Being our best selves

Remote learning & assessments, paying attention, a much-needed puppy photo

TweetMeet

As a reminder, I'm one of the co-hosts for Microsoft's TweetMeet on Remote Learning this Tuesday at 10 AM Pacific time. Join us, won't you? #MSFTEduChat is the hashtag for the event. Questions we'll be looking at include but aren't limited to

- What are key lessons you've learned from teaching remotely?

- What tools and strategies make future learning more accessible?

- How will teaching and learning evolve, from your perspective?

Remote Learning & Assessment

I'm still digesting the Education Reimagined: The Future of Learning paper by Michael Fullan, Joanne Quinn, Max Drummy and Mag Gardner. It was produced in a partnership which essentially consisted of Microsoft going to some leading thinkers in education and saying, "what happens now?"

Consider that for several months many students have enjoyed autonomy at home. Many have had the latitude to choose when to learn, when to move around and how to manage their own time. Some have pursued their own interests through play. Others have chosen to opt out of learning entirely. Educators would be wise to examine their own practices that can extend flexibility, choice and voice to students. Simple ways to do this are to:

• Invite students to share the positive insights emerging from the Pandemic. What did they learn? What did they learn about themselves? What are they grateful for?

• “De-front” the classroom by taking the emphasis from the teacher and placing it on students

• Promote collaboration among students. When students work in groups, there is flexibility, more voices engage, and smaller children can wiggle around as needed

• Incorporate choice into assignments and classroom activities

• Arrange the classroom to support student movement

• Create a discrete way for students to share vulnerabilities or concerns

• Enable students to make suggestions about what and how to learn

Fullan and Quinn are doing a webinar on Monday, June 15 at 3 PM Pacific. I'm looking forward to it. Join here: https://aka.ms/RemoteLearningWebinarSchedule.

I worked on assessments with the Microsoft Forms team for awhile. It's an interesting space, in part because it's shifting. High-stakes summative assessments are falling out of favor with education thinkers despite widespread deployment in the US, China, the Philippines, and countless other areas worldwide. Fullan et al. again:

Assessment practices that prioritize emotional well-being is what is needed during school reopening. Some recommendations include:

• Be cautious of using diagnostic quizzes and high stakes evaluation that will heighten the stress for some learners and therefore will not provide meaningful or accurate direction for the teacher

• Consider formative, low-threat assessments-for-learning to reveal students’ strengths and needs

• Facilitate interviews that invite student and family perspectives

Remote learning is driving several do-we-really-have-to-do-this conversations about high stakes exams, in part because they're very hard to administer and proctor fairly. Emily Levesque wrote a detailed thread of the remote-proctoring requirements for the GRE exam, including rules like "do not sit in an overstuffed chair" (?) or, more importantly, "do not use a mobile device or tablet," which is a major burden for inclusivity. Not every student has access to a laptop.

There are always alternatives. Hampshire College, where I did my undergrad, has famously never used exams or grades. Instead they use a written evaluation system for each course you take, with one-page evaluations of your work both by the student and the instructor. (The similarities to many modern workplace performance reviews are left as an exercise to the reader.) As a system, it had its flaws, but I keep thinking about how much more meaningful the evaluations would be in a remote or hybrid learning environment, where context needs to be acknowledged along with the demonstration of skills mastery and the learning outcomes.

We heard from a lot of customers in the last couple months that they needed tools to proctor exams, so high-stakes assessments will be around for awhile yet. I still wonder about other ways we can measure learning. Remote learning is hard on everyone.

Paying attention

A friend asked on Facebook: "Can we have one day where the headlines do not involve some company or person 'cutting ties' or 'facing backlash'?" If you're tired of it, imagine how more marginalized folks are feeling.

In the US, there's an election year tradition where conservatives pick on some group they find "icky" for culture-war votes. It used to be gays and lesbians, but the conservative right fought that war in the 2000s and lost. These days they've shifted focus to transgender individuals. The latest maneuver is to allow providers to deny transgender individuals health care, which like most of these initiatives has no real point other than performative cruelty. That's bad enough, but when you have famous people like JK Rowling posting anti-trans rants, it becomes legitimized cruelty as well. Use your platform for good. (That said, the Harry Potter actors explicitly calling for trans rights and disavowing Rowling's comments have been warming my heart. Once again, young people have the right idea.)

In higher education the #BlackInTheIvory tag has been calling out racist and unprofessional behavior at schools and universities that really should know better, some by name.

In media, we've seen upheavals at Refinery29, Bon Appetit, Conde Nast more generally, Buzzfeed News, and the CBC in Canada. And that's just this week.

Consequences aren't linear or evenly distributed. They tend to pile up and land all at once. I don't have a lot of sympathy for arguments that amount to "can we just go back to ignoring bad behavior, it's easier." Part of the work is paying attention.

Interstitial

If you're just joining us: I'm Colin Birge, Ph.D. I work in Microsoft's Education Engineering group, mostly talking to customers, mostly in higher education. I live in Vancouver, Canada. Shrewsbury Tech is my weekly-ish newsletter on work, education, and whatever else is on my mind that day. Hello!

Seattle

I lived in Seattle for many years before moving to Vancouver, mostly in a neighborhood called Montlake, just north of Capitol Hill. Capitol Hill, of course, is now famous for the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, an area of a few blocks taken over by Black Lives Matter protestors after police vacated their East Precinct building.

If the issues weren't so important the whole thing would be hilarious. The cops vacated their precinct in a "de-escalation" attempt after several days of police riots including tear gas, mace, and rubber bullets. That night the police dispersed in force to a number of locations nearby and waited. It appears Seattle police were hoping the protestors would trash and torch the precinct building. Good propaganda value -- let's save Capitol Hill from those "terrorists!" -- and possibly an excuse to get a newly built space out of the insurance money.

I'm confident in saying that because of the blatant, laughable lies SPD and their supporters have been coming up with after their plan didn't work. First it was "armed guards are demanding IDs and extorting people." Didn't happen, the police chief admitted later. Then Fox News ran images of a burning city under the headline CRAZY TOWN, claiming it was Seattle. The city was actually St Paul, Minnesota. Finally, Fox News resorted to clumsy Photoshop jobs, quickly discovered.

I mention all of this because I'm seeing a lot of US news media coverage of the Seattle protests that's absolutely at odds with what I'm hearing from friends who live in or around the area. Trump's usual blustering isn't helping. As of this morning, the locals are a lot more worried about an armed response from the cops or military than they are about the protestors. Thanks, Seattle, for working to be your best selves.

Inspiration

Five years ago today we met a friend's puppy, Sophie. I understand she's a lot bigger these days.

Onward

I know we're all tired of the pandemic, but we still don't have a vaccine and won't for quite a while. Please be safe. Wear masks indoors or in crowds. Wash your hands a lot. Let's be kind wherever and whenever we can.