budding scholar

Ways of changing what teachers do in their classrooms and how they teach or perceive their students include:

•  teacher training programs
• professional development
• school reform initiatives
• leadership
• standards, testing (forcing a change by testing it)
• curriculum

I keep thinking about the issue of teachers and demographic change among their students, and how, from the standpoint of policy, we can understand and change what they do with students. One way of thinking about it is policy levers, or policy tools. Another way is social movements.

The basic issue for me centers on understanding teacher reactions to the composition of their classroom changing year to year, and how policy can make a difference in how they teach immigrant students. What do they need to feel confident teaching these students? What do they need to attain the kind of results we all want to see?

How many professional development (PD) programs are happening right now, having to do with language and immigration (in California? Other states? US? Spain?) Who participates? How is it decided who participates? What is the curriculum? Who teaches it? What research is done on teachers’ experiences?

A look at this kind of PD would fit into a larger look at PD, research on how it does and does not effect practice and student learning. PD is the most common tool for trying to change teachers’ practice using policy, very popular under systemic reform initiatives, the quick answer to needs to change what teachers do or the results they achieve. What does the research tell us about PD in areas of language and immigration?

Are there any reviews of research in these areas in the big journals (Review of Educational Research, for example)?

Reading the alumni magazine for my undergraduate alma mater today, I came across a great project. They have created a program where they match international students with host families in the surrounding community. The families include the students in family activities, invite them to holidays, help them navigate the university system and being in the United States. The students bring connections to other countries, other places, languages. Sometimes the families end up visiting the students’ families in the home country.

It’s a neat idea because it breaks down barriers between cultures in small ways. Of course, it’s great for the college because it helps the students feel at home. But it has a larger social purpose as well. The children growing up in these families who connect with international students are likely to have a more open mind towards people different from themselves. They are likely to have more chances to visit other places if the relationship continues beyond the students’ time at Connecticut College. This is how larger social barriers based on fear, difference between countries and cultures are broken down in small ways.

Like many people, I set about watching Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture after hearing of his death a few weeks back. He was quite a man. Such a university professor. So filled with life, with a will to live. And I learned a lot from both the Last Lecture, and another lecture he gave on time management. Some notes are included here:

Last Lecture

Childhood dreams. Positive attitude. Brick walls are there to make us show/prove how badly we want things. It’s easy to be smart when you’re parodying smart people. Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. Attaining your dreams and/or enabling the dreams of others. You obviously don’t know where the bar (for success) should be, so you’ll be doing a disservice if you put in anywhere (i.e. push for greater and greater levels when you’re not sure what the best could be). When you find something really great, the hardest thing is to let it go…find someone better than you to take it.

He’s uncomfortable in academia because “I come from a long line of people who actually worked for a living”.

The best gift an educator can give is to get someone to become self reflective.

Everyone should be helping others. Teachers, mentors, friends, colleagues help us.

Respect authority while questioning it.

How to get people to help you: tell the truth. be earnest. apologize when you screw up. focus on others, not yourself. do the right thing. get a feedback loop, and listen to it!! show gratitude. don’t complain, just work harder. be good at something, it makes you valuable. “work hard…what’s your secret” (answer, it’s pretty simple, just call me any friday night at 10pm and I’ll tell you).

Decide if you’re a Tigger or Eeyore!

Time Management

Time is the only commodity that matters. What do you cost your organization an hour?

The real problems in our life: stress and procrastination.

The money’s not important. The time you spend in school is what is important–not the money you spend or lose on it.

“The Time Famine”. If you’re not going to enjoy it, why do it?

Being successful doesn’t make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful.

GOALS, PRIORITIES, PLANNING. Why am I doing this? What is the goal? Why will I succeed? What happens if I choose not to do it? Doing things right vs. doing the right things?

List of 100 things to do in your life. Look at it every week. If you’re not working towards it every week, what are you working towards?

Do not lose sight of the power of inspiration. If you can dream it, you can do it. (Walt Disney).

Do the ugliest thing on your to-do list first. Quadrant to-do list.

Keep your desk clear. Touch each piece of paper once. Touch each email once. Your inbox is not your to-do list.

A good filing system is essential.

Key thing is screen space for monitors.

Thank you notes (that weren’t obligatory). A very tangible way of doing nice things. They make you rare. Buy a stack, keep them readily accessible on your desk. Showing gratitude is important (not only for job interviews!).

You don’t find time for doing important things, you make them by not doing other things.

Find your dead time, schedule things where you don’t need to be at your best. Maximize your best time, guard it carefully. [for me and writing, this is the first hours of the morning…which means I need to get to bed early].

Time journals: monitor yourself for 15-minute increments for 3 days to 2 weeks. List what you do on the left, time up top, check off.

Make your own study hall between classes, go to the library.

The most efficient people in grad school are the ones with a spouse and kids.

Procrastination. Doing things at the last minute is really expensive. Make up fake deadlines and act like they’re real. Identify why you’re not enthusiastic about doing the thing you’re procrastinating from.

Delegation. Don’t treat it as dumping. Grant authority with responsibility. Delegate but always do the dirtiest job yourself.

If you want to get something done, you cannot be vague. Give a specific time with a penalty or reward. Give objectives not procedures. Give the relative importance of each task. Reinforce behavior you want repeated. All meetings should have an agenda. One minute minutes. At the end of a meeting write down decisions made and assignments of work.

Manage from beneath. When is our next meeting? What would you like me to have done by then? Who can I turn to for help if I need it?

Get feedback loops. People you trust who can tell you what you’re doing right and wrong.

To-Do list in priority order. Do a time journal. Revisit this talk in 30 days and ask “what have I changed”?

Part of making progress in this path I’m on is to continuously carry around a basic set of questions, to have driving interests, clearly articulated, that continuously inform my work. They need to be both narrow and broad, to include specific questions while linking with bigger topics. This is what the reading should inform, what I ask questions about and make links to as I read.

Here is a stab towards articulating mine (hopefully as successful as this cake stabbing with a sword at our wedding :-)). The basic problems I’m interested in are:

• education and social integration in diverse societies
• teachers and changing student demographics
• equity in educational outcomes
• policy implementation, especially language and education policy

The harder pieces to settle on are methodology, specific, researchable questions related to these basic problems, and theory.

It’s easy to forget with this kind of work that you get out what you put in. The work is so isolating at times, just me myself and I reading and writing alone. Yet it’s true, we get out what we put in. Whether in contacts with people, reading, or writing, time invested yields rewards, though they may take a long time to arrive.

The semester is almost over. Another year completed. Next year at this time I hope to have completed my orals, and have a dissertation project designed. There’s a lot to do between now and then!

Feeling the anxiety of the end, pressing into my head and making me drink three times more tea or coffee than I usually do and spend hours at my desk at home. Two more big papers to write or finish writing, and one set of reading responses to finish, and then the class part of the semester is over!

Am excited for my summer research project as well. Three weeks to get to know academics in Spain, interview people about education and immigration, and do a lot of reading and writing for my theoretical position paper.

Smells like progress.

Am up early writing this morning. It reminds me how much more focused I am about writing early in the morning. Makes me think I should start up my morning writing discipline again. I can accomplish more in 30 minutes or an hour in the morning than 2 hours in the evening sometimes. Especially since there is so much writing to accomplish before the end of the semester… Starting up daily writing will help to kickstart those final papers in the right ways well ahead of time.

I’ve always dreamed of writing children’s books. Bilingual stories that take children on journeys through other cultures, peoples’ homes who are different from them. Opening up the world through books. Teaching kids to be curious rather than fearful of people who are different from them. Starting conversations about tolerance and the kind of society we all dream of. (Decidedly not the topics of the beloved books I remember!)

It would be really neat to pick up this dream. Go through the library, read all the stories I can find that try to do what I’d like to write about. Learn about children’s book authors, who is out there doing the kind of work I’d like to do. Find an illustrator. A good place to start would be to begin collecting ideas, writing snippets. This seems far from my academic work, but in fact is not so far since it involves cross cultural learning, potentially immigration, language issues.

Children’s books shaped my thinking so much when I was young. Through stories I grew to know other families, imagine other worlds. I would love to create this for a new generation of kids.

In other words, what are we doing here? A discussion in Language and Identity class that started with a study of undergraduate writing turned to a debate about what academia is supposed to do, especially in Schools of Education. What is our voice supposed to be in universities? When we’re writing for an academic audience, what are the constraints and expectations re how we express ourselves?

Our teacher describes the purpose of academia as defining problems. She also said, academic papers are supposed to build and extend a field. Academic writing is about having texts speak to each other. Writing is such a significant part of the identity you learn in academia. Who are you as a writer, how are you drawing on others’ writing? At the same time, who are you as a thinker, how are you drawing on others’ thinking?