#DBC50Summer

#DBC50Summer 43/50: Shake Up Learning

/ Alicia Ray / 3 Comments

I’ve always enjoyed the shiny things in life. I love the feeling of “new”. I’m guilty of tossing something in our house because we just need a “new” one. (It drives my husband absolutely crazy.) I have to admit that I’m the same way with technology. When virtual reality started to become readily accessible in the classroom I was given the opportunity to participate in research with the organization, Foundry10, and I jumped on it! I had no idea how we were going to integrate VR, but I knew I wanted to try. I started out by co-planning lessons that stemmed from the use VR rather than creating ways for VR to enhance the lesson. In the Disney movie Moana, there is a song that the crab sings called “Shiny”. This song reminds me so much of technology and how many of us (myself included) gravitate toward the latest and greatest in an effort to be as shiny as possible.

Newsflash: kids aren’t that impressed with the shiny. After the first few VR experiences, my students are more difficult to impress. They’ve seen the shiny and moved on. As teachers we can’t chase “anything that glitters” – we need real ways to help propel education forward. I believe that Kasey Bell has the solution in her notion of Dynamic Learning Experiences as described in Shake Up Learning, the 43rd book published by Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.

Reading this book was an eye-opener. This is the first book in which I’ve used the space available at the end of every chapter to share my reflections and connections to the chapter. I connected with Kasey from the very beginning, when she described her early years of teaching as a reproduction of how she was taught. I, too, gave problem after problem in math, allowing 2-3 minutes for students to work it out, then showing the entire class how to correctly answer the problem on the overhead, whitebard, SMARTboard, or under the document camera – all that technology just a waste in my classroom for years. It wasn’t until I moved past my fear of change into the realm of risk-taking that I really began to understand that I was doing my students a disservice. And now… I get frustrated that others haven’t reached that same epiphany in a more timely manner. Ironic, much?

Thinking through this book as both a teacher of students and of teachers brings new insight. Focusing on what the students can do with the tool, rather than the tool itself will be imperative as we continue to move forward one step at a time. In our makerspace, we have more tools for learning and creating than we really know what to do with. Our goal in makerspace managers is to create playlists for students and teachers about the tool by creating unboxing videos, tutorial videos, and “what do I do with this” videos. I’m excited to see where this goes and hopeful that our makerspace will be used more this year. I think people just don’t know what they don’t know. The fear of moving into this space with so many unknown tools can make both teachers and students feel a little uneasy. It is my desire to erase that fear this year.

As I read through Kasey’s book, I was continually hit with the notion of Google Keep. In my blog about Ryan Sheehy‘s book Be The One, I mention my desire to use Google Keep to keep myself organized with a checklist. I believe Google Keep is a hidden gem in the Google Suite and I want to uncover that gem for my students and teachers. This is the perfect way for my students to keep a planner, and a way for teachers to stay organized and allow students to create their own learning goals. This tool is constantly showing up in my readings, as well as in professional development and I’m feeling more and more certain that this is a tool I’d like to present to our district’s Digital Learning Leaders in October.

Kasey speaks to using Google Keep, Diigo, and Pinterest as ways to curate resources through digital bookmarking. Curation is so important for both teachers and students. I have used Google Classroom to curate resources for my students, and am thinking Google Keep is a great outlet for curating makerspace playlists, as well as available Virtual Reality content, for my teachers.

I love to learn completely new things! Sometimes I feel as though I’ve reached that point where there’s not a whole lot that impresses me or excites me with technology, as I have used or seen a tool used in multiple ways. The past few years I have attended conferences, I’ve had a lot of “me too” moments. I have been exposed to 360-videos and own the Ricoh Theta S. (We used it in our search for a new home and it helped us pick a home because we had the ability to take a virtual tour of the home. They all run together after seeing 5 or 6 of them in a short period of time.) I started my first makerspace 5 years ago and have been doing high-end virtual reality with the htc Vive for the past 3 years. My school is 1:1 Chromebooks (has been for over 5 years) and has a successful and often used Bring Your Own Device policy. We’ve had 3d printers for at least 4 years. My students have grown up with MinecraftEDU in their media center and we use game-based learning in many of my classes. Gamification is the foundation of EPIC Academy, a teacher professional development model created by my friend and mentor, Lucas Gillispie.

I don’t say all of this to sound pompous or arrogant. It’s just to say that when I hear about something I was unaware of, I get really pumped! This is one reason I loved Kasey Bell‘s Shake Up Learning so much! There are several things I learned about in this book that I’d never heard of, or with which I had limited interactions. One of those things was Google Alerts. I immediately went to set one up for my name, this blog, and #DBC50Summer. I was blown away by the customization and ability to find information about these. I even found a quote from a local newspaper that I was unaware was listed. I can’t believe this service is out there for free! Go check out alerts.google.com!

There are so many practical applications from this book! Choosing one implementation from this book was so difficult because there are oodles and oodles (yes, real words, promise) of reproducible information shared in the pages. I like the idea of choice menus, and I love that Kasey gives multiple examples for various audiences! I like the Dynamic Learning Experiences lesson plans, and I love that Kasey pulls in some spectacular educators to share their own DLE at the end of the book, as well as giving us space to write our own. I like that Kasey implements the ISTE standards and P21.org skills of the Four Cs, and I LOVE that she puts it into an easy-to-understand graphic that brings DLE to the forefront of planning.

My implementation plan comes from the idea that we should be teaching our students and teachers how to fish, not bringing them the fish daily. As an instructional coach, my ultimate goal is to work myself out of a job. I want my learners (whether they are students or teachers) to be able to sustain their own search for knowledge. In an effort to model this, I am going to take the Google Certified Teacher exams this year. I will definitely take (and expect to pass) the Level 1 exam, and would like to carve out the time to take the Level 2. Between this and creating collaborative Google Keep notes for curation among teachers, I’m hoping to begin taking the first steps to empower my teachers to find their own answers. If they are empowered to find their own answers, they will, in turn, empower students to find their own answers.

I very much enjoyed Shake Up Learning and really appreciate the message Kasey shares with educators in her book. Letting go of fear and control is necessary in creating an environment where students feel more comfortable taking risks and failing forward. I would recommend this book to any teacher and administrator who is eager to move from the way it has always been to the way it should be. I’d also recommend this book to the exact opposite audience in hopes that Kasey’s words might be the nudge needed to begin the transformation in their own classroom.

Kasey practices what she preaches by making resources available outside of her book. For more on Shake Up Learning, check out the hashtag #ShakeUpLearning and her website here. There’s no better time to start than now as she is hosting a Book Study beginning on September 27! More information can be found here. The Google Teacher Tribe podcast is a must-listen as Kasey and Matt Miller (author of Ditch that Textbook and co-author of Ditch That Homework) begin season 3 on Monday, September 17! The flipgrid is available here. Thanks to my pal, Andrea Paulakovich, for allowing me to co-pilot this incredible idea of hers to have a global collaboration space for each DBC, Inc book! I also have to say as a southerner, that these shirts are amazing! I will be ordering one as soon as I click publish here! She also shares a companion resource website within the pages of her book, but you’ve got to get the book for that! You won’t be getting it from me! Go grab your copy of the book now so you can start your journey in moving from static lessons to dynamic learning experiences!

I’ve learned enough about DBC, Inc books by now to know that even though book 44 appears to be another book for administrators, I should prepare myself to take away something epic as a non-administrator. The Secret Solution by Todd Whitaker, Sam Miller, and Ryan Donlan is up next! Just taking a sneak peak into the cast of characters provided in the first few pages has me excited to see where this one will take me!

#DBC50Summer 42/50: All 4s and 5s

/ Alicia Ray / 1 Comment

As a high school student, I was pretty driven. I knew that when (not if) I attended college, I would be the first in my immediate family to attend a four-year university. My dad dropped out of high school (later obtaining his GED) and my mom took some courses at the community college, but went into the workforce and was married soon after high school graduation. Knowing that my family would be stretched financially, I tried to complete as many college courses as possible before attending the university.

Advanced Placement, or AP, courses were becoming a thing of the past in my state when I was in high school. Our state has an articulation agreement between community colleges and public state universities (like University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Appalachian State University, East Carolina University, etc). There is also an agreement that students currently enrolled in high school can take college courses at no cost through dual enrollment, many even renting textbooks and courses being taught on the high school campus by high school teachers who are qualified by community colleges to teach the course.

Regular courses held a GPA of 4.0 for an “A”, while honors were weighted at 5.0 and AP and college level courses were 6.0. In order to obtain the 6.0 GPA for the Advanced Placement course and college credit, students had to score proficient or above on the AP Exam. Therefore, students were opting to take college courses and show proficiency through classwork rather than through College Board exams. I left high school with something like 24 credit hours for college completed. I never took an AP class.

I had been excited about Book 42 for quite some time! Coming up on its 6 month “publish-iversary” is Andrew Sharos‘s book All 4s and 5s!

all4sand5s

Andrew straight up brings it in this book! There’s another acronym, which I’ve just about come to expect from DBC books! Knowing that Dave Burgess has a (slight) obsession with acronyms, and being that he’s the President of Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc – it would make sense that so many of the authors he publishes share an affection for acronyms. In Andrew’s book, SCORES is not just what he’s aiming for, but it’s also his acronym of choice. You’ll have to purchase his book in order to find out what his system is for increasing AP scores as an AP teacher.

And increasing scores, he does!!! To go from a 1.96 class average on the AP US History exam with an 18% pass rate to a class average of 4.45 with 100% pass rate in just 3 years… that’s incredible by any standard with any group of students! His students outscored students with much higher socio-economic status and more privilege than these kids could ever dream.

There was this point in the book that I was just highlighting. I could have highlighted every single word Andrew said. There was so much truth and I couldn’t get enough.

It was just that good. (By the way, this guy knows how to hook the reader… he sucks you into a story, then right before he delivers the punchline, he switches gears to fill you in on a backstory or whatnot. I may have skipped ahead in Chapter 4 just so I could hear what Guadalupe said to him after class the day he got emotional. Yeah, that may have happened.) I love the passion exuded in this book. You can tell that the author is truly passionate about believing all students can succeed. Not only succeed, but succeed at the highest levels in one of the notoriously toughest exams available to them.

One of my favorite quotes in the book is a reminder that we are the adults in the situation. This doesn’t always mean that we’ll have it all together, but that we are the grounding force in the classroom. This isn’t a responsibility to take lightly.

Throughout the book, Andrew talks about the culture of his classroom being “us against the test”. He speaks to the stress of taking these advanced courses and the sense of community that can be created within these students. In a survey given to my students at the end of last year, the word “stressed” or some variation was noted 15 times by 14 different students. Middle school students who are stressed about the workload they endure.

Teaching at a middle school, we don’t offer AP courses. However, we do offer a “younger cousin” (if you will) by offering high school courses while in middle school. The middle school I serve offers the opportunity for 8th grade students to take Math 1, English 1, Earth & Environmental Science, and World History. These are all 9th grade courses. These students are still responsible for learning the content and showing mastery on the 8th grade work as well. This is an incredible opportunity for these students (many who which elect to take all four advanced courses) because this translates to a semester of college courses for free through dual-enrollment on the back end!

Like Andrew says in All 4s and 5s, “AP Students are often among the most stressed out in the entire school. They are also the most overcommitted students who rarely turn down an opportunity to play, act, compete, participate, serve, or belong.”

When asked what they wished teachers knew, one student at my school replied: That we (or try/want to) have a life outside of school. Also that we can’t handle so much work at once. Stress, especially at this age, is NOT something easy to cope with. I know from personal experience.

For this reason, I love Andrew’s advice to teachers to be flexible.

Coordinate with teachers of other higher level courses to plan your tests, essays, etc around their syllabi. This is true of all content areas and not just for advanced placement.

I love this thought and believe we should all be participating in cross-curricular planning so we don’t stress students more than necessary. We have to remember that these students aren’t just going home and playing video games all evening. Many of them support their families through working a job, taking care of younger siblings, being the adult in the house for various reasons, and worrying about an essay due in this class and a large exam in another, while a culminating project is due in a third, all within the same day… that kind of stress can be avoided. Yes, they will experience this as they are adults – we all have stress like this. But their brains and emotions are not yet mature enough to handle this. Remember, even at 14, 16, 17, even 18 years old… they’re still kids.

My implementation plan for this book excites me! I used to do more of this as an elementary teacher, but then I had children of my own and wasn’t able to commit to this as much, so I dropped it all together. Now that both of my personal children are in elementary school, I am able to pick it back up and as soon as I saw Andrew Sharos mention it in All 4s and 5s, I knew this was the implementation route I had to go!

Andrew speaks to making “relationship deposits with students in academic and non-academic ways whenever we can.” We can connect with our students…”attending their games, performances, and activities after school or on weekends.” That’s exactly what I plan to do! Some of the greatest looks I’ve ever seen on the faces of my students are when I show up at their games after school. Knowing that I support them both academically and athletically establishes trust that cannot be replicated any other way. Therefore, my plan is to attend at least one game in each athletic season of my middle school students. This will be quite a feat as we have multiple sports at my school – cross-country track, volleyball, soccer, and football are happening now. Then we’ll have basketball and wrestling, swimming and golf, tennis, softball, baseball, and track and field. I think that’s all of our teams – that’s quite a bit in middle school, right? I’m so excited to cheer my students on as they take the field (court, diamond, etc) this year! Having my own daughters there and knowing that they will be yelling their support for their educational brothers and sisters (because they’re all “my kids”) makes it all the more meaningful for me, too! I can’t wait to see the dividends this pays throughout the year!

All 4s and 5s is definitely a book for planning a successful AP program in your school, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a book for any educator who wants to see the best from every student. It’s a book for educators who believe that every student can be successful. I believe any school with accelerated classes, academically/intellectually gifted, etc programs would benefit from this book, as well as classroom teachers who refuse to “teach to the middle”. I am a firm believer that if you teach all students with high expectations, they will eventually rise to those expectations. I’m excited to see the impact of Andrew’s book as it continues to make its way across the country!  I highly recommend you go grab a copy – don’t let the “AP” on the front deter you!

You can follow along with Andrew on twitter at @AndrewSharosAP and the book at @All4sand5s. Ideas are tweeted to #APTeach. I especially love the pictures of the signs in the yards of students. You can see the pride on their teachers and parents faces as well! It’s truly a team effort! There is also a chat you can join on the first Wednesday of each month at 9:00 pm EST. Use that #APTeach hashtag on Twitter to join! Be sure to check out Andrew’s website here. Vicki (@coolcatteacher) Davis interviews Andrew on her 10-Minute Teacher Podcast here. You can also search for #LeydenPride and see the incredible stuff this school and district are doing in Illinois! As always, you can join the fun (or start the fun) on the flipgrid copiloted by Andrea Paulakovich and me. Andrea sent me a DM a few days after #DBC50Summer started and she was eager to begin her own journey with the addition of Flipgrid. I was so blown away that she’d share this experience with me and I’m honored to copilot the flipgrid that was her genius idea! Use this space for global collaborative reflections on all DBC, Inc books!

*Fun story: I just realized that Andrew is in the same district as a fellow I met in 2015 named Jason Markey. Jason came to NCDLCN to present about Empowering Students and the power of a hashtag! Such a small, small world! Jason likely doesn’t remember me, but I was so inspired by the discussion that day that I immediately wanted to create a blog and write every day for 180 days and create a school and/or district hashtag. We did eventually create a school Twitter account at the elementary school I served at the time and our district has a hashtag that is used to share the awesome in our district. What a small world!

I highly enjoyed book 42. You may be wondering if I’ve forgotten the secret I was going to share in the last ten blogs. I’ve not forgotten. I’m just not ready to share it. Soon though, soon. Book 43 is up and I’m thrilled to share Shake Up Learning by Kasey Bell!

#DBC50Summer 41/50: Be The One For Kids

/ Alicia Ray / 4 Comments

Today I was able to tell a student “Yes, I can sponsor the up-cycling club you want to start.” I was able to connect another of our students who needed support with a like-minded teen on the other side of the country. I was able to tell a new student who was visibly distressed about something going on at home that I would always be there to be a listening ear whenever she was ready to talk because I noticed something was off in her demeanor in our media class. A student in In-School Suspension (ISS) had his hood over his head with an obvious chip on his shoulder. After a short chat and telling him I believed he could do better, the hood was off and his entire body language changed. A new teacher came to ask me about two young men who got into a scuffle in her classroom and I had the privilege of changing her mind about the two, as she was obviously frustrated with their actions. She’s planning to take a closer look into the backstory and what circumstances led to this unforeseen hostility in the boys when they return to school.

Today was a good day. Today I feel like I did some good in my little part of the world. Not every day is like today… but today was a good day. And I’m going to celebrate it. What allowed me to go from the crazy Chromebook lady from a few days ago in The Principled Principal by Jeff Zoul and Anthony McConnell blog to this? I was in the middle of reading the 41st book published by Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc which reminded me to Be The One For Kids! Ryan Sheehy shares how to be the one for kids in relation to culture, creativity, empowerment, and continued learning.

This book was the get-up-and-go that I needed to kick the year off right! You can feel Ryan’s passion radiating from the words on the page. In two-three page mini-chapters, Ryan challenges us to be the one for kids in various ways. Some of my favorites were:

Be The One Who Knows Kids’ Stories

Be The One Who Show Kids How To Have Fun

Be The One Who Puts A Smile on Someone’s Face

Be The One Who Tells Your School’s Story

Be The One Who Stays Positive

Be The One Who Teaches Kids It’s Okay To Fail

Be The One Who Loves The Job

Be The One Who Changes The Game

Each of these challenges encouraged me and spoke to my heart! In fact, just rereading the titles gets me pumped all over again! I was about 1/3 of the way through the book this morning and just finished the book. I am motivated to get back to work tomorrow and continue spreading positivity! Ryan says to “Focus on the good and spread it like wildfire.”

I’m looking forward to continuing that tomorrow, and the next day, and the next…

This book wasn’t without some punches to the gut, though! Ryan speaks to being balanced. He tells a story of when he was interviewing for a position and told them that if they wanted someone to be there in the evenings, they needed to find someone else because he was going to be home with his family (paraphrasing his words, of course). He also speaks to being organized and flexible. At this moment, I am poorly organized at work, and at home. There are stacks of bills, papers, books, Lego bricks, etc piled up on nearly every surface I see from here. I know a big portion of my stress can be attributed to the mess around me. I function much better when I am organized. The disorganization is also a sign of the lack of balance in my life at this point. It seems like I never slowed down this summer for the annual “get my life back in order before school starts” house cleaning party. You educators know exactly which one I’m referring to!

With these two hitting me the hardest while reading, I have no choice but to make these my implementation plan! It was a fairly easy decision. Next week I will be shadowing students and cannot wait to spend a few days in the life of a middle school student! I will choose students purposefully with the goal of being in every classroom and shadowing a variety of skill sets. This gives me time to get organized again at work as well. I will not have classes to plan for, so I can spend my afternoons finishing up many of the projects I have floating around the media center and in my Cloud.

I will be using Google Keep to create a checklist of the things I need to accomplish by the end of the month to be sure I am organizing my time and efforts in the most beneficial manner. Creating checklists has always proven to be of benefit to me, so I’m excited to use Google Keep so I can color-code my checklists and organize as needed. (I’m also planning to share Google Keep with my students as they do not have planners in 7th and 8th grade to keep up with all work that needs to be completed. Some students will use this daily while some will never look again. If it positively impacts even just one student, it’s worth sharing with the student body.)

My other implementation feels like I’m cheating because it was booked a long time ago. In July 2017 when the new itineraries for Fall 2018 came out, my husband and I booked a Disney Cruise for our family. We kept this a secret for almost a year. We’ve been saving since our last Disney Cruise (multiple years ago) and despite purchasing a new home and more medical bills than we ever expected, we were able to book this cruise for November 2018. We will be enjoying all the magic Disney has to offer on our 7-night adventure. Because we booked early (and I scoured the Disney Moms website) we were able to book a massive balcony (about three times the size of the oversized verandah we had on our last cruise) and just booked a few excursions while in the Caribbean. This is going to be my balance time. I am very much looking forward to turning off all devices and disappearing for a week, enjoying my family and spending some much-needed time away with them. My daughters certainly get the worst of me. By the time we get home, I am exhausted and the last thing I want is more questions and silliness. I certainly don’t want to do homework and review sight words or argue about whether the reading assignment is completed. I am excited to give them the BEST of me while we’re gone. We will have fun, relax, and they will get my undivided attention and I am so excited to spend this time creating memories with them!

Be The One For Kids is an extraordinary book! It is inspirational and makes you want to do all you can to reach those kids that feel unreachable. I love Ryan’s passion and energy and I can’t wait to meet him one day! Every Wednesday night at 8:45 pm EST, Ryan hosts a fast and furious fifteen minute chat on each chapter of his book (currently on chapter 17 if you want to join tomorrow night)! You can join these chats (and follow along with educators every day of the week) by using the hashtag #BeTheOne. These chats are inspirational and allow you time to reflect on how to better serve your students. You don’t have to have read the book to be successful in the chat! Ryan hosts a fantastic website that you can access here.

Ryan supports foster and homeless youth through the proceeds of t-shirt sales. (Another example of how fabulous the DBC, Inc authors are as humans!) You can order your t-shirt here (they run for a limited time each month). I definitely recommend the tahiti blue long-sleeved t-shirt with a hood. It’s SUPER soft!

Ryan was a guest on multiple podcasts including the Teach Me, Teacher podcast (access parts one and two) and the Pondering Education podcast. He also chats with Teach Better Talk and #ShareMOEdu. He is constantly sharing amazing stuff on Twitter, so I’d definitely be sure to follow him at @sheehyrw! Definitely grab yourself a copy of his book Be The One for Kids! You won’t regret a second of reading his passionate words. His enthusiasm is contagious! Check out the flipgrid, a collaborative space for global reflections on each DBC, Inc book and share your thoughts on Be the One for Kids! I am ever-so-grateful that Andrea Paulakovich messaged me just a few days after my beginning #DBC50Summer and jumped on board with me! Soon after her first post, she suggested copiloting this amazing flipgrid space! Thank you for letting me be part of this, Andrea!

Book 42 is a book I had never heard of before my research in #DBC50Summer. It would make sense that I’d never heard of it though because it’s about Advanced Placement (AP) classes and my experience is at the elementary and just recently the middle school levels. I’m looking forward to reading this one through the eyes of a non-AP teacher and seeing what I can apply to my students in middle school. Also – the author, Andrew Sharos, is a HUGE inspiration to me on Twitter (I adore him) and I’m thrilled to finally reach his book! We’ve been counting it down for a while, and it’s finally time to take on All 4s and 5s!