My MACUL Journey

Today I had the pleasure of attending the MACUL conference at COBO Hall in Detroit.  Though it was an early start to the day, it was an important experience that I feel every teacher should have the opportunity to attend.  Despite the fact that I have previously attended a technology conference at Michigan State University and the MSTA conference in Grand Rapids, the MACUL conference was a very different experience.  MACUL was incredibly large, with well over 5,000 people in attendance.  With a plethora of sessions to choose from, it was difficult to decide which ones to attend!  In the end, I was able to attend Mark Dohn's session Failure Is an Option, Gary Abud's Evaluating Teaching with Google Apps, and the Lightening Talks.

 

The first session Failure Is an Option was about how mistakes and failure should be treated as opportunities, rather than shameful occurrences.  In today's society, educators are expected to teach students the content and the students are expected to get all the problems correct or write a perfect essay...somehow.  Rather than encouraging mistakes and using fix-ups, it seems that teachers mark students down for making mistakes, which often discourages them.  Dohn asked us if we could remember a specific paper or project that we got a perfect score on in high school.  The general consensus was that sure we could remember doing well, but there was no particular instance that stood out in our minds.  Then, he asked us if we could remember bombing something.  What do you know?  The answers were very different in that most people could remember doing poorly or failing at something in school.  He asked these questions to illustrate to us that we do not learn from success, rather we learn from failure.  If we learn from failure, then why do we punish students for making mistakes and failing at something?  Therefore, one of Dohn's goals is to figure out how to create a learning environment where students can learn and be productive.  Approaching failure in a positive light is one way.  Additionally, he brought up ideas of the students using self-reflection, so they can do better on their second attempt, and modeling failure.  In order to illustrate his point, he used a video of a girl doing gymnastics on a shower rod making a mistake and an Olympian falling when attempting the vault.  One is a child and one is an expert at his craft, but both are capable of making mistakes.  It is what they do with their mistakes that is important. 

 

To me, Dohn's talk means that failure and mistakes should be honored in a sense.  This isn't to say that mistakes and failure should be encouraged, but rather that they should be used as a chance to explore a topic further.  Failure is not the objective, but getting students to take risks and reflect upon them is the objective.  Just as the Olympian had to approach the vault, which is his obstacle, some students will have to approach the academic vault in the same way.  These students must be encouraged and given guidance, rather than an F and a stern look. Dohn's session was inspiring because it illustrated to me that there are educators out there who care more about the process, rather than getting it exactly right the first time.  One of his suggestions was that students engage in reflection about where they made mistakes and why they think they occurred.  Metacognition is pertinent in a student's academic journey and one way they can accomplish this by using technology is to film themselves talking about their mistakes.  Additionally, Dohn brought up the idea that when a teacher implements a new technology in the class with good intentions it does not always go according to plan.  I think this is one way that a teacher can model failure to his or her class and to encourage students to persist and work through the difficulties.  In this sense, both the teacher and the students can learn something.  These are both ideas that I could use in my classroom right now.

 

The second session, Evaluating Teaching with Google Apps, was very informative, but not directly applicable to my life currently.  Abud talked about how his school district was having trouble with their teacher evaluations, not only because of the multitude of forms and disorganization, but also because they were measuring a teacher's effectiveness, rather than including professional growth in the mix.  Additionally, a problem with teacher evaluations is that many people take these evaluations personally and get defensive because they do not think they are ineffective.  Abud challenges teachers and administrators to stop thinking of them as measuring the person and instead think of them as measuring the instructional approaches that the person is using.  He had everyone in the room get up and stand in an area of the room that corresponded to how their school districts use teacher evaluations and the results were almost split down the middle, with about half of the attendees claiming that their school districts use evaluations for measurement only and half claiming that their school districts use them for measurement and professional growth. Hint: the goal is for measurement AND professional growth!  In order to alleviate the anxiety that so many teachers feel about teacher evaluations and to implement a tool that provides a consistent definition and distinction between "effective" and "highly effective," Abud's district has made use of Google Apps to host their evaluations.  Rather than spending time shuffling through emails and papers to find something, teachers and administrators can all log online to collaborate and make the process of evaluations run much more smoothly.  This makes sense because we are always trying to push for collaboration between our students and make everything simple enough to use, so why wouldn't we do this for ourselves as well?

 

Abud's session does not directly apply to my life right now, but it will very soon.  Though I will only be a first year teacher, I think I could carry these ideas around with me if the time ever comes that my school district needs ideas about how to implement a better evaluation system.  From what I can see, Google Apps are very useful and have so many different functions that they would be a great idea to try out.  With the push for a paperless classroom, it seems logical to me that teacher evaluations would also become paperless or near paperless.  In addition, during his talk, Abud made use of MySoapBox, which is a platform for voicing opinions.  He had several questions that he had the attendees answer and provided them with a way to write down their questions for him that he would try to answer at the end of the session.  In my classroom, this would be a really cool way to have students answer questions.  I think it is similar to Socrative in that a teacher can prompt the class with a quick question.  However, the additional feature of being able to ask questions and put them in a "parking lot" can help students feel less embarrassed about having a question as well as demonstrate to the teacher what the students need help with. This is similar to Google Groups and Piazza to me. I think this is something that could work fairly well in my classroom if we were to use the laptops all the time or if we let them have their phones out.  The students could have these at their desks and type in a question whenever the need arises and other students could "up-vote them" if they have the same question, which would show the teacher and other students that some topic or concept is confusing.

 

Finally, the Lightening Talks were informative in that I was able to catch a glimpse into the minds of 8 different teachers, both at the elementary and secondary levels.  They presented some examples of projects they have used in their classrooms, like the "Global Cardboard Challenge" or the "1,865 Hours of Code."   For me, the main take away's from this session were that it is important for students to get a chance to discover their passions, every teacher can incorporate technology in the classroom in some way, and we must work to keep from labeling our students.  There is more to a student than a test score and we must work hard to find out about those pieces so we can cultivate their interests and help them to see their worth.  The Lightening Talks session did not necessarily give me any new ideas of things I could use in my classroom besides a few links, but it did provide me with some motivation and things to keep in mind when I am interacting with students.

 

I was a bit surprised at the type of sessions that the MACUL conference had.  Before arriving I was anticipating sessions in which the speaker would introduce some piece of technology (i.e. PhET, Kahoot, Edmodo, etc) and describe how we could use it in our classrooms.  Maybe I just attended sessions that were a bit different and these other types of sessions were hiding in other rooms across the hall. Either way, it was a good experience overall because I learned some new ideas and was inspired by some of the stories that I heard.