As part of a national project focused on researching and identifying exemplary models of virtual professional learning communities, the U.S. Department of Education and the American Institutes for Research have recognized the Alabama Best Practices Center for its "notable" work with online communities of practice.
 
ABPC is recognized at the Department-sponsored Connected Educators website for its development of two online learning communities -- the 21st Learners project supported by Microsoft Partners in Learning from 2005-08, and our current Instructional Partners Learning Network, developed in partnership with the Alabama State Department of Education.
 
You can visit ABPC's Notable Community page at Connected Educators and also read an interview with the ABPC leader Cathy Gassenheimer, who describes some of the lessons learned from this new kind of professional development work.
 
We appreciate this recognition and want to give special thanks to State Superintendent Tommy Bice and the ALSDE for their faith in our ability to do this work — and for the wonderful partnership we've been able to create together on behalf of our public school students and schools.
 
Here are several excerpts from Cathy's interview:
 
"Our first online community experience grew out of our participation in a Microsoft Partners in Learning grant. We created a Community of Practice that engaged teacher-principal teams in a group of Alabama schools (elementary, middle and high) in several years of learning together. The focus was on integrating web tools and technology into best-practice instruction — blending the right tech into “instruction that works.” Over the course of that project, the community grew to include 40 schools and added some face-to-face collaboration to what began as a completely virtual experience. PiL was pleased with the results and we learned a lot about how to engage educators in online professional learning.
 
"Our second experience, which is currently underway, is part of the Alabama Instructional Partners Project. We’ve established a truly vibrant online community among participants in the project’s first year, using a private Ning-based platform. We started with just 15 teacher coaches and will triple that size in the fall of 2012. The IP project is done in partnership with the Alabama State Department of Education. We provide the professional development and support the online IP experience."
 
____
 
"We think face-to-face PD is important for social bonding, trust building, and some aspects of small/large group work. But we also know that online communities of practice can not only augment F2F learning but produce a synergistic effect. Both F2F and online experiences keep conversations and explorations “alive” and moving forward. The asynchronous aspect of online community also maximizes the use of scarce teacher/leader time. And online communities are a perfect place to share and curate digital work products, outside resources and research. If they are well-facilitated, they can also increase the social bond and build commitment and resilience through the sharing of solutions and success stories that may feel like “bragging” in a time-pressed F2F environment.
 
"If the community is well-bonded, excited by their shared interests, and 'restless to improve,' then the blended approach is ideal. The model is strengthened if the F2F experiences are relatively frequent — in our case, seven times during this school year, including three 3-day retreats. At the same time, I can’t stress enough that the power of the online community comes in its ability to “keep things going” — to keep the work and learning that’s our focus always in front of participants, 24/7. Because virtual CoPs are essentially “asynchronous,” they make it possible for professional learners to participate when they have the time and energy, and when they’re motivated by events or just inspired by some wondering."
 
Read more at the Connected Educators website
  Read More...

by Caroline Novak
President, A+ Education Partnership
 
If non-fiction speaks to the mind, literature speaks to the heart, as a teacher's story published recently in the New York Times so well demonstrates. Some of her observations are important for Alabama, as we take new steps to accelerate real learning in our classrooms, bring more balance to assessment and accountability, and increase our educators' capacity to lead students to higher levels of thinking and understanding.
 
Claire Hollander engages high-needs youngsters at her Manhattan middle school in a reading enrichment program that introduces them to great literature — to fiction written in complex language, telling stories that can help us explore what it means to be human. In doing so, Hollander says she is helping her students -- some of whom "are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods" -- build "cultural capital" that can give them the resilience they need to complete high school, to pursue college and careers, and to mature into thinking adults, effective workers and committed parents.
 
As Hollander suggests, a decade of well-meant but sometimes counterproductive accountability testing has pushed the study of literature and storytelling far down on the curriculum priority list. Most items that test reading comprehension today, she says, include "passages from watered-down news articles or biographies...memos or brochures — passages chosen not for emotional punch but for textual complexity."
 
We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level — not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.    
 
Students, and especially students with challenging home lives, are not likely to engage with exceptional literature outside of school, Hollander believes. Many low-income students "who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary...will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort."
 
In her experience, those are the same students "who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep." And the same can be said for many students in Alabama's high-needs schools, where educators (as we might expect) are shaping their curriculum and instruction to maximize student performance on test items that emphasize informational text. Hollander writes:
 
Of course no teacher disputes the necessity of being able to read for information. But if literature has no place in these tests, and if preparation for the tests becomes the sole goal of education, then the reading of literature will go out of fashion in our schools. I don’t have any illusions that adding literary passages to multiple-choice tests would instill a love of reading among students by itself. But it would keep those books on the syllabus, in the classrooms and in the hands of young readers — which is what really matters.
 
As Alabama schools implement new learning standards that will require higher orders of thinking from our students and higher orders of teaching from our educators, we believe it would be a terrible mistake to ignore Claire Hollander's core message:
 
We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts.... We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.
 
The A+ Education Partnership is all about "both/and" solutions. We believe that our schools can teach students how to analyze informational text and apply what they learn in the real world. We also believe that, at the same time, our teachers can guide our students as they grapple with the complex words and emotional events found in great fictional stories.
 
We affirm the power and value of literature to reach our hearts, and A+'s support for promoting real literature as part of curriculum for all students, whether they live in book-rich environments or depend on our public schools to help them become eager and able readers of every kind of text. Read More...

Beth Sanders (front,center) teaches 9th and 11th grade social studies at inner-city Tarrant High School in Birmingham, Alabama, where her students recently participated in the iCitizenship project. She is also a technology consultant for the Alabama Best Practices Center and a Connected Coach for the Powerful Learning Practice Network, where this article first appeared.

by Beth Sanders

What do citizenship, social justice, empathy, social networking and a high school classroom have to do with each other? In my classroom the answer is EVERYTHING. My mission is simple yet absolutely necessary to helping my students prepare for their futures.

Mission statement: Support my students to become not only informed but aware, not only aware but empathetic, not only empathetic but active, not only active but connected, not only connected but reflective and ready to create real life solutions to real life problems.

In a time when the global community is literally in our backyard, it becomes our duty (and privilege, I think) as educators to not only open the door to important questions and information but give our students access to tools and technologies that will help them connect to the global community, share their work, have relevant discussions, discover, learn, grow and develop. We need to help them become knowledgeable people, fitted out with the skills and tools they require to travel any path they choose to take outside of the classroom -- and to cope with whatever they come across.

I began this school year with a list of questions that could help me envision, plan, reflect and maintain focus on where my students and I needed to be when the last bell rings in late May.

Some questions especially relevant to this post are:

• How can I ensure my students are gaining purposeful and relevant 21st century knowledge and skills every day?

• How can 20th century standards be adapted to support 21st century students?

• How can I embed empathy, adaptability, and problem solving into every class I teach?

• How can I create a global environment in my local classroom?

Out of my personal questioning and reflection came what would be the essential question for my 11th grade social studies students during our time together: What does it mean to be a citizen nationally, globally and digitally?

So we became iCitizens

To support my Tarrant (AL) High School students in pursuit of this question, we created and engaged in the iCitizenship project, a collaborative effort (with Dr. Marialice Curran’s freshman seminar at St. Joseph’s College) to create a variety of public service announcements (PSAs) in various media. Through this project, my soon-to-be-voters are helping inform many audiences about what a 21st century citizen is and how a 21st century person should practice citizenship in national, global and digital contexts.

As students work to inform a larger, global audience about iCitizenship, they are simultaneously equipping themselves to be advocates and putting their definitions into action. It's crucial that we help them understand the clear difference between the bare-bones qualifications to be a citizen and what it means to be an active, empathetic, aware person practicing citizenship. Then we need to support them as they work through the complexities of citizenship today from a school, city, state, regional, national, global and (increasingly important) digital or "connected" perspective.

Read More...