You say you want a resolution?

Here we stand on the precipice of another new year. Not only a new year but a brand new decade. No worries about a Y2K bug this time around. A lot of folks use this as a time to make resolutions about things they want to do, not do, or change about themselves in the new year. It is a time of promise and possibilities. For all of you that have made such resolutions I wish you the best in making them a reality.

I have always struggled with resolutions. The root of resolution is resolve. It is hard for me to tell myself I am going to resolve to do something. It seems to me the only group that should be resolving things should be constitutional conventions but I guess that's just me. I do, however, have some things in my professional life that I would like to pledge to myself (and somewhat publicly obviously) to do over the next 365 days that I believe will make me a more effective educational leader and thereby improve the educational environment for all employees, students, and stakeholders of OHS. Here are a few:

1. I pledge to read more. Reading the works of great educational minds and staying current on educational research is a great way to sharpen my own saw. I heard a story about a lumberjack competition in which two men were racing to cut down large trees. One started in feverishly cutting away while the other spent the first several minutes sharpening his saw. Although the first man got out to an early lead, the second man, the one who took the time to make sure he was cutting with a very sharp saw, soon overtook him and won the race. It is a reminder to me as a leader that I must take the time to sharpen my own saw by studying the voices of people like Sir Ken Robinson, Alfie Kohn, and countless others. We have so many great minds discussing such important aspects of educational reform these days. With a growing family making time for professional reading can be a struggle. For me it will mean a few less reruns of The Office and a bit more quality time spent with my Kindle.

2. I pledge to work with each teacher to assist them in their journey toward continual improvement. This will take many forms. It starts with having a good foundation in what is happening in each and every classroom. The administrative team in our district has made this a commitment. My goal is to do brief (10-15 minute) Walkthroughs of every classroom once every two weeks. I have set up an observation feedback system through Google Docs through which I can provide immediate feedback to each teacher as soon as the observation is complete. It also enables them to give input and thereby create an ongoing conversation between us that encourages reflection and collaboration and focuses on continual improvement.

3. I pledge to do all I can to ensure that student failure at OHS is not an option. We are currently working on a system of academic tutoring within the school day for struggling students. Students will be identified through grade reports and those students who are in need of assistance will receive it in a small group guided environment with assistance from a staff member as well as student volunteer tutors. In this environment students will receive extra focus on subjects in which they are struggling as well as the opportunity to learn and develop strong academic skills that will help them achieve success in all areas.

4. I pledge to celebrate our successes. We have a top-notch school. We have outstanding teachers, dedicated and skilled support and maintenance staffs, outstanding students, involved parents, and a supportive community. The Okoboji School District takes a backseat to no one and we need to celebrate all the great things happening in our schools. Is there room for improvement? Heck yes there is. My entire goal as a principal is to find ways to make our school and district better and I love working toward that goal every day. It is also true, however that we have so many amazing people doing so many amazing things with and for our kids. We need to celebrate those successes as we work to multiply them even more.

5. I pledge to be a voice of unity and collaboration. Every school has its "hot button" issues that seem to cause division and discord. As anyone associated with our school knows, right now athletic participation is one of ours. Numbers in many of our programs are down. This concerns us all. We all know that involvement in extracurricular activities is shown to increase positive indicators of success (school attendance, homework completion, a feeling of belonging to a team) and decrease negative indicators (apathy, drug use, disengagement with school). There are many different views on what we need to do in order to turn this recent trend in a positive direction. This is an issue we all feel passionately about. We all know the great lessons our kids learn from being a part of a team and we all want to ensure a thriving extracurricular program in all areas including music, fine arts, and sports. Sometimes our passion can turn to words and actions that can become divisive. I want to be a voice of unity and use my words and actions to bring all of our various stakeholder groups together to create and realize a common vision for the sustained success of our extracurricular programs. Together Everyone Achieves More is not just a cute acronym for TEAM, it is true and we can make it happen.

So there you have it. My professional resolutions pledges for 2011.  I ask you to hold me accountable to these ideals as we go through the year.  I look forward to December 31, 2011 when I can look back on a successful year and forward to an even brighter future for Okoboji High School. 

Happy New Year!

You say you want a resolution?

Gearing up for the Stretch Run...

I hope everyone associated with OHS had an enjoyable and restful Thanksgiving.  Our family was busy with dinner, traditions that include decorating for Christmas, watching the first Christmas movie of the season, and lighting the Christmas lights we hung outside the house back when the weather was still warm.  [In case you hadn't noticed, we are kind of into Christmas at our house.  :-)]  A trip to the Winter Wonderland at Falls Park and watching the Festival of Light Parade, both in Sioux Falls, were highlights for us as well.  If you have never been I highly recommend it! 

The break was enjoyable and restful. Transitioning back from a break is always a challenge for students and staff alike.  I like to call this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas "The Stretch Run."  It is easy to overlook this next 3 1/2 weeks.  They go very fast.  A wide variety of winter athletics and activities, coupled with Christmas concerts at all levels make these 18 days of school go by in a blink.  Many students would say that is just fine with them.  They got a little taste of break and it has whetted their appetite for the granddaddy of breaks - the coveted Christmas vacation. 

There is just one problem with trying to close your eyes, shut off your brain, and wish away the time between now and December 23rd - a lot of teaching, learning, and assessing happens in this short time.  We are in the heart of 2nd quarter.  In fact our midterm is coming up in just a few days.  Courses that have been building sequentially from the first unit are well into their curriculum and the work has become more and more rigorous.  Due to the small number of days in 1st semester after Christmas break, a lot of courses focus heavily on these next few weeks.  Most teachers are only able to complete one small unit and then begin preparing and administering semester exams in January. 

All of this means that the next 3 1/2 weeks are very important.  Students; do not attempt to disengage your brains between now and December 23rd!  Your grades and more importantly, your education, will suffer for it.  I promise Christmas Break will come...that is for certain.  What is up to you is how well you apply yourselves between now and then.  Parents, encourage your sons and daughters through this busy time.  Help keep them focused on the goal and try to keep healthy routines established. 

This is a great time of year with lots of school events and family traditions to keep us all busy.  Thank you for all you do to keep a focus on priorities so all of these wonderful events don't become a stumbling block on the road to academic success for all students.  

Gearing up for the Stretch Run...

We Can

Last night my oldest daughter and I attended "The Music Man" as performed by the Okoboji High School Drama Department.  It was a wonderful show and both of us enjoyed it very much.  From the great songs (sung by some amazing singers I might add), to the wacky antics of the mayor, his wife, and of course Professor Harold Hill, it was fun from beginning to end.  Any show that can hold the attention of a 6 year old for two hours has to be good! 

As we watched I was once again reminded why I love small schools.  My daughter only saw actors and actresses on the stage but I saw them as something more.  I watched the wrestler share the stage with the debate champion, the student council representative sing a duet with a fifth grade student, and some students who I have yet to hear say more than 10 words this year, make the audience roll with laughter.  At several points during the show there were over 30 students sharing the stage for some of the larger choral arrangements.  This number isn't even including all of the backstage and behind the scenes help needed to put on a show.  This is what is great about a small school.  At Okoboji High School anybody can be involved in anything they chose.  There are no cuts, no one needs to specialize in just one activity all year in order to make the team, and kids from all different backgrounds and interests can come together to make something great.  In fact, to take it a step farther, in a small school kids from all different backgrounds MUST come together in order to make something great.  We are not a 4A school, where students are split into different factions depending on their activity of interest and rarely get involved outside of their circle - nor do we want to be.  Students at Okoboji are encouraged to play sports, sing, participate in the band, debate, and get involved in clubs like FFA, DECA, and many more, all at the same time. 

Hopefully you are all aware of the community meeting being held on Thursday at 7:00pm in the OHS Auditorium to discuss the status and future of our football program.  In recent years our numbers have dwindled leaving us with a dangerously low number of players. We are meeting on Thursday night as a community to discuss the problem, the possible outcomes if the situation does not change, and then we will be breaking into smaller groups to brainstorm what we can do within our groups (parents, staff members, community members, students, etc) to turn this situation around. 

Some have asked why we are focusing on the football program.  To be honest we have seen numbers in many of our sports programs decline and we are concerned.  The reason we are meeting regarding football is that in football, unlike other sports, you cannot make up for a lack of upperclassmen by regularly playing freshmen at the varsity level.  In basketball if you start freshmen against seniors you will probably get beat.  In football if you repeatedly start freshmen against larger, more developed seniors, they are probably going to get hurt.  Also, it takes a large number of players to field a football team.  Frankly our participation rates have reached a level where we need to increase our numbers or our program won't survive. 

I haven't been here long but I can tell you this is a community that will not back down from a challenge.  We are proud to be Pioneers and together we can do things none of us can do alone.  I believe we can reverse this trend in football and all of our athletic programs.  I believe we can rebuild a team in which our biggest concern will be ordering enough uniforms for all of our players, rather than if we will have enough to field a team.  This meeting is about so much more than football.  It is about the pride of a school and our continued commitment to excellence in all areas.  Please join us on Thursday night as we meet together to listen, discuss, and tackle this issue head on as a school district and community.  With all of us working together, I know we can. 

We Can

Moving Beyond Textbooks...

Recently a challenge was issued to interested Iowa educators on the 1 to 1 Schools Blog sponsored by the CASTLE group we discussed last week.  The original challenge was issued by Scott McLeod and can be found HERE.  The basic idea was to spend at least one week teaching without a textbook as the source of information for students.  Two Okoboji teachers took the challenge and wrote blog posts on their experiences.  The teachers were Justin Bouse, 5th grade teacher, and Sue Hillsabeck who is in her first year of teaching 8th grade social studies.  Their reflections were published on the 1 to 1 Schools Blog and can be found HERE. (They are the first two posts at the top of the page) 

Please take a minute to read through their reflections and learn about the great things going on in their classrooms!


Have a great week!
-BD

Moving Beyond Textbooks...

Did You Know?

It has been a very busy weekend around the Downing household.  With three little girls to get ready for trick-or-treating, Halloween can be a hectic time!  It was still a ton of fun and the girls had a marvelous time trick-or-treating in Milford.  Between the Sugar Shack house, the garage full of toys, and all of the other wonderful houses that so generously filled our little beggars buckets, our girls are set for quite some time!

This week I am going to keep my writing short and (hopefully) sweet - rather appropriate for the biggest candy night of the year. :-)

In the past two weeks we have discussed two different aspects of technology integration in schools.  First we discussed the idea of exponential change and what it has meant in terms of computing power.  Last week I shared a story that outlined the power of technology to be used as a tool to increase engagement.  Thank you to all of you who took the time to fill out Grace's survey by the way.  She sits at 112 responses right now and I can't tell you how many times we have reviewed her data.  This week I want to share with you two videos that really made an impression on me when I first saw them and I think they will with you as well.

They are two videos in a series called "Did You Know?"  They are produced by a team of researchers that includes a professor from Iowa State named Scott McLeod.  Scott is the leader of CASTLE (Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education)  Scott is also a well known speaker and blogger.  He often discusses the need to increase technology integration in education and you can find his blog HERE

The Did You Know videos are filled with facts about technology and the changing nature of our world.  There have been four official releases of the video series.  The two that I will share with you are Did You Know 2.0 which was produced in 2008 and Did You Know 4.0 which was released in 2009.

It is quite possible that you have already seen the videos since quite a few people have seen them on YouTube alone (11,631,097 for DYK 2.0 and 1,970,730 for DYK 4.0 or there abouts.)  Check the videos out and I encourage you to leave a comment about the facts or statistics that surprised you the most.  Some of the information is hard to believe but you can check the bibliographies at the end of each video to see where the research is coming from.  I think you will see that these videos really do present some startling information that makes you think and makes a strong case that we are truly living in exponential times.







Have a great week!
-BD

Did You Know?

Moving from Compliance to Engagement...

Note: This is the second in a series which, over the next few weeks, will hopefully help everyone understand the reasons behind the 1:1 learning initiative in the Okoboji School District.  Today we will talk about the power of student engagement...

Our oldest daughter entered kindergarten this year.  She loves school.  She loves her teacher and all of her classmates.  She loves sharing with us what she is doing each day in school.  She is very compliant by nature.  If the teacher says we are doing "X" today, she will do it with a smile on her face and she will enjoy doing it.  If for no other reason than that's what the teacher said we're doing.  I believe a lot of students are this way.  Even in high school I see a lot of students who will slug their way through hours of homework and have a smile on their faces when they turn it in.  Compliance is often a good thing in education.  It is the idea that the "teacher knows best" that keeps kids going even when they don't necessarily find the assignment intrinsically motivating or relevant.  I am glad we have compliant students. 

I have however, long believed there is something much more powerful than compliance.  The level of student-buy-in that is several steps beyond compliance is engagement.  A compliant student will work hard to please the teacher, an engaged student will work hard because they are intrinsically motivated to do so.  Student engagement can be an ambiguous concept until you see it.  I had a great chance to see it this week. 

Earlier this week my daughter mentioned that she had been learning about surveys and graphs in class.  I asked her if she would like to make a survey on the computer.  She was excited about the idea and wanted to start right away.  We used Google Apps (which many Okoboji teachers are already using and we are offering training on for all staff members) to make her survey.  It took about 3 minutes with her creating the questions and me typing.  The longest part was her picking the picture to go on the survey.  She thought that was great, then I asked her if she wanted some people to answer her survey.  She was very excited about that idea so I shared her survey on Twitter, included the link, and asked people to take a minute to fill it out.  As soon as I sent it out I filled out her survey.  By the time I hit "submit" and returned to the spreadsheet that is automatically created when you make a Google Survey, 4 other people had already responded.  That was the light bulb moment (or moment of engagement) for Grace.  Throughout the evening she watched as more and more people responded to her survey.  As the responses poured in we analyzed the bar and pie graphs that Google was creating for us out of the data.  She took pride in telling us which season most people were saying was their favorite and how many brothers and sisters her respondents had. 

One of the questions she had asked was where everyone was from.  One of the early responses was from Utah to which she asked "where is that?"  We opened a Google map, named it "Graces Survey" and began marking the locations of her responses.  Grace spent the rest of the evening eagerly checking her spreadsheet (the reading of which was another new skill she was eager to learn) to see if any new responses had come in.  We had to force her to finish her dinner and her dessert because all she wanted to do was check on her survey.  This young lady was engaged.  A fire had been lit.  In the glow of that fire she had eagerly discovered and learned about subjects ranging from surveys to spreadsheets to graphs to geography.  It was truly an amazing thing to watch.  She took pride in telling her teacher all about what she had done and that real people from all over the place and answered her questions.  At last count she is up to 94 responses from 18 states and 4 countries including England and Sweden.  At 6 years old she has interacted in a very real way with a global audience.  That is real world engagement. 

Please understand, I am not claiming we must use technology in order to engage students.  We have a high level of student engagement going on in our classrooms every day.  We have teachers engaging students in real world, authentic, relevant learning both with an without technology.  The amazing thing about technology is its power to connect.  We could have used made up data on a just for practice survey to analyze canned data and make charts and graphs.  Had we done that, Grace would have listened politely and worked hard to follow my instructions because she is compliant.  The magic of our activity was the fact that it was real.  We used the power of technology to connect in real time with a real world audience.  The fire that was lit in that little girl's mind last Wednesday night was real and intense and it has led to a much deeper understanding of surveys, graphs, and geography than I had at her age.

One of the goals of the Okoboji 1:1 computing initiative is to put these kinds of tools in the hands of every teacher and every student.  We want to empower teachers to engage every student.  Not all students are compliant, but all students can be engaged.  If we are to accomplish our school's mission, student engagement is key.  Using real world technology to enable students to make real world connections allows us to build on the strong tradition of teaching and learning in the Okoboji School District.

By the way, if you would like to take a minute to view and fill out Grace's survey, she would love to get your input.  You can access the survey here: http://tinyurl.com/26hfsyk 

Moving from Compliance to Engagement...

Exponential growth is a funny thing...

Note: This is the first in a series which, over the next few weeks, will hopefully help everyone understand the reasons behind the 1:1 learning initiative in the Okoboji School District.  Today we will talk in general terms about the world we are preparing our children for....


There is a legend that is told about the invention of the chessboard.  It goes something like this;

When the games inventor brought his chessboard to the king, the king was so pleased that he asked the inventor to name his price for the game.  The king was surprised when the man asked simply for one grain of wheat for the first square on the board, two for the second, four on the third, and so forth, doubling the number of grains with each square.  Since the king did not have a great handle on arithmetic, he quickly accepted and ordered the treasurer to count out the wheat for the payment.  The image below illustrates how this accounting would go.

Much to the king's surprise, by the time he got to the 64th and last square he would have owed the inventor 2 to the 63rd power grains of wheat.  This equates to  9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of wheat.  That amount of wheat is approximately 80 times what would be produced in one harvest, at modern yields, if all of Earth's arable land could be devoted to wheat.  This type of growth, in which the amount of something doubles at each time interval, is known as exponential growth.  As you can see, on the first half of the chessboard, the number grew but it is the second half of the chessboard in which the number skyrockets.  When plotted on a graph, exponential growth looks like this:

At first, exponential growth is not that distinguishable from linear or geometric growth.  The funny thing about exponential growth, as you can see from the graph, is that by the time the rapid rate of growth is noticeable, it is about to take off at a rate you could not have imagined before.

Examples of exponential growth can be found in nature.  One example is the rate at which bacteria in a culture will grow until one of the essential nutrients is exhausted.  Another is the rate at which a virus can spread until there is a vaccine.  Population growth can also be exponential at certain times under certain conditions. 

By now you are probably wondering why I would devote so much time to explaining and discussing exponential growth.  The reason has to do with the rise of computing technology and specifically the processing power of computers - which is defined as the number of discreet calculations that can be completed per second.  Below is a graph that displays the increase in processing power over the past 100 years.

 

As you can see, the white line is the graph of an exponential curve.  The graph shows the number of calculations per second, per thousand dollars of computing investment.  In short it shows what $1,000 worth of computing power will get you in processing ability.  The red dots are actual data points showing, in that moment in time, the processing power, or calculations per second, that could be achieved for $1,000 of computing investment.  As you can also see, for the past 100 years, the increase in processing speed and ability has followed an exponential curve - exactly.  This is not an estimate, this is not a theory.  This is fact that has been documented over the past 100 years.  If the increase in computing speed has followed an exponential curve for the past 100 years, it stands to reason that it will most likely continue on this track.  

The dashed lines show specific benchmarks of computing speed.  The data points are a bit dated but the trend in the past 10 years has stayed the course.  The number of calculations per second accomplished by the average computer now exceeds the speed of a mouse brain.  Assuming the trend that has stayed constant for the past 100 years remains so, we can expect that a $1,000 computer will be able to conduct more calculations per second than a human brain sometime within the next 15 years.  Projecting out further, we would expect that $1,000 computer to have greater computational power than the entire human species somewhere around the year 2050.  Some of those reading this may not be around by then.  But this post isn't about us. It is about our children and grandchildren.  This year's kindergarten class will be 45 years old that year.  They will need to be able to live, work, and thrive in what can only be described as a "brave new world."  

When sharing this information recently, I was asked - do you think this advance in technology is a good thing?  My answer was and is - it isn't about good or bad.  It simply IS.  Barring some unforseen intervention or obstacle, this rate of technological advance will continue at an exponential rate.  We have two choices - do what we can to prepare our children for the future, or stick our heads in the sand.  Our job is to prepare them for their future, not our past.  

Have a great week!

-BD

 

Exponential growth is a funny thing...