I've been in Philadelphia for three years, and the School District has had three different leaders. There is not a single cabinet level position that is held by the same person that was holding it when I start. The district has absorbed over a quarter billion dollards of cuts in that time. One of the ancillary issues around that is that is that much of what people talk about is, not surprisingly, the palace intrigue and the latest personnel and structural changes, rather than talking about the big ideas around education reform, rather than talking about how we can transform our schools to reflect the world we live in today.

This summer was no exception to that rule as people wondered who was going be where, and what positions would and wouldn't survive the latest changes. And, in the end, it's too easy for people to be distracted by the intrigue and lose track of what matters -- what it means to teach and learn in our schools.

And even if we don't get distracted by that, we can drift too far from the practical to the theoretical, and we can worry and wonder about a thousand things.

But the great thing is that there's an antidote to all that talk. And that antidote happened today. The kids came back. They came back with all their energy and excitement and passion and life. And today, after the laptops went out and the schedules were filled out, we were reminded of what matters most -- the kids we teach.

SLA flat out crackled with life today. Kids were happy to be back, not just to see their friends but to see their teachers, to see their school. And I spent the afternoon walking in and out of classes, watching the process of building classroom communities resume and restart as teachers and students got down to the work of the school year.

And the building just felt right. We had our kids back.

That's the best lesson we relearn every September.

Seventy-five comments into a thread, Dan Meyer asks a really important question:

I got my 07-08 Geometry results back yesterday and they were not acceptable. Too many kids listing along at Basic levels, not enough kids rising to Proficiency. My question to so many commenters here: what would you have me do with that data?

As a principal who is both against standardized assessments and also very much measured by them, here's what I'd do:

First, let's work under the assumption that I've watched you teach, and I feel that you are a good teacher.

1. I would take the scores and compare them to grades. I believe that the multiple data points that go into making up a grade give us a richer sense a student's learning. So the first question is this -- Is there a correlation between student grades and scores? If there is -- or if there isn't -- what does that tell us?

2. The next thing I'd do is ask you for your assessment: Most importantly, what is your assessment of how the students learned Geometry? How does that line up with what the scores suggest? What surprised you? What was what you expected?
3. If -- as I would think -- you were surprised by the scores and you honestly feel like there was deeper learning than the scores suggest, then the question is this: Is there a disconnect between the way you're teaching the skills or the process or just the language and the way the state test assesses the learning? This raises several more questions:
   1. What are the assessments that you did in your classroom that would lead us to believe that the learning was more successful than the tests suggest?

   2. If we believe that your methods are successful, what do we do about the tests? Given that they are the coin of the realm, we cannot ignore them, so are there modifications we need to make? Can we make them without harming the learning you see going on?
   3. There is something going on in your class if your sense -- based on the work you see every day -- is that the scores really are not reflective of what they've learned. Is there something going on with the multiple opportunity style of assessment that you're doing such that on a one-shot test the kids aren't able to replicate their learning? Do you need to just take two weeks before the test to do some explicit teaching on how the way they've learned can translate to a test? Do you need to give them more opportunities during the year to take tests that mimic the structure of the state test?

Much of test taking is about the skill of making sure your knowledge and skills translate well on the test. The hard part, I really believe, is making sure that the learning you see every day in your class is measured on the tests, especially if you don't teach in a pedagogical fashion that is in line with the state assessment. And I really do believe it's important to tell us that the tests tell us something, but they don't come close to telling us everything.

Anyway, that's what I'd do.

Tags: danmeyer, high-stakes tests, assessment

Go read Gary Stager's article "School Wars" in GOOD Magazine?

Here's a sample:

The tragedy of No Child Left Behind, and the private and public efforts to undo its damage, is that not every child is given the chance to achieve her full potential in a caring, creative, dynamic, and intellectually rich environment. And in the absence of ongoing classroom innovation and grassroots advocacy, NCLB has taken over.

These days, anyone who attended school is an expert in education and everybody has a plan to “fix” the public schools—the philanthropist, the businessman, the bureaucrat, the politician. For ages, business leaders and politicians have wanted to privatize the entire system and let the marketplace sort things out—as it did with Enron, Chinese pet food, or oil prices. Now, they’re taking control of schools through philanthropy. Parents of means, meanwhile, are opting out in record numbers, sending their children to private schools, or charter schools, or are homeschooling them. Indeed, as the federal government has steadily eroded public support for the public school system, through propaganda and failed policies, children are the collateral victims. The winners of the school wars remain uncertain; the losers can be found in almost any classroom.

Go read now.

[O.k. -- this too is an insanely geeky post. I promise, I'll write about education theory or EduCon or something like that soon. But for now, I've got my geek on.]

This is a very simple block in Moodle -- my first custom-designed Moodle block -- that makes it very easy to put a link on a Moodle course directly to the related DrupalEd course/group. As with before, this uses the Moodle variable "Shortname" and corresponds that with the "URL Alias" in Drupal. Those have to correspond or this doesn't work. 

And if you are into learning how to make custom blocks in Moodle, this page of Block Documentation on the Moodle.org site was incredibly helpful and important, and I really just used their template.

In <site>/moodle/blocks, create a directory called drupal_link. Then create a file block_drupal_link.php -- here is that code:

Then, create a file called config_global.html -- this is what will allow you to have global settings for the block. The global setting we create here is the root of the drupaled site, so that it's the same for all courses. (You could make this editable, course by course, but I didn't want to because we only have one drupal site.) Here's that code:

Once you do this, you may need to go to main moodle admin page for moodle to recognize the block, but otherwise, you should see the block in the Administration -> Blocks page. Edit the Settings with the root of your DrupalEd install (include the trailing slash), and you should be able to just add the block to any course and have the link show up. It will show up as the name of the course, rather than the URL. I thought that looked prettier.

Also... one silly issue that I'm wondering about. For some reason, the Block name is enclosed in [[ ]] brackets. I don't know why. Any ideas?

Tags: moodle, killer app, drupal, killerapp, programming

[Be aware -- this is by FAR the geekiest post I've written in a long, long time.]

Thought I'd share this for anyone who is trying to use both Moodle and Drupal. We just figured out a quick way to create a link on a DrupalEd Group page to a corresponding Moodle course.

Here's how:

This assumes that a) you have CCK and Computed Field installed

First, give every DrupalEd course an automatic alias that is the same as your Moodle short-course name. (Yes, right now, we have to do that by hand. That needs to change eventually.)

Then, in Content Management -> Content Types -> Course -- create a new field called field_moodle_link (or something like that) and select Field Type -- Computed and create the field.

In the next page that pops up, fill in the Label with whatever you want the label to be on the Drupal Group page. Then I chose "Required" under data settings, but I'm not 100% sure that's necessary. And under Computed Code, enter this:

Make sure "Display this field" is checked, and I use this as my display format:

And then save it.

Once it's saved, click "Manage Fields" and make sure that your new field has a lower numerical value than the Highlighted Content Field, so that it's at the top of the Drupal page.

What I'd like to do eventually, is figure out how to make that link appear in the Group Details block, but I haven't figured out how to edit that. Anyone who knows, I'd love to know.

In the meantime, drop me a note if you find this useful... or make it better.

(And now, off to figure out Moodle blocks. And yes, I'm still a principal, why do you ask?)

Tags: killerapp, drupal, programming

I've really enjoying playing with Drupal the past few weeks. We've done a site redesign at SLA, and now our DrupalEd install is our front page. I've learned a ton about Drupal, and while it does have a steeper learning curve than a lot of other systems, it is insanely flexible and powerful.

I've learned how to configure menus, ported the homework checker from Moodle (the first piece of real interactivity between Moodle and Drupal at SLA), configured a Upcoming Events calendar so that we can have that as a sidebar on the side of our page, posted our Student Handbook in wiki-style format, created a private faculty handbook wiki that we will continue to build together over time, and generally tweaked the site so that it closer and closer to what I want our web site to be. (And as soon as we have a student who is willing to take a stab at designing a sleek custom theme, we'll redesign the look, too.)

As we continue our work with SchoolTool, and as both SchoolTool and I play with interoperability between SchoolTool, Moodle and Drupal, we will move closer and closer to the Killer App that I've been dreaming about. I've no doubt now that Drupal is the absolute right pick as the content management system for that app.

(oh... and just a huge shout-out to Bill Fitzgerald of FunnyMonkey. He is as patient and available mentor as a person could want with Drupal. If you need a consultant or you have specific needs for a DrupalEd install, hire him. He is a teacher first which means that a) he can teach how to use this stuff, and b) his solutions make sense for schools and the classroom. Without the changes in Drupal that he has made by creating DrupalEd, there's no way I would have seen the power of Drupal in schools. And without his patient mentoring, there's no way we would have been ready to move Drupal to be the front of our website. Thank you, Bill!)

Tags: SLA, drupal, open source, killer app

Inspired by Dan Meyer's latest video:

dy/av : 008 : behind the scenes from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

As usual, Dan gives us a great piece, and as is often the case, he uses the structure of the video to "bury the lede" on purpose. Dan speaks about how difficult it is to both create these short films and how difficult it is to craft smart, thoughtful, engaging lesson plans. And, in the "aha" moment, he speaks about how easy it would be to take short cuts -- in both lesson planning and film making, and how you have to make that choice every day. And that choice -- whether you choose to go all the way or take shortcuts -- is easier to make with each day you make it.

And I think that Dan has hit on something really important in several respects that extend beyond the individual teacher and the choices s/he makes every day. Here's a few things that he has me wondering:

• When we think about the individual teacher, we can certainly argue that if teachers just kept at it, they'd reach that magical tipping point where it gets easier and they wouldn't need to take shortcuts.
• But that's not working. We've got way too high a percentage of people leaving teaching in the first five years -- does that mean we can infer that the moment when it becomes sustainable for the typical "at-risk of leaving" young teacher happens after five years?
• Given that many, many teachers are not able to sustain the choice that Dan is arguing for -- given that the shortcuts (or leaving, the ultimate short cut) are so enticing for so many teachers -- what's wrong with the system that creates that?
• How can we change the system so that more teachers are rewarded for not taking the short cuts? 

Dan's video is excellent as far as it goes. But if being a great teacher is only achievable by Herculean effort, we're going to always struggle to create systemic reform. What do we need to do to make it easier for more and more teachers to always make that right choice toward careful crafting of curriculum?

Tags: dan_meyer, school reform

Registration for EduCon 2.1--  January 23 - 25, 2009 @ Science Leadership Academy -- is open at Eventbrite, and the conference wiki -- http://educon21.wikispaces.com -- is expanding.

The Call for Proposals will be out in the next week!

Tags: EduCon, EduCon2.1

[Cross-posted at LeaderTalk.]

I had the opportunity to be on a panel of education experts speaking to college class. On our panel was an PA Department of Education official, and one of the new topics she spoke about the new graduation competency tests that the state is considering. I've been pretty outspoken on my blog and in my presentations about my opposition to high-stakes graduation tests. That comes into play later.

The topic was "How can Philadelphia improve its public education system?"

What I spoke about was how we need a new vision of our schools. We can talk about all of the issues facing public education, but we have to fundamentally ask ourselves first what we want our schools to be. We have to be able to articulate a strong vision of what we want our schools to be or other people are going to tell us what our schools have to be.

Right now, there are too many people who want to put too much of the fault on the people in the system. That's the biggest legacy of NCLB -- the erosion of trust in educators. And that's criminal because we are squandering the good will and hard work of a generation of teachers.

In the 1980 Presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan used the myth of the "Welfare Queen" as a major part of his campaign. Today, under NCLB, we have created the myth of the lazy teacher who, if only there was something to hold them accountable for the way they teach. The myth of that lazy teacher who could get students to achieve if only they worked harder is just that -- a myth. Are there bad, lazy teachers? Of course, but they are the vast, vast minority. Most teachers went into the profession because they wanted to make a difference. But our system is broken, and if you put good people in bad systems, the system will win more often than not. And as a result, we have lost the ability to negotiate the terms of our own profession.

And that's what our current testing mania is at its root. It's a political tool. It gives politicians a number that they can use to compare schools to each other, and claim that one number can encapsulate all that a student have learned. And these tests now are determining student, teacher and administrator lives, when we know that the tests -- at best -- tell only a small part of a student's -- and a school's -- learning.

We need to tell a new story -- we need to articulate a vision of caring, student-centered schools where students are judged by the work of their own head, heart and hands. We need to talk about how the technological tools at our disposal allow us to fundamentally change the structures of our schools so that we can prepare students for the world they will inherit, but we can't do that as long as our assessment system is firmly placed in the past.

And that's what I told the State Education representative in front of one hundred Drexel students. Were my knees shaking when I said it? You bet. But I felt like I could say it after a 20 minute presentation of a different vision of school where the test no longer made sense.

It's not enough for educators to be against NCLB, we've got to be for something else.