Archives: December, 2008

For our next book club selection, I’d like to suggest Tribes by Seth Godin. As we build off the work of the Network Working Group and our efforts to mobilize our network of coordinators and groupies, Tribes applies to LEARN NC because it discusses how other individuals and organizations have accomplished precisely what we’re trying to do.

To best describe what the book is, I’ll start with what it’s not:

• Not a how-to book. This book won’t give us an easy formula to mobilize our ambassadors. Godin explicitly states he doesn’t have step-by-step plan to get people to do what we want them to do. There’s not a single strategy or tip to be found. Instead, Tribes presents dozens of case studies of how people have harnessed technology, charisma and courage to inspire their fans to spread the word. Godin also states there’s no single right way to lead a tribe of people–the only thing his examples have in common is they make remarkable things or perform remarkable services, without which they wouldn’t have fans in the first place. LEARN NC does make remarkable things, and we’ve got the fans to prove it.
• Not a guide to social media marketing. While many of the case studies use services like Twitter or Facebook, Godin makes it very clear that these are just tools to facilitate communication and leadership. While he states that these tools make it easier than ever to communicate with a tribe (and allow them to communicate with each other), it’s knowing how and when to communicate with people that matters, whether you communicate via social network, in person, over the phone, or whatever.
• Not heavy. Tribes is a little on the airy side, and you can get through it in only a couple of hours (I listened to the audiobook, which clocks in at less than four hours). However, after slugging through Shame of the Nation, perhaps that’s what we need right now.

Through years of hard work and providing services that are truly helpful to teachers, LEARN NC has built an enthusiastic bunch of fans. Though Tribes won’t provide a bulleted list of how to get them to do our bidding, it does present many ideas and strategies that have worked for others, which can hopefully inspire us as we look to do the same.

Like this idea? Want to suggest something different? Sound off in the comments.

In a recent New Yorker Magazine article, Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” states,  “After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. . . . The students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”

The problem is, he says,  “No one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.”  For example, he says researchers “have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be . . .[practically useless] in predicting success.”

He concludes, therefore, that “Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start . . . an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated” and that “tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. . . .  An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.”

Read the entire article here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?yrail

For your next presentation, consider using this tactic to keep people involved with LEARN NC.

On Tuesday, Emily and I presented some LEARN NC resources to Wake County middle and high school teachers. They were a receptive bunch, and our resources went over well. In addition to handing out flyers and lanyards, we passed around an email sign-up sheet so people could sign up for email updates (we put our names and email addresses on the sheet so they could see how to fill out the form, as well as so they could see our email addresses). They could choose to receive updates for general LEARN NC news, as well as professional development updates. After the presentation, we sent an email listing links to all the resources we talked about (Digital Textbook, standard course of study, Instructify, PD) plus a few we didn’t have time for (DiscoverNC, The First Year, Ed Reference).

If you’re underwhelmed by our strategy, I don’t blame you. A clipboard and a pen (even a snazzy LEARN NC pen) are as low-tech as it gets. Besides, folks can sign up for email updates very easily from the LEARN NC website. So why bother?

In my opinion, when asking people to take action, no matter how simple it is, your odds of success are inversely proportional to the number of barriers in their way. While someone can easily go to the site and sign up, they can just as easily decide to check their email instead. Or maybe they’ll visit the site and forget to sign up. Or they can’t find the email updates link (I confess I often miss things right in front of me). Or maybe all the enthusiasm they built up during the presentation has been overwhelmed by test scores, grading and lunch duty. Putting a sign-up sheet and pen in their hands right there and then removes all potential distractions or avenues for procrastination. If they’re not interested, they pass the clipboard along, no harm done. If they are interested, they sign up, and we don’t have to worry that any potential LEARNatics slid off the hook.

Further, sending a follow-up email gives them a direct line to the people they talked to, in case they have questions or ideas. Sure, we had business cards ready during the presentation. But are you more likely to type in the email address of a speaker who gave out a business card, or hit “reply” to an email from the friendly presenter who reminded you of the URL to that neat Digital Textbook project?

In case you’re wondering, we got 23 signatures — roughly one-third of the attendees — all but two of whom signed up for both general updates and professional development updates. I honestly don’t know if that’s a lot, but I’d bet you 11 American dollars that’s at least double what we would have gotten had we just asked them to sign up at the website later.

It’s possible, of course, that all of these folks will unsubscribe once they get their first email from us. It’s also possible — even likely — that at least a few will forward some of the information on to a friend who they think could benefit from it. Remember, each person we speak to is a potential LEARN NC evangelist, and I’m all for making it as easy as possible for them to spread the word to their friends. For them to do that, though, they first have to be excited about what we do. And if they’re new to LEARN NC, the time when they’re most excited is moments after we’ve just shown them all the great stuff we can do. Why risk letting that enthusiasm fade away? Sign them up on the spot so we can keep them in the loop.

From the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, an announcement:

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain is delighted to announce the publication by Yale University Press of “THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: ENCLOSING THE COMMONS OF THE MIND//,” the new book by CSPD Faculty Co-Director James Boyle. Appropriately given the book’s theme, it is both for sale in hardback and available online for free under a Creative Commons license. To download the book or read it online, please visit http://www.thepublicdomain.org/

Not surprising that Boyle would do this; you may be interested though in his explanation/argument for doing so. Read the comments though to see what he thinks about distributed comment and annotation. This is basically what we’re talking about doing with lesson plans, right? His (admittedly brief) comment sounds like some things I’ve said, and it sounds like what the teachers at our user group meeting in April said.

The question is, are our lesson plans more like a scholarly book or more like a blog post?

The annual report on teacher retention will be presented to the State Board this week.
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/sbe_meetings/0812/tcp/0812tcp05.pdf

Turnover is up, over 13.5% even when adjusted for VIF (Visiting International Faculty). Note that secondary math and science as well as EC (exceptional children) and ESL (English as a second language) continue to top the chart of hard-to-staff positions, validating anything we can do to support the recruitment and retention in those areas.

LEAs with the highest turnover are concentrated in the eastern part of the state. Weldon City lost over 40% of their teachers this year.

At the end (pages 51-53) there is a report by Eric Hirsch who works with us in the Teachers’ Working Conditions (TWC) survey indicating the role of good working conditions in retaining teachers. Trust, mutual respect, minimization of paperwork, shielding of teachers from unnecessary disruptions, and strong mentors for new teachers are all strong in the systems experiencing highest teacher retention. Further validation for the need to treat teachers as professionals and the dire need for new teacher supports.

Opera has made available a tool called MAMA that anyone can use to mine their research on the structure of web pages… so if you want to know what the web actually looks like underneath (it ain’t pretty):

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/

I don’t know that this has any practical value for us, but I found it interesting that the average web page still has tables nested three-deep.