to be creative, and to make sure they are valued?

IDEAS FROM TEACHERS, SUPPORTED BY ADMINISTRATORS

One of the best at this is the High School Principal at William Tennent (the district where I work). Dennis Best has seen what happens when he supports and helps to grow teacher’s ideas.

He valued our teacher’s ideas for an innovation program and supported CentennialX, our home-grown human-centered design program where students work side-by-side major companies and organizations to solve real-world problems.

In addition, our partnerships with companies, organizations, and institutions have grown with teachers and students working alongside people from:

• The Character Lab (Angela Duckworth’s team is doing action research in our schools and working with our teachers and students around grit and character)
• Drexel University (our students go to Drexel Med to work on real cadavers)
• The University of Pennsylvania (our biology and psych students work with lab rats and we recently built a lab with real rats in our HS)
• St. Joseph’s University (our students work with undergrad students who are performing neurosurgery)
• Fox Chase Cancer Center (the TRIP program and our Genetics of Cancer course)
• ShopRite (we have a Shoprite store in our HS where students work at and the community shops at)
• Eli Lilly and PRA Health Sciences (sponsored student challenges for our design teams to solve real medical problems while in school)
• MIT Cycling Team (our students developed a new cycling performance sock for the MIT Team during CentennialX)

Amidst all of these innovative opportunities, the teaching and learning continued at WTHS. There was not a huge reform movement that had to stop everything we were doing to start something new. The change happened from within and took place while life went on.

Recently WTHS took this approach a step further with their Teacher Innovation Pitch.

First, Dennis and his administrative team identified the areas of innovation, growth, and success at William Tennent High School. They noticed that many of these areas were started by staff and supported by the administration.

Yet, they were still in pockets and wanted more teachers to feel empowered to have ideas and try something new with their students or in their own professional journey.

Enter the Teacher Innovation Pitch.

Last spring, teachers had the opportunity to pitch their ideas to their colleagues and administration.

The goal is to further empower our teachers to:

• Take instructional risks and feel free to make mistakes and get better.
• Innovate as you might see fit given the current constraints.
• Develop and leverage partnerships to provide opportunities for students to participate in authentic, real-world learning experiences.

The question I keep coming back to again and again is: “Did you ask the teachers?”

And why wouldn’t we? Teachers are with students every day. They see things from all kinds of perspectives. They live in the practice of teaching and learning, not just the theory of teaching and learning.

When we included the teachers in the decision-making process, or better yet, started with the teachers for ideas to teach/learn better, it now became a team initiative. Everyone was involved, and everyone wanted it to succeed for our kids.

It sounds simple, but might just be the most profound thing we can do as leaders. Ask a teacher, see what they think, and then give them space and support to create something worth doing.

Below is a post from Katie Martin, IMpress Author of the incredible book Learner-Centered Innovation. We are also excited to announce that Katie’s book is coming out on Audiobook in 2020!

A few years ago at the San Diego Equity Symposium, I got to hear Liz Murray tell her story about growing up homeless to graduating from Harvard. Through her incredible life story, she highlighted that the experience of an individual isn’t black and white. She shared many struggles of growing up with parents who were addicts but also the love she had for her family. It is easy to put people in a box- “low performing” “low socioeconomic status (SES)”, “Gifted”, language learner and so many other labels and categories that we use in education but fail to tell the story of the kids in our classes.  There are strengths and opportunities that exist alongside great challenges for all of us.

Liz shared a specific story of how a researcher tried to convince her that she had suppressed her anger because she chooses to not to blame her parents. After listening to him and his research. she responded, “You can read and research anything you want but it doesn’t replace my experience.”  Her point, that is important for all educators, was that just because the trends in research tell us that groups of people tend to act a certain way or experiences will impact us in a certain way, or even that specific strategies are better for learners, there is no substitute for getting to really know people and all their complexities to determine the best way forward.  We can learn so much by trying to see the world through our student’s eyes and understanding who they are and who they want to be.

Here are 4 things that are important to consider as you get to know those you serve this year. 1) check your assumptions, 2) ask questions, 3) believe in them and 4) meet them where they are.

Check Your Assumptions

We can’t assume that we know individuals or understand their experiences because we have read the research or they fit into a specific category. The truth is we all belong to many categories and have vast experiences and circumstances that make us unique. We are consumed with grades, test scores, and data but we have to remember that they don’t tell the whole story, and they rarely inspire learners to wonder, create and do work that is meaningful and relevant to them and of service to others. To go beyond labels, and to cultivate a sense of belonging and purpose, we must create the opportunities to get to know learners, their passions, their challenges, and their goals.

Our brains make generalizations to make sense of the world but when you want to build relationships and get to know individuals you have to be careful with this and check your assumptions. Sometimes it is simply assuming you know one student because you had their older sibling or know the family.  Too often, we judge people by how they look, how they talk.  When we have data, we can falsely assume they tell the story of an individual. When students don’t do homework, act out, or are apathetic in class, we can assume they don’t care.  Even from well-intentioned educators, I still hear too often, those are the “bad kids” or “these kids don’t care.” Instead of assuming that students don’t want to learn, could we ask, What might be preventing students from learning in school?

Seek to Understand

If getting to know the learner’s strengths and challenges is the goal, I would argue that sometimes the most valuable data you can gather is through actual input from students. Seeking to understand others begins with asking questions. Beyond asking, we need to make sure we are listening to truly understand the complexities that make up the stories to understand the experience of those we serve. Here are some questions I suggested in a post, Why we should stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. These would also be great questions for administrators to ask teachers.

• What are interested in?
• What do you love to do?
• What makes you happy?
• When do you feel like you are successful?
• How do you like to work/play with others?
• What do you want to learn more about?
• What is important to you?
• What makes it hard to learn/ do you work?

To add to these, here are some great questions from Pernille Ripp to ask families and guardians, too. Beyond asking the questions, fostering relationships among the community is also powerful. Create opportunities for students to ask each other questions, ask you questions, ask the community. We make a lot of assumptions about what others want and most of the time it’s just better to ask.

Believe in People

If we really want to create learning environments in our schools where all learners are valued and seen as capable of achieving desired outcomes, we have to begin with the belief that they can.  When we believe that people can do something we act in a way that makes that outcome more likely. We need to believe in our students and help them to believe in themselves and see what is possible.

In 2013, researchers conducted a study on feedback in middle school classrooms. They found that there was one phrase that improved student effort and performance so much that they deemed the following phrase “magical.”

I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

When students received this feedback they chose to revise their paper more often that students who did not (a 40 percent increase among white students; 320 percent boost among black students) and improved their performance significantly.

Meet Learners Where They Are

It’s important to have high expectations but you also have to recognize that people will need a variety of supports to get there.  Having taught middle school, I have heard every excuse and quirky young adolescent drama possible.  I would love to say that all changes as we grow up but having taught many graduate classes for teachers, I have yet to have a semester where I didn’t have multiple teachers turn in work late, they often need accommodations, were late for class or struggled with assignments.  I always try my best to meet them where they are and support them to meet the expectations.

I know some of these same teachers demanded homework on time and didn’t allow students to make up or revise work. Think about how often we hold kids to expectations that we can’t always meet as adults. Life can be challenging and you never know what is happening in someone’s life and how powerful of an impact you can make by empathizing with their situation and showing them some grace.  If they need a paper or pencil, why not just give it to them. If they need more help, more time, or just someone to talk to, consider the impact you can make by meeting them where they are.  Hopefully, someone will do it for you when you need it, too.

Liz reminded us during her talk, that our actions, our interactions or lack of them, matter every day. You always make a difference.  It’s up to you to decide if it’s a positive or negative.