Jedcamp is coming to New Jersey!

For many of us, the word "camp" brings back memories of bygone summers endlessly playing sports, participating in color war (before color war came to schools as well), and experiencing our first extended time away from home.  However, as we have moved through life, many of us have also come to realize that the greatest thing that we took away from camp was the friendships that we made.  So often we move to a new educational level or stage of life, only to discover that a friend we had made in camp is waiting there for us, ready to reminisce about the summers of yore and to build on that initial connection to forge a more lasting bond.  In other words, camp was our first real brush with networking.

That is the one of the guiding forces of the Edcamp movement.  If you have ever attended a professional conference, you know that while the sessions and speakers are certainly part of the attraction, the real action happens in the hallways, over meals, and anywhere that people have the opportunity to speak with their colleagues, both old and newfound.  In the age of Twitter, LinkedIn, and PLN's, conferences become the places where virtual connections become live encounters and the networks thus grow even stronger.

Edcamp capitalizes on this aspect of conferences by not being a conference.  More accurately, Edcamp is an "unconference".  What is an unconference?  Imagine attending a conference where everyone is there for a common reason, but there are no keynote speakers, no planned sessions, and no set schedule.  Rather, every attendee has the opportunity to offer a presentation or lead a discussion.  No one is a guru or an expert; rather, every session is populated by a group of individuals who share a common interest and come together for an hour or so to have the kind of unplanned, honest, and undirected conversations that we usually only have with our immediate co-workers but rarely with people who work in different buildings or in different environments.  In other words, it is the best type of networking - bringing people together around common interests and providing for constant sharing of ideas.

(see more about Edcamp in this video)

Unfortunately for Jewish educators, Edcamp tends to take place on Saturdays.  Enter Seth Dimbert (@MisterD) and Rabbi Meir Wexler (@RabbiWex), who held the first ever Jedcamp - Jewish Edcamp - in late December down in Florida.  Roughly 40 Jewish educators from all types of Jewish schools came together on a Sunday to discuss a wide range of topics in education, from hi-tech to low-tech to no-tech.  Conversations and discussions were natural, free-flowing, and the positive feedback that was bursting out of the event created a ripple effect that has spread straight up the East Coast.

And so, it is a pleasure to announce the opening of registration for the first ever New York area Jedcamp!  Officially titled JedcampNJNY (#jedcampnjny on Twitter), it will be held at Yavneh Academy in Paramus, NJ on Sunday, April 21st.  Online registration is required and can be done at our Eventbrite page, and make sure to see Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky's blog for more thoughts about Jedcamp.

A few details that you should know about Jedcamp:

• It is absolutely, positively, 100% free of charge.
• Attendees will have the opportunity to post session topics throughout the day.
• Jedcamp runs by a "vote with your feet" approach - if you are in a session and decide you would rather be in another one, you can walk out and move to another room - and no one is allowed to be insulted!
• There is no cost for attending Jedcamp.
• Jedcamp is a grassroots event - there is no sponsoring organization.
• This event is open to all who are interested - day school teachers, high school teachers, Hebrew school teachers, all denominations, all subject areas, administrators, everyone.  As long as you have a desire to share your thoughts and ideas about Jewish education or be shared with, this is the conference for you.
• Did I mention that it is free?

So what next?  If you are reading this blog, and you are a Jewish educator in the New Jersey/New York area, first register for Jedcamp and then spread the word to your colleagues.  Their reactions may range from "Yes! I have been waiting for something like this my entire professional life!" to something along the lines of "Look, I tried '7-Up the Uncola' and that was a big letdown - how do I know that an 'unconference' won't be more of the same?"  Either way, encourage them to find out more about how Edcamp/Jedcamp works and encourage them to try it.  Space is limited - register today!

The Character Clause and Bad School Rules

Tomorrow, the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame will be announcing its newest inductees, paying tribute to those individuals whose lifetime on-field accomplishments have earned them the right to be called all-time greats.  While there are always many long and involved discussions about who is worthy, what makes someone worthy, and so on, this year's discussion is quite different than any that I can recall.  For the first time, there are a significant number of players on the ballot who are known or suspected to have used steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs to improve their performance and perhaps to raise their statistics to Hall of Fame levels.

I am not going to go into all of the arguments for and against any of these players.  Wonderful writers over at si.com and the Sports and Earth blog and just about anywhere else where sportwriters lurk have already hashed, and rehashed, and re-rehashed all of these arguments, and many others, so many times that it amazes me that that have anything left to write.

No, my issue for this time and this blog is what is known as the "character clause".  According to the official voting rules, the voters are to consider "the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."  While most of that seems fairly logical - basically vote in the best players - many people are getting hung up on what it means to consider a player's "character".  Some argue that steroid users, by definition, have character issues, since they effective cheated (whether or not that it technically true is not my issue here), and thus they should be kept out.  Others argue that the Hall of Fame already includes many people with so-called "character" issues, including racists, scoundrels, drunks, and so on - and so therefore this clause is meaningless.

Interestingly, I have never heard about the character clause being used the other way - as an actual qualifying criteria for the Hall.  No one has ever said that a player (for those familiar, think Dale Murphy or Don Mattingly) has below-Hall of Fame numbers but also was such a wonderful role model for other players or for fans or for the city in which he played that those considerations should compensate for the missing numbers and earn him admission to immortality.  In other words, the character clause is a one-way rule - it can only be punitive but cannot be advantageous.  It exists only to catch people for their misdeeds but not to reward them for their good ones.

As educators, I wonder if we ever fall into a similar trap.  Every school has its rules, and those rules are hopefully aimed at providing a safe and nurturing environment in which children can grow and receive an education.  However, we should ask ourselves if we have rules which do not really benefit the children, but do provide opportunities for those children to get caught and get punished.  Dress codes spring immediately to mind.  My school does have a dress code, but most of our focus on it is enforcing it and dealing with infractions.  Does that make the rule inherently punitive - or do we as a school need to do a better job of explaining why the code exists?  Similarly with cellphone restrictions.  Many school still restrict their use during school, and there is a healthy debate about that point.  However, if the restriction comes solely from a fear of the unknown, or if it comes from a good place but the students see it as primarily a noose around their neck waiting to be tightened, then the rule is not only doomed to be ineffective, but is likely to be a source of ongoing tension between student and faculty.

Take a moment or two to think about it - does your school have any "character clauses"?

Can We Assess Student Engagement?

A young and creative-minded teacher recently sent me the following email:

One of the things that I have been working on this year was creating a more engaged classroom atmosphere. [My Principal] wants me to come up with ways of assessing my ability to engage the students and come up with areas of growth that will lead to sharpening these skills. Aside for observations I have not come up with any other meaningful way to measure my engagement capabilities and level and I need assistance in developing a plan to enhance this skill. 

While I normally aim to respond to such emails within a day or two, this one took me some time.  At times I thought that I had too much to respond, while at other points it seemed like I was not sure if there was a definite and concrete answer to his question.  After roughly a week of pondering, I responded as follows:

Your question is a good one, and a difficult one to answer.  While student engagement is the holy grail (or one of them) of teaching, it is not always easy to know when students are engaged.  The easy way is to use test scores, although we know that that really only gauges their ability to cram in information the night before a test.  Looking at how many students have their hands up during class or otherwise participate is a bit better, although that is difficult to chart during class, and it does not tell us for how much of class those students were actually engaged - for all we know they are spacing out most of the time and then snap to attention for 10 minutes and participate heavily during that time.

It could be that the question is fundamentally flawed.  Perhaps not so much flawed as in need of redirection.  To the extent that the class is focused on the teacher, we are forever searching for the elusive way to quantify and assess engagement.  On the other hand, if we make the class more student-centered, with accompanying measures of accountability, then the students will be engaged in their learning for much of the time, as goofing off will not even result in an appearance of learning (something that spacing out can accomplish).  That is the flaw - are we looking for students to be engaged in the teaching (done by the teacher) or in the learning (done by them)?  I think that the more that we can make the latter our goal, the less we will even have to ask the question in the first place.

Of course, making the shift is in no way simple and takes a lot of work.  My advice to teachers in general is to pick a lesson a week or two away and think about how it can be done in a non-frontal manner.  You would likely need to be ready with support material and a willingness to adjust on the fly (and even to fail once or twice!), but in the long run it is amazing to see how much the kids can do on their own with your guidance.

What are your thoughts on the issue?  Please respond in the comments.

Let's Close the Door on Open Houses

A few years ago, I walked into the home of a friend who also happened to be a school administrator (the two often seem to go together).  Expecting him to greet me in a relatively normal fashion, I was a bit surprised to find him frantic and on the phone.  Apparently, his school had just botched their open house and he and his fellow administrators were now scrambling to schedule local parlor meetings and other ways to reach out to the community to get out the message that they had failed to effectively communicate that morning.

What struck me as funny about this was how unnecessary this all should have been.  Yes, his school has several local competitors, but the fact is that most prospective parents and students could probably have told you more or less what made this school unique from the others, which students already attended the school, what the word on the street was about the school, and so on and so on.  In other words - what was the purpose of the open house in the first place?

This issue bothers me every year as we prepare for the open house in my school.  Every school in my area holds one of these events, and the costs in money and time are staggering.  While I am not privy to the specific budget involved, schools spend money on consultants pushing the latest cool model for open houses, for ads in local Jewish papers, for decor and food, and for who knows what else.

On top of that, and perhaps a bigger drain on the school, is the amount of human time involved.  Meeting after meeting of administrators and teachers and lay leaders to make sure that every detail of the open house is planned just so in order to maximize the positive buzz that emerges from the evening.  On top of that, it is almost impossible for an open house to be a winning moment - if it goes well, then you did what was expected.  If it goes poorly, people ask how you can mess something up when you had four months to prepare?!?!

And what is actually the goal of the open house?  On the elementary school level, and perhaps the high school level as well, the main goal is to get people to come back to take a tour when they can get a truer and more unvarnished look at the school - the school in action during the day and not the school when it is dressed up for a two-hour show at night with no students present.*

*Kind of funny that an open house trying to sell a school has everything except the actual students.  I am not counting those students who are carefully selected to serve as smiling faces at the open house, kind of like the smiling kids on the tarmac greeting foreign dignitaries to North Korea.

There may be a second goal of the open house - to give the prospective parents or students a warm fuzzy.  In other words, the open house aims to make an emotional impact that hopefully will carry the day when families are making their decisions.  As I noted before, there is not really much of an intellectual decision to make - most people learn much of their information about schools by talking to people who already attend or by picking up the general "word on the street."  No, the open house tries to paint a rosy picture of the school that will be difficult for you to forget when you are making your decision.  In other words, it aims to sway a $100,000-$150,000 decision based on a gauzy video and some nice presentations in an extremely controlled environment.**

**In no way should this post be seen as denigrating the work that people put into the open houses.  I have seen many dedicated and talented people devote and donate much of their time to producing impressive open house productions.  My point is that all of that work could be better directed towards helping the schools in a thousand other areas.

My colleague, Rabbi Steven Penn (@stevenpenn1) has an idea which I think is brilliant, and is actually done at a higher level of education.  His suggestion is for all schools that serve a given area to have one showcase night in a neutral location.  Each school will have a booth and can do with the booth as they wish, with the goal being for everyone to sign people up for tours.  Obviously, schools who seek to impress with new buildings or flashy productions will lose that aspect of the night, but the savings in man-time and money should be well worth it.  Basically, this is what Yeshivot and Seminaries in Israel do.  At least in the New York/New Jersey area, there is one night in each general region where all Israel schools send a representative in order to present and arouse interest.  After that evening, students and parents investigate their chosen schools, perhaps take a trip to Israel to go on tours, and ultimately come to a decision.  On the whole, it seems to work, and I am not sure why Jewish Day Schools and High Schools in areas where there are choices should not aim to follow their model.

What do we think?  Can this work?

The Newtown Tragedy and the Teacher's Dilemma

This is not going to be a post trying to understand what happened this past Friday in Newtown, Connecticut.  I don't think that anyone will ever or possibly can understand what possesses an individual to murder 26 innocent people, including 20 kindergarten children, in cold blood.  And, honestly, it won't matter all that much even if  the police manage to piece together a motive.  Nothing is going to bring those children or the adults who cared for them back to this world.

This is also not going to be a post about how the concept of school as a fortress has been once again shattered.  After Columbine and Virginia Tech and who knows how many other such tragedies, schools have had in mind the possibility that some deranged individual could, in a flash, turn a ordinary school day into unspeakable horror.  My school, in accordance with State law, conducts drills every month preparing us for what to do in case a dangerous individual is inside or outside of the building.  My sense is that we are all going to take the next drill a lot more seriously.

No, this post is about something that teachers struggle with from time to time when dealing with difficult students.  We are being told that the murderer in Newtown was a loner, the type of kid who would avoid prolonged interaction with others.  He was apparently intelligent, but had personality issues that probably led some of his teachers or guidance counselors to wonder if he was in some way classifiable.

And, let's face it, every school has kids who are like that in some way - withdrawn, shy, socially awkward, perhaps the target of bullies.  After Columbine and other tragedies, there was much talk about how the perpetrators had been socially marginalized and speculation ensued that if we could make schools more inclusive places then we could undercut some of the emotions of exclusion that were suspected to have led to murder.  As such, the past decade has seen a tremendous amount of discussion and programming and legislating about bullying, to the point where certain states have developed "anti-bullying" laws that require schools to file all sorts of paperwork every time one student says anything demeaning to another student.

But now we come to this case, and we have to go back to the drawing board.  This murderer does not seem to have been subject to bullying.  His social marginalization seems to be self-inflicted and there are as yet no accounts of his having been made to suffer at the hands of others (of course, we may yet learn that he was).  At this moment, a mere 60 hours after the tragedy, it seems that the murderer was some who had been mentally ill for some time, and somehow something snapped that brought him to this - or a series of events eventually led to this moment.

And that is where I get to the dilemma that teachers face.  There is an article being passed around social networks today written by a woman whose 13-year old son displayed such violent behavior that she eventually made good on her promise to bring him to a mental hospital after he threatened her over a dispute concerning the pants he was wearing.  While the behaviors of the boy in this article are more extreme than any I have ever seen in my almost 20 years of teaching tweens, I have definitely seen behavior that is a mere few steps below his on the extreme-behavior ladder. Should I ignore a student who locks up when things do not go as planned?  Do I call the school psychologist? The principal? The police?  I would hope that at least the latter two options would be considered a gross overreaction, but I cannot help but think that there are people in Newtown today who knew the murderer a few years ago and are questioning whether they should have done more back then so that 26 people could still be alive today.

It is a bit of a tightrope that we, teachers and parents, walk when it comes to extreme behaviors.  We want to believe that our children are having a rough stretch or are learning how to work through conflicts or are just a bit on the quiet side.  We don't want to be alarmist or offend anyone or stigmatize a child before he or she has had a chance to mature and develop into the fine young man or woman that we are sure they can become with the right guidance and love and nurturing.

But...

But the more that these tragedies continue to dot the landscape of our consciousness, the more that there is a tiny voice in the back of our minds that wonders about that kid who is a little too impulsive, too detached, too difficult to reach.  Does this child have the capacity to, God forbid, do something unspeakable?  Is it OK for me, as a teacher, to think that about any child?  If yes, then is there something that I should be doing, even as minimum as throwing up a red flag to those people who can be helpful?  If not, am I running the risk of ignoring a child who, at the end of the day, needs help?

The answers are not easy, but it is important that we grapple with the questions.

Changing the Culture, One Teacher at a Time

As technology rushes into schools at an ever-increasing pace, we are constantly bombarded by talk about whatever happens to be hot this week.  Khan Academy! Ipads in classrooms! Skyping with your teacher! Attaining warp speed, Mr. Scott!

However, once we clear through all of the hype and excitement, the fact remains that no technology is going to change anything in a classroom without teachers who not only understand how to use that technology, but - far more importantly - understand how that piece of technology can have an impact on the way that learning takes place in their classrooms.  A teacher who has students use an ipad as a cool notetaking machine or who skypes with another classroom or an author as an activity in between curricular pieces is pretty much wasting someone's money, specifically whoever laid out the dough for all of that fancy technology.

The real challenge for school administrators is how to encourage teachers to adopt a mindset that sees technology as a powerful lever that can help them to alter their classrooms to produce more authentic and deeper learning.  The traditional answer has been through large-school professional development where the guru of the month comes in, gives a speech that wows everyone and gets them thinking about how they can employ these new ideas in their classrooms, and then everyone has another cup of coffee, sobers up, and continues teaching in the exact same way as before.  Thankfully, this approach is on the wane, but that still leaves us with the issue of how to move teachers towards incorporating technology in an effective and meaningful fashion.

The approach in my school is to narrow my view.  Instead of saying "How can we make our school a place where all of the teachers practice effective use of technology as a means towards better learning?", we turn our focus to one teacher at a time.  In our minds, there are teachers who already understand how to do this effectively, and they need only general support and encouragement from us to keep doing what they are doing and some guidance on how to take it to the next level.  That is usually enough, as they instinctively know what we am looking for and how to get there.

The real work on our part is with the next category of teachers - those who are willing to learn but are not sure where to begin.  With these teachers, we work one-on-one, on a regular basis, exploring their current curriculum, speculating about how it can possibly be taught in a more effective manner, and only then finding specific pieces of technology that can be helpful.  It's kind of PBL for teachers - we figure out the problem that we are trying to solve and then locate the means and the tools to help solve it.  As a result, we am slowly increasing the number of teachers that are on board.  The key word is slowly- we will not have a full faculty teaching in this manner by the end of the year. But then again, the guru or large-scale approach was not going to do it either.  My hope is that this approach will eventually increase the number of teachers who focus on 21st century skills and good technology integration to the point where they help to set the overall tone within the school.

Thoughts on ipads in the Classroom

As readers of this blog well know, I have just jumped back into PBL in my 7th grade class, with a revamped version of my original PBL Korbanot unit.  In addition to the changes that I have made to the unit, I now have the added advantage of our school's newest ipad cart, thus giving us the ability to have access to either  computer or an ipad every day of the week.

What has been so amazing to watch in the first couple of days with the ipads is both the ease with which the students began using them and the fact that every student used them in a slightly different way.  The ease of use was a no-brainer - several of them have their own ipads already, several more have parents or older siblings who have them (including my son), and many of the others have ipods and so they were at least familiar with the basic interface.

What was more interesting was the way in which each student set out to use their new devices.  I have created a wiki complete with links to source material, instructions, videos, images, and many other resources that they will need to access in order to construct their learning.  But aside from that one constant, the students discovered a wide variety of apps that they can use for taking notes, and many of the apps have different features that sometimes speak to each student's strengths - whether it is ScratchWork with its split-screen ability or Pages and its powerful set of tool or Evernote and its cool elephant logo (and ability in take pictures and insert them into notes, among other things).  I learned a great deal about my students' work habit and I picked up a few tips for apps that I promptly downloaded onto my own ipad.

This highlights one of the real strengths of Project-Based Learning, the freedom for each student to decide how they want to proceed through material, and more importantly the freedom for them to learn how to collate and organize that material.  As my 7th graders move from a stage where they expect notes to be handed to them to the more mature stage where they will have to be create meaningful notes that eventually lead to a meaningful product, the different ways in which they use their ipads shows that they are quickly learning this very important skill.

One other note - I have had almost total student engagement in class the past few days.  I don't mean silence - students can be silent if they are surfing the web on their ipads.  My students have been highly focused and highly motivated, asking crucial questions about material, struggling to understand what their overall purpose is, and learning how to work within their groups so as to maximize their learning.  Again, I see this as one of the main goals of PBL - ensuring that every student is actively learning for as long as possible during the course of the class period.  So far, so good.