Digital Communication, Part I

For anyone who is in education, it’s impossible to avoid references to the “six Cs” of 21^st century education. In case you’re not familiar, the “6 Cs” refers to the skills and knowledge that educators and business leaders have deemed necessary for the future success of our children in the world marketplace. The 6 Cs are:

1.     Collaboration,

2.     Communication,

3.     Creativity,

4.     Critical Thinking,

5.     Cross-Cultural Competency, and

6.     Character

For this blog post, I want to focus on communication. Lately, I’ve been think a good bit about how we communicate in today’s digital world, how that communication has changed since I was in school, and how we best go about teaching communication to students who are “digital natives.”

To start with, I think there are some very good things about our connected, digital world of communication. Social media certainly has its utility. For example, I have 1,989 “friends” on Facebook. Through Facebook, I’ve been able to reconnect with former students, friends and acquaintances from high school, and relatives who live in other parts of the country. I’ve also met people online who have common interests I never would have met, otherwise. Here at HA, we have Skyped with job candidates and hired teachers from as far away California, Minnesota, Utah, China, and Latin America. My children still keep up with their friends from Tennessee, where we lived five years ago. 

Furthermore, I have almost unbelievable access to information. When I first graduated from college, I subscribed to a half-dozen magazines in order to get my news. I don’t subscribe to ANY magazines anymore; I read them on my tablet and phone. In fact, my cell phone gives me access to more information more quickly than I could have EVER imagined when I first started teaching. Additionally, the novel I just finished reading was on Apple’s iBooks. I didn’t have to go to the bookstore or even order it online. I wanted to read it, and POOF, it was on my iPad AND my phone. I could have bought it at the bookstore, or I could have ordered it on Amazon for much less money, but I didn’t want to have to wait for the actual book to arrive. After all, I now live in a world where I demand and receive instant gratification.  

Similarly, I can give feedback to students and parents almost immediately through email and through my web-based Google Classroom. My students in my AP Economics class have a free, online textbook, with links to relevant primary sources and websites, and I can post announcements and changes to my students in real-time, after they leave my classroom. I have to say, as a teacher, it’s pretty awesome.

So, I suppose all of this is good – or at least it’s not bad. But I can’t help but think that in the history of mankind, we have never been so connected, yet, so disconnected. I find myself asking the question: “Is the communication in which our children are engaged authentic.” For example, have you noticed that when you go on vacation that our kids don’t seem to miss each other?

I can remember that when my family went on vacation, I missed my girlfriend and my buddies. I couldn’t wait to see them when I came home. Plus, my girlfriend and I would spend hours and hours on the phone, actually talking.

Not anymore. 

After we returned from fall break this year, I asked my kids if they wanted to get together with their friends, and the response was condescending. “DAAAD!”, they snarled (with a hint of an eye-roll), “We’ve been TALKING the entire time we’ve been gone!” There was no sense of urgency to see their friends. In fact, they told me stories about some of the funny things that went on during break in the cyber-world of Instagram. It actually occurred to me that the kids tell stories of happenings on the internet in a way that resembles the stories I’ve told about my fraternity days. But the kids’ stories aren’t about wearing a goofy costume to a date party or swimming in the campus fountain. Their stories are about clever memes or “LOL” retorts.

Moreover, it’s not just the fact that our children are communicating online, but the amount of time they are spending “plugged in” is worrisome to me. A 2015 Pew Research Center report indicates some not-so-shocking data about teenage social media and electronic usage. 92% of teens (aged 12-17) go online, daily, and 24% report being online “almost constantly” (Lenhart, 2015). Still further, 88% of all teens have cell phones or smartphones at their disposal (Lenhart, 2015), and according to the Common Sense Media, teens spend an average of nine hours per day using media online (Tsukayama, 2015).

So, I’m posing the question, to which I honestly don’t know the answer. Is today’s communication real or even healthy?  To me, something seems very wrong, but maybe it’s just a bad idea whose time has come? Maybe I am just old-fashioned? Maybe, I’m like my grandparents who thought rock and roll (and Elvis Presley, in particular) was the source of all evil in society? I mean, to our children, Snapchat IS authentic communication. Our children DO feel connected and DO feel they are engaging in genuine dialogue. Just because I don’t think it’s authentic doesn’t mean it isn’t. 

In my next blog post, I’ll delve into some of the research on social media and screen time, and also talk about some of the ways we can use online tools to our educational advantage.

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Changes

I’ve had the pleasure to live and work a number of places, including Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Connecticut, Ohio, and New Jersey. Despite the homogenization and transience of modern America, I’ve certainly found that different regions of the country have their own mores and folkways. For example, upon reaching my college destination at Miami University in Ohio, I discovered that, in the North, when you say, “Hey!” to a stranger, you get perplexed looks. It turns out that said stranger becomes confused because he thinks you must know him from somewhere in order to say, “Hey!” Northerners also, it seems, confuse the southern vernacular for “hello” with a grain crop that horses consume. That is not to say that Ohioans are not friendly, but in Ohio, you probably don’t say “hey” to strangers, and you certainly don’t offer them grain.

I have also discovered that, in the South, there is a teasing pecking order. When I moved from Georgia to Tennessee, I discovered that Tennesseans made fun of me for being from Georgia. Likewise, Georgians make fun of Alabamians, Alabamians make fun of Mississippians, Mississippians make fun of Louisianans, and EVERYONE makes fun of Arkansas (*KIDDING*).  Since I spent my childhood and the majority of my adult life in Georgia, we grew up making fun of Alabama.

One of my favorite jokes concerns a high-speed police chase on I-20 East. As the story goes, an Alabama State Police officer and his partner are in hot pursuit of a suspect, who is going over 100 miles per hour. After several miles, the suspect crosses over the Georgia line. As soon as the suspect does so, the Alabama police officer slams violently on his brakes, abandoning his pursuit.
Shocked, his partner asks, “Why did you do that? We almost had him!”

To which the officer responds, “He’s an hour ahead. We’ll never catch him, now.”

Another joke about Alabama that I heard as a child was that the Alabama state motto was, “…because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

I point to these two jokes, because they have some relevance to our change agenda at Houston Academy. We are the only school of our ilk within a 2-hour radius that has a college preparatory mission and a mission to prepare our students to compete in a global society.

When I worked in the Atlanta and Memphis areas, we were afforded the frequent opportunity to collaborate with peer schools. I was friends with division heads, teachers, and coaches who worked at some of the finest college preparatory schools in the country. We met, both formally, and informally, to talk about educational issues. We also visited each other’s schools and classrooms.

The fact is, since we are located in L.A. (Lower Alabama), and we are very isolated from peer schools, we have to work with extra diligence to make sure other parts of the world are not “an hour ahead of us.” It’s also important that we can give a better answer for our educational practices than “…because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

Houston Academy has always done a great job fulfilling its mission as an “independent college preparatory institution.” However, what it means to be “prepared” for college and life is different now than it was when I was in high school, and certainly it is different than it was when HA was founded. In this vein, I like to quote former President of the National Association of Independent Schools, Pat Bassett, who said, “We are preparing our children for their future, not your past.”

That’s a nice mantra, but fleshing out what that means, in practical, pedagogical terms is a difficult task. Putting what that means into practice is even more difficult. Fortunately, there is some excellent research out there on what skills and competencies students are going to need to be successful for their future. Moreover, there is a growing body of brain research that scientifically supports best practices for student learning. This requires our teachers to shift from their teaching routines and reflect on their practice in ways that can be extremely uncomfortable. It also means that, sometimes, parents aren’t going to be able to help their children with their homework because lesson and methods might be structured in such a way that is unfamiliar.

It also means that, in very real terms, if we do not change, we will not be able to live up to our mission, and being a market-driven, independent school, we will not be able to survive. No one is going to send their children here if the students are not prepared for college and life.

So, make no mistake, more change is coming. Part of this change involves our new advisory program, curriculum change, and organizational change – all of which I will outline in future blog posts. For right now, let me introduce our most tangible and immediate changes – our new faculty.

Our new 3P teacher is Shanna Boothe (no relation to Karen). Shanna has a B.S. in Elementary Education (K-6 collaborative Education) from Troy University. She has an MS as a reading specialist from Troy University, and she has 13 years of teaching experience.Her husband is Bart Boothe, and she has three children, Logan, in the 7th grade, who will be attending HA, Cason, in the 4th grade, and Katy Claire in the 2nd grade.

Hannah Braswell will be teaching lower school art. Hannah has a  degree in Art from  Asbury college, 1991, and is coming to us after a 25 year teaching career in Dothan City Schools. Hannah is no stranger to HA, as she has served in the past as our head volleyball and softball coach.

James Brown will be teaching Honors 10th grade English and 11th Grade AP English Language. James has a B.A. in English from Armstrong State University and an M.A. in English from the University of Tennessee. He has a long independent school teaching history, but most recently, he taught and was the curriculum coordinator and professional development director at Benedictine in Savannah GA. Jim has a daughter, Ellen, who is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia living in Atlanta.

Natalie Cromer will be teaching Middle School social studies. Natalie has been a teacher and grade-level chair at Hidden Lake Elementary School. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Troy Dothan. She is married to Terry Cromer, and has two daughters who attend HA – Brooklyn who is in 8th grade and Allie who is in 4P

Jill Dykes is also returning to HA after a very short hiatus. This time, she will be teaching kindergarten. Jill is a fellow Georgian, with a B.A. in Early Childhood Education from Valdosta State University. She taught at HA, previously, for 11 years, and has also served as the Dothan Cotillion Director. Jill and her husband Jim have three children at HA – Ellis – 11th grade, Sullivan in 9th grade, and Boland, in 8th grade.

Jennifer Gaye is our new English Department Chair. She will also be teaching 11th grade English and 9th grade English, and will be helping to form our new literary magazine. Another native Georgian, Jennifer has a B.A. in English Literature and an M.A. in English Education from Georgia State University. Most recently, Jennifer was the English department chair at University Liggett School in Gross Pointe Woods Michigan. She has moved to Dothan with the love of her life, Phillip McCohnell.

Brian Jackson will be our new director of marketing and communications and will be continuing his soccer coaching duties at HA, as well as working with our football kickers. Brian has a B.S. in Sports Management from Ball State University in Indiana. From 2009-2015 He was the events manager at Ft. Rucker. In addition, he was a professional football kicker for 9 years in the arena league, winning two championships. He is married to Stephanie Jackson with whom he has a three-year-old son, Korbin.

Ann Jordan will be teaching Middle School English, after an extremely successful career in Dothan City Schools. Ann graduated from Troy with a B.S. in Secondary Education and a major in English and a minor in Journalism. She is married to Mark Jordan with whom she has two grown children.

Rachel King will be an assistant in 3P. Rachel holds a bachelor of Education from the University of Memphis. She has been a lead kindergarten and 1st grade teacher at Power Center Academy and Snowden School in Memphis, TN. Rachael has moved to Dothan with her fiancée who will be attending ACOM, and they are looking forward to seeing what Dothan has to offer.

Ronda Paoletti will teach 5th grade choir, MS Drama, US Drama, MS Choir and US Choir. She has a Masters of Music from the University of Florida and a Bachelor of Music from the University of South Carolina with a specialty in music and voice performance.  She comes to us from Valwood School in Valdosta. Georgia. She is married to Dar. Karl Paoletti, Jr who teaches voice at Wallace College and is the music department chair. Her son, Nicholas, will be a senior at HA, and her daughter, Sophia, will be a 5th grader.

Jessica Pineda will be teaching 5th grade, and is coming to us from the American Cooperative School of La Paz in La Paz, Bolivia. Jessica holds a Bachelor of Arts from Ashford University and an M.S. from University of Buffalo. She, and her husband, Craig (our new Head of Upper School) have two children who will be attending HA – Nate, who will be in 5th, and Emily, who will be in 3rd grade.

Craig Selig, our new Upper School Head,  has been the Head of School at two different independent schools in Latin America, most recently as the Superintendent at the Cooperative School of La Paz in La Paz Bolivia. That actually means that we have three administrators on campus now who have served as Headmasters. Craig has a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Brunswick in Nova Scotia and an MA from the University of Buffalo. I’ve already described their family, but one question I have gotten from folks is how a family with such vast international experience will adjust to Dothan. What I can say is that while we were interviewing Craig via Skype they were without potable water for a week or so at a time. So, my thought was that just the fact that we have running water every day makes Dothan a little slice of heaven!

Cindy Reyner started towards the end of last year as our receptionist. She has worked 14 years as a teacher assistant and office assistant in grades K-5. She also worked in personnel at Flowers Hospital. She has done an outstanding job, already!

Mary Sanders will be our new Extended Day Program Director. Mary comes to us with 26 years of experience in childcare, including in-home care, a US Naval preschool, and private and church preschools in Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama. Mary loves working with children, a well as senior citizens.

Elizabeth Whaley will be teaching Upper and Middle School Mathematics. She comes to us from Daleville High School, where she was also a math teacher. Elizabeth has a degree in Mathematics from Troy University with a minor in Business Administration. Interestingly, she’s also a licensed cosmetologist and licensed homebuilder. She has four grown children who are all in various stages of earning their degrees, undergraduate and graduate

Lucy Woodson will be teaching upper school Spanish. She has earned a B.A. from California State University, Bakersfield in Spanish and Art History, with a minor in French. Lucy is coming to us from a stint teaching Spanish and AP Spanish at Gilroy High School in Gilroy, CA. She and her husband, Kevin, have a 16 month old baby girl, and they are coming to Dothan where they will be close to Kevin’s family.

Please join me in welcoming all these wonderful teachers into the HA family!

Memorization?

For this blog post, I want to try something a bit different. I'd like to point you in the direction of some interesting videos and articles we have come across in our discussions at Houston Academy.

Over the past three years, we have been engaged in a discussion about what education should mean in the information age. As a 1:1 MacBook school, our students have more information at their fingertips than there has ever been in human history. The “Knowledge Doubling Curve," created by Buckminster Fuller, tells us that up until 1900, human knowledge doubled about every hundred years. By 1945, knowledged was estimated to double every 25 years. Now, we believe that human knowledge doubles every 12 months. IBM asserts that it will soon double every 12 hours. Moreover, we can pull out a "smart phone" and access that information instantly, from anywhere in the world. We have "smart" TVs, and "smart" computers that can "think." That begs the question of "What is essential for our students to know?"

For example, we would agree that students need to know their vocabulary in their world language classes if they are going to be fluent in their chosen language. However, debate is raging in the educational community about the nature of essential knowledge and the role of memorization in our educational system. Do students need to learn times tables? What about spelling? Do they need to know that "in fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue"? We still have a "classical" educational model that maintains that memorization is the key to learning, but at HA, we have come to  virtual consensus that it is more important for our students to be able to find information that to memorize information. Furthermore, once that information is acquired, the real challenge is to synthesize and analyze that information and separate good information from bad.

Actually, the argument against memorization is far from new. As early as 1956, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom identified six cognitive domains, starting from the most simple to the most complex. Informed by brain research, "Bloom"s Taxonomy" was revised in the 1990s to place "creativity" at the highest level. "Remembering" (or memorizing) has remained at the lowest level.

I encourage you to click on the links I have provided. These videos and articles are thought-provoking, and I would love to get a discussion going about the value and role of memorization in our educational system.

Read this article!

And this one! 

Watch this video!

And watch this one!

Forming a True Middle School

Many of you may not be aware that Houston Academy has a strategic plan.  This plan, devised by a special committee of the Board of Trustees, outlines our goals for Houston Academy for a five-year period.  A major component of that plan is the establishment of a middle school. 

You might ask, “Why do we need a middle school?”

That’s a good question. After all, Houston Academy has been very successful with the lower school comprising 3-year-old preschool through 6^th grade and the upper school comprising 7th grade through 12^th grade.

The driving force behind the middle school movement, nationally, is the research-based idea that children ages 10-14 have a unique set of learning needs; therefore, those children need a school setting, curriculum, and culture that meet those unique needs.

If you’ve ever spent time with a group of middle schoolers, you will quickly see that they are, indeed, “unique.”  As one of our teachers, who is in love with the middle school child, likes to say, “They’re not real people yet! I love them, but they’re not real people!” One of my former colleagues aptly described the middle school children as “hormones with feet.”  I particularly love a description I read in the NAIS, Middle School Handbook:

You know them.

We all do.

They are the ones we hear in a much too near booth in the fast food restaurant, talking, laughing, eating so loudly they complicate our digestion. They are the ones who cause us to hurry to new seats in a movie theater just as the theater goes dark. They are the ones we brake for as they skateboard past us down a steep hill and through a busy traffic intersection. They are the ones playing comfortably with toy cars at one moment and dreaming of real ones at the next…

Middle schoolers are complex. Next to old people, early adolescents may suffer more age-based prejudice than any other group in society. Through the middle school years, the young person frequently wonders or asks, “Am I normal?” (Finks and Stanek 2008)

If you’ve had a middle school child in your home, you’ve seen it. One day, they talk to you eagerly, like a 40-year-old historian, and the next day they sulk alone in their room, listening to Rhapsody on their iPhone, while wondering why “nobody gets them.” My own middle school daughter describes herself as “angsty.”

Not surprisingly, the brain-based research tells us that our teaching methods and environment should be driven by students’ brain structure, growth, and development.  We would never think of teaching a kindergartner the same way we teach a fifth grader, because we understand that their brain development is at a very different place. Inexplicably, though, we seem to think it’s perfectly fine to teach a 7^th grader the same way we teach a senior![1]

To successfully educate the middle school child, we also need to make sure we have a structure that reflects middle schoolers’ impulsivity and seemingly inherent need to test boundaries. Again, from a disciplinary perspective, it’s neither productive nor realistic to hold an 11-year-old to the same standards as a 19-year-old.

In short, the middle school child needs a guided and planned transition from childhood to the teen years and young adulthood. Early adolescence is an absolutely critical point in human development, and a carefully designed educational experience from grades 5-8 can have an indelible and lasting impact on our children and their future. Unfortunately, many of our schools in this country have not done a very good job structuring their middle schools. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that our middle schools have collectively failed our children.

The middle school at Houston Academy will be a model for the region. At the beginning of the year, we formed a volunteer faculty and administrative committee to study and plan for a middle school.  Before Thanksgiving, our committee took a trip to two quality independent schools: Altamont in Birmingham and the Montgomery Academy. Both schools have a middle school that encompasses grades 5-8.

Subsequently, the committee has decided to move forward in steps.  Our first step will be to reorganize the 5th and 6th grades employing a schedule that will allow the students to move between disciplines and have more class time in science, math, English, world and classical languages, and social studies.  This will NOT mean that we will denigrate the time for the arts; it will merely mean that we will rearrange the schedule to fit a middle school model.  In addition, we are looking to have a smooth transition in terms of expectations, responsibilities, and class structure from 5th grade to 8th grade. In other words, 5th graders will be handled differently from 6th graders. Our goal is to have this in place by next year. We also hope to have some athletic, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities for these grades. Concurrently, we are studying academic and social best practices of middle schools and working to integrate those ideas into our new middle school.

In the 2016-17 school year, we plan on fully integrating the 7th and 8th grade into the middle school.  Pending strong enrollment and a sound financial footing, we will hire a middle school head.

As we move forward, we will be dealing with the issues outlined below:

 I. What is our educational vision? Envision our middle school….

     A. What kind of education should we provide?

     B. What will our middle school provide that other schools don’t provide? What will our middle school provide for students that is NOT being provided under our current structure?

     C. What kinds of academic and social experiences do we want to give our students?

     D. What do we see implementing right away, in five years, in ten years?

II. What is our structure and curriculum?

     A. Day-to-Day operations

          1. How long will our classes be?

          2. How many classes in a day?

          3. When will the day start and end?

          4. How will lunch work?

          5. We will have an Advisory program. How will it work?

          6. How will we schedule teachers and students (structure and method)?

          7. What extracurricular activities will we offer? At what grades? What is our middle school athletic philosophy?

     B. Student Learning

          1. What is the objective of student learning?

          2. What do they need to know/be able to do?

          3. What criteria will we use to assess learning?

          4. How will students be tested?

          5. What constitutes successful completion of the middle school?

          6. How will curriculum be developed?

III. Write a statement of good practice in teaching

     A. What pedagogy will we use?

     B. Are we writing-based, collaborative-learning based, etc.?

IV. Facilities

     A. What physical facilities are necessary?

     B. Where will those facilities be?

     C. What will the facilities cost?

At first glance, this outline contains an overwhelming list of questions. On the other hand, this is incredibly exciting for both our teachers and our children.  We already offer the finest education in the Wiregrass. We have no educational peer, but we are going to be even better.  I can’t wait to see what we become as we evolve as a school of excellence!

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[1] Actually, research suggests that male adolescence continues well into our mid-20s. I know most women will not find that fact surprising!