Half-Glassed Thinking

It's interesting how the more some things change there are still some things that stubbornly remain the same. I was in a day-long professional development session recently and observed an unbelievable amount of what I call "half-glassed" thinking.

"If only ..."
"We can't be expected to accomplish anything when ..."
"The problem is that ..."
"They shouldn't ..."
"They should ..." ("They" are almost never identified but are nearly always at fault!)
"If have no control over ..., we can't ..."

This was a tough group because all but a few were glass-half-empty folks. The one or two "half-full" participants tried gamely a few times to look for positives and possibilities, but they were drowned out by a litany of obstacles. Interestingly, the group represented a range from young teachers to those with lots of experience.

Now I'm no Pollyanna, but I have a hard time imagining what it must be like to focus on obstacles and use them as excuses rather than approaching them as challenges to overcome or work around.

But what do we do about those negative influences? Give up on them? Ignore them? I don't think so. I do think we need to keep the conversation with them going whenever possible and keep it as positive as possible. An even better approach is to find opportunities to share successes of colleagues that do overcome the obstacles and to share the results in terms of student engagement and achievement. Best yet is to share local examples in our own schools and district. We have begun collecting video and audio clips of such successes in our district that might be useful for this purpose. Capturing and cataloging success, then sharing it as often as possible might just be a powerful antidote for half-glassed thinking.

Richardson on GLEF Advisory Board, and an Announcement of My Own...

Will Richardson just announced on his blog that he has been appointed to the George Lucas Educational Foundation National Advisory Board. Kudos to Will for another opportunity to share his vision and voice, and kudos to GLEF for a wise and inspired selection. Will's advocacy for meaningful and transformative use of technology for teaching and learning has gained great traction through his blogging, his book, and his appearances. And the GLEF has been an important resource for educational technology for many years. It's Edutopia website should be on all technology-using educators' short-list of web links to visit often. It is on mine.

And for my own announcement, I was just selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator -- an exciting opportunity and a humbling honor to join this special community of educators. Look for blog posts in July when I attend the ADE orientation institute in Monterey, California. I can't wait!

Student Bloggers: Great Examples

Want to see some great examples of student blogging? Visit the Possibilities Abound blog by Lani for her 3/6 post: There's something happening here!

Not only are there great examples of high school students blogging about their learning in pre-calculus class (great reflective posts), but there's a mini-story in the post about a 5th grader elsewhere posting a comment and the subsequent connection between the high school students and their new friend, Eddie. Very inspiring!

And in many of the posts (please follow the links -- there are many great gems to uncover), the students write about how much their teacher's use of an interactive white board has changed their class and how they are now using the white board as well as the teacher.

A tip of the hat to Jim Gates' TipLine blog and Anne Davis' EduBlog Insights for pointing me to Lani's post. Jim's post actually references Lani's post via Anne's Tell the Stories post.

And that's why it's call The Web. BTW, you'll see Jim's and Anne's posts in my Shared items listed to the right. Lots of other goodies there that I haven't blogged about -- yet...