Hamilton Roadways: 40 Years Without Change

Main St. (West from courthouse)

Gore Park (Northeast)

Gore Park (Northeast)

King and John (Northeast)

Main and John (Southeast)

Main St. (Southwest from city hall)

Main St. (East from city hall)

Main and MacNab (West)

All photos Phil Strong c. 1970-1980

My Favourite Tweet Ever

QUIZ: biodiversity museum display or nightmarish existentialist diorama? pic.twitter.com/ybBSM0ml92

— Exceedingly Perfect* (@Choplogik) April 16, 2016

Pretty well OK

I recently received a new subscription deal on The Spectator, and while I am not and have never been a regular reader of the newspaper, I thought I might as well give it a try. In my last post I was critical of the lack of meaningful content on the front page. This time however, I would like to express my disappointment in the general authorship of the paper. Look at the caption above. Does anything stand out to you?

I'm not sure when "pretty well OK" came into use, but I'm pretty well OK sure that I have never seen such a ridiculous string of adverbs committed to paper before. What is it even supposed to mean? Why couldn't he have just finished well, or strongly, or with an impressive lead? 

My next complaint is regarding today's article about math scores and instruction time. While I plan to write an entire post about the flaws in how the article is reported, for now just read the section I have highlighted below. We're abusing our adverbs again. How did this slip past the editors of both The Spec and Toronto Star? All I can say is that while I had planned to cancel even my introductory offer after the front page feature of broken umbrellas last week, I will now hold on a little longer just to pick it apart. Too, we all make mistakes, but please proofread your work pretty well OK.

News, Undone

          It was a bad day for umbrellas. That is apparently the best headline that Ontario's 4th largest paid circulation newspaper could come up with. Is this an April Fools' joke? Please tell me it is.

          Articles like this are the reason media literacy is part of the Ontario Language Curriculum. The objective of "helping students develop the skills required to understand, create, and critically interpret media texts" is that they will become informed and responsible citizens and consumers of media in an age where information is readily accessible and extremely transient.

          How can it be that a few broken umbrellas on a windy day take precedence over the abysmal living conditions in First Nations communities, spilled industrial waste leaking into city sewers, or the growing need for youth mental health services?

Collaborative Planning

     One of the main benefits to collaborative unit planning is that all work immediately becomes peer-reviewed. This aids in the planning stage by having someone vet ideas and sequencing, as well as helps highlight cross-curricular connections in order to create rich and engaging lessons. Another aspect related to this is that collaborative assessment planning allows teachers to ensure that success criteria are being met and assessed in the same manner for all students. 

     In my practicum my associate teacher was the only grade 7/8 math teacher. As a result, when I took over the grade 8 math portion I found I had no one to plan with and no idea whether my lessons were any good. While I could have turned to my associate for guidance, he was very laid back with respect to planning and had a very traditional approach to teaching that I hoped to stray from. This left me unsure whether my lessons and activities would sink or swim when the time came. I recall having students use playing cards to make fractions during an addition exercise, and they really seemed to enjoy this. I decided to try the same thing again with multiplication the next week and found the students to be wholly unenthusiastic. I found out later when conferencing with them that it was a fun novelty the first time, but that it got really repetitive and dull overall---something I had not considered at the time. Another benefit of collaborative planning is that while the expectations, big ideas, and goals of a unit will be overwhelming to any single person, the work can be drastically cut down when working as a group.

     A few years ago collaborative planning of a task revolved around email. One person would send an email to the group, then it would be a series of reply-alls until the original content of the message was so watered down that everyone had a different idea of what was happening in the project. It was always fun to be awoken at 3:00 in the morning by a notification on your BlackBerry that Person 4 had replied "ok" to Person 2, who had emailed to say which days they could not meet in response to Person 3's email about when they were going to get a book from the library....And so on. It was like the game telephone we all played as kids that invariably descended into chaos and incoherence.

     Thankfully Google Docs (and many other resources) now exist. Docs allows files to be shared across a group of people and edited in real time. This is a big upgrade from files stored on networks (like at Xerox where I once worked) where only one person could edit any file at a time. Files could be opened by several people at once, but the edits all overwrote each other. It was a nightmare. Docs avoids this. You could have dozens of people collaborating on the same file at any given time, and all changes are recorded and visible to others. And what's more is that changes are all logged so that you can go back in the document history should there be any disasters. Docs also allows you to add comments, which notifies participants via email (should there be any important updates), and share the final document in a read-only capacity with outsiders.

     I had no personal experience with collaborating over Google Docs until term 1, when my group used it for a collaborative unit assessment plan for grade 7 math. In order to organize the work we broke the material into a chart and assigned each member a section that they were to work on. Text was coloured so that members could easily see who had made changes and where, and this made it apparent when certain group members took charge thereby introducing a degree of accountability in the work.

The Pitfalls of Technology

Hi, @drsteveperry. Since you're not following us, we can't respond to your DM. Let us know when you're following and we'll get back to you.

— edutopia (@edutopia) March 30, 2016

     We've all been there. Maybe you accidentally forwarded an email to the entire email server. Maybe you accidentally liked a photo that someone posted ninety-six weeks ago. Maybe your boss found out about your slightly riqué Twitter handle. It's only human. We make mistakes with technology just like anything else. So while the above correspondence might seem rather trivial, it was tweeted out to all 759,000 of Edutopia's followers (which Steve Perry apparently isn't one of). 

     But was it an innocent mistake? Steve Perry has over 49,000 followers himself. Was Edutopia humble bragging in front of the better part of a million people about how they're having private conversations with cool people? Is it a power play on their part, trumping his considerably large following? Who knows. And does it matter? Not really. But there are probably a lot of other people like me that saw the tweet and thought to themselves why? And such are the pitfalls of modern technology. Even the most innocent mistakes can be misconstrued. There is a lesson in there about responsible technology use. Perhaps even media literacy. But I'll leave that for you to figure out.

     And on another note, there was a humorous glitch in our Sakai site the other day. Sakai is the online learning platform we use at Brock, and we often use it to do quick diagnostic quizzes on Ministry documents. For our Aboriginal Education quiz this week the long answer answer field went all buggy and multiplied. I entered my answer in the first box and found I was given a mark of 0.01/1.0! So I went back and answered the question 98 more times. There were only 99 boxes, not 100, so I guess this put me up to 0.99, or some repeating decimal form of such number, that was rounded up to 1.0. I wonder how many people would have trouble figuring that out, or could be bothered to copypasta their work 98 times. [edit: one other person copied their answer to all 99 boxes]

Teaching the Gifted, Coffee House Session

     Tonight I had the pleasure of attending a session on teaching gifted students held by Zoe Branigan-Pipe and Kristy Luker of the HWDSB. It was not only refreshing to see that there are information sessions being held for this demographic of students, but also that so many parents and educators were in attendance to learn more. 

     The session focused primarily on different tools and resources that could be used for teaching gifted children. As someone that went through the self-contained program years ago, I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to reflect on a few of the questions that arose from parents at the meeting. Please keep in mind that I am speaking from personal experiences and not from academic research!

As a parent, how do I keep up to date on all of the tools and resources my child is using?

     The honest answer is that you can't. We all have responsibilities, and the sad reality is that we will never have time to do all of the things that we want to do in life. The good news however is that your child is learning about new tools and resources on their own time and it's an excellent opportunity for them to teach you something. Getting involved in your child's education will benefit them tremendously!

     The wealth of tools and resources that are available for educators nowadays is overwhelming even for those of us that are younger and learning about them in our teacher education programs. At Brock, the Google suite is heavily emphasized, and we had an entire course exploring some of the tech tools out there, but there will never be time to become an expert at all of them. Pick something and stick with it. Maybe you start a blog with WordPress, go paperless with Google Docs, or get involved in local events through Twitter---the possibilities are endless! 

     It is important to remember that this is not a gifted thing, but something that applies to all students. While it might be more obvious in an enrichment centre, the times they are a-changin'. Just like we all got on board with cell phones, email, and Facebook, we need to shift our mindset of what education should look like and do our best to be positive role models in the responsible use of technology.

How do we get more of the experiences offered by the enrichment centre?

     There is often the misconception in gifted education that students would benefit more from a self-contained classroom than from visits to an enrichment centre. If a child has such positive experiences in an enrichment centre, why can't we develop a self-contained program for them where they always feel this way? There are many reasons, but the first is budgetary. The HWDSB enrichment centre sees about 450 students, or 20 classes, and is run by two full time staff. Right away we would need ten times as many staff to run a self-contained gifted program for the same student population. Beyond this, the resources of the enrichment centre would be divided between 20 classrooms, and suddenly the program isn't nearly as enticing.

     I could write an entire blog post about the stigma of being identified as gifted and placed in a self-contained classroom, but I will save that for a later date. Let's just say that there is a huge push in education right now towards inclusive classrooms, and the idea of segregating students identified as gifted would go against the grain. Instead of thinking about how to get gifted students out of the "regular" classroom and into the enrichment centre more often, what we really need to do is focus on developing ways to bring the environment and experiences of the enrichment centre into our "regular" classrooms. In teaching lingo this is often referred to as the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and it is the idea that classrooms should be structured so that all students can be successful. The move away from self-contained gifted programs aligns well with the UDL framework, but now it's a matter of providing inclusive programming in our classrooms that can meet the needs of our gifted students. And we're not quite there yet. 

If my child cannot spend more time in the enrichment centre, what else can I do for them?

     The enrichment centre acts as a supplement to regular classroom routines, and what works best or what is the most engaging will vary for each student. Student motivation however is generally optimized when faced with tasks that are challenging and meaningful. Tune in to what your child is interested in and incorporate it into their life outside of school. Whether it is music, Minecraft, sewing, or quantum theory, there are plenty of resources out there you can put to use. As I said before about technology, you can't be an expert in everything, but you can talk to your child about their interests. And if you're completely stumped, talk to your child's gifted teacher---they do this for a living!

More information:

HWDSB Enrichment and Innovation Centre

Zoe Branigan-Pipe: @zbpipe / Pipedreams

Kristy Luker: @lukerkristy