How can we ensure students are prepared and "Ahead of the Curve?"

Panel discussion about preparing our students for the future.

Watch it live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/x%27s-and-o%27s-of-education-with-coach-norm

Engineering and Technoloby Breakout session

Live broadcast here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/x%27s-and-o%27s-of-education-with-coach-norm

What We Know About Central Texas Graduates

Second session of Ahead of the Curve: Preparing Students for the Future

Click the link to the live video below.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/x%27s-and-o%27s-of-education-with-coach-norm

Chris Engle Powerpoint from Ahead of the Curve: Preparing Students for the Future

Watch Chris Engle's presentation on Ustream at the following link:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/736400

The video quality it difficult to see the slides but the PowerPoint is located at Slideshare.net.

Engle Skillpoint 9 08 Final2

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: skillpoint alliance)

Ahead of the Curve, Preparing Students for the Future

Two weeks down

The second week of school is now over. It seems like it has been more than two weeks since we started. This was only a 4 day because of Labor day. Several kids commented about how the 4 day week seemed so long.

This next week will be very busy: Back to School night for Morgan and me, Micah's first football scrimmage, Robotics Team Kickoff meeting, Engineering meeting with University of Texas, First Lego League conference call, Micah's Back to School night, Morgan's first basketball game and we are hosting the Kickoff for Capital BEST Robotics next Saturday. It will be busy but fun.

My Robotics team seems very excited about the contest and the year. At least this year, they knew what they were getting into when they signed up for the class. For an assignment this week, they worked in small groups on last years BEST contest. Each group had to propose a design and a scoring strategy for the contest. Each group presented to the class. It was interesting for Hamzah and I to listen to their proposals since we were part of the contest last year. Many of the designs were very complicated but not completely thought out. Each team had difficulty answering questions about how they would actually accomplish their proposal. But we have N.O.R.M.A.N. from last years robot contest. They will be able to look at the speed, manuverability and reaction of the robot. They were very receptive to feedback and questions from me about thier design. It will be ineresting to see how they approach the season and contest.

The Robotics I students began building their Lego robots on Friday. We are using the Robotics Engineering curriculum from Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy. They were so excited to start building and working with the Legos. Several of the students had worked with NXT kits before but all students were very focused and intent in the class.

This year will present some new challenges for me a teacher as well as a learner. In addition to my job, I am beginning my research for my graduate school project. I have to email Dr. Summers a paragraph describing my research topic. I visited with her on Wednesday about my topic and research. Topics I am considering are high school to university transition, gender in robotics, diversity of age in my robotics classes and ???? This is the most pressing issue for the weekend for me.

Image source: http://www.wireandtwine.com/img/products/busy/prod-busy.jpg

First Week of School

One week is almost over. It seems as if it has been longer than that though. The year seems so different this year. I am in a new classroom in a new part of the building, new faces on campus, some old faces are gone, others seem distracted and distant but the all of my students seem excited about the classes.

I have been doing some research and reading about some more student focused learning.

I was turned on to Consultant Learning by Bill Harris from Mt. Carmel High School outside of San Diego. He gave me a packet produced by Dr. Scott W. Kunkel from University of San Diego. Dr. Kunkel states

... if you are searching for a better way to engage students, motivate students, and structure a classroom so that you don't have to spend the majority of your time enforcing rules, disciplining, and grading, then read on. If you are looking for a better way that frees you to really teach and coach students to do their best work -- then this information is for you.

The students are empowered and in control of their own learning process. Students determine their own grade based on how many hours of work they choose to do. The idea is very interesting to me. It requires the teacher to produce a book of projects and the fee the student will get in return for turning in a professional quality work. I do not know if I know enough about our Robotics curriculum at this point to design a book of projects and the associated fee I think I will experiment with the method with my Robotics II students. The consultant method allows students to structure their learning but the teacher can require a certain number of projects from certain topics or areas.

The second method is one I heard about from Ian Jukes. Ian referenced Ted McCain's book Teaching for Tomorrow, Teaching Content and Problem Solving Skills. McCain lays out a method of teaching that prepares students for their world by using independent study and role playing scenarios.
I began my Robotics I class this year with a role playing scenario. The students had to sort, inventory and organize LEGO Mindstorms kits. Each class had to design how they would go about the process. The plan had to be presented before they could begin. It has been very interesting to see how each class has approached the scenario. It has been a been a very good team building activity as well since I was not the one in charge for each class.

Both of these processes provide a way for students to actively engage and invest in their own learning. I am looking forward to the continued experimentation with these techniques. I will be searching for some answers to my questions: How will these methods effect discipline, off task behavior and grades? Can I sustain the work and not revert back to former methods of teaching and instruction? Will the students learn more? Will they learn skills they need to be successful in today's world that they would not otherwise learn.

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership, School Finance

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership - Student Activities and Activity Accounts

Attention: Howard Rheingold

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Attention Training

Can you train someone to pay attention? If so, at what age do we stop being able to be trained?

We often boast about our ability to multi-task thus paying attention to a multitude of influences and stimulus.

But cognitive brain research shows that multitasking can in fact be a waste of time.

Is multitasking effective or just an illusion? Who is to decide? Multitasking is something I feel I do very well but at what expense. I find myself being distracted and wanting to pay attention to multiple activities at a time. I know when I choose to focus on the task at hand, I do much better. In one of my recent grad school classes, we discussed "Flow" in reference to our creative ability.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields

I know when I get in the state of flow, I almost become trance like and focused like a laser, not to mention this is the time when I am at my best. Why then do I allow or continue to multitask?

Do I have ADD? Makes me wonder sometimes. Or am I afraid I am going to miss something. If I am honest with myself, I believe it is a little of both.

Today I ran across an article at Boston.com that tickled my personal and professional thoughts. Can we train someone to pay attention? If so, why don't I train myself and more importantly why aren't we teaching this in schools? As a professional educator, I notice my students have great difficulty getting on task and staying on task for extended periods of time. Would attention training help improve my students in my class?

The ability to pay careful attention isn't important just for students and air traffic controllers. Researchers are finding that attention is crucial to a host of other, sometimes surprising, life skills: the ability to sort through conflicting evidence, to connect more deeply with other people, and even to develop a conscience. Boston.com

This evidence and new research is exciting to me as a teacher, parent and learner. Bring it on!

This research is in the infancy stage but it has promising discoveries. I believe it is so exciting to know that we have some proof that we can work on this aspect.

My big question for myself is, Does my multitasking help me or distract me? With all the new tools such as the Twitter, UStream, Plurk, etc. will my multitasking get more efficient or much more distracted? I am enjoying the social staff development from reading so many different blogs, twitter posts and social conversations. Interesting ideas such as Dr. Scott McCleod's 140 word book review, Google's advice for student to major in learning or David Jakes 15 minute Staff Development. would never made it across my learning space if not for this social network.

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership, Data analysis of a campus

Today, we looked at AEIS reports for your schools. The groups were divided by the type of school: elementary, middle and high school.

We used our personal laptops to access the reports online. In each group we were to analyze the data and answer questions Dr. Boone had given us. We searched the web for additional information data for your group. We looked at Houston High School in San Antonio.

Each group gave a small presentation about our analysis and findings.

The data was very rich but also provided lots of questions we could not answer by just looking at this one data instrument.

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership - School Improvement

Campus Leadership

Models of change discussed in class - Lionberger's Stage of Change, Fullan's Three I Model, Concerns-Based Adoption Model, Lewin's Force-Field Analysis.

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Campus Leadership Analysis

Assignment: Interview your practicing campus principal. Topics to be included include: supervisory activities, including providing feedback to staff, working with and nurturing assistant principals and teachers, making changes happen in school, his or her decision making practices, the campus improvement process.

Prepare a 3-page summary and conclusions about what you learned in the interview.

Key points from the interview for me:

Administrative duties are tough in large schools.

Feedback and supervision tends to be impersonal in large schools due to size.

Family time will be impacted.

Separation from students is hard to deal with but inevitable.

Change is a process.

Decision making ability is key.

Be more of an influencer but be prepared to make the decision if needed.

The notes in the live blog reflect comments from the class.

Day Four - Dr. Boone

Dr. Boone, Day four, Campus Leadership in Texas: The Effective Principal and New Voices in the Field. Topics of the day were the relationship of culture and climate, Maria's Story from New Voices and Campus Leadership in Texas.


The relationship between culture and climate. Culture is the foundation climate. You can change and impact the culture by changing the climate since culture is based on beliefs and are hard to get at. The climate can be changed in a variety of ways.


Maria's story was in the first chapter in Voices in the Field. Maria described her first year as an Assistant Principal. She described the many activities she experienced that she was not prepared for. Time seemed to disappear and was not manageable. Maria was also surprised at the many different situations she was not prepared to handle, either due to lack of experience, identity with the problem or lack of training.

Campus Leadership is Texas
We read and discussed the first Chapter in the book. Key ideas were the First 100 Days and three key questions to ask. The three key questions were:
What are the strengths of this school and community?
What are the opportunities for improvement? If you could change one thing immediately, what would it be?

Cultivating Leadership, Chapters 2 and 4

Day Three - Chapters 2 and 4

Public School Leadership Reconsidered and The Planetary Culture of Schools

Day two of Summer II at Texas State University with Dr. Boone.

EDA 5347 Educational Environments

Dr. Clarence Lorrotta,

Dr. Boone, EDA 6344, Texas State, Campus Leadership

This is my first Live Blog. I am taking notes from my Graduate Classes at Texas State university. Feel free to comment about the notes and ideas from class.