Dan Barnes

“In what ways might I productively benefit from and contribute to professional dialogue outside district boundaries?”

I think that the future of my PLN really lies in Twitter.  I enjoy reading others blog posts but for right now I’m not ready to contribute in lengthy form of a blog.  I love the short, direct tweets from people posting thoughts or resources and in the future I want to move up to the level of some people that I follow.  As I find resources, strategies, or tools that work I want to share them.  This is particularly important for me because as I moved away from where I went to college I lost some connections to very smart colleagues.  I have since been able to reconnect to some and enjoy the common knowledge of the many instead of the few.  Parkway is great, absolutely, but only because they realize that they don’t have all the answers.  Even Parkway School District has a twitter and I believe that we, as teachers, need to be smart enough to realize when to adapt and adopt new ideas.  So maybe outside our boundaries rather than within is where we need to look when lessons are stale and the students aren’t learning.  There’s a whole lot of people out there – someone is bound to have a good idea.

This year, as many may know, is Parkway’s year to adopt the teachings of Grant Wiggins and practice UBD.  I have been a fan of this framework of teaching for about a year now ever since I had to fill out Madeline Hunter lesson plans every day for my student teaching.  I like the idea of coming up with the big picture items.

This idea came to mind as I’m working on my graduate degree.  I have to miss this week’s class because of parent-teacher conferences.  As an act of “good faith,” for the class, I will have to write an interpretive paragraph for each of the non-fiction essays we read this week as well as paragraphs for four of the fiction stories we read.  This week, that totals six paragraphs I must write.  This however, will not count for the missing quiz grade for this week’s selections.  I will still receive a zero on the quiz; the papers will just count as a sign that I am still interested in the class.

To me, this sounds ridiculous.  I have to do all this work for the same grade as if I just negligently skipped class.  This is why UBD is so important.  If we begin with the end goal in mind and what is really essential for the students to learn (Essential Understandings), then the daily assignments can be judged with for their necessity and ultimate value.  Will my papers ever count for this week’s “make-up” work?  Never.  The only reason I’m doing them is that I don’t want to get on the teacher’s bad side.

I am a UBD instructor this year because I believe in its importance.  I hope that as Parkway moves into this system of backwards design, that its employees please keep an open mind.  The whole idea is that we, as teachers, know our goal and that our assignments should be valuable and worthwhile to what the students should actually be learning.  We don’t just assign random paragraphs with no goal in mind. 

I wonder how many college professors would ever get their contracts removed if they were held to some sort of UBD standard.  I think we all know what it’s like to have a college professor that clearly has no goal in mind but the sound of their own voice.

P.S. Best Graduation Shirt Ever

There was a reference to Festivus in lunch today so I felt that I had to allude to Seinfeld in the title of my post.  If there is tension in your department between members, what do you do?  What are some positive ways of conflict resolution in between collegues?  If you have any ideas I would really enjoy them.  Thank you all.

I’ve recently started a new book called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky.  There was something very interesting that I saw in the first chapter that (I feel) should be shared.  The book opens with the tale of a stolen sidekick.  I defer you to the link instead of me trying to explain the story.  What really interested me about the story was the comments Shirky made about the situation: “Evan’s evenual victory seems like a shining success, but it came at a cost.  Policing time is finite, yet the willingness of humans to feel wronged is infinite.  Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with tthis kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?” (14).

As English teachers we’ve always had a responsibility to teach our students how to evaluate sources.  We instruct our students to examine websites for authors and publication dates so they only find the most up to date and accurate sources.  However, our job extends beyond that.  As I try to include web discussions and more computer-oriented English activities, I now realize that my job extends far beyond print literacy.  It also includes a general responsibility and ettiqute for interacting on the internet.  I feel that educators, regardless of subject, need to teach students how to be a citizen and interact with the environment they live in.  As the world becomes even more digital we have focus on the power that the internet has and how bloggers, surfers, and viewers aren’t as anonymous as they think.  I’m not entirely sure if that made sense, so here’s a final random thought to end the blog on.  Please click here for my new favorite thing.  Educational Rap Songs – they’re “fresh,” as my seventh block would say.

P.S. Is anyone else starting to get their first illness from the school year?  I think mine’s coming earlier than last year – should I be worried?

I had a revelation about PLNs and blogging.  The idea of a blog is the new academic journal, updated for the 21st century.  Instead of reading a 10 page article with 20 pages of footnotes, the new digital “footnotes” are placed in the form of links.  After all, Sue Waters said on her blog that a good blogger should “ALWAYS link to articles, websites or other blogger’s post when you write about them! Nothing says newbie faster than lack of links!!!” (“Blog”).  Hopefully as I explore this idea of a PLN more I can further myself as an educator and really push myself outside of the box using other people’s ideas.  It seems to be a good way to reconnect with collegues who are now teaching in a new school or state and still have the same degree of collaboration as we did face to face.  In the future (for me), the PLN seems to be a way to really start a discussion and use technology to help us all become better at what we do.  After all, teaching and learning are why we’re here.