I am once again disgruntled, disheartened and generally pissed off. With whom I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps it should be myself for being so naieve as to think our state leadership was genuinely concerned about supporting our schools over personal political gain. Once again, I’m proved wrong.

We recieved our Year Two allocations for the Classrooms for the Future grant yesterday evening and I was shocked to discover that while I had applied for the $838,000 that our district was eligible for, we were actually only awarded $163,000. I know it seems I’m…how does the saying go?…punching a gift horse in the mouth, but $163,000 does not go far to provide the technology supports necessary to fully implement the classrooms of the future that fundamentally transform instruction in the ways this initiative intends.

Lets take a look for a minute at the actual distribution of money. Keep in mind that the governor was somehow able to get the full proposed budget for this project past the state legislature in a difficult fiscal climate. This year we see 255 additional high schools recieving funding for CFF, bringing the total to 358 schools - a total of 303 districts recieving money. Now a clear stipulation of this funding was the readiness of the district to implement good programs using the technology. An existing infrastructure to support classrooms for the future and definate evidence of potential sustainability was the clarion call of year one application. You can not convince me that the majority of schools in Pennsylvania posess the infrastructure to adequately implement this level of technology saturation….well, lets modify that statement….they can’t support the INTENDED level of technology saturation.

In my opinion, they effectively destroyed a very well intentioned, ground breaking, poineering, and potentially revolutionary program by diluting the focus to satiate the political machine. This hypothesis might be more substance if I actually could determine who THEY are. Who made the funding decisions? Who determined how many additional districts to fund? Who determined the level at which to fund them? I can tell you this much…I was a peer reviewer for this year’s Year One grant applications and I can tell you that the quality of some of the applications was absolutely inexcusable. Many showed little or no evidence for sustainability, little or no evidence of exisiting support structures, little or no foresight of implementation, little or no committment to local buy-in. And some of these districts recieved funding. Hmmm. Maybe I just didn’t understand the scoring protocol. Was it scored like golf?

I know I’m sounding a little bitter, but thats just pure dissapointment in the abominable implementation of a project that had the greatest potential of any I have seen in my professional career to further the cause of educational technologies, instructional reform and foundational change. Yes, we will be able to provide projectors and interactive whiteboards in a bunch of classrooms. Yes we may even be able to purchase a couple laptop carts (to share among classrooms), but this initiative was about getting laptops on ALL student desks and ensuring our teachers had the skills and supports necessary to fully integrate computer resources into instruction. It assumes all teachers have access to these tools - not shared, not scheduled, not accomodated, not workarounds and good enoughs.

We were supposed to be creating model schools and gathering the data that could justify future investments in instructional technology. How can we get that data from half-assed program implementation? All we’ve done is dilute the potential of an enormous amount of tax dollars in order to ensure that we make all the voting delegates of our state legislature happy by distributing a token to their constituent school districts. And I feel slightly dirty for being a part of it. I lobbied our local representatives and dog and ponied with the best of them, but if I could do it over again with the mature understanding of how this kind of politicing works, I’d recommend against the entire project. Put the money into social welfare programs, because we’re going to need to support our future generations if we continue avoiding substantive educational change.

Kyle Peck (Penn State and Mid-Atlantic Regional Lab)

Year one is a formative evaluation of the program focusing on how the program affects what teachers do, how they teach, how do their teaching methods change as a result of this program, as opposed to the ’summative’ evaluation of the impact on student achievement.  Not enough time to really take a look at student achievement but maybe we can determine how it might affect student achievement by taking a look at how it is effecting the way teachers are teaching (formative vs. summative).  Other factors that we can look at include - attendance, discipline referrals.

Another question that we are asking is ‘Are CFF students asked to work more with 21st Century Skills?’.

They will use observations, surveys, interviews and existing district data (see Matrix Handout) to get the data. 

Requirements

• PATI Survey
• CFF Technology Observations (4 classrooms, pre and post)
• TPR Observations (4 classrooms, pre and post)
• 2 Teacher Online Surveys (pre and post)
• 2 Student Online Surveys (pre and post)
• Interview with building leaders (post)

They will determine which four teachers will be evaluated (to ensure a random sampling).

They want the same evaluator to do both evaluations for the same teacher.  They want the evaluator to be specifically trained on the delivery of the evaluation.  That’s what we will cover for the rest of the day.

CaseNEX (TPR)
Diane Reed and Rebecca Berlin

Major benefits of the TPR - objectivity (feedbakc is specific), consistency, individuality (professional development is easily adapted to individuals), data driven
Teaching Pennsylvania Record is a lower-inference observation system developed at the University of Virginia.  105 items used to observe teacher and student behaviors in the classroom.   Build on reasearch-based conceptions of effective teaching - based on many previous studies. 

Will require a 30 minute in-class observation, pre-observation conference, three cycles of teacher observation, three syscles of student observation, presence or absence of multiple teacher behaviors.  Can use a laptop or the handheld (or paper).

5 Key Areas

1. Focus and Capacity - teachers demonstrate a focus on goals, objectives
2. Syntax - sequence of classroom events - teachers focus on an organized sequence of events
3. Principles of Reaction - the tactics of teaching.  Teachers are able to gauge student engagement/motivation
4. Social System - teachers build and maintain social systems conducive to learning.  roles and relationships and student behavior
5. Provisions for Evaluation - formative and summative for purposes of improving learning.

http://tpr.casenex.com

I created an account on the site (craig). 

There are some great videos that demonstrate each of the behaviors with many supporting examples.  Also there are test implemetnations of the tool that show how the example video lessons were actually scored.  Then there is also an evaluation of our skills using the TPR to evaluate.  The evaluation will be available after Jan 31st.  We will need to get high (above 80%?) in order to be considered a reliable evaluator.

PDE held an Elluminate meeting today around the subject of equipment questions.  Here are some notes:

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The following are notes from the Classrooms for the Future vendor meeting held yesterday morning in Harrisburg…

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The district just recieved some Polycom videoconferencing equipment from part of the e-fund grant we recieved.  The unit is pretty slick - a VSX7000 - and includes the camera/speaker combo as well as a little gizmo that you can use to hook up to a computer/doc cam.  This unit allows for limited multi-point bridging as well. 

Chris picked out a nice 32″ LCD monitor that we ordered to hook it up to and we used a cart that we found here at the high school.