I recently responded to a prompt that asked why I decided to teach my subject area (Social Studies), and what I do to stay interested in the topic.  As I was contemplating an answer, I realized that most of my love for my content area comes from the new ways that I learn to teach it. My passion comes from finding new methods to reach kids and my vehicle is the content while using technology might be the spoiler, new rims and the cherry bomb muffler that I add on after market. I get to keep that interest fresh by building new online courses, revamping old ones, and reviewing those of others.  Out of that desire to engage kids came new passions like using Web 2.0 and best practices in online teaching that I now teach about as well, but the prompt explores my original content area only.

Below is my full response to the prompt, but what I’m really wondering is did you ever love your content and if so, how do you stay drawn to it?  If not, how do you stay motivated to teach it?

I was initially drawn to the field of Social Studies and specifically to the area of History because it helped me find my answer to “why?”  When I studied Math and Science in high school, it told me why certain things happened at biological and structural levels.  English helped me to better understand myself and better communicate that knowledge.  However, history and government courses were the only subjects that ever told me why people fought in wars, why religion was so dominant throughout the world,  why the national news broadcast the stories it did and why governments made decisions a certain way.  I have always been interested in the human side of the underrepresented, and social studies courses helped me learn more about humankind.

After years of struggling just to get to college, I finally pursued my dream of higher education and specifically teaching kids about the topics I cared most about, history and people.  A professor took me under his wing and mentored me for years and showed me how to dig deeper, ask harder questions, and gave me a true love of sharing information.  He also modeled what mentoring and working with at-risk youth looked like.  I did not get into education to talk about history but to help kids get through a terribly difficult time in their lives and pursue the one thing that can truly give us equal opportunity in this society, learning.  That professor helped me reach a new level of knowledge that I took with me to my first job, working at a blended learning high school with at-risk students.

About three years into teaching, I became quite enamored with education reform, best practices in online teaching, and building stronger relationships with my distance education students.  I began looking at social networking and education technology as tools to help me motivate and engage my students as well as to reach them at their level and in places they liked online.  As a result, I became heavily involved with Web 2.0 and education based social networks throughout the country.  That drive to make my courses better led to me constantly revamping my existing courses as well as developing new courses for my primary online high school.  With each revision and new course comes diving deeper into my content area in order to find better angles to hook students and incorporate what I was learning in my education communities.  As I fell more in love with this newer version of course development and facilitation, I expanded my passion for the study of people, which is all social studies is to me.  I went on to complete my Masters of Educational Technology and to teach for many different programs with kids and adults from around the country and with each new day in my jobs comes new ideas for my courses formed from my own deep love of learning.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Flickr user  doozzle

Back Story

At the beginning of school last year, I decided to call all of my students to welcome them to my courses.  I had about 150 students.  It took me 3 weeks to call them.  I was making calls at night and on weekends, averaging about 5-10 per night.

Usually I don’t need to call every student, just the ones who have fallen behind.  But in a school, a district, and a state that has difficulty graduating kids, we have a lot who are behind.  Enter Phonevite.

Here Comes the Great Tool Part

I can now call 150 students in 5 minutes.  Okay, okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit.  First off, I don’t have 150 students this year, I have under 100 (wish I would of known about Phonevite last year).  Secondly, it takes a little more than five minutes.

You have to set up your phone book.  I currently have 55 contacts which took me about 30 minutes to input over a couple sittings.  This is the longest part of the process.

Then you have to record your message.  I try to keep my messages around a minute.  My last one said something like ” Hi, this is Mr. Plough calling.  Your child currently has under 55% in my course.  Please give me a call back so that we can come up with a strategy to help them succeed.”  Of course, that’s the abbreviated version, and you can add as much or as little as you need in order to get the parent’s attention.

One of the negatives is that you can’t answer all the calls that blow up your phone right after your call goes out.  And, many of the parents calling me back wouldn’t leave a voicemail.  I could see they called on my ‘missed call’ list, but I feel a little awkward about returning a call when someone didn’t leave a message so I have to take those for a loss.

The best part is that parent’s get your messages, most of them listen to the entire message (you can check on Phonevite), and student’s start doing work. Immediately.  The teacher is connecting, albeit with an automated message, to the parents and then the parents are sitting down with their kids, or giving them that extra push they might have needed, and the assigments start rolling in.

Even though I’m excited about this tool, it is not the end all for contacting students.  I still have to meet them in their classes, call the parents personally and have long discussions, and send dozens of emails everyday.  But, this tool makes communication easier than it ever has been in my five years of teaching online.

It’s one week before the first quarter ends, and I have my highest passing rate ever at this point in the year.  Coincidence?

In the past couple years, I’ve spent a lot of time networking in order to learn more about teaching with the hopes of using what I’ve learned to help my students achieve more.  I came to the point where I had learned a lot and felt that I should share it with others who didn’t know as much about certain tools, or resources, or research, or methodologies as I did.  That’s fine.  That’s not a bad thing, and I’ve had a lot of fun presenting and working with people online.  However, I’ve lost a little focus along the way.

No longer was I looking to just learn more in order to better teach my students.  I have been trying to tackle too much.  I have high hopes of making online learning a viable option for students and schools across the country.  But, I have failed to do the one thing that really needs to be done ahead of all my other goals, get my students learning as much as they can in my classes. I spend so much time on my classes and really thought that I had been giving it my all, but to be honest, there is still more I can do.

I am refocusing my purpose.  Time that I spend at home on Twitter or in CR 2.0, I can use to call my kids.  Time that I spend preparing for conference presentations, I can spend building better examples for my online students.  Time that I have spent emailing and chatting with people in my networks, I can spend creating audio recordings for my lessons.  There is so much more that I can do to help my kids that I have to refocus all of my energy on that until I figure out what works.

The first couple weeks of school have been very dramatic, a lot has changed, budget cuts and a reemphasizing of fundamentals has overtaken our school.   These changes and challenges have made me really examine my goals for the year.

Instead of several wide ranging goals like I had last year, I’ve narrowed it down to one.  Just one little thing.  Nothing else.

Get all of my kids to pass all of my classes and learn to the best of their ability.  That’s it.

photo from Flick User: Scott Robbin

So how do I stop it? How do I not be so serious?

Which one of these is stopping you from having more fun?

When I was in High School I was petrified of public speaking. It got even worse when I went to college and didn’t know anyone in the room. In fact, early on in my college career I would drop courses if I found out there was a speech involved. I hated that about myself, but hated the idea of speaking even more. Then I became a teacher.

Knocking Down that First Big Wall:
When I began college at 21, after 3 years of floating around through life, I knew I wanted to work with kids. I wasn’t interested in teaching at that point because I didn’t think there was anyway I could get up in front of a class everyday and just….talk. But after a few years of college, something changed. I had to take a speech class to move to a 4 year school, there was no way to avoid it anymore. Even though I dreaded every one of those 3-5 minute monologues ( I would shake, my stomach would get upset, and I felt flushed with heat), I started getting a little confidence in myself. The final assessment of the semester was presenting a Persuasive Speech I wrote about working with kids in the community (I still didn’t think I could teach at this point). My speech got nominated by our class and I ended up in a school-wide competition. I didn’t win but made it to the finals and the observers were about 50 students, a dean from Stanford, one from Cal Poly, and the head of my school. In about 6 months I had gone from being deliriously nervous just to talk in front of 30 kids in a community college classroom, to the finals of a speech competition in front of some very intimidating people.

Going for It:
Once I got through that course, I knew I could become a teacher. But the fears didn’t stop once I did. I still get nervous in front of my peers and large groups and there are still personal barriers that I keep trying to knock down. The main difference now is that I set goals to break down those walls. I push myself to handle uncomfortable situations. Just last week I presented at my first NACOL Webinar, which was really strange and awkward. I wasn’t happy with how I presented my ideas in that hour, but I know that next time will be better because I got through it.

How This Applies to my Kids:
I want to push my kids to do things that unnerve them. I want to teach students to play outside of their safe zones. I want to help them get through their fears at a much younger age than I did. I talk to kids about this in very limited situations right now, but as I’m growing as a teacher I’m learning that this plays more and more of a role in students lack of success. I think I’m finally beginning to understand the role of fear in a teenagers mind, and hopefully I can help them break down some of the barriers that fear creates.

This isn’t always the case though and its a frustrating thing to see in the teachers that we work with. They are proficient in their subject, can teach the heck out of Pythagoras, but haven’t learned any new skills in a long time. They haven’t made the commitment to continually become better. That commitment leads to learning. Its somewhat understandable though, teachers have a lot to deal with at their jobs. Their jobs are difficult, their time is short, and their day is filled with constant pressures. But teaching is dynamic, its fluid, and there are always ways to improve.

Best practices change. Pedagogical techniques and theories progress. Technology is always advancing. Our kids are moving so fast that we have to do everything we can to connect with them and make their education relevant. If we aren’t learning how to do that we are just helping these kids fail.

Scott Mcleod recently wrote about the concept of creating teachers that are learners and making it operational at the school level. Is there a way to operationalize the idea that if you are teaching you have to be learning?

At the state/district level we require teachers to take college or professional development courses to maintain their certificate. Is that really effective though? We have all seen teachers that take courses to move up on the pay scale and remain certified but never apply anything that was taught to them. So if the application of learning isn’t there then is the learning still valid?

Can we evaluate teachers on new concepts that they learned throughout a year? If so, wouldn’t we have to evaluate how they implemented what they learned? I mean, sure we can have teachers write out or tell us what best practices, new pedagogy, or content area material they recently learned but it’s still not benefiting the student if they don’t apply their new knowledge.

Maybe in order to operationalize learning at the school level we need to monitor how it is applied in the classroom. We can always add another school policy, maybe one that requires dedication to continual learning and proof of the implementation of that learning. Or…….

^{_{photo courtesy of flickr user: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³}}

Embrace Myspace: Safe Uses of Social Networking and Web 2.0 tools

There are some fundamental accessibility problems at our online school. High School students, and students of all ages for that matter, have trouble navigating online courses. So, if we know that, why don’t we make it easier for them? Are we trying to trick them? Are we trying to exude power by playing guessing games? It’s simple, they will learn more of the actual content if we take the time to include some fundamental basics when constructing our courses. Below are 5 tips for making your online coursework more accessible.

1. Lesson Introductions – Most of our online teachers do not include this basic part to a good lesson plan. The introduction, or what I call the hook, has to somehow connect what kids are about to learn to what they already know. Building your lesson to connect to their background knowledge is the first rung on a ladder to creating schema organization in long term memory. It also gives the lesson relevancy and motivates students by tying into what they already know or like.

2. Be Brief but Organized – We have all been to a website where you scroll down further and further, seemingly never coming to an end of the webpage. If you do that in an online lesson the kids are gone, done before they ever begin. Lessons have to be constructed in small, organized parts without including pages worth of material on one webpage.

3. Requirements – Tell the students what you want them to do. For example, if you are sending the student to a link outside of your webpage then tell them what to do once they get there. Be specific, tell them exactly what to read and sometimes what to ignore. Also, when the student is completing a project or written assignment, you should include the exact requirements of what they need to understand for that assessment.

4. Student Samples- Try to provide student samples. We do this in a regular class, why wouldn’t we do it online? All of my courses utilize a wiki that my students have created and host to show off quality work.

5. Don’t hide things from our kids- If you want HS kids to find what you want them to learn, put it right in front of them. Don’t make them go to one page to find a password or another to find what you are going to assess them on. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to have links that shoot the kids off to content, but don’t make accessing the content a labyrinth they have to navigate. Its difficult enough for kids to just complete the assignments in an online course, don’t try to teach them how to be successful scavenger hunters to do that.

Many of us believe the way we have set up our courses is spot on. Are we paying attention to the signs that student’s are giving us that tell us they aren’t?