ChatGPT Discussion Question

This it the discussion question I’m going to post for my undergrad Educational Technology class.

How do you think AI will change education in the future? Play around with ChatGPT. Here are some things to get it to do for you: 

  1. Have it write a lesson plan for something you think you might teach.

    1. Keep chatting with it to refine the lesson plan.

  2. Paste your biography from the introduction page from your website and get it to rewrite it for you.

    1. Do you like its writing better than yours? 

  3. Ask it to write a study guide for the Google Certified Educator Exam. 

  4. Ask it to explain a concept that you plan on teaching and ask it to explain it on the level you plan on teaching (for example: "explain mitochondria as if I were a high school freshman."). 

  5. Ask it to rewrite one of your tool descriptions in instructional tools. 

  6. Ask it to write all of your tools in the Assessment/Management section. 

Let me know how this goes for you. How is this going to change education? Please don't give solely positive or negative views. 

ChatGPT and Education

ChatGPT is a new tool that has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach education. Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a large language model that is trained to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs.

One of the key features of ChatGPT is its ability to understand and respond to context. This means that it can carry on a conversation with a user and provide relevant and coherent responses, even when the conversation is about a complex or unfamiliar topic.

This capability has exciting implications for education. Imagine a student asking ChatGPT a question about a difficult concept in a textbook. Rather than simply providing a pre-written answer, ChatGPT could engage the student in a conversation and provide explanations and examples that are tailored to the student's level of understanding. This could provide a more personalized and engaging learning experience for the student.

Another potential benefit of ChatGPT is its ability to generate unique content. This could be useful in a variety of educational contexts, such as providing personalized writing prompts for students or generating customized practice problems.

Overall, ChatGPT has the potential to change the way we approach education. By providing personalized and engaging learning experiences, it has the potential to improve student outcomes and make learning more effective.

I had ChatGPT write this for me.

Data Primer

Because of some TikToks I had seen where teachers were complaining about how irrelevant looking at last year’s testing was to their teaching, I thought i’d make a Data Primer so teachers could find useful ways to use data, and so principals could see which kind of data is the most helpful to teachers.

This presentation is geared towards teachers in my school system, but it is easily applied to any teaching situation.



The State of Education in Tennessee

I wrote this as part of an application package to get into a learning academy. I am sharing it here for posterity and because I think you’ll find it interesting.

The state of education in Tennessee is the story of a state that has been on the forefront of the education reform movement in the United States starting with Race to the Top in 2010 (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). “Tennessee has been the fastest improving state since 2011, with students showing more growth over time than students in any other state” (Tennessee Department of Education [TNDOE], n.d.), the COVID-19 pandemic has set those gains back, and now most efforts at the state department of education are to undo the learning-loss that students suffered during the ongoing pandemic (Tennessee Department of Education, 2020).

Chief among the reforms that were adopted as part of Race to the Top were the Common Core standards (Loveless, 2021) that, after two revisions, became the Tennessee Academic Standards (Tennessee Department of Education, n.d.). The adoption of Common Core began a period of parents and others questioning whether the federal government was too involved in education. Because of the backlash against President Obama, Common Core became associated with his presidency and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and viewed in a negative light by President Obama’s political detractors and standardized testing detractors, alike (The Momma Bears, 2015). One of the reasons Tennessee won one of the first Race to the Top grants was because of the promise to adopt the new standards, and within five years, they were being replaced with slightly different, and differently named standards (Aldrich, Common Core is out. Tennessee Academic Standards are in. Here’s how teachers are prepping for the change., 2017).

Another victim of shifting political winds was the accountability testing program, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Initially, Tennessee was set to adopt PARCC (Wesson, 2013), but it became associated with the Common Core State Standards, and Tennessee legislators quickly distanced themselves from the test (Aldrich, Why Tennessee legislators share blame, too, for TNReady testing headaches, 2018). This resulted in the General Assembly passing legislation requiring the TNDOE to adopt an RFP process and bid out the test. Tennessee cycled through two different companies, Measurement Inc. and Questar, both of whom had major issues (Tatter, 2016).  After having suffered through issues with both Measurement Inc. and Questar, Tennessee finally adopted Pearson as a testing vendor to deliver the TN Ready and TCAP tests (Aldrich, Tennessee chooses testing giant Pearson to take over TNReady, 2019). This has created stability with the testing program, whereas before, confidence was low whether the test would ever be delivered or would work online. Having the same test for multiple years has allowed TNDOE to give teachers tools like SchoolNet to help teachers analyze student performance in real time during the school year rather than waiting on test results during the summer months.

The other major event shaping the state of education in Tennessee today has been the COVID-19 pandemic.  In March of 2020, Governor Lee urged schools to close as quickly as possible between March 20 and March 30, 2020 (Tennessee Office of the Governor, 2020). Most schools did not reopen to in-person students that semester, rather nearly every school went virtual following plans issued by TNDOE (Tennessee Department of Education, n.d.). The legislature issued a hold harmless to drop TN Ready tests and allow LEAs to shorten their school years (Aldrich, Sweeping Tennessee legislation filed to drop TNReady tests, allow fewer instructional days as schools close due to COVID-19, 2020).

Even though virtual schools have been in operation in Tennessee since 2011 (Potts, 2016), fewer than a dozen LEAs had experience operating them. This meant only a few LEAs were able to deliver quality educational programs to their students through existing Learning Management Systems like Canvas or Blackboard. Other LEAs essentially were experimenting with this learning modality for the remainder of the year, and since everyone including students were being held harmless, LEAs encouraged their teachers to innovate.  

In the 2020-2021 school year, the state issued re-opening guidance that gave specific requirements for virtual schools, and LEAs had to submit a virtual school plan to the state. Different systems used different models for virtual instruction. Those who had already employed an LMS for their teachers to use with their daily instruction or 1-to-1 programs employed synchronous models where students would log in much like they were attending school in person. Other school systems used programs like Edgenuity and had teachers supplement the computer-based instruction with tutoring and managing the students’ work.

Meanwhile, the students who were attending school in person were doing so with many protective measures put in place such as frequent handwashing, social distancing, and staggered schedules. Schools were also contact tracing which meant quarantining and isolating students for long periods of time in accordance with TNDOE guidelines (Tennessee Department of Health, 2020). Students in quarantine or isolation were supposed to receive online instruction at home, but many school systems in rural areas were unable to do that, and many students who did not have technology at home were unable to do that. These challenges made virtual instruction look like one of the culprits for learning loss, and the TNDOE made it much more difficult to offer both in-person and online learning (Testino & Mangrum, 2021).

Because of the loss of instruction in 2020, a disjointed school year in 2020-2021, and varying quality in virtual school models, the data from the 2020-2021 school year showed that students experienced significant learning loss (Tennessee Department of Education, 2020). To equip LEAs with tools combat learning loss Tennessee General Assembly passed the Tennessee Learning Loss and Student Acceleration Act (Tennessee Code Annotated, 2021). Among the programs that the state mandated out of this legislation are as follows:

·       Summer learning-camps

·       Learning-loss bridge camps

·       After-school learning mini-camps

Additionally, the General Assembly added a caveat that “any 3rd grade student scoring at “approaching” or “below” grade level on the ELA TCAP assessment must receive additional supports and services. This involves the choice of multiple pathways, including summer programming, TN ALL Corps participating, retesting, and/or retention” (Tennessee Department of Education, 2020). This legislation has made many worry that many third graders will not be able to meet the requirements to pass third grade creating a logjam at that grade level when this bill is enacted in 2023-2024 (Aldrich, Tennessee strengthens third-grade retention requirements as legislature takes up flurry of education bills in special session, 2021).

In addition to the state legislation, the federal government passed the Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund as part of the CARES Act (Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, n.d.). Congress set aside $13.2 Billion in a grant fund for LEAS to access these funds through their State Education Agency (SEA) in three different disbursements commonly known as ESSER I, ESSER II, and ESSER III. According to their fact sheet, the U.S. Department of Education (2021), the LEA must “reserve at least 20 percent of funds to address learning loss through the implementation of evidence-based interventions and ensure that those interventions respond to students’ social, emotional, and academic needs and address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on underrepresented student subgroups”. LEAs can spend the remainder of the funds on a wide range of products, services, and other items that help districts improve their ability to educate students during a pandemic.

To help LEAs spend their money based on needs, the TNDOE has provided LEAs with planning resources (Tennesseee Department of Education, 2021). Additionally, organizations like SCORE (Tang, Price, & Brown, 2021) have also written papers to help LEAs can spend this money wisely. One suggestion is that districts spend this money on one-time investments so that they do not overextend themselves when the money has run out. Despite this warning, many districts have had to hire additional personnel to meet their students’ needs.

Hiring personnel is more difficult than it has been in the past. Some reports say that nearly 22% of the state’s teaching force is considering leaving it (Davis, 2021). In reaction to this, the state has started a Grow Your Own model, and have recently announced a Teacher Residency Program partnership between Austin-Peay and the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (Tennessee Department of Education, 2022). It is not yet clear if teachers will continue to resign from education at the rate they have recently, but some suggest that findings solutions for this crisis is education’s biggest concern in the upcoming year (Morrison, 2021).

Beyond student achievement data and learning modalities, TNDOE is also looking to change how schools are funded (Tennessee Department of Education, 2021). Town halls have been conducted across the state to get the public’s input on funding local education agencies. Governor Bill Lee has tasked the TNDOE to seek public input based on the following investment strategies:

·       Prioritize students over systems

·       Empower parents to engage in their child’s education

·       Incentivize student outcomes

·       Ensure all students, regardless of location or learning needs, are served at a high-level

·       Reflect Tennesseans’ values

·       Create flexible funding that prepare students for postsecondary success (Tennessee Department of Education, 2021).

This change to funding will permanently change the way schools are funded which will change how schools operate. 89 school-systems currently have a lawsuit set to go to trial against the state of Tennessee because of the Basic Education Program (BEP) funding formula (Aldrich, Tennessee’s lingering school funding trial is reset before a new court, 2021).  The BEP has not been overhauled since 1992, and the Comptroller and others have asked that it be overhauled to reflect new realities (Associated Press, 2011). While the new funding model that will replace the BEP is not currently impacting the state of education in Tennessee, it will most certainly impact LEAs in the future more than any other change the state has made in decades.

It appears 2023-2024 is shaping up to be one of the most transformational years in public education in Tennessee because of the culmination of events that will happen that year: the state will change to a new funding formula for schools, ESSER money will have run out, and third-graders who are not proficient in reading will have to be held back or put through rigorous summer courses in order to be at the level. Additionally, it is likely that the COVID-19 pandemic will have lessened or will have come to an end by then. No one can guess what the future holds, but it seems like it will be an interesting time to be in public education in Tennessee. LEAs need to prepare for the end of ESSER and a new BEP now so that they are in a better position to meet their needs in the future. Developing low-cost, high0-impact programs to meet learning loss and reading intervention will be a key to success in the future. 

Works Cited

Aldrich, M. W. (2017, June 26). Common Core is out. Tennessee Academic Standards are in. Here’s how teachers are prepping for the change. Retrieved from Chalkbeat Tennessee: https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2017/6/26/21102827/common-core-is-out-tennessee-academic-standards-are-in-here-s-how-teachers-are-prepping-for-the-chan

Aldrich, M. W. (2018, April 23). Why Tennessee legislators share blame, too, for TNReady testing headaches. Retrieved from Chalkbeat Tennessee: https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2018/4/23/21104918/why-tennessee-legislators-share-blame-too-for-tnready-testing-headaches

Aldrich, M. W. (2019, May 30). Tennessee chooses testing giant Pearson to take over TNReady. Retrieved from Chalkbeat Tennessee: https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2019/5/30/21108233/tennessee-chooses-testing-giant-pearson-to-take-over-tnready

Aldrich, M. W. (2020, March 17). Sweeping Tennessee legislation filed to drop TNReady tests, allow fewer instructional days as schools close due to COVID-19. Retrieved from Chalkbeat Tennessee: https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2020/3/17/21196031/sweeping-tennessee-legislation-filed-to-drop-tnready-tests-allow-fewer-instructional-days-as-schools

Aldrich, M. W. (2021, January 21). Tennessee strengthens third-grade retention requirements as legislature takes up flurry of education bills in special session. Retrieved from Chalkbeat Tennessee: https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2021/1/21/22243450/tennessee-legislature-strengthens-third-grade-retention-requirements

Aldrich, M. W. (2021, September 2). Tennessee’s lingering school funding trial is reset before a new court. Retrieved from Chalkbeat Tennessee: https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2021/9/2/22654926/tennessee-school-funding-trial-bep-memphis-nashville

Associated Press. (2011, December 9). Comptroller calls for TN school funding overhaul. Retrieved from Desert News: https://www.deseret.com/2011/12/9/20237278/comptroller-calls-for-tn-school-funding-overhaul

Davis, C. (2021, December 7). Survey: 22% of Tennessee teachers say they're ready to leave education. Retrieved from News Channel 5 Nashville: https://www.newschannel5.com/news/survey-22-of-tennessee-teachers-say-theyre-ready-to-leave-education

Loveless, T. (2021, March 18). Why Common Core failed. Retrieved from The Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/03/18/why-common-core-failed/

Morrison, N. (2021, December 24). Stopping The Great Teacher Resignation Will Be Education’s Big Challenge For 2022. Retrieved from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2021/12/24/stopping-the-great-teacher-resignation-will-be-educations-big-challenge-for-2022/?sh=495fb1ea157c

Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. (n.d.). Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Retrieved January 2022, from Office of Elementary and Secondary Education: https://oese.ed.gov/offices/education-stabilization-fund/elementary-secondary-school-emergency-relief-fund/

Potts, K. (2016, March). Virtual Schools in Tennessee. Retrieved from Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury: https://comptroller.tn.gov/content/dam/cot/orea/advanced-search/2016/2016_OREA_VirtualSchools.pdf

Tang, P., Price, M., & Brown, K. (2021, January 21). How Tennessee School Districts Can Make The Most Of ESSER II COVID Relief Funding. Retrieved from SCORE: https://tnscore.org/how-tennessee-school-districts-can-make-the-most-of-esser-ii-covid-relief-funding/

Tatter, G. (2016, April 27). Tennessee fires TNReady testmaker, suspends tests for grades 3-8. Retrieved from Chalkbeat Tennessee: https://tn.chalkbeat.org/2016/4/27/21098160/tennessee-fires-tnready-testmaker-suspends-tests-for-grades-3-8

Tennessee Code Annotated. (2021). Tennessee Learning Loss Remediation and Student Acceleration Act. Retrieved from LexisNexis: https://advance.lexis.com/documentpage/?pdmfid=1000516&crid=6c045431-33b5-453c-9d41-9fa8cd077fbb&nodeid=ABXAAGAAPAAB&nodepath=/ROOT/ABX/ABXAAG/ABXAAGAAP/ABXAAGAAPAAB&level=4&haschildren=&populated=false&title=49-6-1501.%20Short%20title.&config=025054JABlO

Tennessee Department of Education. (2020, September 23). Tennessee Department of Education. Retrieved from Tennessee Releases Data Showing Significant Learning Loss Among K-12 Students: https://www.tn.gov/education/news/2020/9/23/tennessee-releases-data-showing-significant-learning-loss-among-k-12-students.html

Tennessee Department of Education. (2021). Tennessee K-12 Public Education Funding Engagement. Retrieved January 2021, from Tennessee Department of Education: https://www.tn.gov/education/tnedufunding.html

Tennessee Department of Education. (2022, January). Grow Your Own. Retrieved from Tennessee Department of Education: https://www.tn.gov/education/educator-resources/educator-pipelines-innovative-pathways/grow-your-own.html

Tennessee Department of Education. (n.d.). Academic Standards. Retrieved January 2022, from Tennessee Department of Education: https://www.tn.gov/education/instruction/academic-standards.html

Tennessee Department of Education. (n.d.). National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Retrieved January 2022, from Tennessee Department of Education: https://www.tn.gov/education/assessment/naep.html

Tennessee Department of Education. (n.d.). Reopening Guidance. Retrieved January 2022, from https://www.tn.gov/education/health-and-safety/update-on-coronavirus/reopening-guidance.html

Tennessee Department of Health. (2020, September 2). COVD-19 Response Rubric. Retrieved from Tennessee Department of Health: https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/education/health-&-safety/TDH%20COVID%20Case%20Response%20and%20School%20District%20Decision%20Making%20Protocol.pdf

Tennessee Office of the Governor. (2020, March 16). Governor Lee Issues Statement Regarding Statewide School Closure. Retrieved from Tennessee Office of the Governor: https://www.tn.gov/governor/news/2020/3/16/governor-lee-issues-statement-regarding-statewide-school-closure.html

Tennesseee Department of Education. (2021). ESSER District Planning Resources. Retrieved 2021, from Tennesseee Department of Education: https://www.tn.gov/education/top-links/esser.html

Testino, L., & Mangrum, M. (2021, April 26). Tennessee schools can't offer both in-person and virtual instruction starting this fall. Retrieved from Memphis Commercial Appeal: https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/education/2021/04/26/tennessee-schools-cant-offer-both-person-and-virtual-instruction-in-fall-covid-19-updates/7342955002/

The Momma Bears. (2015, May 21). The Momma Bears. Retrieved from Mc Queen's children too Blessed to be TN READY: http://www.mommabears.org/blog/category/parcc

U.S. Department of Education. (2010, July 22). Race to the Top - Game-Changing Reforms. Retrieved from U.S. Department of Education: https://www.ed.gov/comment/3490

U.S. Department of Education. (2021). ESSER Fact Sheet. Retrieved from U.S. Department of Education: https://oese.ed.gov/files/2021/03/FINAL_ARP-ESSER-FACT-SHEET.pdf

Wesson, L. (2013, July). TCAP and PARCC Student Tests. Retrieved from Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury: https://comptroller.tn.gov/content/dam/cot/orea/advanced-search/2013/2013_OREA_TCAPandPARCC.pdf

Initial Research into Financial, Geographical, and Population Effects on Academic Achievement Part 2

After Part 1, I got a lot of people asking me to give the rankings for the School Systems in TN. I could not find specific financial information for municipal/special districts. I am embedding these reports from Google Data Studio. If you want to access that directly, go here.

Rankings for individual school systems. You can change the systme with the button at the top.

School System Ranking Table. Click the header to sort.

Raw Data

Initial Research into Financial, Geographical, and Population Effects on Academic Achievement Part 1

I haven’t even done a lit review yet, so don’t look for much here other than some raw data and some preliminary tests on it. I am only using data from Tennessee.

Someone once asked me if money made an impact on education and how. The how is pretty easy. You can pay more, get your choice of employees, hire more assistants and support staff, fund software and other programming, and have better facilities to do it all in. In sum, C.R.E.A.M.

I didn’t know (and still don’t know) if anyone had done a study on that, but I thought it would be easy enough to look at that in Tennessee. I took the 2019 school report card data file and the TACIR Fiscal Capacity Index for the following data points: District Success Rate (percentage of all students who were proficient on TN Ready tests), ACT Composite Average, 2017-2019 Taxable Sales, and SY2021 Fiscal Capacity.

I chose sales tax base to have an idea of the county’s wealth, and I took the Fiscal Capacity since that’s how the state ranks county’s in terms of being able to fund education. I looked at Success Rate from 2018-2019 since that’s the last year we’ve had reliable data.

To see if there is anything going on there, I ran simple Pearson correlations for the following:

  • TN Ready Success and ACT Composite Average (r=0.82)

  • TN Ready Success and Sales Tax Earnings (r=0.36)

  • ACT Composite Average and Sales Tax Earnings (r=0.34)

  • TN Ready Success and Fiscal Capacity (r=0.39)

  • ACT Composite Average and Fiscal Capacity (r=0.36)

  • Sales Tax Earnings and Fiscal Capacity (r=0.99)

All of the above showed positive correlations. The highest correlations were between TN Ready and ACT (r=.82) and Sales Tax and Fiscal Capacity (r=.99).

Counties with municipal or special districts

There was some replication of data because the state data shows this information for counties, and in TN, there are several municipal systems within counties. For example, Gibson and Carroll Counties both have multiple municipal systems rather than have one consolidated county system. Blount County has a county system and two municipal systems (Alcoa and Maryville). When looking at the data, it is clear that the small municipal systems outperform the counties they are in. Out of curiosity, I did initially break down Blount County’s.

Blount.png

The disparity between Blount County Schools and the two municipal districts in terms of TN Ready Success and ACT Average could be somewhat shocking (to a lay person) considering all three of these districts are sharing the same funding base that is prorated based on Average Daily Membership (ADM, or enrollment) and Average Daily Attendance (ADA, or attendance rate). So looking at that led me to wonder how other county/municipal districts looked like.

In a word, they looked similar.

IMG_3268.jpeg

Having worked in one large county with no municipal districts and in two municipal districts in large counties, I have anecdotal evidence of what is happening here, but I am going to avoid using it if I can help it.

Square Miles and Population Density

One of the aspects of municipal and special districts that separates them from county districts is their general geography. For example, Elizabethton City Schools cover 9.6 miles while Carter County Schools cover 331.7 square miles. That is a lot of ground to cover. The population density between the two is 1,421.2 persons per square mile for Elizabethton and 129.2 persons per square mile for Carter County Schools.

This is obviously the same for every municipal/special district in comparison to the county districts in which they are located, thus I wanted to see to what extent square mileage and population density correlated to academic achievement for all school districts - not just counties versus smaller districts within them.

I did a Pearson correlation comparing square mileage and TN Ready Success Rate. It had a medium negative association (r=-0.33). The same was found when comparing square mileage and ACT Composite averages (r=-0.34). This is suggesting that the more square mileage a school system has, the lower their academic performance will be.

But what about population density? I compared population density to TN Ready Success Rate and found a large positive association between the two (r=0.46). The ACT comparison was even stronger (r=0.52).

Correlation is not causation, and there are many variables to consider when looking at achievement rates.

In Part 2 we will look at how different systems rank in terms of size, finances, and achievement.

Changes in attitude: Customer service in schools

In my six years at Tennessee Online Public School, we never had one student who had to attend the school. Every student chose to go there, and we were responsible for not only making sure students were able to find us, but we also had to keep them there since they could always return back to the school who sends a bus by their house free of charge.

Just like every school, there is only a reason to have a school if you have students. And since no students were zoned to go there, we had to find our students online. We relied on Facebook, media attention, relationships with other schools, and word of mouth to get our students. Getting students was only half the battle; keeping them was also important.

Types of Students

Even though virtual learning is commonplace now since the COVID-19 pandemic began, it was not that common in 2012. Students who were looking for a virtual option in 2012 could be placed in one of four broad categories:

  1. Students who need time flexibility for other pursuits: these students were often athletes such as golfers, tennis players, motocross drivers, business owners, and even some hockey players. Because their prime practice time was during the day or other logistical reasons, they needed a virtual option for school to keep from missing out on a great opportunity available to them right now that wouldn’t be available later.

  2. Students who were incapable or had major difficulty attending traditional school: whether it’s something like a medical issue or specific psychological condition, these students were just unable to be successful in traditional school and were at-risk for failure. Choosing a virtual option was typically done rather than choosing to drop out.

  3. Students who just really liked technology: some students just loved technology and thought this was “a cool way to do school.” These students usually sought us out rather than their parents doing it.

  4. Anti-establishment families: these students came from families who were generally against traditional public education and were typically the type of students who had been homeschooled or who had attended parochial schools previously, and for whatever reason, they needed us to do the high school piece of their education.

Because of this, like any other school, we were dealing with different groups of people who have different expectations for the level of service they receive. The difference is that if you treat any of these people rudely, they can just go elsewhere. In a traditional school setting, they can also go elsewhere, but they are doing that from in the system rather than from outside of it like it was in a virtual setting.

Elements of Customer Service

Appearances

The enrollment process starts with your website or Facebook page or whatever the person first engages with. Does it look professional? Is the information on it easy to find? Is there a way to collect someone’s information who is interested in your school?

In our first year, we didn’t have anything very professional, but in our second year, we used a combination of Squarespace for our website and MailChimp for our inbound marketing tool. Both were lifesavers, and they integrated very well. We also went from having a paper application to an online application because it was more efficient, and it was more convenient for parents.

When you’re a virtual school, your website is essentially your school building. It’s how you present yourself to the world. At the Pal’s Business Institute, they talk about how much time they expect owner-operators (the manager of the Pal’s location) to put into the outside of their stores. They not only clean their parking lot, but they are expected to clean as much of the adjacent properties that they can. They had several stories of owner-operators convincing neighboring businesses to let them pay to landscape or pressure wash a business next door. This is all about perceptions; the better a building looks, the better customers will automatically feel about it.

Pal’s sells hamburgers, but what do schools do? If someone selling hamburgers is that worried about the appearance of their building, how concerned should schools be about theirs? We serve lunch. We provide medical care. We house many students who spend 6+ hours with us a day. We provide a child’s education. What confidence will students and parents have in us if our building looks like a dump? And if someone who is trying to sell a hamburger will put that much effort and energy into the cleanliness of a building, why won’t we? It’s easier for a virtual school who can just throw money, effort, and time into a website, but cleanliness and neatness is one of the few problems a principal will encounter that isn’t complex and difficult to solve.

Responsiveness

Even if you have the most informative website in the world, you’re going to get phone calls and emails, and you’re going to get questions. For us, this was a great opportunity to show people that we were responsive to them; we did what we said we’d do; and, we were kind and caring group of people in whom they could trust the education for their children. This means the following were important aspects of answering the phone or emails:

  1. Don’t act like you know something if you don’t know it. Find out. It’s ok to say I don’t know and call someone back or transfer. Do your best to help the person right then, but if you can’t, get them to someone who can.

  2. Don’t give people the run-around and send them to someone else if you can help them even if you’re not the right department. Helping the person is always your job, and there’s nothing that trumps that. So never say, “That isn’t my job,” because it is.

  3. Don’t speak with poor grammar. We are trying to build confidence in the education we provide.

  4. Be kind and upbeat (but not annoying).

  5. Let frustrated people vent before interrupting them.

These rules were mostly for anyone who answered the phone, and this was the first time I’ve ever written them down, but they were things that I would always remind the person who answered the phone. For the principal, the following rules would apply:

  1. Answer every email the day you get it even if it is to say you’ll get back to them later.

  2. Do not avoid someone who is trying to call you unless you’ve already attempted to solve their problem and you’re sending them to someone else. Often, just taking your whipping from someone is all you need to resolve the problem and move forward together.

  3. Do not let anyone disrespect your employees. They need to have the confidence that they can hang up on someone who is angry and that you have their back. If they think you’re going to hang them out to dry, then they’re not going to feel comfortable dealing with difficult people.

  4. Do not be afraid to escalate a problem to your superiors. If you have done the right thing, and you feel confident about it, tell someone with whom you’re having a conflict that you aren’t going to change their mind, and if they want to go to the next level, here is how to reach that person.

How often to principals monitor the communication in the front office? I know there are a million other things to do, but it’s something to check every now and then. Personally, because we were so different, I had to personally train the front-office secretary. I would sit with them basically their entire first week and let them listen to me answer calls. During a change in the year, (Spring enrollment, Fall enrollment, etc), I would repeat this again until the secretary was comfortable enough answering things the right way. This also provided me with an opportunity to lay out my expectations for how to talk to people on the phone.

What about teachers?

Teachers also need to be responsive, professional, helpful, and kind. Imagine if a teacher were responsible for a number of students wanting to transfer schools. What if that put the school in a terrible financial bind? It just hits a bit differently when someone’s bad behavior affects a school existentially rather than just having some annoyed parents call the principal to complain about the teacher. In an online environment, they have more flexibility to just leave.

No matter what kind of school you attend, parents do not like finding out at the end of the year or semester that their child is failing. Being proactive and communicating early and often can keep that from happening, but it can also establish an early intervention into poor habits or other issues that are causing the student to fail.

When it comes to help, teachers have to strike a balance between appropriate help and over helping. Teachers have to protect their time by not answering emails after hours. Teachers need to be intentional about the time they’re available. No parent can complain when a teacher says they will only be available during certain hours and then honor that. Sometimes you will have issues where a parent or student will point out that certain teachers answer emails outside of their announced availability, but that’s easy enough to handle as an administrator.

The other balance to strike is with the integrity of the rigor of the course. When I was a young teacher, this grizzled old veteran who was definitely not someone who gave good advice told me that if he had parent complaints, he would just give the student an A. He said that it made them shut up, and he generally tried to make sure that any students who had parents he knew to be problems made an A so he wouldn’t have to deal with them. Obviously, if you can guarantee an A in your class, then it’s probably not very rigorous. However, many teachers fall prey to parents who bully them into this type of behavior even if it isn’t as intentional as the teacher’s behavior above. You have to balance providing students opportunities to improve their learning (and grade) with protecting the integrity of your class.

Traditional Schools Must Adopt Good Customer Service

This is not to say that traditional schools don’t already provide good customer service. Many do, and I am very proud of the schools with which I work, but we aren’t perfect, and everyone has room to grow. In the near future, it is going to be absolutely crucial that they do. The world has changed, and in the wake of COVID-19, there will be many more options for students. Virtual schools that might have been seen as a fringe option before could be seen as a viable option now. Since most students have been thrust into virtual learning by mandate, many who didn’t think they would like it before may have fallen in love with it. Many who felt like it was a cheap substitute for traditional school might have discovered they learned more that way. Schools will be competing for these students.

Many of the more affluent districts will be able to create their own virtual schools, and they won’t have to worry about losing students to others, but most districts are not affluent. If nobody has to attend your school, how are you going to keep them there? The advantages that traditional schools have are things like proximity, tradition, history, sports, and familiarity. Eventually, virtual schools will start encroaching on that territory. That’s why it is important to start instituting customer service values right away. Make the decision to transfer very difficult for them.

Traditional schools need to start worrying about customer service now. Here are some basic guidelines:

  1. Keep your building and grounds spotless.

  2. Communicate early and often about any issues going on at your school.

  3. Have multiple communications platforms for disseminating information.

  4. All persons answering the phone need to be kind and polite to every caller and visitor.

  5. All emails received during business hours need to receive a reply that day (within reason).

  6. Teachers need to reach out weekly to the parents of any student who is struggling.

  7. A spirt of helpfulness from anyone who interacts with the public. “I am not sure, but let me see what I can find out.”

  8. Administrators need to protect those who answer the phone from mistreatment. "If anyone is extremely disrespectful to you, end the call and tell them they’ll need to contact an administrator. I won’t let you be mistreated.”

  9. Administrators need to reinforce their expectations for customer service regularly. Make sitting in on parent phone calls part of your evaluation. Put out surveys to stakeholders to gauge what the community thinks about the customer service at the school. Sit with secretaries and listen to their phone calls. Get a feel for what they need to know.

  10. Build capacity in employees to participate in the communication plan. Secretaries and teachers can often tell administrators what needs to communicated more clearly to parents and students. Build mechanisms where they can suggest these things regularly so that the school is addressing points of confusion quickly and clearly.

But what about…

  • Secretaries also serve as gatekeepers; they can’t make everybody happy. Customer service isn’t about giving away the store. Customer service is about helping people all one can and doing it with kindness. Every school should have written procedures for when and how parents can get an audience with the principal. If it is posted in the office, the secretary can be helpful by pointing it out and helping the parent schedule an appointment. If it is an emergency, they can call the administrator immediately.

  • People will lie and will say teachers or secretaries are being hateful when they aren’t. First of all, they already do this. Second of all, if an employee is known to always be nice and helpful, everyone will wonder what that parent did to get their ugly side (if they even believe they have an ugly side).

  • How does this help with teaching and learning? It is easier to communicate more often with parents and get parents involved if you do it from the beginning of the year. This will help with classroom management, holding students accountable, and parents giving you the benefit of the doubt in conflicts.

  • They don’t mean to be hateful; it’s just how they are. They’ve been doing this since the school was here. What am I supposed to do? Tell them the job has changed over the years. Everyone can be coached. Most people can listen to a 20 minute speech about this and know exactly how you want the job done. If it doesn’t stick, sit with them for an afternoon and model how you want the phone answered. It is a good investment of your time.

What a percentage raise means for most TN Teachers

If you read the headline here, it says Governor Lee is proposing a 4% raise for teachers. When you get down into the text, it actually quotes him more closely which says, “Tuesday, Governor Lee announced a proposal for a four percent recurring increase to the funding formula for all Tennessee teachers.” That’s the rub. This is a 4% increase to the funding formula, but that’s not going to be a 4% raise for teachers. But why? How does this funding formula work? I’m going to attempt to take you through the complexities of it so that you understand it, and that way, when you see “4% raise!” you’ll know it means something quite a bit different. Of course, someone writes something like this every time the state offers teachers a raise.

If you don’t want to read all of this, it’s as simple as this: every school system, by necessity, employs many more employees (especially teachers) than for whom the state provides funding. This dilutes the percentage of any raise employees would receive.

Basic Education Program

The TN Funding formula for public school is called the Basic Education Program, or more commonly its abbreviation, BEP. If you want to know more about its history, you can read that here. It has been around since 1992 after a lawsuit by 77 small school system who said that the previous funding formula was inequitable.

Average Daily Membership (Enrollment)

The BEP funds school systems based on ADM (Average Daily Membership). This is the number of students you have enrolled in a school system the previous year. The average is weighted using four of the nine Reporting Periods (20 day periods). The weights are as follows: Reporting Period 2 (12.5%), Reporting Period 3 (17.5%) Reporting Period 6 (35%) and Reporting Period 7 (35%) (pictured below). This weighting values the two reporting periods in the Spring Semester (January 30-February 27 and February 28-April 2) more than the two in the Fall.

weighted reporting periods.jpg

Every single school day, school districts send a report to EIS (Educational Information System). These are done through extracts from your local Student Information Systems (such as Aspen or PowerSchool or the like). These extracts include data about student enrollment, all the information about those students like demographic information, attendance, and even grades/credits. This is how the state determines your ADM. It’s the average of your enrollment in a 20 day period referred to earlier as a reporting period. Also note that all numbers are rounded to the ten-thousandths place.

Funding Areas

There are four areas that the state funds for schools:

  1. Instructional Salaries (State 70% share): If you look at the components in here, it includes teachers, administrators, and supervisors.

  2. Instructional Benefits (State 70% share): This is what the state funds to help with benefits for teachers.

  3. Classroom Funding (State 75% share): This includes nurses, assistants, textbooks, and other materials.

  4. Non-Classroom Funding (State 50% share): This is everything from the superintendent to secretaries to custodians and other building maintenance.

School systems are funded for the next school year based on their ADM for the previous school year. And that funding mechanism is broken down into four different categories that you can see here. Each category is broken down into several components.

For example, the state will send funding for one teacher for every 20 K-3rd grade students. That means if your school has 100 K-3rd grade students, the state will fund them for five teachers. For every 25 4th-6th grade students, your school system will be funded for one teacher. That means if your school has 100 4th-6th grade students, your school system will be funded for four teachers. If you read all the categories in the link above, you can see how that works. Also, note that the default is for the state to fund 70%, 70%, 75%, and 50% of the expenses with the county’s portion defaulting to 30%, 30%, 25%, and 50% (which is considered their maintenance of effort), but the state calculates every county’s ability to fund education and kicks in a higher percentage for many (more on that in a second).

(Note: for counties that have more than one system (Anderson County in whose borders also has the Clinton and Oak Ridge school systems, for example), they have to split the BEP allotments which is prorated based on their ADM. That’s a conversation for a different day, but it does explain why counties containing large metro areas decided to consolidate (Hamilton County, Shelby County, Knox County, and Davidson County); it’s a more efficient use of their funds).

State percentage versus local

The argument you often hear from school systems is that BEP inadequately funds schools, and the retort to that is typically, “The BEP isn’t a spending formula; it’s a funding formula.” In other words, spend it however you want it, but this is how we determine how much you’re getting. The state’s percentage for funding is determined by a fairly complex process. The starting percentage is 70%, and then two indices are used to rank every county in the state to determine their ability to fund schools. This is done using a combination of the TACIR and CBER models (see p. 92 and 93).

“Tennessee’s fiscal capacity model was developed at TACIR and adopted by the State Board of Education to fulfill the requirement of the Education Improvement Act to equalize state education funding through the Basic Education Program (BEP) formula. The model is used to help determine how much local governments have to contribute to the BEP for each school system. Fiscal capacity is the potential ability of local governments to fund education from their own taxable sources, relative to their cost of providing services. The formula estimates how much revenue per pupil each county area can afford to raise for education.”

The state of Tennessee will fund some counties’ education program over 70% and some less than 70% depending on the TACIR and CBER indices. Think of it this way: the state ranks every county with how much they can afford to pay, and the higher you’re ranked, the less the state pays. This allows poorer counties to be able to provide an equatable education to their students and pay competitive wages to their employees. There is also a cost-differential factor for systems where the cost of living is greater than the statewide average that can adjust the percentage the state will pay.

Computation

Once a system’s ADM, state’s percentage of payment is determined, and System BEP Instructional Salary, then you can compute the amount the district will receive the next year using the handbook for computation. This handbook has example sheets of how BEP is calculated (p. 87-91).

So what does this have to do with the raise?

So the Governor is not saying he is going to fund education in each school system to the extent that each teacher will receive a 4% raise. What he is saying is that the portion for salaries will be increased by 4% than it currently is. In my school system, the System BEP Instructional Salary multiplier was $49,296.00. This means this multiplier will now be $51,268.00. This is an increase of almost $2000 per teacher, but yet, it will fall short of the 4% increase per teacher. Plugging this into last year’s BEP How to for my district, this would have given us $617,084 more for the instructional salary component. This is approximately an $1646 annual increase per teacher or $164.60 per month increase. Of course, because of the way teacher salaries work, it would work out differently for educators with different education levels and different years of experience.

The problem, of course, is that all school systems employ more teachers than the BEP funds. For example, last year, my school system earned 339.92 teachers based on the ADM formula. Currently, we employee 375 teachers, and that’s with the highest teacher:student ratio we can tolerate. So just for my system, we have to make up millions of dollars to pay teachers over what we are funded; it’s more than that because of the different steps and years of experience. As you can see, a 4% raise would be 4% if we only employed 340 teachers, but those 35 (nearly 10%) teachers above the BEP reduce the percentage of the raise.

Many other school systems employee even more teachers above the BEP than we do. This will dilute their raise even more. I would rather see a solid, legislated plan to increase salaries over time rather than these bills passed that are shot from the hip, and in this case, the spoonful of sugar to make all of the other dumb stuff they’re passing taste better.

What other issues are there with the BEP?

Can you imagine running a large elementary school without an assistant principal? Can you imagine having only one nurse in a school system? It doesn’t take long reading down the list to discover how much funding doesn’t match with reality in today’s schools.

School systems are funded for one nurse per 3,000 students. Having 12 schools, my school-system employs many more than that even though our student population is 5,100 total. This is an unfunded need. If you’re wondering why we need nurses, every school has students who are on an Individualized Health Plan (IHP) and emergencies to deal with. Every year, but this year especially, our nurses have been instrumental in keeping our students safe. They bring a level of expertise that every school needs, and who would feel safe without a nurse in their school especially if there are multiple students with severe health problems, and nearly every school has that these days.

Counselors are funded at the following levels: 1 per 500 K-6th grade students and 1 per 350 7th-12th grade + vocational students. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 1:250. And in their standards, that the state of TN recently adopted as their own, they recommend spending 80% of a counselor’s time with students. How would you do that with 350 to 500 students in a meaningful way?

My system employs four elementary assistant principals, but we don’t receive funding for any of them. We employ four and a half high school assistant principals between two high schools, and we are only funded for 2.29 of them. Why doesn’t the state value assistant principals while simultaneously pushing having a leadership pipeline? What many systems have done to offset this cost is having jobs like “Assistant to the principal” or “Program assistant” which is way to have an elementary assistant while paying them teacher pay. Parts of that are great, but everyone who takes on the mantle of leadership is committing a lot of additional time and responsibility and stress no matter what you call them. The allocation is listed below. A school has to have 880 students before they are allocated for a full-time elementary assistant principal. That seems a little crazy to me.

Conclusion

The BEP is an interesting way to fund school systems, but it is antiquated because of its 1992 roots. The world has moved on since then, and it needs to be updated. TN Governors need to stop throwing out percentages for raises when they know it won’t end up being a 4% addition to a teacher’s paycheck.

My recommendation is to do a bill that has annual re-authorization that puts teacher raises in a five or ten year plan rather than giving these diluted raises whenever it is politically expedient to do so. In other words, it’s better governance to have a plan for this type of thing.

What I didn’t include

  • The Special Education funding is its own beast, and I didn’t bother to mention it because I felt like it would have been more confusing than enlightening.

  • Local funding levels are another thing. Some counties give millions more than their maintenance of effort and some give the minimum amount. I did an anecdotal study that showed that the amount of money that locals give correlates strongly with higher test scores, but I didn’t want to open that can of worms here.

  • A smart aleck response to commenters on local news sites who say things like “They’re keeping them schools open so they can have more money.” Hopefully, more information will make for a more knowledgeable group of stakeholders.

  • The impact of geography on county school systems. In city systems like Greeneville or Bristol or Kingsport, their coverage area for providing transportation is very small compared to a county. Consider Carter County where it is almost an hour from Happy Valley to Cloudland. Or Greene County where is nearly an hour from South Greene to North Greene. Consolidating schools is nearly impossible in these systems because of having to bus students for such a long time. Small municipals systems don’t have these challenges, yet they often take the funds from the county systems keeping them from being able to fix some of their issues through tuition students. I have worked for two small municipal systems, and I would have been firmly against consolidating with the county system mostly because of those specific situations. It can’t be generalized.

  • I left out things like funding School Resource Officers because it is different in different places.

Resources

BEP BlueBook

BEP Handbook for Computation

Education Law Center: BEP Primer

TACIR Report on BEP Funding

TN DOE - Education Information Systems

CBER Indices











Synchronous/Asynchronous Learning

I have dishonored myself. I used my résumé to support an argument. This is bad behavior, and I don’t condone it, but I do get frustrated when people who have done online learning since March give me the old “Well, actually…” when I’ve been doing it for years, and I have some hardware to back it up.

I don’t know everything, but I do know some things that are tried, true, and hard won. And more Importantly, I can tell you how it works in real life.

I have noticed that the state of Tennessee has been pushing synchronous learning hard. I get why they’re doing it: they think it feels more like school than asynchronous learning. They also know that it engenders more confidence from school boards, parents, and local leaders that kids are logging in and interacting with a teacher. They have the right of it from a political angle.

The problem is that synchronous learning isn’t the best way to learn online; synchronous learning is the best way to learn in person.

Here are some problems with synchronous learning:

  1. A lack of institutional control: it’s an easy way out for students. They can just act like they were there. They can act like they were listening. They can refuse to turn on the video. They can turn it on and alt-tab to something else. Are you still going to give them attendance credit? Yes. Are they going to learn anything? Only if they’re motivated.

  2. Synchronous learning lends itself to lecture: I’m not one of those people who believes that all lecture is evil, but I do believe lecture should be delivered in small doses, especially online. Zoom meetings wear me out as an adult; I can’t imagine what they’re like as a teenager. Imagine spending 6 hours every day in Zoom meetings. That’s what synchronous learning is.

  3. Synchronous learning robs the teacher of time they could be doing more productive things for their online students. The most important feature of online learning is the feedback/conversation/correction cycle between teacher and student. That is where the magic of learning happens, especially if the assignments are appropriately heuristic. If a teacher is Zooming six hours a day, she isn’t grading and giving feedback. And if she is giving feedback, it’s truncated and lower quality because there aren’t enough hours in a day. If you’re going to make the argument that starts “Well, what about classroom teachers?” I’m going to answer, “No kidding. You’re right. This is something we should think about.”

If you look at what are considered effective practices in teaching in the state of TN, among them are the following: differentiation/personalized learning, timely and detailed feedback, grouping students, problem solving, thinking, and questioning. And while no one expects a teacher to do all of those all the time every day, it is clear that a student-centered model where the teacher is the facilitator of learning rather than the sole source of knowledge is the model we should be using to maximize learning. As the Dothraki say, “It is known.”

This is why I don’t understand why the state of Tennessee is pushing people towards doing more synchronous content. If they’re serious about not having a learning loss, they need to be encouraging us to go against what feels politically expedient and what feels like school, and adopt a better model for online learning.

What about direct instruction?

I’ve covered this in other blog posts, but to provide effective direct-instruction, short, focused videos are preferable to long, rambling Zoom sessions with all of the interruptions that will inevitably happen. But what about questioning? You can use something like EdPuzzle or Canvas Studio to ask timely questions and to also hold the student accountable for watching the video. While it’s easy to get on a Zoom and do literally anything else in the world, it’s impossible to dodge the questions in these programs.

In a Zoom session, if it’s recorded you can go back and watch it, but a student will be digging through 45 to 90 minutes of video (depending on how you do it) to find the information they want to review. In a short, focused video, that information is easy to find especially if there is one video per concept. How many times have you looked up how to do something on YouTube and had to rewind it a few times to get it? This is something they can have online that they probably wouldn’t ever have in person (unless you told them to record you presenting a new concept which would be really smart). One could argue that furiously taking notes during a rushed lecture is the hallmark of good education, but they would be wrong.

What about students who are feeling lonely?

I’m glad we’re considering students’ social-emotional needs, but do we want to address that while simultaneously giving direct instruction? It seems like a bad time. Why not do that during a group project? Why not do that in a discussion? Or why not encourage kids to get on Xbox or whatever and socialize after school? If everyone is online, why does it have to be exactly like it is during school? “Oh this is when students see one another and interact with one another during in-person learning, so it must be exactly like that online.” That’s the kind of flawed thinking that I am trying to address in this blog post.

But, can’t you do some really engaging stuff on Zoom?

Sure, you can. And if you want to try it that way, that’s fine, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I would rather have students working on the work rather than sitting in a Zoom meeting with me even if I’m doing breakout rooms and stuff. I want to save my interactions with students for office hours or emails or one on one tutoring sessions. To me, it comes down to a choice between what I want students doing, and what I think students want to do.

Consider the shy guy

One of the magical moments you will have as an online teacher is when a student who never participate start blowing up your discussions. It’s always articulate and impressive, and you have no idea where it came from, and then you realize that when you take away the time clock and the peer pressure, you have leveled the playing field in your marketplace of ideas. In synchronous learning, discussions are typically dominated by the same types of people who would dominate them in an in-person learning environment. An asynchronous environment is ultimately more democratic, and it lends itself to participation from people who typically shy away from it.

Consider this other advantage

When I was the principal of an online school, the peak time for students to work was 10pm to 2am. One might argue that it’s unhealthy for kids to be up that late, but what was I supposed to do about it? And if you know teens, they’re going to be up that late doing something because their circadian rhythm changes. They’re more likely to get to their school work during these hours if it’s sitting there waiting for them. If they have to wake up at an unnatural hour to attend class, then they’re not going to get as much out of it. This will allow them to get natural sleep and still get their work finished. Again, one might argue, “Well, if that’s true, then why are we making kids go to school at like 7:40?” And my answer is “It has nothing to do with following science around teenagers and everything to do with following a traditional work schedule for factories.” If the learner needs help, then they can get it during the day during office hours, or just email a question to their teacher and get a response the next day.

Flexibility

I like learning blocked into a weekly module with daily targets rather than daily deadlines. It builds in flexibility for both the learner and the teacher. This fits into a teacher’s planning cycle better, too, with conceptual units and themes. It also changes the type of work a teacher can assign. Instead of having to rely on a strict time schedule, a teacher can give assignments that take a day or two to complete giving the student more time with the material. This is great for students who do not work as quickly as others. Instead of finding themselves rushed to complete something, they feel liberated without that pressure.

Wrap it up

In summation, there are plenty of reasons to embrace asynchronous learning that have to do with teaching and learning. While there are some good things about synchronous learning, most of them are political or for the sake of appearances, and that stuff doesn’t really matter as much to me.

Five Things I Wish I'd Known When Starting a Virtual High School

In 2012, I was the leader of a team of teachers who developed (before COVID) a successful online school, Tennessee Online Public School (TOPS). While we ended up creating a successful school that was a god-send for many of our students, we experienced growing pains like any other fledgling organization.

I’m the first to admit that I had no idea what I was doing when I was hired to design and lead TOPS. I had never been a principal of any kind before that. I realize now what great faith Gary Lilly had in me even to put me in that position. Honestly, I have no idea what he was thinking, but I’m happy it worked out. I had some strong beliefs about what schools should be, and I had a model to follow for building a school from scratch (even though my own personal distrust of dogmas kept me from following that model with complete fidelity).

Here are some things that I wish I had known before beginning:

  1. Choosing LMS is the single most important decision you will make. We started out using “Moodle” because it was free and because the district had been using Moodle for several years. Moodle, as anyone knows, is a nightmare for end-users and a dream for developers. It was mostly just a nightmare for us overall.

    We ended up adopting Canvas our second year, and it made all the difference.

    The LMS matters because design matters. Your teachers can’t design well in a poor LMS. The LMS matters because getting to the content matters. The adage we used at TOPS is “We want the content to be difficult; we want getting to it to be easy.”

  2. The more full-time teachers who are dedicated to online learning the better. Institutions don’t like throwing full-time teachers at online learning because it’s expensive. For example, at TOPS, our budget was about $500k. About $300k of that were the salaries of my three full-time teachers and my principal salary. By contrast, my adjunct budget was around $120k to teach the rest of our classes. And while that was very cost-effective, the full-time people were absolutely important to the culture of the school, to the fabric of the overall faculty, and to the overall operation of everything.

  3. Counseling is extremely important. I wish I had been able to convince the district that we needed a full-time school counselor. Many of our students were coming to us with mental health issues, and many were also coming with weird and tricky credit situations. It was way too much work to do for a part-time counselor. Fortunately for the school, through the charity of their free time, the school counselors who worked at TOPS did a great job (even if it did end up being the defense against the dark arts position).
    One thing the counselor could have done at TOPS that would have been beneficial to students is helping them build capacity to be successful online. There was some pressure from the district to 86 students who weren’t doing well because they were going to be a drag on the metrics: graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, and test data. And while this was justified if a student was trying to use the online school as a truancy shelter, there were many who just didn’t have the capacity to be successful because they wanted to learn how to be successful the hard way which is by failing miserably first (which is the way of the teenager).

  4. I wish I would have sold out more. I didn’t realize how important it was to “be the face” of the school. I did daily announcements (most days) and tried to be present on social media to answer questions. In one of our leadership team meetings, one of my teachers suggested I do some sort of dance (to be relatable to students). I have never liked that sort of “relatable” stuff (a bunch of white people rapping or doing weird handshakes or whatever) because it seems fake (because I took Catcher in the Rye way too seriously) and because I believe in authenticity (because I took Jean-Paul Sartre way too seriously).

    I could have done more to sell out to get my school’s name out there. I feel bad that I was just too whatever (shy?) to engineer some sort of tipping point. Honestly, TOPS enrollment should be over 500 at this point. Look at how many students are doing virtual learning during COVID. In just my small district, there are as many high school students doing virtual learning as there are enrolled in TOPS.

    I don’t know what I could have done, but what I did do was effective. I just could have done more of it, and I didn’t. Just like having a face and presence in an online class is important, it’s also important for the school to have that in the principal.

    As a result of that meeting, I did make this dancing video that one of my teachers set to music.

  5. I wish I had known that I was even more right than I knew about the battles I was fighting.

    There was just no way to know that I was right about teachers being able to work from home, and that working from home would help them be more empathetic to students working from home.

    I wish I had known that offering an asynchronous learning environment with small opportunities for synchronous interactions was an extremely effective model.

    I wish I had known how right I was that online instruction is not the same as putting face to face instruction online. I had to constantly fight the battle of “this doesn’t look like what we do in classrooms.”

These are just five small things, but they could have helped me tremendously. There are probably 15 other things I wish I had known, and if I wrote this again, I’d probably come up with a different list of five. I hope this helps someone out there trying to start an online school.

Let's hear it for online teachers

I’m not writing this to be mean to anyone. I’m just writing it to get these thoughts out of my system.

When I was principal of Tennessee Online Public School, most of the obstacles I encountered had nothing to do with delivering online instruction. The teachers took care of all that, and they were fantastic at it.

Most of the obstacles were with other people and their perceptions of what we were doing (Sartre was right, after all). Here are some comments that we often had to endure from other educators:

  • “I don’t think it’s fair that these online teachers get paid the same as classroom teachers.”

  • “It’s not a real school.”

  • “It’s not fair that their teachers get to work from home.”

  • “I’d love to teach there; you get to work in your pajamas.”

  • “Their students aren’t learning as much as the students in regular schools.”

  • “It’s not fair because they don’t have to deal with classroom behavior.”

  • “Must be nice to only work with gifted kids.”

  • “It’s easier than real school!”

All of these comments were made purely in ignorance and some sort of misplaced jealousy. And they certainly weren’t made by everyone, but each time someone said one in earshot of my teachers, it really hurt. I even got my own brand of shade from other principals, but that’s ok. I freely admitted that I enjoyed being able to avoid beans (food service), balls (sports), buses (transportation), and butts (discipline), but I filled that time with grander educational pursuits for my school.

I feel like finally a lot of the folks who made these comments are having to eat some crow. Many teachers are finding out that teaching online isn’t a pie job. It’s a very hard job that requires a lot of problem-solving and troubleshooting on a daily basis. It’s a job where a ton of work is front-loaded with design work and back-loaded with problem-solving and troubleshooting. While all of that is going on, you’re also grading, giving feedback, and helping students. In addition, you’re also working with behavioral issues such as students not turning in assignments and trying to come up with interventions or plans to help those students catch up.

What I want to say to these teachers who said these things now is imagine having to teach online like you’re doing now and count attendance, give EOCs, be held accountable for your students’ EOC scores, be held accountable for your students’ ACT scores, follow IEPs and 504 plans, and make sure everyone graduates prepared for life after high school. They did this working with a mostly at-risk student population who had, as a group, been disenfranchised by public education in one way or another.

It’s quite an accomplishment that the teachers at TOPS were able to do all of that and to be designated a reward school for three years in a row while facing all the obstacles online learning presents and while also being dragged by many of their colleagues.

So let’s hear it for online teachers - the real ones - the ones who did this on a trapeze with no COVID Closure net below. And if you are one of those teachers who made one of these ignorant comments about my online teachers, your apology is accepted.

Blended Learning - The role of the leader

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"This job would be great if it weren't for the parents." 

I've heard principals say that more than once, and there is some truth in it even though 95% of my experiences with parents as an administrator have been positive. When leading blended learning, your interactions with parents are going to be the key to success. 

Now at this point you might think of everything else you have to do to get blended learning going in your building: convincing teachers it's best for students; shifting classrooms from teacher centered to student centered. All of that is important, but how you handle parents will make or break it. 

Whenever you have a new innovation in the classroom people are always watching to see what happens. And typically, as long as it doesn't affect little Johnny's grades, parents are pretty quiet about it. With blended learning, it's going to require little Johnny to start doing some things he hasn't had to do before. And while I would expect little Johnny to enjoy his school experience more now that he has more say in his learning, not everyone is going to react the same to it. Some might even look at it is being extracurricular and thus something they don't have to do. 

Here's a scenario: Ms. Johnson has fully embraced blended learning in her U.S. History class. Ms. Johnson has started assigning discussions for homework to continue the rich discussions they're having in class. Little Johnny doesn't feel like it's fair that he has to do discussions after school so he just doesn't do them. He gets a 0 for the assignment. Little Johnny's mom calls to complain. How do you react? 

It's easy to say that you tell her that online work is now an expectation of Little Johnny and he has to do the work, and he gets a 0 because the class has moved on from the discussion and it's of little benefit for him to do it now. Or do you bend and tell Ms. Johnson not to require the discussions and just make them optional instead? 

The more you bend here the more likely your teachers are going to get turned off to blended learning. You must hold the line. It's not easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. 

Blended Learning - Mindset 1

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This summer I'm going to train two different groups (so far!) of principals on blended learning. I guess I'm qualified to do this since I've been leading an online high school for the past four years, and the biggest piece to blended learning that high schools don't have is the online part of it.

To prepare for this training, I have been reading a lot of internet articles, blogs, and blended by Michael Horn. I highly recommend it, and I might review it if I ever get time.

One of the biggest hurdles for principals to overcome when introducing blended learning in their schools is changing the mindset from a teacher-centered to a student-centered classroom. Some people call this teacher-lead versus student-centered instruction. Others call it learner-centered instruction instead of student-centered. It doesn't matter what the nomenclature is, it's still the same thing: it's the notion that the teacher doesn't hold all the knowledge in the classroom, and in its ideal form, the teacher is the lead learner.  This is the essence of Dr. Eric Glover's Leading, Teaching, Learning triad.

So what's the difference between teacher-lead instruction and student-centered instruction? The University of Connecticut has a great comparison of the paradigms here.

So how do principals get teachers to move towards student-centered learning? I'll reflect on that in part 2 of this series.

Inbound Marketing

Even though this site isn't designed to be Inbound Marketing for myself, it's something I've been thinking a lot about because of my job. I am the principal of public online school serving students all over the state of Tennessee, which is a fairly spread out state. I'm not from the largest metropolitan area, so any sort of news articles that are published about my school aren't going to reach Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville, or Memphis. I'm reluctant (refuse, actually) to spend public funds on outbound marketing (TV, print, etc), so inbound is the right thing for us to do.

I recently took a cool course on Inbound Marketing through HubSpot. I really liked what I learned. It has quite a bit about content generation, calls to action, emails, and SEO. Those are things that I just didn't know before. Ironically, I have a student at my school who is a master at this because he already makes money doing this sort of thing for his DIY business. I had him do some SEO for us, but this kid has enough going on with school and work, so I didn't want to take advantage of him further.

Something that has become abundantly clear to me through this process is that we needed to have a new website. I built the other one using Dreamweaver. I was very proud of it, but I noticed that my best amateur job was probably the worst professional job out there. Since nearly every Podcast I listen to is sponsored by Squarespace, I checked out what they offer, and I was really impressed with it. After buying it as a platform for my school, I decided to create my own personal site instead of playing Fallout 4 for a few days.

So, I guess this is part of a new world for me where I'm going to start creating content to drive traffic to our school website. I'm anxious to see where we are with this in a year.

First Post

Well you have to write something for your first post. I hope to keep a blog about everything I'm interested in here. Whether it's education, music, pop culture, literature, or anything else. I know you're not supposed to do that, but I guess we all do things we're not supposed to do.