PLC's: How to Do Them Right!

The article entitled, “The Parable of the Blind Squirrel” by Thomas W. Many, first starts off with a story. A grandfather and his grandson were outside one day watching a squirrel. The squirrel was old and blind but was able to find acorns. The grandfather explained to the boy that in life if you work hard for things, you will get them and good things will happen to you using the squirrel as an analogy. The author then goes on to explain how this story relates to him. He sometimes feels like the squirrel when leading school improvement. The faculty always tries hard and does all of the correct things although sometimes performances levels are uneven in grades and other times he faculty is unsure of why things were successful. The author wanted to not be part of the blind squirrel story, but instead wanted to work more efficiently not harder. The faculty then went and read a book entitled, “Professional Learning Communities at Work” by Richard Dufour and Robert Eaker. After reading this, the faculty realized that much of what the book spoke about was already in place. They then decided to focus more on creating these professional learning communities.
The article goes on to explain how the math program was lacking in the district. The high school teachers wanted more students to pass algebra in eighth grade. Due to this wanted change, the math curriculum would then need to be updated. A group of willing teachers worked on creating a new math curriculum. After much time and planning, the new curriculum was put into place. With the change, more than ninety percent of the elementary students now met or surpassed set goals in math. This was great news to the faculty who worked long and hard to make this happen. However, now there was a gap between math and reading scores and the math scores were now higher. This gap lasted for close to ten years and no one could figure out why. After this persistently long gap, the district decided in 2001 that by the 2003-2004 school year, they wanted ninety percent of all third graders to meet or exceed the state standards in reading. The administration continued to tweak their goals and kept referring back to the book they had read. With their research, the administration decided it was time for some changes. They adjusted goals, made common planning time for teams, added a standardized curriculum framework, and made a list of data that they collected from the year. Teachers also aided with this in that they researched and read books as well as attended summer courses on the topic. Learning had then become the main focus point for teachers, not teaching.
One year later the district saw improvement in reading scores. Two of the elementary schools had made it to their ninety percent goal with two more working on reaching that goal. This proved that the students could reach high goals in math and reading consistently. In comparing the reading and math goals, it took six years to reach the math goals, while it only took one year for parts of the district to reach the reading goal. This success is marked by becoming a better professional learning community. The district intends to continue the use of professional learning communities to align themselves and to become a better district.
I thought this article really showed how professional learning communities are suppose to work. It showed how there was a problem and how the district went about fixing it. It proves that PLC’s work if they are used correctly.
In all, I think the way this article researched a topic and pursued it to better students learning was the true way to run a PLC. If my county could work on something like that it would be better than the way we do PLC’s now. It would be a large undertaking and would be tough because within the county setting you have to worry about different living demographics that make each school different from one another. However, I think it would worth the effort and we could focus more on problems we have as county, solve them, and better ourselves as a county. I enjoyed reading this article and could relate to it. This article was definitely a worthwhile read and gave me some ideas of how our county could now use PLC’s. What do you think?

Homeschooling: Friend or Foe

In completing this weeks discussion questions, I thought I would look more deeply into homeschooling. In researching this on the web, I found an interesting article related to homeschooling and is it as good as public school. The women who wrote the article, Barb Shelton, seems to be more one sided on this decision. In her article, she explains she has been a homeschooling mom for seventeen years. She thinks that homeschooling is best because it opens the doors to spending more time with your children and more freedom for high school aged students to explore their options to see what they want to do with their life. This woman also sells books on this idea.
Another article I came across was one about homeschoolers coming of age. One student who was homeschooled said he feels he did not miss a thing from homeschooling. Most people think that a child who is homeschooled misses out on socialization and activities associated with school. This student says he is happy he missed out on some of those things because some of those activities can include bullying and peer pressure, something he never had to succumb to. This article also speaks about homeschooled children being freer to explore their creativity and what their interests are.
Here’s another site I found on the subject of homeschooling. This one speaks more about the bad sides to homeschooling. This site, written by Greg, says that homeschooling is a way of cheating the system, provides children with less opportunities and resources, lower quality teaching, is ideologically driven, and oversight testing. In the end, the author agrees with most in that he is also undecided. He sees the good in homeschooling as well as the bad. He personally would pick public schooling over homeschooling.
As far as looking at these sites all together, none of them really produced much data or research on the topics. They were mostly opinions. Still, I found them to be very interesting and they did bring up some good points. In realizing this, I then decided to look to see if I could find any data or statistics on homeschooling. I did come across this article about academic statistics on homeschooling. This site explains studies conducted about homeschooling. At the end, it agrees that homeschooling is possible and works. It even explained how homeschooled students tend to outperform public schooled students by thirty to thirty-seven percentile points in all subjects. It gave many other facts and was very interesting.
After reading all of these articles, I still think public school is the way to go. I can see how homeschooling would work, especially because the pupil receives more one on one time than they would in a traditional classroom. Do you agree? After checking out some of these sites, did your opinion of homeschooling change?

Updating Blooms Taxonomy for Technology

In reading this week’s chapters in the book, I read a lot about Blooms Taxonomy. This is a topic I remember learning quite a bit about in my undergraduate work at West Chester University. I also remember completing an in-service at Fallston Middle School that was about using higher level thinking and Blooms Taxonomy in the classroom. In reading this week’s chapters, I decided to further research Blooms Taxonomy. I came across and interesting article about integrating Blooms Taxonomy into the digital world. This article first describes what Blooms Taxonomy is and how it works. It them explains how one of Blooms student’s later revised the taxonomy to make it easier to understand. The author of the article then explains how one could insert digital concepts and skills into the revised taxonomy. For example, under the creating or evaluation skill, besides including: designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising and making, the digital world could add: programming, filming, animating, blogging, video blogging, mixing, remixing, wiki-ing, publishing, video casting, podcasting, and directing/producing. I think this is a smart move to make being the world is transitioning into the digital world in every facet. For instance, this is something our professor could use in our class. We are learning and using technology in our class and she could use this new version of Blooms Technology to figure out if we are using higher level thinking and reasoning. This could even be useful to the everyday teacher. Schools are being encouraged more and more to use technology in the classroom. A teacher could use this digital taxonomy to see if students are learning at higher levels.
On the bottom of this article a few people wrote comments. One spoke about another site that also relates Blooms Taxonomy to technology. This site goes a little more into depth about how one would integrate this idea to Blooms Taxonomy. First, this site lists the definitions of for each level of the technology domain. Next, the article explains what action words go to represent every level. Finally, the article explains each learning objective. This is done by giving an example of the learning objective, listing the taxonomy level, listing the condition, behavior, and criteria.
I feel from reading these two articles that I have a better understanding of Blooms Taxonomy. I also now know how I can update it to apply better to technology in today’s world. Do you think this could aid in your teaching? How would you use it in the classroom? Would you change either technology taxonomy? If yes, what would you change?