Students come to our classrooms with many assumptions and misconceptions, and it is the teacher’s job to anticipate them, recognize them, and correct them. Here are a few that I have seen or heard about:

• When you add or subtract, always line up the numbers on the right
• When you multiply, the answer is always bigger
• Rockets work because the exhaust pushes against the Earth
• Magnets stick to anything made of metal
• Christopher Columbus was trying to prove the world was round
• The American Revolution was fought over high taxes

Many student misunderstandings are simply a lack of experience. There is a scene in the 1982 movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Khan, the villain, is trying to hunt down our heroes. Kirk flies the Enterprise into a nebula in order to obscure the ship from Khan’s scanners. After a few minutes, Spock makes an observation about Khan:

SPOCK: Sporadic energy readings port side, aft. Could be an impulse turn.

KIRK: He won’t break off now. He followed me this far. He’ll be back. But from where…?

SPOCK: He’s intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates…two-dimensional thinking…

Kirk looks at him, smiles.

KIRK: All stop.

SULU: All stop, sir.

KIRK: Z-minus ten thousand meters. Stand by photon torpedoes.

Like Khan, our students are intelligent but have limited experience. I wonder, though, how often we reinforce misunderstandings instead of correcting them?

Often in the name of making our lessons accessible or understandable we simplify concepts and use stereotypical examples. Consider geometry, for instance. When we draw shapes, they always look essentially the same:

Standard pattern block shapes

Triangles are always equilateral and point up. Rectangles are always wider than they are long and are parallel to the ground. At the extreme, we even refer to shapes by different names depending on their orientation. I actually heard this statement during a math lesson once:

And if you turn this diamond, it will become a square.

The shape was always a square; the direction it faces doesn’t make any difference.

Try these suggestions to avoid reinforcing the misconceptions of your students:

• Know your own misconceptions. Begin with the assumption that you may have picked up your own wrong ideas in school or from popular media. Review the material ahead of time and look for places where you yourself didn’t quite get it right. (Incidentally, if you read any of the items in my original list and thought, “What’s wrong with that?” you may want to do a little research and find the subtle problems with them.)
• Plan ahead for student misunderstanding. Learn the places where your students are likely to get confused or have preconceived ideas about a topic. Many misconceptions are common and repeated, so it’s easy to prepare for them.
• Use a wide variety of examples. Deliberately choose examples that stretch students’ thinking. Use counterexamples to help them better define concepts in their minds.
• Let students construct their own definitions. By letting students build definitions and explanations around examples you use, you are encouraging them to analyze the examples and understand the concept deeply instead of just memorizing a sentence someone else has provided them. After they attempt to build a student-friendly explanation, you can come in and provide more precise vocabulary where necessary to give them a more concise way to express it.
• Expect students to explain and justify their reasoning. Sometimes students are able to apply a rote algorithm accurately and get a correct answer to a problem without really understanding what they are doing. Asking them to explain, even when their process seems obvious to you, will give you insight into whether their thinking is accurate or has flaws that need to be corrected.

Soon after Kirk changed his tactics to account for Khan’s misconception, he was able to sneak up behind Khan’s ship, ultimately winning the battle. While it is unlikely that the misconceptions our students carry through school will result in such life or death circumstances, we can make our own jobs easier by preventing them in the first place.

SPOCK
                             Sporadic energy readings port side,
                             aft. Could be an impulse turn.

                                           KIRK
                             He won't break off now. If he
                             followed me this far he'll be back.
                             But from where...?

                                           SPOCK
                             He's intelligent, but not experienced.
                             His pattern indicates two dimensional
                             thinking...

                   Kirk looks at him, smiles.

                                           KIRK
                             Mr. Saavik, all stop.

                                           SAAVIK
                             All stop, sir.

                                           KIRK
                             Descend ten thousand meters. Stand
                             by photon torpedoes.

Last month some colleagues and I ran a workshop for teachers at my school on differentiation. In preparing for it, I came across the idea of anchor activities. Unfortunately, many of the resources I found giving examples actually list a lot of the traditional time-filler busy work (extra worksheets, copy and define words from the dictionary, coloring pages, etc.) and slap the “anchor activity” label on them. In her book The Differentiated Classroom, Carol Tomlinson defines anchor activities as

meaningful work done individually and silently. This could be journal writing, free reading, foreign language pattern drills, seatwork in math, or sketchbook assignments. It’s something useful and important for students to do…. (p. 97)

The key words I see here are meaningful, useful, and important. We have to put as much thought into selecting what we ask students to do in their unstructured time so that it never actually becomes down time.

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that students’ brains cannot stay in high academic gear all day long. They need frequent short “brain breaks” (as Eric Jensen calls them) to be able to stay alert and focused throughout the school day. The real trick is finding the balance and making sure that the breaks are built into our instruction so that students are more able to continue academic work during their unstructured time.

As with many differentiation techniques, though, anchor activities should be just a starting point. Tomlinson herself explains that setting up anchor activities as a routine in your classroom should be a way to train students to expect that there will be times when different people are doing different things so that some students can break off from the group.

What do you do, then, when you have students who are ready to break off? Perhaps you have a few gifted students who have compacted out of part of a math unit. Or you have several students who routinely finish their work quickly and accurately. Here are a few ideas for ongoing, long-term activities they can do that are meaningful, useful, and important:

• Independent Study. This is of course the tried and true traditional approach, and much has been written about it. What I recommend is that you always give students a way to share their results or integrate it back into the classroom community. I had a student once who was fascinated with folk tales and fairy tales. Her fourth grade class was learning about Africa that year, so her independent study project was to find and study some African folk tales and adapt one into a play (another interest of hers). She then selected student volunteers and put on a very simple (just a few masks and props) production in the classroom.
• Classroom yearbook. Have your regular early finishers form a “yearbook committee.” Their job is to plan, design, and prepare a classroom yearbook to go home with your students at the end of the year. They would need to interview each member of the class, prepare a page about each, take photos, record important classroom events, and so on.
• About Our School video. Have your kids take snapshots of activities around the classroom (and around the school if your situation permits and your students are trustworthy). Use Animoto to put together an introductory music video that the principal could use during Back to School night presentations or post on the school website.
• Unit reconnaissance. Enlist the aid of your better researchers to help you find good materials for upcoming units. Tell the students what the next unit will be in one subject area. Give them some guidelines and some topic suggestions, then give them time to explore the library and the Internet for materials that will support what you will be doing. Use online tools like Diigo or a classroom wiki to gather the information in one spot.

What are your ideas for keeping anchor activities and bigger projects connected and meaningful? How will you work to eliminate busy work from your classroom and school this year?

References:

Tomlinson, C. A. (1999). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

The tension hangs in the air like wet snow on tree branches. Flight Director Gene Kranz listens as his team tells him the command module does not have enough air or power to return to Earth. In this scene from the movie Apollo 13, Ed Harris, playing Kranz, utters the now-famous line verbalizing what the team—and the audience—felt: “Failure is not an option!” (Kranz, by the way, never actually said those words, though he did borrow them for the title of his memoir.)

The Apollo 13 astronauts of course made it back safely, and the intense search for solutions to impossible problems still makes a riveting story.

In public education today it often seems like we’re living this Hollywood scene. Federal policy mandates that five years from now, one hundred percent of our children will meet grade level standards in reading and math. Failure is not an option. And why not? If you believe that all children can learn (and I do), what’s wrong with setting high expectations for achievement and doing everything we can to see that students meet those expectations?

There is plenty of debate about that very question, but that isn’t my focus here. What concerns me is how the expectation of success and achievement can get translated at the classroom level. I frequently see this idea that failure is not an option applied to daily assignments and tests. Teachers have no-tolerance policies about missed homework, for example, or grading scales that doom students who do not pass every test.

This is particularly evident with gifted students. I often hear both parents and students say that since these students are so capable, any grade below a certain level is unacceptable and likely means the student is simply being lazy. The response is often punitive, requiring extra “make up” work or retests for partial credit.

It’s easy to forget that gifted students may have the ability to learn quickly and comprehend at a deep, sophisticated level that other students don’t, but this doesn’t mean they already know everything or can do everything without instruction and guidance.

It also doesn’t mean that a lack of success automatically means a lack of effort. Young gifted children are used to success. Things come easily to them, often automatically, and they learn rapidly without even realizing they are learning. Without fail, though, every child hits a point where content is beyond their ability to absorb instantly, and they need to begin applying conscious thought and systematic effort to their learning.

Most children reach this point early in life, often before school starts. They find out that sometimes things don’t go right the first time, and they develop ways to cope with it, persist, and grow.

But gifted students may not reach that point until later, sometimes not until middle or even high school. When they finally do hit the wall, they often have no concept of what has happened, and they don’t know how to respond.

It’s important for teachers to teach all students, and especially the highly able ones, how to fail successfully.

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down. (Mary Pickford)

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed. (Michael Jordan)

We can’t afford any longer to treat failure like an end. Instead, we need to rethink it and consider it a beginning. I’ve written before about how to deal with perfectionism, and those suggestions apply here as well. Here are a few other specific things that teachers can do to create an environment that nurtures learning instead of stifling it:

• Redefine the word “mistake.” In your classroom, a mistake should always be an opportunity for growth and learning, never a failure. Which naturally leads to
• Give second (and third and fourth) chances. Any student who does not achieve at the expected level should not be labeled as lazy or a failure. Instead, give them the opportunity to relearn and try again. School should be the one place where it is completely safe to mess up over and over until you can get it right.
• Celebrate growth. Instead of focusing only on accomplishment, give every student the opportunity to experience the pleasure of success by redefining it. Progress should be considered success, not just rising above a target level.
• Reward effort. Giving as much (if not more) attention to students who work hard and take risks as to those who demonstrate more traditional types of success, we send the message that our classrooms are a place for working and trying, not just for accomplishment.
• Model failure. By showing students how to deal with times they don’t meet their goals or expectations, we give them tools to cope when it happens to them. We also let them see that mistakes and failure are a normal part of life.
• Set students up to fail sometimes. Especially with gifted children, there will be times that the more important lesson is how to recover from failure rather than to experience success. Set students up to fail by giving them a task they do not have the skill or knowledge to complete. Then help them pick themselves up, think about what happened, determine what they need to do to succeed, and walk them through that recovery process.

Try these in your classroom this year. Create a different atmosphere and see what happens to attitudes and learning.

When I was in college earning my education degree, most of the research on learning came out of behavioral psychology: Pavlov, Thorndike, and Skinner. We learned how to mold our students’ skills and behaviors through drill and practice, rewards, and punishments. Instructional techniques were built around how to train students to become fluent in the reading and computation skills they would need to be successful in life.

Then, about ten years later, when I was doing advanced graduate work and earning my certificate in curriculum design, we learned that learning wasn’t quite as cut and dried as that. Curriculum shouldn’t be compartmentalized, it should be integrated. Instruction shouldn’t be skill-driven, it should incorporate higher level thinking. Assessments shouldn’t be designed around discrete facts, they should be authentic. At the time we read an interview with Lauren Resnick, a major researcher into learning and how it works. (The article is available free to ASCD members.)

I recently came across the article again, and although it is now twenty years old, Resnick’s comments are thought-provoking, not the least because much of what she said then still has not become widespread in the field.

If knowledge consists of small bits of information to be accumulated, then we know how it is learned and therefore how to teach it. In that case the pedagogy has to do with how you organize practice, how you structure and sequence the material, and how you manage motivation…. But if you view knowledge as something more than an accumulation of little bits, if you want students to understand and be able to use knowledge reflectively, that’s different. (Brandt 1988/1989, p. 13)

If you read the professional literature and listen to what is said in training seminars and workshops, you might think this belief that there is more to learning than discrete facts has pervaded our school systems. Resnick talked about how mathematics, for example, is not a collection of skills, but is an “organized system of thought” (p. 14). But the curriculum has yet to catch up with the past. Even twenty years later, textbooks still look essentially the same as they did then. They still are structured around the accumulation of facts and discrete skills, though they often fill them with lots of the latest terminology.

Teaching practices really haven’t caught up either, because our schools aren’t structured to facilitate it.

What people learn is virtually never a direct replica of what they have read or been told or even of what they have been drilled on. We know that to understand something is to interpret it…. It is not enough to focus on making an excellent presentation, because you cannot assume that your elegant explanation will be heard and understood in its entirety. In fact, you can be almost 99 percent sure that no child in your classroom will get it the way you said it. (p. 15)

And yet what do we see in many classrooms? Teacher at the front, telling students what to do, how to do it, and what to remember. I’m guilty of it myself, and I think on reflection it is a function of time. Planning and implementing the most effective forms of learning experiences take far more time than most teachers can spare. So we fall back on what is efficient, even if it is not as effective.

It’s not enough to stay comfortable with what we know how to do. If I keep teaching the way I’ve always taught, I can’t bring my practice up to date with 1980′s research, let alone what is happening in 2009. I don’t think we can even afford to say, “the system isn’t set up for it, so why bother?” Find ways inside the structure to start making changes toward a more student-centered, thinking- and problem-solving-oriented approach.

How are you making this happen in your classroom? What are the struggles you’re facing? How can we work together to overcome the challenges?

Reference

Brandt, R. (December 1988/January 1989). On learning research: A conversation with Lauren Resnick. Educational Leadership, 46 (4), 12-16.

As I was rereading Wiggins and McTighe‘s Understanding by Design recently, it occurred to me that there is a disconnect between authentic learning and the way we are required to teach today. Teaching is increasingly focused into neat little packages that are easily assessed and can be boiled down into a single test score for accountability and record keeping. Curriculum and unit plans are structured and pretty documents, having a well-defined beginning, middle and end. Lessons are little self-contained deals, 45-minutes or less, with a clear structure and closure and don’t necessarily connect to anything else.

It’s teaching in a Twitter and YouTube world where significance boils down to a 140-character summary or a 30-second video clip.

But learning in the real world, or at least in my real world, is messy, lumpy, and long-term. I was thinking about how I personally learn almost everything I’ve learned in the last few years: web design, writing interactive fiction, curriculum compacting, even IEP writing. In most cases, I learned most of what I know simply by jumping in with both feet, getting dirty, and mucking around with things. In a lot of cases, I learned some of the “basics” after I learned more advanced techniques. I learned things as I needed them. When I wanted to make a web page do what I wanted it to do, I just went in and figured it out. There was very little systematic about the process. When I ran into a roadblock, I’d go looking for help, either from those more structured resources or from my network of friends and colleagues.

Not that I didn’t have some structure to my learning. In most cases I did take the time to read tutorials, or introductory level books about what I was learning, and I tried some structured activities designed to walk me through what I needed to know. But often I didn’t know what I needed to know until I was in the midst of my own real project.

I think this is what Wiggins and McTighe are interested in getting at with more authentic ways of assessing students. But how to fit it into the structured world of school? My own teaching the last few years has tended towards the messy, unstructured variety. Often, I’ll teach a unit by having an idea of a project I want my students to complete, and some specific goals I want them to get out of it, and we just sort of dive in and work out most of the details as we go along. There’s some value in this, I think, and as much as I’ve criticized myself for not being organized enough or planning enough, when I look back I can see a lot of good learning that has taken place in my students over the years. The feedback I get from the students and their parents has also reinforced this.

But to an outsider (or an administrator) looking on, it’s hard to explain. I don’t always have finely-detailed unit plans, and less often do I have well-structured daily lesson plans. I don’t always have the clearest idea where something is going to take us, and often the students push a project in directions I couldn’t have imagined it going when I conceived it in the first place. More often than not, too, these learning experiences don’t always wrap themselves up into a tidy package with a bow that I can send home at the end of the marking period. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve set up our annual end of the year open house display with multiple signs indicating “works-in-progress”.

As a teacher of the gifted, I have much more freedom to try these messy projects with my students. But there has to be a way to tighten things up, too. As much as authentic learning is messy, I do want my students to be able to walk away from the year with a sense of accomplishment and completion, and I want to be able to help maintain an appropriate focus.

So where’s the balance? How do we keep things “authentic” (and therefore potentially messy) and still have the neat, accountable package that the school system demands? What are the conflicting forces that pull you in two different directions as you teach and how do you reconcile them?

(This article originally appeared in a slightly different form at Grandé With Room)

Every year I stand in front of a group of new fourth or fifth grade students and face the most challenging teaching task I’ve ever had: training them to be telepathic.

I always begin with a magic trick. Each student chooses a two-digit number. Then I walk them through a series of simple calculations resulting in a new number. On that page in their math book, they choose a picture and memorize it.

Earlier in the day, a mysterious envelope had arrived in the classroom, marked “DO NOT OPEN…TOP SECRET.” I now open that envelope, revealing a duplicate of the photo they all have memorized. I can read minds!

Of course, it doesn’t take long for the class to realize it was a trick, and I don’t deny it. In fact, I remind them that I began the exercise by telling them I was going to do a magic trick. The point is why I had to do a trick: teacher’s can’t read minds.

“So what does this have to do with math?” they ask me.

“Ah, excellent question,” I reply. “When you put an answer down on a math test or a homework problem, how does your teacher know what you were thinking when you solved it?”

“Uh…she doesn’t?”

“Precisely. But for us to teach you, we need to know how you’re thinking so we can help you learn how to solve problems better. Since we can’t read minds, what’s the only way for us to know what’s going on in your head as you’re solving a math problem?”

If the lesson were outside at night, this question would normally be answered by the sound of crickets chirping. One brave soul usually raises a cautious hand: “Uh…we tell you?”

A simple concept. A difficult task. Actually getting the thoughts from their heads into words—and eventually onto paper—is something that takes much practice and many examples. Yesterday I talked about one of the ways to begin this process by teaching and using the correct vocabulary.

We need to teach students that math is not about rote manipulation of abstract symbols. Those symbols, and the terminology that goes along with them, are tools with two purposes: solving problems, and communicating ideas.

I’ve developed a structure that helps students organize their thinking and chunk the way they communicate it. I tell them, “Wear Your C.A.P.E.”:

The most difficult aspect of this, of course, is the explanation—describing the why, not just the what. In order to help with this, I teach them the Magic Words. Just like using clue words to identify the operation in a word problem (like “all together” signifies addition), these words can help to signify their mathematical reasoning when they talk or write. (This list is based on an article by Diane Hurst published several years ago in the PA Math Assessment Handbook, but no longer appears to be available):

Students who learn to use these words correctly will begin to unpack the reasoning that is going on in their heads.

How could you adapt this to your situation? What other subject areas might it work for? Do you have other ideas about teaching students to be “telepathic” and communicate their thinking to other people?

Teachers of mathematics need to recognize that there is a strong link between language, writing, and problem solving. In most of the assessments that states use to determine student and school success, a student must demonstrate math reasoning abilities through writing. This skill is not automatic, though. It develops through a recursive process:

Vocabulary & Language <—> Reasoning <—> Talk <—> Writing

Beginning with vocabulary and language, a student learns to reason, then to communicate those thoughts verbally, and finally to write. Each of the levels feeds back to the previous one, reinforcing and further developing it.

Thus if we’re going to teach reasoning skills effectively, it follows we need to carefully consider the vocabulary we use.

It isn’t uncommon, especially in the primary grades, for teachers to simplify the language we use with children to explain complex concepts. Although this is useful, it can also lead to sloppy language if we aren’t careful. It is particularly important that we don’t permit students to use precise math terms improperly and that we teach the “real” terms as quickly as possible. Even if students don’t use them right away, they should be hearing the correct terminology in context from the beginning.

Here are a few examples of sloppy math language that I often hear from older students. If these go uncorrected, students will have a very difficult time communicating well when they need to explain their thought process–a skill that is essential to upper level math.

I believe it’s essential to require students to be precise when they communicate. Often when students don’t use the correct term, or use a valid term improperly, it is a sign they just don’t have the right words.

I’ve heard teachers argue that young children just aren’t capable of such sophisticated language yet. My father, a retired professor of speech/language pathology, has often said, however, that if second graders can learn and correctly use terms like “Tyrannosaurus Rex” and “Diplodocus”, why on earth can’t we teach them to say “subtracted” instead of “minused”? Vocabulary instruction should be as much an integral part of mathematics as it is of reading, writing, and other content areas.

Tomorrow I will tackle a more challenging vocabulary-related issue in mathematics: verbal and written explanations of a student’s cognitive process.

(This article is based on material I originally posted in Grandé With Room.)

Here’s an interesting idea for a quick classroom activity that has potential for many discussions. This could certainly be applied in many different ways to students at all levels.

Begin by taking kids to this site: http://whereiwrite.org. It is a small site with one purpose: to showcase portraits of authors (they all happen to be in the science fiction genre) in the spaces where they do their writing.

A few thoughts come to my mind as I scan through the pictures:

• Nearly every space is a work space. Creativity isn’t about flashes of inspiration. It’s about doing. And effort.
• Almost every writer surrounds him- or herself with books. Dozens or hundreds of them. Writers read. A lot.
• Writers are ordinary people. They have pets. They even have stained glass thingies hanging in their windows.

I think there’s a great lesson for students, especially reluctant writers.

Some other ideas for follow up activities:

• Have students share photos of their writing spaces and talk about them
• If you could create a better space to write, what would it look like? Why not create it?
• How could we design our classroom space to make it better for doing our work?

What do you see in these photos? What questions would you ask of your students about these pictures? What else do they tell you about what writers do and how to be one?

I had a conversation the other day with Kelly Hines on Twitter about resources for teachers. There are a number of sites out there (like this one and this one) that collect links to resources for teachers in one place for easy reference. Some people find them useful, and there are undoubtedly some great resources there.

But I tend to find them difficult to use, at best. Though they frequently are categorized by topic, or grade level, or some other system, in practice, it is sort of like handing someone a list of all the book titles in the library. I think these kinds of kitchen sink link buckets have value, and I’m not saying there’s no point in having them or using them. I just personally find their value to be limited. For someone who plans around resources, they are, I’m sure, invaluable. Browse the list, gather a few good sites, and then build your instruction around them.

But I tend to plan in the opposite direction. I’ll select my objectives and projects and develop a general outline of where I want to go, then look for resources that will plug into the outline. Link buckets are not the best way to track down this sort of resource.

Problem is, I’m not sure what really would work. I’m a member of Diigo and Delicious and do search through the socially tagged links there. I do use the link buckets from time to time. But what I think we need is something that’s a blend of a wiki and a social bookmarking site. The problem I see with current social bookmarking is that each person’s links are separate. When I search, I get an uncategorized, unsorted list of links which may well contain duplicates. I can see if multiple people have saved the same link, but a different link on the same domain will show up as a separate item.

Here are a few features (in absolutely no particular order) I’d ideally like to see in the perfect resource site:

• Search within search results to narrow the focus
• Grouping and sorting within results
• If I save a link, I will immediately see who else has saved the same page or domain so I can make an intelligent decision about how to save the link
• A way to display annotated links (not just titles or summaries) for a particular tag or search term
• A broad but structured way of identifying links as appropriate for various categories (e.g. K-2, math, geology, etc.)
• A way of editing the categorization made by others and modifying the structure itself (like a wiki)

There has to be some way of balancing volume (lots of worthwhile links) with findability (limiting links to a few strong candidates so it is more browsable, like this list I put together for a workshop I did recently).

What am I missing? What other features should it have? How would it look in practice? Is this even a possibility? Maybe it already exists and I just don’t know it yet. I’d love to hear what other people have to say.

In my last two posts, I wrote about the responsibilities that go along with using powerful technology tools, both for students and for teachers. Today I will consider a third group: administrators.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) recognizes the importance of strong leadership to the effective use of technology in schools, shown by the fact that they have developed national standards for administrators. It is not enough to simply create policies aimed at enforcing safety and productivity for students and teachers. Administrators must accept their responsibility for visionary leadership, which takes several forms.

Understand

Just as teachers and students must understand a new tool or technique before they can use it properly, administrators must deeply understand what is happening in the realm of technology if they are going to be able to lead effectively. This means learning about research and best practices.

It also requires them to use the technologies themselves. Consider what a “chalkboard policy” might have looked like if designed by administrators who had never used one:

1. Chalkboards by nature are open and accessible forums, and as such have inherent risks involved with their use. In the best interests of student and employee safety, it is the policy of this administration to restrict access to chalkboards and to monitor their use at all times.
2. Chalkboards will be maintained behind a locked panel when not in use. The key to this panel is available in the main office of each school building and must be signed out when needed.
3. Only authorized brands of yellow or white chalk may be used on District chalkboards. Other writing implements, including but not limited to colored chalk, serve no discernible educational purpose and are forbidden.
4. Only those who have a signed “Chalkboard User Agreement” on file may write on the chalkboard at any time.
5. The use of the chalkboard is a privilege, which may be revoked by the administrators at any time for abusive conduct or violations of this agreement.

Of course, there are many places where the parallels break down, and it is not my intent to make light of the real issues and risks involved with Internet use by students. I believe, however, that if more administrators had a thorough understanding of the tools affected by their policies, those policies would have a different focus.

Plan

Many districts seem to think that the principle of reverse psychology–where doing the opposite of what is expected will have more powerful results–also applies to policy implementation in this three-step process:

1. Implement new policy
2. Determine how the policy should work (usually after 6-12 months of practice)
3. Decide whether the policy was warranted in the first place (often after a year or two of failure)

In reality there must be thorough planning before a policy can be put into effect, with consideration for how it will impact all areas of curriculum and instruction.

Another, more subtle sort of planning is required if the use of technology tools is going to be anything other than just a tacked-on option to an already overstuffed curriculum. This is where a clear, long-range vision for the future is crucial. The higher in an organization an administrator rises, the more that person needs to see the big picture and proactively design, not manage, what that picture will look like as the district develops.

Model

Educators know that more powerful than telling is showing. Good teachers build modeling into their instruction because it provides students with an example of what skilled, expert use looks like.

Administrators cannot expect teachers and students to simply follow their vision with having an example to follow. If administrators expect technology tools to be used properly, they must show what that proper use looks like. If they want to see more students and teachers blogging, they must blog. If they want to see Twitter used as a professional tool rather than simply a social one, they must be on Twitter themselves.

Communicate

A clear, effective vision will never become reality until it is communicated with those who are ultimately required to put it into effect. Just as teachers must communicate with students, giving feedback, sharing goals, setting expectations, administrators must communicate in all the same ways with their constituents.

Conclusion

Implementing technology responsibly and effectively is a complex thing. Because it has so much power, I believe it would be irresponsible not to embrace these tools in schools today. Many students, teachers, and administrators are understandably reluctant to take on the responsibilities that come along with the power of the tools. But like Peter Parker, who received his powers without asking for them, we cannot ignore them. We have to dive in, accept the fact that we have been handed great responsibilities, and use our powers to become superheros instead of villains.