Tag: twitter

Teaching History – We Need to Become FOLES – Thanks to HipHughes!

On By paulmcguire2013In Teaching Canadian HistoryLeave a comment

Tomorrow, I start teaching history again.

Certainly my first love in a long career in education, my time teaching history usually gets obscured by the things I did later in my career. That in some ways, is the great thing about a career as a teacher, there can be so much variety, change and certainly challenge.

It seems impossible to realize that when I started teaching history our best resources were Jackdaws and history scrapbooks – now relics of the distant teaching past.

a cover from the old Jackdaws series – anyone remember these?
Prentice-Hall 1978 – one of the Canadiana Scrapbooks I used in my grade 10 history class – the only primary resources available at the time!

After I taught history both at the intermediate and senior level I moved on to all sorts of other positions like alternative education, guidance, resource then administration. I did get to move back into the classroom for seven months when I went back to teach grade 6 language arts.

That was pretty amazing. Everything had changed while I had been off doing other things in schools. Assessment had changed dramatically, the resources available to a teacher had grown astronomically – when I taught history the internet didn’t even exist!

There is nothing better than the classroom. There is a real thrill in learning and growing with your students. Tomorrow I return full circle to the classroom to start work with year two Faculty of Education students at the University of Ottawa.

I am teaching ten weeks of intermediate history to 30 year-two students. I am ready and I have done lots of preparation to produce my first three-hour session. To me, there is one thing that is really important now. I want as much as possible to give them something that will be truly useful, that will give them a few tools they can use to engage their students and make the learning count.

This can be daunting in history. The old story goes that history is boring and irrelevant and of little use to anyone. Good history teachers really do need to sell their subjects and they need to make it engaging, they have to make history count. For most of their students, after the grade 10 Canadian History class, they will never take another course about their country’s story.

Not too much pressure right?

One of the great Historical Thinking Project posters from https://historicalthinking.ca/ – an amazing treasure trove of resources for Canadian History teachers

Immersing oneself now in the world of teaching Canadian History is a pretty wonderful process. I am certainly not an expert in the teaching of history and I will be very clear to my students that this is the case. What I can do pretty quickly is absorb lots of resources and start figuring out what tools are going to be useful to someone starting out.

I can also use Twitter pretty well. With the help of Rachel Collishaw, I have found lots of great Canadian history teachers!

I am not going to try to do this here, this will be a 30-hour journey lasting three months. I haven’t met my co-learners yet and they will have a significant role to play in this process of discovery.

One big thing though, good history teaching, like any other subject now is all about helping people to think and learn for themselves. It certainly isn’t the recitation of facts –  it is more an exercise in discerning what is significant, what evidence is important, what events have consequence and where the ethical dimension lies.

This is mapped out clearly as the Historical Thinking Concepts and these concepts will frame all our discoveries and discussions over the next few months.

This framework is relatively new as is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action. How do we make reconciliation part of our history? I know this will be a long journey and the great challenge for these students will be to find meaningful ways to make it central to all the teaching they do. Like the internet, this is something that didn’t exist when I started. How will this impact what we do over the next few months?

Finally, something I do know about – what will work for kids. Even though this is a class on the teaching of history, it really needs to become a class on teaching kids. We never really teach subjects in schools, although it probably feels like that when you are in the second year of a teacher education program.

Probably the best resources I have right now, the ones I am most comfortable with are those that talk about teaching kids. I plan to show two videos from HipHughes on the first day (who knows how much you get through on the first day??) – these ones make lots of sense!

This is the second one I plan to show. I think these days, we are not so much teachers (never a professor!) as we are FOLEs – Facilitators of Learning Experiences. This is what we all need to be. Whether we are holding a group meeting with our grade 7 homeroom students to talk about rumours, or we are in a grade 12 class looking at systemic racism in Canadian History – we are all FOLEs! Tomorrow, I want to be the best FOLE possible.

Thanks HipHughes.

 

Empathy – We Still Have a Way to Go

On By paulmcguire2013In 31 days of posting, Hope, Social emotional learningLeave a comment

 

We are coming up to ‘Bell Let’s Talk‘ on January 31st. This is a day to have an open dialogue on mental health issues in Canada. That’s a very good thing.

Twitter is not always the best forum for discussions on important topics like mental health. I have already seen people ‘like’ tweets about the importance of reaching out if you are someone in distress.

It is so easy to ‘like’. It is much harder to sit there and be present with someone who is really struggling. As someone who has suffered from mental illness in the past, I know people need more than a retweet.

I am happy that this topic is reaching beyond the shadows and getting some publicity. I am seeing people like Chris Nihmey and Laurie Azzi who are doing really important work on social media getting out the message that people need to talk. This is essential and I think their work could actually save lives.

What we need is more people entering this dialogue in a really meaningful way. I remember what it was like to be a struggling educator with serious mental health concerns. I did reach out to people when I was suffering from debilitating anxiety. In all cases, at work at least, my efforts to reach out were rebuffed.

In one case that I have written about before, I told a superintendent that undue stress was a trigger for anxiety. Incredibly, my honest admission was ignored.

Very fortunately for me when I reached out at home, I was understood and loved. That has made all the difference.

I learned a lot from my own mental health struggles and I am better for what I went through. I do however struggle with those in places of authority who are still unable to be empathetic when it comes to the people who work for them.

I have never called out the superintendent that was so insensitive to my own admissions and I won’t do it now. I only hope that they have learned something in the past few years. I hope they have learned a certain degree of empathy.

I am adding a Twitter Moment to this post. It is part of an incredible conversation on Twitter on the need for empathy amongst educators for educators. There are some pretty stark posts included here. I really hope that by writing these tweets, people have found some healing and understanding.

Good that there is a day of awareness. We still have a lot of growing to do.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

One Word for 2018: Radio #OnewordOnt

On By paulmcguire2013In Innovation7 Comments

I am always looking for good writing prompts. Without prompts, it is hard to keep inspired enough to come up with new posts and regular writing is something I plan to continue to focus on as I start my second year in retirement from a formal position in education.

Today’s prompt came out of a discussion on Voiced Radio with Stephen Hurley and Doug Peterson. These two are an inspiration to me and much of what I write these days comes from discussions initiated by one or both of these active educators. Their show, This Week in Ontario Edublogs is broadcast every week and they have now reached their 40th episode.

While discussing blog posts from the past week, they came up with a post from Julie Balen, #OnewordOnt Introduction.

She writes:

There are many reasons why one would take on this challenge, but for most, it comes down to focus and intentionality. Having one word through which to “see” your practice, to guide your work, and to reflect on your professional learning gives you a chance to be really intentional about your professional growth.

If you continue reading, you can see lots of great bloggers who have added their words to the One Word Challenge. It came out in discussion today that none of the contributors came from men! Julie responded via Twitter during the broadcast making the conversation even more dynamic!

So, I need to take up the challenge. I choose Radio. Maybe not the kind of word that is used as part of a challenge like this, but this is what I came up with and I’m sticking to it.

I choose Radio because it offers wonderful learning and connecting opportunities for the new year, especially through Voiced Radio.

I also choose Radio because I was inspired by my partner and fellow broadcaster and blogger Heather Swail. Heather wrote a great post about radio last week – here is the beginning:

A single voice punctuating the dark. Light, bantering voices filling your head. Storytellers mesmerizing with pauses and intonations. Music lulling you to sleep. Radio has been my companion for so many years, in light and dark

Heather Swail – The Seductive Power of Radio

Radio works for me because it represents the opportunity to connect with others. Last week we did a great broadcast led by Brad Shreffler capping off a week of creative connection making all under the hashtag #voicedgratitude. We talked live on radio for over two hours. It was a great community discussion and very interestingly, very few of the discussion participants knew each other a year ago.

There is still something magic about radio that Twitter can’t replace. Radio allows you to hear the other person. Radio tells stories, radio fuels the imagination.

So Radio is my word. What will the new year bring? What will year two of VoicEd Radio be like? For many of us, this is a new barely tried medium, there is lots of room for growth.

A year ago, even before the first broadcast on VoicEd, Derek Rhodenizer and Stephen Hurley talked about the concept. You can hear the first of many rich conversations here.

Connecting and learning this year involves Radio. Where will we be 12 months from now?

 

 

Who Leads in our Schools?

On By paulmcguire2013In #IMMOOC, #SAVMP, governance and public education, Hope, leadership1 Comment

I saw this quote this morning. It is not a new idea, but it is certainly worth a discussion. As I continue to look for topics to write about, I continue to come back to leadership issues.

There are lots of people writing about leadership – there always has been. Sometimes I wonder how much experience these writers actually have working in a school dealing with the day to day difficulties that come with running an education institution. These days to get good ideas I usually go to my PLN on Twitter. There is a great deal of collective wisdom out there.

I put out this prompt to my PLN this morning.

I would like this to become another rolling blog, written by the members of my PLN. It worked once, and I hope there is some interest in discussing leadership as it happens in our schools. Is it simply the ‘frightening conclusion’ reached above by Jennifer Gonzalez?

I hope not. For me the best leaders are those who are almost invisible, silently encouraging others to have a voice.

Is this a difficult topic to talk about? I don’t know that many active administrators on Twitter, so it is hard to get their perspective. One very active member of my PLN  writes:

The collective whole sets the mood, culture and tone of a school. There are many leaders within any school. When teachers start seeing themselves as leaders in education and admin empowers such leadership that’s when education will change

Great to see this contribution, it makes me feel more positive about things. I truly worry when I hear that a school is defined by its traditional leader. I could write more about this, but I would love to see if others will add to this comment.

The contribution above also speaks to the need for change. Maybe if we can move away from the top down system we have now we can see the sparks of innovation really begin to light a flame.

Later in the day, Derek Rhodenizer sent me a note about a podcast conversation he had with Debbie Donsky on education leadership. This is one of the great things about developing a PLN on Twitter. You ask questions and great people get back to you with interesting content.

This is a really interesting conversation and worth listening to. Debbie Donsky makes some good points about taking a more collaborative approach as a leader in the school. Change should be able to take place in a school as a collective experience that reflects the needs of a wider community. This is harder to do, but this is an important element of effective leadership.

This is one of the great things about podcasts. In 40 minutes Debbie and Derek covered so much about how to be a different leader, one who is not the leader on the hill. Their podcast would be great for teachers interested in becoming an administrator. I can think of many administrators who would also benefit from this conversation. There is no way I can do justification to it here, but it is a rich conversation and really worth listening to.

It is great to hear from my PLN as I work through some of these questions on leadership. I hope for more to come!

 

Conversations on Assessment in Ontario – Should We Start Again?

On By paulmcguire2013In EQAO, governance and public education, school reform, voicEd RadioLeave a comment
By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday, September 3, 2013

So, we are finally talking about EQAO and possibly how we can do better.

Last week we started some interesting conversations on Voiced Radio spurred on by the call to get involved in the provincial consultation on assessment. The first conversation was a great panel discussion and you can listen to it here.

Next, Derek Rhodenizer added to the conversation with another podcast on Sunday Night. Because of the varied nature of this conversation I have been really interested in following the evolving discussions. These are really useful broadcasts. A good panel discussion captures so much. Real radio makes a big difference.

Twitter does too. I have Storified a portion of the conversation using the hashtag #ontedassessment. You can see the conversation here.

While it is not part of the mandate to get rid of EQAO, I am most interested in comments like the one above. While we may want to discuss how we can arrange the provincial deck chairs on the Titanic, I like the comments that challenge the entire testing system.

Andrew Campbell may have said it best when he suggested we look at the reality of EQAO’s role in our education system:

EQAO isn’t an assessment tool. It’s an accountability tool.

People have used some interesting words and phrases over the past week – ancient, industrial era, what EQAO doesn’t know, invasive, ranking, wicked problem. Pretty strong words for a test we are not even considering getting rid of!

The Twitter conversation is really worth reading through. It is impossible to summarize here but there are is a great deal to consider.

One theme has to do with diverting some of the vast resources assigned to EQAO into teacher research:

This point has been made very well over the past few weeks. While we do get a static report on how the student has done, we only get the results the following year. How does this actually do anything useful? How do students and teachers learn anything from results that take months to get back to the school?

The tweet above speaks volumes to me. I think we are sowing a huge amount of distrust in the province. The test discriminates against poor schools, ELL learners, students in the Far North. It pits urban schools against suburban schools. It gives some schools a false sense of security while it blames others.

Why not start over? Why not do as Lynne Hollingshead suggests?

Let’s be a global leader, let’s begin again.

 

Making Connections – Edcamp Ottawa, Voiced Radio, MADPD

On By paulmcguire2013In Doug Peterson, Innovation, MADPD, new professional development, voicEd Radio3 Comments

opening workshop on the gradeless classroom at Edcamp Ottawa

To me these days it is all about making connections. This past week has been particularly rich. Starting last Saturday, we took in the latest Ottawa Edcamp where we were able to put together four interviews for our show First Hand Stories.

All four of these are now up on Voiced Radio thanks to Stephen Hurley.

The turnout was great for the Edcamp. There were at least 75 participants and a wonderful collection of workshops scattered over three sessions throughout the morning and early afternoon.

Lots of great sessions at Saturday’s Edcamp Ottawa

All four First Hand Stories conversations were really fun to take part in. One included Derek Rhodenizer who blew in for a few minutes after his kids’ karate lesson. He was there long enough to take part in an on-going discussion about setting up podcasts for students and teachers. He later sent me a Youtube video that he had made on the topic.

The conversations also led to this tweet

This brought Chris Cluff and Stephen Hurley into a great hour-long conversation on Sunday night on Chris’ show Chasing Squirrels. Here we talked about silo busting, something that came up in response to Derek’s tweet on Saturday.

We had a bunch of good conversations at the Edcamp with teachers who had never been on Voiced Radio before. We also covered mental health in schools, the gradeless classroom, creativity in schools and blended classrooms. We also had the chance to interview Laura Wheeler, one of the original organizers of EdCamp Ottawa.

All to say it was a great 48 hours of connecting and meeting new people. All possible because of alternative ways of learning – Twitter, web-based radio and edcamps.

The connecting continues this week as Stephen Hurley and Doug Peterson will be going live at the BIT 2017 Conference in Niagara Falls and the next MADPD begins to take shape including some form of a virtual town hall including a whole host of educators.

This to me is the new learning. It is happening every day and in new and very innovative ways. I think traditional education institutions really need to pick up on this and get more involved. Although we are connecting more and more the circles are still pretty small.

I would love to see some of the big school boards promote MADPD or Voiced Radio on their Twitter feed or take a leading role by encouraging their educators to take part in these new approaches.

This is where the new learning is happening, they should not be left behind.

Taking First Hand Stories to Edcamp Ottawa

On By paulmcguire2013In Doug Peterson, Innovation, voicEd RadioLeave a comment

So this Saturday we are going to try something a little different. Inspired by Stephen Hurley, the creative force behind Voiced Radio and Doug Peterson of This Week in Ontario Edubloggers fame, we are going to take our Voiced Radio show First Hand Stories to the Ottawa Edcamp.

My partner and the creative soul of our show Heather Swail came up with this idea and fortunately, the organizers of this year’s Edcamp, Amy Bowker and Laura Wheeler liked the idea and are allowing us space to try this out.

Quick aside – it looks a little like I am doing a bit of name dropping here and I guess I am, but these are all great people and I am linking you to their Twitter feeds – if you are not following these folks you really should be!

So, how will this work? We are not sure. But it is a really good idea to give this a try. Radio broadcasting and podcasting are so easy to do now. We are totally caught up with the potential this medium is creating to build community and share ideas.

What I am finding now is that many of my conversations on Twitter involve members of the Voiced Radio community. Now I have talked to many of these educators or we have listened to their broadcasts. We have a closer connection through Stephen Hurley’s great education radio experiment.

One of the great things about this upcoming Edcamp is that many of the participants are ‘new campers’ or teacher candidates at the University of Ottawa.

Hopefully, we will get a chance to interview a few of these TCs. What a great way for us to get a sense of what teacher candidates are thinking this time of year.

Do we have a topic. Do we have questions? Not really. This being an Edcamp we think it is probably best just to let things evolve, unscripted and unstaged. We do really hope that this little experiment will work. It would be great in the future to do some live remotes for Voiced. This one will not be live – still working on the technology.

So, let’s see what happens. Let’s get more interviews done and more listeners for a great radio project.

See you this Saturday!!

To see the full schedule for Edcamp Ottawa please see this link.

What can we change in education?

On By paulmcguire2013In #IMMOOC, governance and public education, Innovation, school reformLeave a comment

I am trying something new today. I have put out a prompt – you will see it below – and I am trying to write a post as the conversation evolves. I love blogs because it can be updated as new ideas come out.

Let’s see what happens.

To me, the big questions are the interesting ones, but I wonder how often these get asked. I put this question out today on Twitter:

What needs to change in how education is organized? Roles of admin? Trustees? Community? #educationforward #educationreform

I put this out on Sunday morning and tagged a number of educators to the question. Twitter is really good at provoking discussion. Will this question get responses? We will see.

The conversation started with a reference by Chris Cluff to an article, ‘10 Disruptions That Will Revolutionize Education’

Much of schooling is constructed around conformity and standardization, but digital natives will force educators to break out of that box.

This is very heartening, one of the big problems right now in education is the need for alignment – conformity is king! This really stifles creativity and innovation in education.

This is another key idea in the article that Chris Cluff and Roland Chidiac discuss in this great Youtube broadcast

7. School leaders will give up their desks.

The next generation of school leaders will be less wedded to traditional practices. Students will need autonomy and freedom to customize their own education, so top-down leadership will be replaced by student agency in a culture of mutual respect.

I am still listening to Chris and Roland as they dissect this really interesting article – much more to the discussion!

Update – as the conversation continues, Roland and Chris discuss the idea of administrators get away from their desks. The mention Derek Rhodenizer and challenge him to get away from his desk. I don’t think that is a big deal for Derek, I am sure he does that anyhow. Let’s go further – why not challenge a superintendent to get away from their desk for a week – what would that be like?

So, I put out this additional prompt

This is an interesting turn, we talked about this yesterday in a conversation while we hiked – how would education be transformed if senior administrators were cut off from the board office?

The conversation continues. Derek does weigh in through a series of tweets. No surprise, he is all over the idea of a mobile administrator. Interestingly, today it seems difficult to get others to weigh in on this topic. Too general? Too big, or as we observed a few weeks ago, it is difficult and dangerous to tackle topics like this in the world of education.

screenshotAtUploadCC_1509298463794

Or, maybe the conversation needs to move on. Peter Cameron added this comment which really gets to the heart of the issue of admin in the classroom.

peter

This prompt was added by Derek Rhodenizer. It will be interesting to see if any administrators offer comments.

derek

More people have joined the conversation – Julie Bolton and Matthew Oldridge.

Important ideas added here. The need to focus on relationships and keeping them positive. The struggle to remain relevant when you are no longer in the classroom. Also, by Peter Cameron, the challenge of making sure that teachers make sure administrators are welcome in the classroom. Good point here – respect must always be a two-way street.

These are really important ideas and they are not necessarily taught as part of the Principal Qualification Program. I have talked to many educators who struggle in their schools just because they have an administrator who doesn’t seem to get these simple lessons. What can we do when a situation like this arises? Generally nothing – teachers usually leave or wait out the administrator.

This might be at the heart of this conversation. We work in a system that is so dependant on leadership from the top – is this a good thing? What do we do when leadership breaks down? Is this an essential problem in our current system?

Freeing the Minds of School Administrators

On By paulmcguire2013In #IMMOOC, Doug Peterson, governance and public education, Hope, Innovation, leadership, school reform2 Comments

OK, today I admit I am entering the world of fantasy posts, but I am still going to give this a try.

We have seen lots of Twitter traffic and great blog posts in the last two weeks about how educators are stifled in what they can write on social media by school boards who do not want to read dissenting opinions from their employees.

The best posts are coming from Andrew Campbell. This post is great

So, we know what the problem is – the overarching authority of school board bureaucrats and senior admin to stifle all thoughtful opinion but their own. But is there a solution?

Only if you live in the world of fantasy!

I think this is really an issue of governance. Education in Ontario is really controlled by a small number of senior administrators who are in no way overseen by anyone else in the province. Yes, there are lots of ministry directives, but there is no oversight on the overbearing behavior of board admin.

I write board admin because I don’t mean school administrators – principals and vice-principals.

These are the people who have trained for years to become administrators and put everything on the line every day to keep things going in their schools. It is a tough job and there is little or no support for the hard work that they do. There is also little protection given to them in they run into conflict with parents and even worse, board officials.

Many believe that they are agents of their school board first and that the decisions made by the board, decisions they have no say in, must be supported without question.

This is the incredible thing. School administrators are seldom asked for their opinion about how things should be done at a district level. These decisions are made by superintendents and program coordinators who have little connection to the schools they oversee.

School administrators need to have a voice. They need to be consulted in a meaningful way and they need to know that if they speak out they will be protected by a higher authority than their own school board.

If this were to happen we might actually read some interesting and useful comments on how schools can become more effective. Right now, the best we can expect from a school administrator on Twitter is cheerleading – the useless tweets that are designed to make the school look good without conveying any useful information.

So, again firmly in fantasy land, this is my solution. Free up school administrators from the heavy drag of district officials. Let them speak on the record so we can hear from a very effective group of front-line workers who may actually have some ideas on how to bring about effective change to our schools.

This shouldn’t be a fantasy.

 

 

Social Media and Educators – When Will We Grow Up?

On By paulmcguire2013In #IMMOOC, #SAVMP, Doug Peterson, George Couros the Innovators Mindset, governance and public education, Hope, Innovation, Leaning in, OSSEMOOC, school reform1 Comment

Doug Peterson has written a number of great posts over the past few days based on a wide-ranging Twitter conversation we had on the weekend.

Doug has summarized the conversation really well in the following posts:

Yeah, it can happen – Oct 11
The right to tweet – Oct 10
The “P” in PLN – Oct 9

This is a hard conversation to summarize as it went on for three days and had participation from at least ten different participants. The conversation is collected here in case you want to see it.

I also tried to summarize things in this blog post: Twitter, Educators, and Dissent – October 8

As the conversation evolved, we got closer to talking about free speech, social media and working for an institution. I don’t think anything was resolved, but it was very interesting and more than a little sad to read what people had to say.

To me, it shows that our ideas on social media are still evolving. It indicates that institutions have an incredible fear of social media and see it still as a threat. It also reminds me of the incredible power of institutions to suppress the actions of its members even if these actions are not clearly critical of the institution.

To be honest, it is amazing that we had any sort of conversation as some of the participants are still working for districts and these individuals clearly took a risk by getting involved. I totally understand why others decided to stay clear.

I wrote one comment on Doug’s post and I think this would be a good conversation to have openly on voicED Radio.

In preparing to write the comment, I took a look at an old disciplinary letter that I received. It had a chilling effect. It brought back all the old, bad emotions that swirled around during the last year and a half of employment for that district. Truly, writing about this stuff is more difficult than what I have written in the past about my mental health journey.

Still, this needs to be written about. Institutions should not be allowed to operate with impunity, nor should they be motivated by fear or the desire to sanction employees who challenge their way of thinking.

I hope these posts, discussions, and comments can open this conversation a little bit. It is way past time that we matured in our views regarding social media.

Here is my comment:

Hi Doug. Thanks for your posts over the past few days. Very interesting discussion. Reading the comments and your post again I think it is important to point out that disciplinary action is not a black and white thing. I think we are all looking for the smoking gun – the obvious tweet that is clearly over the line. It is not as simple as that and not everything can be resolved through a face to face conversation either.
When it comes to a violation of board policy leading to disciplinary action, it is the school board that defines what is appropriate and what is not. They are the ones holding all the cards and they determine what is appropriate. They issue the letter and add in that any further ‘violation’ will lead to further action including suspension without pay.
These are extremely effective actions because they do not need to define what a violation really is.
When you don’t have to clearly define the policy or the violation almost anything can be considered a violation. This effectively shuts down the person who receives the letter.
School Boards are well within their rights to do this and in Ontario at least, nothing can be done about this, especially if you are an administrator.
You do not have to say or tweet something critical of the board, you just have to do something they disagree with. None of this is obvious and none of this falls within the easily defined lines you mention above.
What is the result of all this? Basically, silence.