Tag: Teachers & Teaching

Elisabeth Stock of PowerMyLearning

Posted on by robbie

Elisabeth Stock has always been driven to work toward a more just world. It was what led her to volunteer as a teacher for the Peace Corps in West Africa in her early 20s, and it’s what ultimately motivated her to found PowerMyLearning, an educational technology nonprofit, in 1999. “I wanted to join the Peace Corps because I felt like there was this deep unfairness in society,” she says. “Is it just and fair that where you are born predicts whether you can reach your human potential?”
The key to providing equal opportunity for everyone, says Stock, is through education. To that end, PowerMyLearning uses technology to improve the relationships that are crucial to the learning process — namely, the impact that teachers and parents have on a student’s promise to excel. “What we’re really about is empowering all of them — the kids and the adults — to learn together,” she says. That empowerment is translating to real, measurable results. There is at least one teacher, parent or student registered with PowerMyLearning in 40 percent of the nation’s schools, and since 2012, partner schools have seen an impressive 6.9 percent increase in math proficiency.
Technology is a crucial part of this process, but the company approaches it in a decidedly different way than most ed-tech outfits do. A lot of people in the field try to essentially replace educators with fancy apps and platforms, says Stock. “They think, ‘Oh my goodness, I can build the most amazing code to do what the teacher does!’ But we’ve realized that that’s a mistake, that what you really need to do with technology is focus on the learning relationships.”
PowerMyLearning uses a combination of services and tools to reach everyone involved in a child’s education. The organization’s online platform, called PowerMyLearning Connect, curates the best available videos, interactive games and other online resources to help students master complex topics. PowerMyLearning also provides coaching to teachers, especially those who are early in their careers, and conducts workshops where families can learn about what their kids are doing.

Join the cause! Speak up for family engagement across the country.

Teachers rely on PowerMyLearning Connect for its “playlists” of materials to use in the classroom. They can also customize these playlists for different groups of students or even for just one student at a time. “Imagine that you’re a teacher and you are in a classroom, and you have a couple of students who are really behind,” Stock says. “How do you help them practice without their peers noticing that they’re so far behind, and teasing them?” But if a student is playing a fun game that enables him to catch up at the same time, his classmates will focus on the game, not the fact that the student might have a deficit of knowledge.
The platform is also used to engage families in the learning process and will soon roll out a texting feature that lets parents know what their kids are learning. After a student works through a particular playlist, they’ll be prompted to teach the material to an adult family member. The adult can then text back to the teacher to share how well the child understands the concepts. “So many families want to be helping their students and continuing to improve their learning, but a lot of people just don’t know where to begin,” Stock says. “PowerMyLearning Connect really gives them that starting point.” The platform, along with the workshops, further collaborative relationships between students, teachers and parents.
Azlynn Cornish, a special education math teacher at South Bronx Preparatory school in New York City, uses the platform in her classroom, and she has also received coaching. “Self-motivation is a huge thing with PowerMyLearning Connect,” Cornish says. “It brings students so much choice, and they’re able to really create their own learning environment, both inside and outside of the classroom.” Involving families also helps give kids the feeling that they’re in control of their own education, she adds. “It just creates that kind of cycle of learning that continues daily, and creates genuine lifelong learners.”
For parents, PowerMyLearning provides a window into what their kids are up to at school. Lisnel Rivera, a parent from The Young Women’s Leadership School of the Bronx, recently attended a Saturday workshop to learn more about the program. “I think it’s very important for schools to include parents in their child’s education, because while they go to school to learn, the majority of their time is spent at home,” Rivera says. “If I’m up to date on the assignments, and the essence of what my daughter is learning at school, I can help her at home.” It’s facilitating those learning relationships that is exactly what Elisabeth Stock — and PowerMyLearning — has been about from the beginning.

_____

The 2016 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from November 1 to 15 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.

Is This the Ed-Tech App That Will Change the Way Teachers, Students and Parents Communicate?

Posted on by robbie

At Roy Waldron Elementary School in La Vergne, Tenn., a fourth-grade girl wasn’t where she was supposed to be. A teacher caught her joking around with classmates, and then instructed her twice: Head back to class. A few hours later, when the student returned home, she had excuses at the ready.
“You know I can see the reason why,” Diane Portillo told her daughter.
“Yes, Mami,” the girl replied, cornered. “I’m never going to do it again.”
Portillo found out about disciplinary incident through ClassDojo, an app that allows parents to follow their child’s conduct, classwork and grades in real time. Throughout the day, educators dole out points: They might award them for solving a tough question at the board or sharing art supplies; alternatively, they can deduct points for things like distracting other students. As soon as the behavior, good or bad, occurs, parents can opt to receive a push notification to find out why.
ClassDojo’s creators believe the platform can better shape the learning environment. An unruly classroom not only makes it hard for students to focus, it can also be emotionally draining for teachers. ClassDojo corrects for that by putting Pavlovian reinforcement onto teachers’ smartphones. That’s the baseline benefit: Educators regain control of the classroom as behaving oneself becomes a game. But what’s perhaps just as important to academic success is how the app keeps parents in the loop, allowing them to track points, view schoolwork (in slideshows like a Snapchat Story) and message directly with teachers.
Amid the deluge of other digital learning tools being tested in American classrooms, ClassDojo might not be as familiar a name. But chances are that someone in your school district has already downloaded the app. In 95,000 schools (roughly two-thirds of the nation’s public, charter and private academies), at least one teacher is currently using ClassDojo, according to Lindsay McKinley, a spokeswoman.
ClassDojo was designed specifically with teachers in mind, says Sam Chaudhary, one of ClassDojo’s two co-founders. “For 40 or 50 years, we’ve had a lot of people trying to do things in education from the top down. When there’s a new policy at the district level, it’s pushed down into schools and classrooms. That hasn’t, by and large, been very effective,” he says. “We started the opposite way: from the ground up.”
A former teacher in the British secondary school system, Chaudhary met his eventual co-founder Liam Don, a game developer, at a weekend hackathon at Cambridge. The two traveled to the Bay Area on a 90-day tourist visa, where they approached teachers and asked to hear about their experiences. “We had this amazing freedom, in a way, because we had never lived or worked in America. We didn’t know the system,” recalls Chaudhary, now CEO. “We didn’t start with a solution or even assume that we knew the problem.” The teachers they interviewed kept bringing up the same issue — namely, that the various players in a kid’s education weren’t working as a team. To get parents and teachers on the same page, Chaudhary and Don proposed building a communication tool that could provide live updates about students, and in 2011 ClassDojo was born.

A student uploads an image of his classwork to his personal portfolio on ClassDojo.

Five years and millions of downloads later, teachers report that ClassDojo has dramatically eased communication with parents. Stephanie Smith, the fourth-grade teacher at Roy Waldron Elementary who corresponded with Diane Portillo daily on ClassDojo, used to rely on paper worksheets to connect with parents. She’d write down assignments, add one of three colors (red, yellow, green) for the student’s conduct that day, and ask the kid to bring back a parent’s signature the next day. “It was very tedious and a lot of extra work just to make sure that parents were even looking at it,” says Smith, a teacher with 12 years in the classroom. Even if the sheet did come back signed, Smith wouldn’t know if a parent had actually read it or just signed it pretty much blindly. It became a daily exercise in frustration.
But now, Smith has ClassDojo, and she uses it all day, every day. “Lunch, recess, field trips, anything like that — ClassDojo goes with us,” she says. Smith begins assigning points as soon as work starts. A sound plays, and the room goes quiet as the students hope another will be awarded soon. (The points can be used within the app to buy customizations for an avatar, and often, they can be cashed in at a concessions stand on Fridays.) “It’s nonverbal communication, where students just know what they should be doing,” she says. “It saves time, my voice and words. It’s so much easier than fussing at them to be quiet when all you have to do is push a button.”
Outside the classroom, overworked parents, like those who are employed in La Vergne’s warehouses or commute the half-hour to Nashville, might just stand to gain the most, Smith says. In those cases, a mom might have only a short time to check in on her children’s schooling. “It used to be that they would ask, ‘What happened at school today?’ Like all kids, they’d reply, ‘Nothing,’” Chaudhary says. ClassDojo, which also has an automatic-translation feature compatible with 35 languages, skips that guessing game. Appraised of what’s going on in each subject, a parent feels more involved and their child will likely know it. “Students need all the help and support they can get,” adds Smith. “When their parents and teachers are closely connected, they know they have two people investing their time in them. It helps them realize, ‘Maybe I should take this to heart. This is important.’”
While the cartoon avatars have won plenty of student devotees, ClassDojo isn’t without its critics. The company, for one, hasn’t collected any data on the app’s impact and instead points to the number of people participating as proof the app is working. But a recent study by the Center for Learning in Technology at SRI International, a nonprofit think tank, found that the most popular ed-tech apps are usually the ones that fit best within the status quo, even if they don’t improve student learning. Anecdotal evidence of teachers who use the app also doesn’t give a full picture, adds Brett Clark, the director of technology at Greater Clark County Schools in Jeffersonville, Ind. “That’s like polling people in McDonald’s about how they like the food,” he told The New York Times, without surveying anyone who refuses to eat there. “They are not asking the teachers who looked at the app, walked away and said, ‘Not in my classroom.’”
For his part, Chaudhary says proof is on the way. While more curricula are still in the works, ClassDojo has already demonstrated one important rule for how education technology should be integrated into the classroom. In place of advocating for sweeping change, the platform has prized small but meaningful online tools, and the reward has been millions of downloads. In other words, the role of technology in the classroom shouldn’t be to replace teachers, but to simply help them do their jobs. After that, the company will need to show how — and whether — it measurably helps the kids.

What Happens When a Teacher Walks in Her Students’ Shoes?

Posted on by robbie

What is it like to be a high school student today?
In a viral blog post, Alexis Wiggins, a 15-year teaching veteran, describes what she learned after she shadowed a sophomore one day and a senior for another. She said her experience was “so eye-opening” that she wishes she could go back to every class she’s ever taught and “change a minimum of 10 things.”
Her story, titled “A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned,” was originally posted by Alexis’s own father, Grant Wiggins, a former teacher himself and the current president of Authentic Education. It has been read more than 760,000 times.
Here are three key things she learned:
1. “Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.”
Besides walking from class to class, Wiggins sat the entire day and found herself completely drained from so much sitting. She writes, “I was so tired by the end of the day, I wasn’t absorbing most of the content, so I am not sure my previous method of making kids sit through hour-long, sit-down discussions of the texts was all that effective.”
What she would do now:
1. Require a mandatory stretch halfway through the class.
2. Put a Nerf basketball hoop on the back of her door and encourage kids to play in the first and final minutes of class.
3. Build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day.
2. “High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes.”
Wiggins found that students weren’t offered a chance to speak up in class — most of the time they were just taking notes while the teacher droned on and on. “It made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard.”
What she would do now:
1. Offer smaller lessons with engaging activities that keep students on their feet.
2. Set a timer to not go overboard with the lecturing. “When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story.”
3. Start every class with at least 15 to 20 minutes of questions students might have about the previous lesson. “This is my biggest regret right now – not starting every class this way,” she writes. “I am imagining all the misunderstandings, the engagement, the enthusiasm, the collaborative skills, and the autonomy we missed out on because I didn’t begin every class with 15 or 20 minutes of this.”
3: “You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.”
Wiggins realized how a teacher’s actions may deter a student from speaking up or asking questions: “[If the person teaching me] answered those questions by rolling their eyes at me, I would never want to ask another question again.”
What she would do now:
1. Show more “patience and love” when dealing with students who have questions. “Questions are an invitation to know a student better and create a bond with that student,” she said.
2. Stop the eye-rolling or the snarky, sarcastic remarks to students.
3. Create a specific time period for students to ask all their questions.
After her experiment, Wiggins concludes, “I worry about the messages we send them as they go to our classes and home to do our assigned work, and my hope is that more teachers who are able will try this shadowing and share their findings with each other and their administrations.”
DON’T MISS: The Brilliant But Simple Way This Teacher Stops Bullying
 

When High Turnover Threatens Learning, This Unique Program Helps Urban Schools Retain Talented Teachers

Posted on by robbie

The first day of school can be just as nerve-wracking for new teachers as it is for students. Not only is it their first time in the classroom on their own, but gaining the command and respect of children is no easy task.
In the Baltimore school district, hundreds of teachers are hired every year to fill vacant spots. And just as fast as they’re hired, it seems that they’re gone: 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within three years. This cycle continues year after year.
That’s why former Baltimore school administrator Jennifer Green and her colleague decided to do something about it. In 2009, they quit their jobs to form the Urban Teacher Center (UTC), a Baltimore-based organization working to end the fast burnout rate by preparing new teachers for that first year in the classroom.
How do they plan to do this? Well, in exchange for $20,000 from a school’s principal, UTC will send a recent college graduate to spend a year as a resident working alongside an experienced teacher. Over the course of the year, the resident will gain valuable first-hand experience, take graduate classes and have a chance to receive a full-time job offer.
[Other routes] “don’t have the one year of mirroring an effective teacher,” David Wise, a UTC participant tells Governing. “That helps you a lot.”
If hired, the residents can continue to work and earn their masters from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass.
Currently, UTC has 123 teachers in 35 schools across Baltimore and 200 teachers in 41 schools in Washington. The group plans to expand to Chicago next year and four more cities in the next five years. And it’s not alone, as similar residencies are already established in Boston, Minneapolis and Miami.
It’s obvious that American students are lagging behind students in other countries, and educators are looking towards teachers as both the problem and the solution. Some critics call for stricter and more rigorous application and training processes for new teachers, while others propose evaluating teachers based partly on how their students perform on standardized tests.
UTC falls into the category of the first group. Its process is selective as only 25 percent of the applicants are accepted for the four-year program.
Already, the program is showing results. Although the attrition rate for the first class of UTC residents was the same as the national average, the second class is entering its third year with retention rates improved to 82 percent.
For the school districts, residencies are providing a great, cost-efficient opportunity to find and train new, effective teachers.
“We look for any way we can to get more qualified adults working with students for an extended period of time. The more positive adult interactions kids have, the better they do in school,” Principal Anthony Ruby of Holabird Academy tells Governing. “I can afford four full-time residents for what is still $10,000 less than a teacher.”
With both residents and principals calling it a bargain, this new system may just be the future of education. But the biggest winner? The students.
MORE: This City Gives Dropouts a Realistic Way to Earn Their Diplomas