KM in Education

Return to the Blogging Space

This winter, after I finally resigned myself to finding part-time income with corporate contracting, my exploration of educational career options took an exciting twist.

The Bay Area Education Leaders Forum, which I had discussed last summer with Lisa Petrides of ISKME, became a reality. IBM graciously sponsored our kickoff event on February 17, 2005 at WestEd in San Francisco.  Despite the miserable weather, we had a great turnout for a panel discussion on learning within educational organizations. Everyone enjoyed the discussion and insights shared by panelists from Leadership High School in San Francisco, the Stupski Foundation, the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), and New Schools Venture Fund.

The same week, I launched my new career, as the project manager of the district redesign initiative at Oakland Unified School District. The position greatly exceeded my expectations. I feel incredibly lucky to have joined such a talented team dedicated to the challenge of improving student achievement through district transformation.

Unfortunately, with the rush of activity, my weblog has been too long neglected. In the coming weeks, I hope to change that.

Mentor models for teacher preparation programs

Today I came across the National Teaching Academy, a model that emphasizes the role of mentors or Master Teachers in preparing teachers for certification. The Academy plans to pilot its first class of novice teachers in Washington, D. C.'s urban public schools.

The program reminded me of UCSC's New Teacher Center, whose related Santa Cruz New Teacher Project has systematically graduated teachers who have demonstrated higher levels of professional competence and impressive retention rates. They follow a mentor-based induction model with critical support from individuals, schools, and districts.

With the current emphasis on ensuring highly qualified teachers in the public education system, teacher preparation programs are rethinking their approaches. In the mentor-based models which are gaining momentum, experience clearly counts.

An Analysis of SFUSD Board of Education Candidates

What the San Francisco Board of Education needs today is less in-fighting and more solutions for action. Parents want to see more resolutions addressing school improvement and less politically-driven resolutions such as the banning of irradiated meat and sunshine for the schools. With a strong, positive vision based upon effective community engagement, the Board could become a powerful partner in helping Superintendent Arlene Ackerman effectively implement the Excellence for All plan. The outcome of this election is critical to Ackerman’s ability to continue making improvements in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) as her contract will soon be up for renewal.

I evaluated each candidate along the following criteria:
• Vision and Focus
• Experience running a large organization (SFUSD has a 7000-strong staff running ~120 schools with a budget of approximately $500M)
• Experience with SFUSD, schools and children
• Potential to bridge across multiple communities (parents, teachers, other Board members, etc)
• Ability to work with Superintendent Arlene Ackerman (she is broadly acknowledged to have done very good work so far, and this election is critical for determining whether or not she can work with the new Board)

My evaluation is based on:
• Attending two Board of Education meetings this month and detailed research of all the candidates’ backgrounds and platforms (from candidate statements, schoolboardmatters.org, smartvoter.org, and candidate websites)
• Maximizing complementary skills and experiences and the potential for collaboration with each other and existing Board members.

Below I have summarized each candidate’s background and platform, as well as my assessment in italics. First, the incumbents whom I watched in action:

Heather Hiles
• Appointment to Board of Education in January 2004 by Mayor Gavin Newsom.
• Solid political and non-profit experience in community and economic development as a Coro Fellow, social entrepreneur and non-profit executive.
• Record for working hard to change inefficiencies in Board processes and structure, and in so doing, generating animosity from teacher’s union.
• Action, business orientation supports Ackerman’s policies, but does not bring own vision for SFUSD schools.
Hiles does not offer her own strong vision for SFUSD schools, but her experience, action orientation and support of Ackerman’s plan makes her a strong candidate. Unfortunately, given the antagonism she has generated among union members, I suspect a new face will be better for the Board.

Eric Mar
• An attorney, college educator, political and community activist, and School Board member for 4 years.
• Background and record of for civic rights and racial justice, while important, distracts from real school improvement.
• Priorities are greater community empowerment and involvement in district decision-making, equal education opportunity, and strong financial oversight.
• Alignment with Sanchez may have alienated other Board members.
Mar does not offer an education improvement-focused platform, despite a strong record of leadership, collaboration and accomplishments in the areas of educational equity and advocacy. It is also uncertain how much he will support Ackerman and can collaborate with other Board members given past tensions.

Mark Sanchez
• Former teacher and strong teacher advocate, Board member for 4 years.
• Platform is based on empowerment, openness, and greater classroom resources
• Divisive approach, name-calling and unprofessional behavior have alienated Board members, effectively detracting from finding common solutions.
• Previous threats to fire Ackerman risk disrupting continuity of Superintendent Ackerman’s role and programs
Although Sanchez makes an excellent advocate for his constituency, I find his talents highly inappropriate for the role of a Board member. His vision does not focus on student success, he brings no organizational experience and he does little to bridge the needs of his constituency with other parties.

Jill Wynns
• Parent and School Board member since 1993
• Only candidate with comprehensive vision to make SF schools the best in the country (coming from an 11-year incumbent!)
• Instrumental role in bringing Arlene Ackerman to SFUSD
• Commitment and extensive experience evident in her insightful questions
Among all the candidates, Wynns offers a stellar vision and unmatched experience given her longstanding role on the Board. In the two meetings I attended, she earned my respect for her deep understanding of SFUSD and her integrity in asking tough questions.

And the new candidates, where my assessments are derived solely from my research:

Dr. James Calloway
• Retired principal with 30+ years’ experience with SFUSD in various roles
• Vision of excellence across all aspects of district
• No clear record of achievements in community engagement, administration. or bridging constiutencies
Calloway appears to be running on the strength of his credentials, which is simply not enough for a school system that is widely perceived to have declined in the past couple decades. Without a focused vision and specific concrete achievements in SFUSD, how can any well-informed voter trust in his ability to engage the community to move schools towards excellence?

Jim Ferrigno
• Teacher for 8 years and radio show host
• Vision is based on ensuring transparency, adequate funding and resources, fighting high-stakes testing, academic freedom, and removing the gag order on teachers speaking to the press.
• Active in community non-profit work
• Stated intention to not renew Ackerman’s contract, but open to changing his mind
Ferrigno comes across as an advocate committed to challenging policy at the district, state and federal levels, rather than a Board member dedicated to finding district solutions to build a vision for excellent schools. Also, he blames Ackerman for not fighting federal mandates and enforcing the gag order, both situations which are unlikely to change with another superintendent in place.

Larry Kane
• Wrestling coach at Galileo High School since 1993, corporate lawyer and aspiring SFUSD parent
• Agenda to work to build excellent schools for all based on community engagement, improving low-performing schools and promoting after-school programs
• One of two candidates providing multiple testimonials from kids in SFUSD
• Strong professional/organizational experience in mediation and legal, financial and business matters
Kane exemplifies community engagement and an apolitical platform. Given his deep professional experience, demonstrated commitment to kids, and vision for how to improve schools, he would be an asset to the Board.

Jane Kim
• 27-year-old youth program director and youth advocate
• Bold vision that encompasses many components, including: high standards, small schools, SF values, equity in schools, transparency, community partnerships, and protecting classroom funds
• One of two candidates providing multiple testimonials from kids in SFUSD
• Solid experience in community engagement and advocacy
While Kim is clearly talented in community organizing and working with youth, she lacks experience in working directly with schools and in leading large organizations. In addition, her platform is inconsistent from site to site, belying the lack of focus in her vision for SFUSD schools as she tries to appeal to as many consitutents as possible.

Joel Springer III
• Paralegal and educator with 25 years’ teaching experience
• Platform focuses on neighborhood schools, district decentralization and accountability
• Support for Ackerman’s financial and academic achievements
• No record of community engagement, organizational experience, or building collaborative efforts among divided parties
Springer articulates a focused platform that mentions excellence as an afterthought. He also does not offer any demonstrated experiences that give me confidence that he brings critical community engagement or administrative skills.

Starchild
• Escort/Exotic dancer
• Platform based on school choice, reversing salary structure between teachers and administrators, and bringing an outside perspective
• No clear relevant experience to bring to Board role
• Supports removal of Superintendent Ackerman due to high salary
Starchild does offer a solution, but it simply entails moving people around, not ensuring a quality education. His addition would also not contribute any needed skills or knowledge to the Board.

David Weiner
• Current SFUSD principal at Alvarado Elementary, former teacher and Masters in School Leadership from Harvard
• Vision for building great schools with better community engagement, addressing the achievement gap, and ensuring high quality staff members.
• Valuable experience in successfully building community support and improving instruction as a principal
If elected, Weiner would bring a unique perspective as a recent principal committed to great schools, one which the Board could definitely use. Having improved his school’s performance, he will also provide valuable insight into the process and workings of engaging the community to improve a school.

Norman Yee
• Former teacher and education advocate for 30 years
• 5-Star vision to build excellent SF schools with excellence everywhere, leadership for change, parent engagement, small schools reform, and early childhood education
• Deep experience in building education coalitions and community youth programs
• Broad support from teachers and community members
Yee is a strong contender for the convincing platform he has articulated, his lengthy experience with youth in the community, and his administrative experience. He is one of the few candidates, if not the only one, who scores well along all my criteria.

Based on my evaluation, I found the strongest candidates to be (in alphabetical order):

Larry Kane
David Weiner
Jill Wynns
Norman Yee

All four recommended candidates have articulated compelling visions for the future of SF schools. Jill Wynns, as a longstanding Board member, and David Weiner, a current SFUSD principal, together offer unbeatable experience at the district and school levels. Norman Yee, with 30 years’ experience working with and for youth, and Larry Kane, a law firm partner who has spent 11 years coaching and mentoring the wrestling team at an SFUSD high school, both bring deep organizational experience and critical community perspectives. All candidates also have demonstrated the commitment and ability to work with teachers, a critical constituency that has felt left out of recent Board decisions.

This election will certainly be watched along many fronts, presidentially and locally. I hope that you have found this candidate evaluation helpful - and welcome any constructive comments.

Viral learning

Fighting off two cold viruses in the last month have unfortunately put a damper on my blogging the last few weeks. While lamenting the efficacy of viruses which now traverse the country within days, I began to wonder whether natural viral qualities could be put to better use. The dot-com era first saw viral marketing used by Hotmail. Why not viral learning?

Viral marketing propagated marketing messages through email, passing tag lines through email, resulting in a combination effect of word-of-mouth marketing and a high hit rate. Viral learning would ideally spread learning through a similar construct. A Google search on viral learning returned only one site dedicated to viral learning. Clearly it's not a concept that has taken off yet!

Free PDA Simulations from MIT

MIT's Teacher Education Program (TEP) has developed some free PDA simulation games based on undergraduate research projects. The games with descriptive names like Big Fish-Little Fish or Virus provide students with experiential lessons in genetics, economics, evolution, and game theory.

Also don't miss TEP's links to other interesting projects, such as their indoor and outdoor augmented reality simulations that link real-world experiences to information supplied by handhelds. Mystery @ The Museum is a futuristic simulation that resembles the old-fashioned board game Clue.

Sharing instruction through curriculum mapping

While speaking with a charter school start-up today, I learned of their recent selection of a curriculum mapping tool to enable collaboration and sharing of instruction planning and assessment among teachers and administration. I decided to learn more about curriculum mapping and have summarized below what I found.

Curriculum mapping appears to have grown out of the pioneering ideas in Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' book, Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K–12. In her first chaper, she writes:

With so little real-time data available, we find two polarized tendencies. One is to become rigid and lock step with curriculum guides, giving the impression that all is under control. The second is to become so loose and vague that no one seems to have a clue as to what is going on.

To make sense of our students' experiences over time, we need two lenses: a zoom lens into this year's curriculum for a particular grade and a wide-angle lens to see the K–12 perspective. The classroom (or micro) level is dependent on the site and district level (a macro view)....We need to change the process used in making curriculum decisions because most curriculum committees are ineffective at actually producing work that directly affects student performance.

What Dr. Jacobs proposes is a method that transforms curriculum planning into a vehicle for communication, collaboration and ongoing dynamic review of instructional planning. She also introduces the novel approach of taking a student's perspective in looking at the curriculum holistically and longitudinally to identify redundancies or gaps.

The first two chapters of Dr. Jacobs book provide a good overview of the process and reasons behind curriculum mapping. For a good primer on curriculum maps and different models, consult Least Tern's presentation.

The market for curriculum mapping is fast evolving, as many sites list outdated names and links. The major players all make reference to Dr. Jacobs' methodology as the basis for their design.

Among the more recognized curriculum mapping tools, I found:
AEL's Curriculum Creator - Curriculum Mapping & Design Tool
Atlas Curriculum Management System
Techpaths
WestJam's Curriculum Mapper

Additional players include:
Scantron's Curriculum Designer
Schoolution's MyLessonBuilder and CurrMapper

Beyond these vendors, many organizations such as NCREL and individuals offer consulting services for curriculum mapping.

Dr. Jacobs' site for curriculum design offers further resources.

TFA Teachers Blogging

Today, while scanning my visitor stats, I discovered the Teachers' Lounge. I found it a highly appropriate follow-up to my posting about Teach for America (TFA) as a spark for innovation in public education. The Teachers' Lounge Wiki was created by current TFA member Rob Lucas. As he explains it:

Over the course of last year, my first year of teaching, I spent many a late night planning lessons for the following day. During those nights, a single thought gnawed at me: Thousands of other teachers across the country were doing just as I was, and thousands more had done so every year for decades. Yet there was no way for me to fully benefit from the experience of all those who had come before.

I’ve created this website to change that. It’s a new type of collaborative website called a 'wiki,' where most pages can be edited not just by a webmaster, but by any registered user. That means you can post lesson plans, links, handouts, PowerPoint presentations—virtually anything!

It is this blend of entrepreneurism, familiarity with technology, and understanding of educational challenges that generates innovation in education today. The next challenge for these education innovators will be to disseminate their successes into classrooms beyond their immediate reach.

Who Knows What - Who's Accountable?

One challenge that should be addressed in the next few years is helping educators, administrators and those who support them to quickly tap sources of expertise. Currently most people leverage their professional networks to locate the person or information they want. With the number of reform efforts, foundations, for example, express frustration at not knowing who is currently funding or planning to fund specific areas, so they can best determine their grantmaking strategies. At the district or charter management organization level, schools that are successful in certain areas should share their experience and strategies so other similar schools do not reinvent the wheel.

If all these entities belonged to one large corporation, say USAEducation, in the interest of minimizing redundancy and therefore costs, USAEducation executives would mandate building of processes and tools to ensure that expertise is shared throughout the corporation, not recreated for every similar issue that pops up per school, district, state, or foundation.

Unfortunately, our education system is not designed in such a way so that some entity, even the U.S. Department of Education, feels accountable for being cost-effective across the sector. Perhaps transformational change across the education sector will occur when an organization finally assumes that level of responsibility.

Ending insularity to achieve high performance

The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, also known as BASRC, is currently working on a best practices study drawn from high-performing classrooms, schools and districts. According to Ida Oberman, BASRC's Director of Research and Evaluation, among the study's findings is a pattern of high performance facilitated through knowledge accessed from the outside. High performers tend to tap into external knowledge sources.

This pattern should not be surprising. The first chapter of Bill Ouchi's Making Schools Work touches on this pattern in the transformation of one of the worst-performing elementary schools in Chicago into a high-performing school. In the process, teachers at the school conducted research and imported a reading program from New Zealand to help children who are in danger of falling behind. Their willingness and readiness to adopt best practices from outside certainly contributed to their success.

By encouraging and helping more schools and districts to look beyond themselves and their communities in order to identify best practices for their students, we should be able to improve student achievement without reinventing the wheel.

Capturing that whiteboard

Have you ever wished you could just whisk your whiteboard notes into a computer? I saw it done once with a handy device a client pulled out of his briefcase a few years ago. Then I forgot all about it until I stumbled across this.

Introducing Virtual Ink's Mimio. Mimio is a portable device that attaches to a whiteboard and enables you digitally record, copy and print anything you write or draw in that blank space. I'm not very familiar with the market, but am frankly surprised it hasn't taken off faster. Perhaps it's that $799 price tag that they refer to as low-cost on their website.

That hefty price tag is probably one reason that Virtual Ink has sponsored a monthly giveaway contest. They are giving away one Mimio free every month to the educator, student or administrator who submits the most creative, innovative idea for how to use the Mimio. Not a bad approach for conducting direct market research and generating innovative ideas pretty cheaply!