Bena Kallick is a private consultant providing services to school districts, state departments of education, professional organizations, and public agencies throughout the United States and abroad. Kallick received her doctorate in educational evaluation at Union Graduate School. Her areas of focus include group dynamics, creative and critical thinking, and alternative assessment strategies for the classroom. Some of her written work includes: Assessment in the Learning Organization (ASCD, 1998), the Habits of Mind series (ASCD, 2000), Strategies for Self-Directed Learning (Corwin Press, 2004), Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind (ASCD, 2008), Habits of Mind Across the Curriculum (ASCD, 2009) ( all co-authored with Arthur Costa), and Using Curriculum Mapping and Assessment to Improve Student Learning (Corwin Press, 2009, co-authored with Jeff Colosimo). Her works have been translated into Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Her work with Dr. Art Costa has led to the development of the Institute for Habits of Mind, an international institute that is dedicated to transforming schools into places where thinking and Habits of Mind are taught, practiced, valued and have become infused into the culture of the school and community. The Institute provides services and products to support bringing the Habits of Mind into the culture of schools and the communities they serve.
She and Art Costa have just completed an online course for EduPlanet, a company that is dedicated to Professional Development for Educators using the most contemporary tools and thinking to be successful engaging students as 21st century learners.
Perhaps best known for her work with Art Costa developing the Habits of Mind resources for educators, Dr. Bena Kallick is a respected education leader with diverse experience at the highest levels of learning. Kallick’s most recent endeavor is Eduplanet, a teacher professional development company looking to “revolutionize the education industry using social media as the platform for 21st century learning.”
In a series of emails, I talked with Kallick about learning, specifically teacher development, and the appropriate role of social media in the teacher development process. What follows is part one of our two-part interview.
Terry Heick: Let’s begin by talking a little bit about Eduplanet. What is it, and what brought you to it?
Bena Kallick: I have been interested in virtual learning–particularly how to use a virtual learning environment to encourage teachers to exchange their learning and practices using the framework that is provided by some of the best thinkers in education.
Eduplanet provides a platform that is designed for this purpose–learning from expert thinkers in the field and learning from expert practitioners who interpret the work of the experts and apply it in their classrooms.
There are many notions about how best to measure teacher effectiveness. Now that the issue has entered the political and mass media realm, there is (ironically) perhaps more confusion than ever about what “learning” looks like. In your eyes, what does it “look like” when a teacher learns? Beyond external measures (i.e., walk-throughs, formal observations, etc.), what are symptoms that teachers themselves can look for to indicate their craft is evolving?
When you ask what it looks like for teachers, I would say that these are some indicators:
- Looks for feedback from students both through their work as well as through their responses to the work.
- Looks for feedback from not only peers, but any credible source—e.g., experts in the field
- Reflects on work and modifies based on what might need to be changed
- Plans thoughtfully; monitors the process of teaching and learning; modifies based on insights gained from observations about student learning
- Uses data thoughtfully to customize as much as is possible for students
- Documents reflections through a journal or another way to keep records of thoughts
- Remains open to continuous learning (habit of mind)
- Thinks flexibly (Habit of Mind)
- Is metacognitive (Habit of Mind)
- Applies knowledge from past experience (Habit of Mind)
These are some of the characteristics that come to mind. They are all verbs—these are behaviors in a teacher. As for evidence, there might be curriculum maps, journals (public not private), conferences, goal setting and monitoring results in light of student learning, participation in study groups, book studies, action research, and PLCs to name several.
You mention feedback, reflection, and flexibility. In the past, this has been very local, and very time consuming. What are some possible ways we might rethink professional development to really enable educators to learn prioritized ideas more deeply with a more diverse peer-set–and then have the time to actually implement these ideas at the curriculum, lesson, and activity level? (Obviously two key ideas here are personalization, and prioritizing the sorts of tasks teachers spend time on.) And further, how can agents providing this kind of training work with district and state level policymakers to ensure that it’s viable in terms of their own professional growth and development plans?
The design of Eduplanet is specifically addressing the question of how to think both locally and globally. It has some features that really emphasize this approach of a blended model:
People cannot buy in unless at the building level–preferably district level. People cannot join a learning path as an individual. Teams join as a cohort to work on the learning path together. Many schools are using the presentations from the author experts for their PLC meetings.
They then engage with the activities which are designed for using the social learning media provided in the platform. This brings them to collaboration with others nationally and, when appropriate, across the world. Social media is designed for long term collaboration and engagement to encourage and extend the work of the experts.
So the learning paths then are literally social–departments, content areas, and/or grade-level teams working together through social media-based to learn cooperatively?
Yes, but they then reach out to the global networks where people who have been engaged with the path are also uploading and exchanging practices.
The “accountability era” of education has created a collaborative approach to professional development, along with a shift away from a focus on curriculum, and a focus instead on standards, assessment form, and data. What are the long-term effects of this kind of shift, and what might be an appropriate response for educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders?
There is not a shift away from curriculum. In fact, there is a greater shift toward curriculum design based on standards. Curriculum mapping has been a key opportunity for teachers to think through the meaning of the standards–especially now that they are upgrading their work to meet the common core standards. Teachers meet to think about what needs to be agreed upon and where can they be flexible in terms of customizing curriculum to the needs of their students. This is a collaborative practice and is most often done with software that allows teachers to think and design both face-to-face as well as online.
I suppose I was getting at the art of crafting curriculum–authenticity that comes from differentiation at the curriculum level (rather than lesson), student-centered media, honoring local issues, mapping strategies such as spiraling and power standards, and planning for transfer–there is so much that a classroom teacher has to juggle that struggling districts can be tempted to focus on two things: the standard, and mastery of the standard. This outcomes-based focus is helpful is manufacturing data and increasing accountability, but as we know, the world students live, laugh, struggle, and thrive in is changing quickly. One of the concepts behind Eduplanet seems to be a rethinking of the way learners learn–in this case, teachers. The learning pathways you create honors this learner-centered approach, offering a “path” versus a linear, hop-scotch set of squares.
It is also flexible and responsive. I was just working with a district yesterday that will be using the assets of a learning path as a part of their PLC. They will be viewing a presentation or two, discussing its meaning, and then leaving the meeting with the promise to follow through with the social media. Really nice, like a book study in that they study the text of the presentations, construct meaning, and apply and exchange through the (social) media.
If only social media–even simple cloud-based office suites like Google Docs or Adobe Buzzword–could somehow be used in the learning path, the PLC/data team, and their daily work. In that respect, the “PD” would be seamlessly merged with its application. Then, as teachers can be offered “voice and choice” within these pathways and tangent opportunities, increased ownership supports everyone.
I think it is happening. We have our own platform and people are sharing work, uploading videos of classroom practices, and using shared tools to exchange.
This interview is part 1 of 2. Part 2 of 2 will be posted later this week.
Terry Heick is interested in social improvement via the innovation of learning. He is at work on multiple projects, including the book, “Moby Dick is Dead: Reimagining the Role of Media in the 21st Century Classroom,” available soon through Kindle and e-book format. You can follow him via his Amazon Author Page, twitter, Facebook,Linkedin, or his blog TeachThought.
Computers are only assistants and a good teacher’s will always be needed.
However social networks such as facebook and YouTube as well as great resources including Wikipedia and Wolfram-Alpha are here to stay so that educators must use them in the teaching process. Many academics are posting great educational videos and materials online. The only problem is to sort the good ones from the rest and present them in an organized manner.
This effort is being done by: http://Utubersity.com which presents the best educational videos available on YouTube in an organized, easy to find way to watch and learn.
They are classified and tagged in a way that enables people to find these materials more easily and efficiently and not waste time browsing through pages of irrelevant search results.
The website also enhances the experience using other means such as recommending related videos, Wikipedia content and so on. There’s also a Spanish version called http://utubersidad.com
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