Leading Learning for Digital Natives

Combining Data and Technology in the Classroom

Rebecca J. Blink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317624936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In light of rapid advances in technology and changes in students' learning styles, Leading Learning for Digital Natives offers much-needed new tools for guiding effective instruction in the classroom. By offering practical strategies for gathering data with technology tools, this book helps school leaders embrace data and technology to develop the classroom and instructional practices that students need today. Blink's practical and accessible tips make it easy for teachers and leaders to use technology and data to engage students and increase student achievement.

Focusing coverage on the latest technology tools, this book will help you lead a school that personalizes instruction and learning through:

• Integration of data
• Real-time instruction
• Setting expectations and outcomes to align with new state standards
• Integration of technology tools and blended pedagogy

1	The Need for Change

We talk constantly about improving our educational system. We have tried multiple initiatives, some state mandated and some voluntary. However, very few of those changes have truly improved our educational systems and improved student achievement. Millions of dollars have been allocated to school districts across the country for the purpose of closing achievement gaps (e.g., stimulus funding, Race to the Top funding, Elementary and Secondary Education Act funding), yet very minimal changes in student achievement have been documented to show undeniable success. We must do something differently or we will continue to see the same results we have always gotten. What will truly make a difference? As educational leaders, we struggle to try to manage change in our districts, balancing state initiatives and district and school priorities. Where should the priorities be, and how will we truly change educational practice so that we actually do have documented improvement by closing achievement gaps? We have to have the courage to take risks that we believe will truly make a difference.

It is Wednesday, one week prior to the start of another school year for the Wildwood School District. Parents are finishing up the back-to-school shopping for new clothes, notebooks, colored pencils, book covers, glue sticks, and so on. The smell of a new school year is in the air. School buses are visible in the streets as they time their routes for the first day of school. Students are dropping off their materials at school during the Open House so that they can organize their desk or their locker before the first day of school. Students have an opportunity to meet their new teacher and are eagerly awaiting the start of a new school year. As students are walking through their school looking at their schedules, anticipation is evident. They are laughing and joking with their friends, showing pictures from their summer vacations on their cell phones, talking about their latest conquest on Minecraft, and showing their friends the latest app they got for their mobile device. Forgotten friendships are rekindled, smiles abound, and everything has the feeling of a fresh start. Students get together and plan the remaining days of their summer vacation and promise to cram in everything they can before school starts. They make sure they have one another’s phone number in their phones and promise to text one another for one last get-together before the start of school.

While students are planning their final days of summer, teachers and administrators are frantically realizing that they have only a few days left until they open their doors for another school year. Teachers have been trickling into their classrooms for about a month now, getting ready for the start of the year. Bulletin boards signify a back-to-school theme across the district, and the finishing touches are being completed in the classrooms.

Now that the Open House is coming to a close, the remaining time this week is scheduled with back-to-school staff meetings. There are multiple new initiatives at the state level for schools to implement, so Thursday and Friday will be spent learning about the new mandates and planning to implement them.

Sound familiar? Education has historically been a field of reactionary implementation. The state or federal government develops a new mandate that must be put into place in schools, and then schools and districts react with planning committees, action plan development, and implementation plans. Guidance on how to implement these new initiatives is usually left to the discretion of the school. However, with no guidance from those who created the mandates, schools and districts often struggle with implementation.

At the start of every school year across the country, comments such as these are probably heard: “If we knew what they wanted, we could do it. Couldn’t they just tell us what they want and we’ll make it happen? This is just another one of those things that they make us do and no one ever follows up on, so we put all this effort into doing things in a different way and no one ever checks to see if we have actually done it. Here we go again. Only three more years until I can retire. Is this the one thing that is finally going to make a difference for kids?” As school and district leaders, you have, I am sure, heard comments like these before.

As educational leaders, we talk about improving educational practice every single day. We have seen initiatives come and go and have even implemented a few along the way that made sense in our school or district. However, very little has been proved to be of any significance or shown results in improving our student achievement. Should we use guided reading books or a basal reader? Should we group students in multi-age looping classrooms or keep them in classes with their grade-level peers? Should we move elementary teachers from grade level to grade level and keep students with the same teacher for several years in a row? We have created common assessments, administered benchmark assessments, and put into place systems for intervention, enrichment, and behavior modification. Has any of it worked with marked success? No.

Identifying how students learn and what they need to learn is paramount with regard to improving student achievement. Many previous initiatives have dealt with what we need to change to show growth with students academically, but few have coupled that idea with the delivery method of the instruction. If we know what students need to learn from analyzing data on their performance and then teach it to them in a way that they are natively used to (using digital devices), then we have coupled the use of data with the integration of technology in a way that should dramatically improve student achievement. The students in our schools today are digital natives. They have grown up with some sort of digital device at their fingertips (smartphone, tablet, laptop, iPod, even a smartwatch) since birth. Students today are wired. They are constantly connected to a world in which they receive immediate feedback. If they do not know an answer to a question or want to find out a piece of information, they Google it. They are not accustomed to memorizing facts and recalling them on an exam because they know they can look anything up in a millisecond and find the answer. They are not motivated by reading and responding to questions about what they have just read. They live in a fast-paced world, and we need to adjust our educational practice to compete for their attention in that fast-paced world. We need to find ways to keep students engaged in their learning, and we have to stop expecting them to “do it our way.”

In spite of all the changes that occur in education, nothing seems to really change the outcomes and improve student achievement. Why are these initiatives not making a difference, and what can we do that will change instructional practices at a deep level? How can we, as educational leaders, create and facilitate instructional change that is sustainable and that really transforms the way classroom instruction looks and feels? How do educational leaders implement and sustain all of these change initiatives in a way that really changes current instructional practice at the classroom level? We have to make these changes relevant to today’s students. We have to integrate the use of technology at a much deeper level to meet the students where they are. We cannot continue to try to teach students the way we have always taught them—we are not reaching them. Our instruction must be at a much faster pace and must include the use of digital devices. Lessons need to include the use of a smartphone, tablet, or laptop for research or fact-finding. We have to take advantage of the high interest in technology to reach our students.

Common New Initiatives in Education Today

The following initiatives are in no particular order but are representative of the top-trending initiatives that school and district leaders must tackle in education today:

Common Core State Standards

The state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards was launched in 2009 by state leaders, including governors and state commissioners of education from 48 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia, through their membership in the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). State school chiefs and governors recognized the value of consistent, real-world learning goals and launched this effort to ensure that all students, regardless of where they live, are graduating from high school prepared for college, career, and life.

The standards are informed by:

• The best state standards already in existence
• The experience of teachers, content experts, the state, and leading thinkers
• Feedback from the public

State education standards have been around since the early 1990s. By the early 2000s, every state had developed and adopted its own learning standards that specify what students in grades 3–8 and high school should be able to do. Every state also had its own definition of proficiency, which is the level at which a student is determined to be sufficiently educated at each grade level and upon graduation. This lack of standardization was one reason why states decided to develop the Common Core State Standards in 2009.

The development of the Common Core State Standards is a success story of meaningful, state-led change to help all students succeed. During the development process, the standards were divided into two categories: First, the college- and career-readiness standards, which address what students are expected to know and understand by the time they graduate from high school. Second, the K–12 standards, which address academic expectations for students in elementary school through high school.

The college- and career-readiness standards were developed first and then incorporated into the K–12 standards in the final version of the Common Core we have today. The National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) received nearly 10,000 comments on the standards during two public comment periods. Many of the comments from teachers, parents, school administrators, and other citizens concerned with education policy helped shape the final version of the standards.

Teachers played a critical role in development. The Common Core State Standards drafting process relied on teachers and standards experts from across the country. Teachers were involved in the development process in four ways:

• They served on the work groups and the feedback groups for the ELA (English/Language Arts) and math standards.
• The National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), among other organizations, were instrumental in bringing together teachers to provide specific, constructive feedback on the standards.
• Teachers were members of teams convened by states to provide regular feedback on drafts of the standards.
• Teachers provided input on the Common Core State Standards during the two public comment periods.

Once the development process concluded, states began voluntarily adopting the Common Core State Standards based on their existing process for education standard adoption. In most states, the state school board members formally adopted the standards. In others, the decision was made or ratified by the state superintendent of education, the state legislature, or the governor.

Today, 43 states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have adopted the Common Core and are implementing the standards according to their own timelines. Minnesota adopted only ELA, and Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Virginia did not adopt any of the Common Core State Standards. (Common Core Standards Initiative, 2015)

Beginning in the 2014–2015 school year, districts implemented new standardized assessments to measure student performance on the basis of the new standards.

Aligning Curriculum to New Common Core State Standards

After the Common Core State Standards were developed, the hard work began. Schools and districts across the country began to realign or redesign their curricula on the basis of these new standards. Schools and districts spent countless hours unpacking the standards to determine what measurable objectives were embedded in each standard. Taking a look at those measurable objectives by standard and aligning them to the instructional practices that would occur in each classroom at each grade level was a task that required a great deal of time and a great many resources. Reviewing their existing curriculum documents and/or pacing guides to determine what objectives were taught in what grade levels was a necessity. If things were currently taught in a certain grade level under the current standards but were taught in a different grade level under the new Common Core State Standards, then any lessons, activities, or quizzes that aligned to that objective needed to be moved from one grade level to the other. This review and revision process took years in many districts.

Previously, education professionals received some background information on the development of the Common Core State Standards. Aligning district curriculum to these new standards has had a profound effect on the use of professional development time and resources that are available to a school district. As you might imagine, having new standards in English/language arts and math that must be taught also requires that any previous instruction in those subject areas be realigned to the new content standards. To do this, schools have spent an incredible amount of time reviewing their existing curriculum documents or pacing guides, determining what should stay in a course and what should be moved to a different course, eliminating topics and/or concepts that no longer fit into the curriculum, rewriting curriculum guides or pacing guides, and adjusting instructional materials to match their newly developed curriculum guides.

This process was a major undertaking across the country. As districts and schools were changing from their state standards in academics to these new Common Core State Standards, there was a lot of work to do. Since many of the people involved in the work that needed to be done to adjust and adapt curriculum were classroom teachers, the bulk of this work happened either before or after school or required that the school district bring in substitute teachers so that the content leads/department heads who needed to be involved in this work could get together and rewrite their guides. This required not only a large time commitment by schools and districts across the country but also one that could have a substantially large monetary value depending on how the work got done in the district.

Educator Effectiveness

What is the measure of an effective educator? Should an educator be evaluated on the performance of students in his classroom on a standardized test? Should an educator be evaluated on the basis of the number of years he has spent in the classroom teaching? Should an educator be evaluated according to how well his students perform when compared to other students in the same grade level but who have different teachers? How do educators evaluate themselves? What do they believe to be valuable ways to measure whether they are doing a great job? What are the characteristics that really make an educator an effective teacher, and how can these characteristics be measured and replicated?

Some of the most recent sweeping changes in education have come in the area of educator effectiveness. Now, more than ever before, educators are being evaluated on the basis of performance data of the students within their classrooms. In some states, as much as 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation is based on the results of student achievement. Will this level of accountability improve our educational system as it exists today? In addition to the teacher component to the educator effectiveness system, many states are also incorporating a similar evaluation of principals to determine whether their leadership really does improve student achievement over time. I ask the same question related to principal evaluation—will this level of accountability improve our educational system as it exists today?

People who work in fields outside education say things like, “Student achievement results should be the basis of how a teacher is measured and evaluated. After all, isn’t that why the students are in school—to learn? So measure the learning.” The assumption here is that learning should just happen at a school. However, we know from our student achievement data that learning does not just happen. We have students who are failing and continue to fail year after year. Is that the fault of the student? The teachers? The system? Will adding accountability measures to the teacher and the school ensure that learning takes place? I believe that the purpose of implementing a system such as educator effectiveness was to improve instruction in the classroom and not just to measure whether students are learning. In most cases, one would hope that improving instruction would automatically translate into higher student achievement. My question related to educator effectiveness remains this: by implementing a system that we call educator effectiveness and placing accountability measures in place for teachers and principals, do we ensure that student achievement will improve? Is an educator effectiveness system the answer we are looking for to improve student achievement, or are there more pieces to the puzzle?

Think back for a moment to the days when you were a student in school. Who was your favorite teacher? Why was that teacher your favorite teacher? Did he give easy grades or very little homework, or was he the one who finally challenged you to do your best? Did you know as a student which teachers had the highest performing students or the students who demonstrated the most growth? You may not have known the student achievement data for your favorite teacher, but I bet you could identify whether you thought that teacher was effective, right?

Characteristics of Good Teaching

What is it about your favorite teacher that made her effective? What characteristics define effective educators? When I think back to the teachers I thought were effective, these qualities come to mind: motivating, compassionate, inspiring, knowledgeable, prepared, fair, personable, committed, engaging, caring, and patient. None of the characteristics that I list here can be measured by any quantitative assessment. Identifying those characteristics and teaching preservice teachers about these characteristics might be the best way to improve student achievement, rather than just putting an accountability system in place for them that may or m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Meet the Author
• 1 The Need for Change
• 2 The Collection and Analysis of Data
• 3 The Utilization and Application of Data
• 4 Real-Time Instruction
• 5 Integration of Technology Tools for Digital Natives
• 6 You Have the Technology—You Can Do This
• Appendices
• References