I recently started grad school at the Teachers College at Columbia. I am going to be studying Instructional Technology and Media, and I plan on learning how to effectively assess the impact of technology in schools.

I’m going to grad school super part time (4 credits currently!) for a few different reasons.

1. I was flustered around this time last year, wondering what I was doing with my life, and figured I’d apply to only one grad school. One was enough!
2. I need to get a Masters degree at some point if I still have dreams of one day being a teacher.
3. I think this program will provide useful skills if I want to go back into the classroom (we’ll discuss current policies, theories, and strategies for educational research and implementation) or if I want to stay in technology or start-ups. (I’ll learn research skills that are applicable anywhere, and I have a few required Javascript courses I’ll have to take. I might even learn some basic programing.)
4. If you go to grad school super part-time you have a lot more time to earn the $$$ to go there. 😉

One burning question I’d love to help research and answer is: How Effective is Teacher lead Professional Development? When I worked at ShowMe I went to ISTE and TEDxNYED and edCamp. These are all teacher lead professional development events (Well, ISTE is a lot of things) and I’ve participated in #edchat and other education twitter chats. The teachers that participate were engaged and excited to share what they’ve done in their classrooms.Obviously these teachers are the early adaptors, the mavens, the innovators. Most teachers are not like them. But I’m interested to see more mandatory, well-structured, teacher-lead professional development in schools.

Think of it as after school show and tell; the teachers share any PD they’ve recently attended and what they found useful. They can also share any failures or successes they’ve experienced trying a different tool, policy or strategy in the classroom. Everyone loves talking about “bad” teachers these days, but I think very few teachers are actually “bad.” Many are  just not innovative and stuck in their old ways. Teaching is a rather independent profession and you can get stuck in a bubble believing that what you do is working, simply because students are passing a test or sitting quietly. If all teachers heard what more adventurous, innovative, teachers are doing in the classroom it could at least give them the inspiration and opportunity to change their classroom as well.

But for now this is a complete hypothesis. I can chat all I want, but I’ll need some data to back this up. So perhaps this is a research question I’ll be working on for the rest of my time at Columbia. Or maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow. Either way I’ll keep you updated.

Student loan debt is a hot topic these days. Recent graduates have a lot of debt but not a lot of job prospects. The average debt in 2011 was $23,300. Roughly 54% of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. I was in that category until recently, and many of my friends are struggling to find a job. Last Friday the NY Times released a short video interviewing three recent New Paltz graduates that were drowning in debt.  That obviously hit close to home.

I am so lucky and fortunate for several reasons. My family was able to pay for my education and I don’t have any loans to pay.  I really wanted to go to Bucknell University in high school. I did well and a lot of my friends were heading off to big name state schools or private schools. Bucknell had a great campus and a $40,000 per year tuition price tag. I remember my parents telling me they would try as hard as they could to pay for me to go if I got in. In hindsight I am happy to say I was rejected, so I never had to decide whether to go to a prestigious private school or a SUNY. Four years of New Paltz tuition was less than a year at Bucknell.

Who’s to blame for all this college debt? Well first, it does no good to place blame on anyone since these recent graduates are stuck with this regardless. Because they are stuck with this it is easy to place blame on them. When I was watching the New Paltz video the NY Times posted even I thought “Why did you spend $60,000 for an Art History degree? C’mon now!” But I started college in 2007, a year before the recession started. We had been bred since middle school to become college students. Adults gave us this idea that college was the golden ticket to the sweet life, we just had to get a decent SAT score, pass our finals and join a sport or club. Once we were accepted to college we would therefore be guaranteed a job upon graduation and we would be quickly reaping up those millions of additional dollars you earn over the course of your lifetime thanks to our degrees. And the better the college we attended, the better our lives would turn out. Any price tag was worth it!

This might sound suspicious for you, an adult, who has learned that adults can often be incorrect and misguided, just like kids. However, at 16 and 17 years old this can sound like a completely logical game plan. Senior year of high school is all about comparing your SAT scores to colleges in your range. You have “reach” schools, “good fits” and finally, “safety” schools. Getting into a reach school was amazing, being stuck with a safety schools seemed like failure. (At my high school most of our safety schools were state schools and community colleges, the ones with a lower price tag! But we didn’t see it that way.)

After we found out our fate, our parents often had good sense and helped us make a decision based on a combination of school fit and price tag. After time and consideration I decided that New Paltz was worth the bang for its considerably smaller buck, it had a decent education program and four years later I graduated with a degree and great friends and memories.

Sometimes I think about what I would have done if I had to pay for college myself. At 17 years old I worked at a West Point gift shop on the weekends and I made an average of about $100 every two weeks. I can’t imagine how overwhelming it must have been to take out loans. The actual weight of amounts like $23,000 are foreign to the average 17 year old. We had been told our whole lives that we should go to good schools, the schools most have heard of often cost upwards of $40,000 or more. If that’s their price than you would assume it is reasonable- maybe it’s not as much money as your 17 year old self seems to think it is. One year on the job after college and this will all be paid off…

After the economy sank we can now see that this student loan debt really can’t work. I want us to change this ridiculous mindset. The average cost of a private school in the 2011-2012 school year was $27,340. The average starting salary for 2011 graduates was $41,701. I don’t see why you would pay more to go to college than what you make in your first year on the job.

The United States is a free country, and if you want to and can pay $30k per year tuition, it should be an option. But this should not be the norm by any means. It shouldn’t matter the name of the school but the worth of the student who attended it. With all of the publicity going towards student loan debt, I hope it has helped high school graduates and their parents realize what a disaster large amounts of student loans are. I hope strong students are attending schools within their financial means and that this is the norm, not the exception. State schools are great. Community Colleges are a valuable and necessary option for many. Going to school part time while working is commendable. Working a few years before going to college should be valued as well. We need to stop allowing our high schoolers to be so jaded and help them see that college can be their first big financial investment. A lot of the same students that took out student loans would never buy a car without having an income, yet they thought they were doing the right thing to buy their college education without one.

Just some food for thought. I’m a little sad because I feel like my generation was somehow tricked, and I hope all these kids are able to stay afloat.

A while back i wrote a post about The Value of Teachers, where I tried to make the point that good teachers don’t come from better salaries and standardized teacher evaluation systems, they come from a positive and innovative environment where people are excited to foster learning in students.

Recently I saw this post from Staffroom HQ that linked to a speech made by Dan Pink called “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.” I’ll include the video at the bottom of this page. Pink discusses various studies where workers were given monetary incentives to do work. In physical/mechanical tasks the more you were paid the harder you worked. But when even rudimentary cognitive work was required, a larger reward lead to lower performance. Crazy, right??

So what incentives are needed to foster increased performance in cognitive tasks? They discovered that higher performance happened when workers experienced  Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

Pink was able to say more eloquently and factually what I’ve been thinking for the past year in regards to gaining “better” teachers.  Many people seem to think the best way to see increased teacher performance is to create a standardized evaluation system. This system can rely on student standardized test scores. People like Michelle Rhee would like to see evaluations lead to higher pay for those with good results. I’m not naive, I also think teachers must be evaluated in some way, they have the serious responsibility of educating our children and they must be held accountable for it. But this standardized way of evaluating teacher and student performance is actually hindering performance for both parties involved.

Higher teacher salaries are not going to increase performance. (Although it is a real issue that some teachers don’t get paid enough.) An environment with more freedom to customize lessons to the interest of the teacher or students would increase performance (Autonomy). If teachers were  given time and partial stipends to attend professional development workshops or enroll in a courses about topics in their content area, we would see increased performance (Mastery). Respect from families, administrators and the general public would help increase teacher performance (Purpose).

One little anecdote: foursquare has hackathons every once in  a while where developers drink beer, work together and hack away over the course of the weekend. At the end of the weekend the hackers have created games, websites and other cool things using the foursquare API. Some of these things probably suck. Others are silly and will never amount to a profit making product, but they are still really fun. Timehop, a viable startup, was born out of a foursquare hackathon, then called 4 Square & 7 Years Ago. The people at these hackathons are smart and creative, and they have been given the autonomy to work on whatever they want. The result: a large amount of innovation and improvement in the short period of 48 hours. They don’t get paid in any form other than beer and food. Yet they work hard and create great stuff.

I’m fully aware that taking this and transforming it into an activity that would work at a public K-12 school may be difficult. Startups are small, private and there isn’t much at stake for the general public if they fail. Public schools are enormous, funded by tax payer dollars, and the future of our country is at stake when they fail. But as Dan Pink has showed us, money and standardization are NOT going to improve teacher performance. So we need to figure out what will. (And although it wouldn’t sit well with most, I personally love the mental image of teachers drinking beer and staying up all weekend creating new and innovative teaching strategies.)

Here’s the Dan Pink talk:

It’s TED talk week here! Sorry, I always love TED talks but this week I’ve seen two really stand-out talks. If you’re anything like me you love an excuse to watch a good TED talk anyway.

This talk is from Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian author. I came across it because Globaloria shows this video to students as a part of the curriculum early in the year. This week we have been looking at the curriculum, seeing if we can build up the empathy and social understanding portion. Globaloria is a game design class, so these things don’t have to be a huge part of the curriculum, but I think each class in every school should devote some time to the importance of respecting others and embracing people of all backgrounds and orientations.

I would love to see our schools put more effort into informing students about the dangers of “a single story.” But right now we live in a country where many teachers, administrators, politicians and policy makers also live by one story. This is probably one of the biggest reasons I wanted to be a Social Studies teacher. Students see things like the Holocaust or the Civil Rights movement, and they can see that the way Jews were treated was horrible, or that the way Blacks were treated before 1970 was inexcusable. But we still have so many more subtle instances of racism and hatred today because many people believe ideas that they were told and think it is right to make judgements about all people from one background based on a single story they have heard.

Don’t just believe a story.  Never assume someone is a certain way because of their background. Find out for yourself. It’s always ok to change your mind and alter your thought processes. It doesn’t mean you’re weak, I actually think it means you are so very strong.

I believe 2012 is really going to be a big year for me somehow. Things are going to change but at the same time things will fall into place. At the beginning of this year I started two new internships. Now I’ve been at them for almost a month and I wanted to share what I’ve been working on with you.

I currently work 4 days a week at World Wide Workshop. WWW has a program called Globaloria, which is a curriculum and learning network in 4 different states across the country. In the class students build an educational game using Flash Software. Students design the game from start to finish, creating a paper prototype (just ideas for the game on paper) in the fall, and eventually develop a game demo by mid-year and a final playable game by June. The main office is in NYC and the team is very small. I’m enjoying my time and I find this work to be meaningful and interesting. I’m thankful I have many different tasks to do when I come in… I hate doing the same thing everyday. One of the projects that has been assigned to me is maintaining the Globaloria Spotlight blog, which highlights exceptional student work throughout the year.

I also spend a few hours a week at Hot Bread Kitchen, a not for profit bakery in Harlem that aims to help women from low-income backgrounds receive a decent income and gain valuable food service skills. I’m working to bulster their Social Media presence over the course of the next 3 months.  I’ve mainly just been scripting out some interactive/ interesting content for them to post. I’ve been working on this project for less than three weeks and their followers/”likes” have already increase pretty significantly which is really encouraging.  I also created a foursquare page which has over 35 tips at different Greenmarkets and Shops throughout the city. It took a while but I really like how it turned out. I’ll eventually incorporate some tips at cultural locations that fit well with the mission of HBK.

Check out Hot Bread Kitchen on Twitter, Facebook and foursquare

I’ve also been helping the community manager at ShowMe work on some odds and ends since the end of last fall. ShowMe is a great iPad app that allows anyone to create lessons very similar visually to the style of Khan Academy. I don’t have an iPad, but I’m going to start spending a few hours a week working there (a new internship!) with them so maybe I’ll have time to create a lesson or two and post it on here. For some reason I really want to create a compare and contrast lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm  X. (I created a lesson about that last year with the 8th graders and they enjoyed it.) Until then you can check out a guest post I wrote for their blog here.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’ve been so busy I had to quit my retail job. My dad and I have a joke that I work for dozens of places yet I make no income. No worries though, its all about experience and I’ve definitely felt my confidence in myself increase over the past month. I’m getting involved in all my interests; ed tech, community management and social media management. I  suppose that is more valuable than money. 🙂

This morning a few people on twitter posted this NY Times Opt-Ed article by  Nicholas D. Kristof, titled “The Value of Teachers”. Articles like this help me remember why I wanted to be a teacher and how I still would like to teach. I enjoy these discussions about the “value” of teachers. We all know a great teacher is one of the most empowering and influential people in our lives outside of our family and friends. But the statistics of a valuable teacher even surprise me.

” A landmark new research paper underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime — or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class — all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade.”

Wow.

I watched Waiting for Superman recently and the movie talked about the same idea. A good teacher is so valuable and a bad teacher is so detrimental to our students, yet our Teachers Unions provide practically no way at all to differentiate between “bad” and “good” teachers. Both get paid the same amount of money and receive the same benefits. That doesn’t seem fair and it doesn’t make sense. Michelle Rhee, the previous Chancellor of DC public schools, wanted to give good teachers the opportunity to earn up to 6-figures per year with a merit-based pay system. This plan was immediately shot-down by Teachers Unions.

In theory we all like the idea that “good” teachers be rewarded with higher pay and “bad” teachers really should quit the profession. And although we can all rattle off names of a few nightmarish/amazing teachers we’ve had in our lives, in practice it is much harder than it sounds to weed out the bad from the good.

There are over 400 comments on Kristof’s Opt-Ed piece, all of them bringing up some excellent points on the issue. But today I just wanted to share a few ideas that I’ve thought about after reading this piece.

1. I don’t like the idea of merit-based pay because like I said earlier, it is too difficult to measure the quality of a teacher. Certainly we don’t want test scores determining whether or not a teacher is deemed as “good”, but really what else could we go off of? How many students like the teacher? How decorated the classroom is? How many parents call and complain? It could maybe be an elaborate evaluation process, but eventually school politics would get in the way and good decisions would not always be made.

2. Instead of focusing on separating the “good”  from the “bad” teachers, our systems should and can work on making most teachers “good”. And in my opinion, the best way to get good teachers is to make all teachers feel valued. A higher salary is not the only way to feel valued.

Ways to make a teacher feel valued:

• Allow them to attend a professional develop event of their choice each year.
• Give them smaller class sizes (no more than 25 students) so they are not overloaded.
• Give them the proper supplies and equipment they need to teach.
• Allow teachers to pursue their more exciting ideas; fund class field trips, bring in exciting public speakers.
• Provide Administrative support for the teacher when students are in trouble or parents come in ready to attack.
• Allow time for teachers to collaborate and discuss lessons and teaching with co-workers in a positive setting. (This is not the same as complaining in the Teachers Lounge at lunch.)

We always talk about how students are uninspired in our current school system; It is because our teachers are facing the same problem! They are overloaded, disrespected, under supplied, putting up with tedious, irrelevant B.S. everyday. Schools are worrying about complaining parents and standardized test scores for state funding. They are not interested in creating an innovative and engaging environment to inspire learning. When schools do focus on that I believe we will see that many of our “bad” teachers actually have a “good” teacher in them somewhere just waiting to come out and inspire our students.