Size Matters

 A couple of days ago, the ASCD Smart Brief reported on some research done into the differences in achievement between students in small schools as opposed to large schools.  I am not really going to engage in any discussion about the merits of this research or the validity of the results because there are so many other variables that make as much of a difference or perhaps even more. What I wish to focus on is the unintended consequences of small schools beyond the walls of the classrooms.  I am referring to the ability of a small school to offer more than strictly academic programs.  Of course, in a time gone by, one room school houses were more than adequate for much of the country and indeed they are still the norm in much of the underdeveloped or develping parts of the planet.  However, in the wealthier North American world, we are beginning to understand the need to teach to the whole student and that means  having programs in the arts, in physical education, and so forth.   It is indisputable that larger schools with more students can afford to offer a huge variety of programs before, after and during school that help the non-academic learner feel comfortable and accepted and perhaps even glorified in a way that he or she would not get in the classroom itself.  We live in a part of the world where we need to help every student be more well rounded and find something that he or she can feel successful at because we so often are dealing with students who are not coming to school with sound mental health dispositions in tact and therefore able to withstand not measuring up in all areas of school.  So being able to offer programs for them is of huge benefit overall, especially in enabling them to find satisfaction in one part of the program that they are motivated to try harder in other areas.  This means that size does matter and as I was thinking about this the last couple of days, I realized that it matters just as much in the Jewish community. WE have one member who is really anxious to see us get involved in the movement to resettle Syrian refugees which is part of the mandate of all to repair the world, Tikkun Olam as we say in Hebrew.  However, in order to get involved, there have to be people who can take on such tasks, and in a small community there is only so much that the leadership can do successfully and other things lay to the side.  The problem with that is these are the very same issues that motivate millennials to be involved in the the synagogue the same as the poorer academic students want to be involved and part of the school.  Size matters, both in schools and in synagogues, because they enable a sharing of the leadership responsibilities of the community and allows it to broaden its reach from a small tent to a large tent, to one that appeals and meets the needs of the few to one that will meet the needs of a much broader group of people.

The Quality of Teacher Education

 Now that the school year has begun, there is a lot of discussion about the quality of teacher education programs and the preparedness of newly certified professionals for the rigours of the classroom. One ASCD brief referred to panels meeting in Washington, DC and 16 separate plans being tabled for the enhancement of teacher education programs. An article in the Globe & Mail, on the other hand, referred to the new two-year program of teacher education being implemented in the Province of Ontario and how it is designed to better prepare teachers for the diverse classrooms of the 21st century. The one thing that no one wants to talk about is why can educational improvement be implemented in Canada so much faster than in the United States. There was a time when all the best in education came from south of our border.  Until the American people begin to see that decentralized educational governance does not lead to enhancements over large areas, the sooner change will come. It doesn't help that the constitutional arrangements of areas of responsibility between federal governments and provincial or state governments militates against change happening any time soon.  In Canada, Education is a responsibility of the provinces and so provinces have the right to centralize decision making and "take control".  Ontario had to play catch up because of the district school board structure but once that was rationalized and teacher federations were enabled to participate officially in their own change process, then the College of Teachers was born and now it is moving towards enhanced teacher education programs. In the United States, so much of the responsibility is decentralized still and the national ethic of states' rights and individual freedoms means that educational change cannot happen easily or speedily.  Too many states don't really see how things like Common Core and Teacher Accountability make education better for all.  Papers can be written, educators can speak out, legislators can suggest change, but until some one uses the power of the state in the service of change, nothing is going to happen.  Unfortunately, too often, we have to be forced to accept change or else.

Just In-Time Professional Learning

 We live in an age of great pressure on the concept of a university as a place of learning for four years.  The view of those four years as a waste of time and a costly endeavour began with the crisis of the economy and the plummeting of new jobs for the recent graduates.  Unfortunately, that situation has not changed. The job prospects of lots of university graduate still look pretty slim.  At the same time  that this has been coming to pass, the power of Web 2.0 communications and the two-way capability of computers, smart phones and tablets have meant a growth in online learning tools.  That leads directly to a confrontation between the cost of university and the ability of students to take courses that they need when they need them.  Recent work at Harvard University into the movement to enhance professional learning has lead to the suggestion that professional development be broken down for teachers into modules that they would only have to take as they needed them. This brings to mind the efforts by the Ontario College of Teachers to enhance the professsional learning of its teachers through a program of additional qualifications.  However, Harvard goes further to suggest that there is the possibility that students could earn university degrees in their entirety without ever having spent time on a campus.  The research clearly suggests that hybrid programs whereby face-to-face is combined with online learning is far superior to entirely online.  I would go one step further to point out that there would be something huge lost by enabling students to take only courses that aid and abett their professional goals.  I have observed time and time again how narrow the understanding of far too many teachers is about the world around them. I might be biased, but I believe that a broad general education is crucial to anyone wanting to be a teacher.  How can we help students appreciate good literature if they have never  been exposed to them themselves?  How can we enhance literacy if teachers have never been required to write high level essays and can't write themselves so can't help their students to develop their own writing skills?  How can we develop S. T. E. M. objectives with our students if we have not been forced to come to grips with these concepts on our own?  I couldn't agree more with the need for courses online for teachers or anyone else to enhance their skills and these should be for just-in-time learning. However, we must never allow an entirely online university program to take the place of the compulsory experience of learning with a group of like-minded inviduals, having to grapple with the bigger picture issues of our society and way of life, and having to share part of our journey to professional expertise with others and learning from each other. 

Mindfulness and Leadership

 At the end of the Tanach, or the Five Books of Moses, HaShem through Moses gives his parting advice to the Children of Israel as Moses ascends to Mount Nebo.  Moses reminds the children of Israel that freedom from Egypt has given then free will to chose for themselves the path of righteousness or immorality.  The children of Israel are told that they must pay attention to the choices they make because they are responsible to each other, not to HaShem, for their behaviour and their choices. Rabbinic Judaism embellished on this and taught how Yom Kippur provides us with an opportunity to amend our ways and atone for those sins we have committed to each other primarily.  We are told that treating each other properly is the essence of the 613 Mitzvot and essentially, as the Christ taught, do unto others as you would have them do on to  you. At the same time that I was reading over various commentaries on the week's Parsha, I also read some articles in Educational Leadership that referred to the concept of Mindfulness.  This concept advocates for the idea that we need to, as educators, be ever-mindful of the needs of our students and who they are as people.  In my mind, the mindfulness that we need to employ in the classroom is no different than the respect we need to give to others so that we can be respected back and it is the same as the mindfulness leaders must employ if they want others to follow them.  In each of these three situations, we must acknowledge and act on that acknowledgement, not just pay lip service, to the idea that each of us is a person in our own right and we have needs that are no different than those of the next person or student or follower.  It requires, as I often told my students, the disposition to others of empathy.  No one walks in our shoes but no one can walk in any one else's shoes and all we can do is try to understand what the other person is thinking or feeling or needing so that we show them the respect and the esteem that they deserve. Mindfulness is an approach to the world that more of us need to practice, day in and day out.

Dispositions and Emotional Intelligence

 

This month's Educational Leadership magazine has a series of articles on the need to be aware of the emotional state of the students in any classroom.  It profiles things like emotional intelligence, dispositions and so forth.  In looking over the titles of the articles it occurred to me that we need to think about these issues in relation to the programs of teacher education.  I know that the Ontario College of Teachers, in its new Enhanced Teacher Education Program, mandates that teachers in the province need to include in their programs things that help students feel good about themselves. New teachers are being taught about diversity, mental health, and so forth.  However, the question must be asked as to how we attend to this same issue with the teachers as THEY are being prepared to enter classrooms of their own. Teacher Educators make the assumption that candidates for certification are already at a place where they want their future students to be and that is a huge assumption.  As the chair of a department of Teacher Education, I had to deal with far too many students who finished the program eventually but had major issues of mental health and a paucity of positive dispositions to teach. We all can admit that we had teachers who were really not empathetic or student oriented.  When we talk about excellence in teacher education, we have to some how acknowledge that dispositions to teach have to be overtly talked about and taught and we have to figure out a way to either help students who are struggling emotionally so that they are then ready to take on students themselves or to counsel them out of the program.  If you think about talk therapy, or self-help groups, they are most often lead by people who understand or appreciate the flawed journeys of the people in their groups.  They understand because they have been there. Too often teachers are not emotionally ready to deal with a classroom full of students who have the same mental health issues that their teachers do. If we really aspire to excellence in teacher education, we have to include work on the dispositional component of education overtly, not just in passing. The future mental health of our students depend upon that. 

Enforced Seating Plan and Mental Health

 I have often found myself wondering how many new teachers actually spend time looking through educational magazines.  I am betting that, today, fewer and fewer of them actually seek out professional growth ideas that way. I am convinced that few seek out any kind of professional growth through reading and yet it is one of the primary ways I have helped myself on the path to professional growth and improvement.  You are probably wondering where this is leading since I have declared myself to be finished with the classroom and so finished reading anything from the perspective of professional growth.  Well, you would be wrong. I have already determined that if my blog is going to be of any benefit to anyone, I had best be including in it, things that will resonate with new teachers or with colleagues who would be interested in preparing classroom teachers.  To that end, I took the time to look over articles published in the magazine Educational Leadership which arrived in my mail box yesterday.  Usually, I see affirmations of things I already knew or assumed, but today, amazingly, I found something that threw me for a loop and I bet it will throw others for the same loop.  This month's journal is all about Emotionally healthy kids and mental health in the classroom.  One of the articles I looked over made reference to the idea that students ought not to be allowed to sit wherever they want because it will, too often, compound the problems many students will be having with identity and depression and peer pressure and so forth.  AS soon as I read it, of course, it made perfect sense.  But without thinking about it, most of us would want to allow children to choose where they sit as an expression of t their growing independence and decision making.  We would also allow it because we would want to empower them more in our classrooms. On both counts, of course depending upon the child, we could be dumping more on to the shoulders of some children.  As soon as they have a choice, some students will be left out of the classroom cliques or pushed down on the pecking order of the classroom groups.  As I am writing this, I remember standing in line waiting to be chosen for a team in phys ed when the teacher gave two students the right to choose and I would be left till last because I couldn't play.  Now I can see where the teacher can, very benignly facilitate group cohesiveness and sense of belonging with every child but making sure they are not allowed to be isolated or picked upon.  When you give kids those kinds of choices, some kids are going to feel the pressure of rejection and that hurts. Trust me. I know from numerous times.  If you are an empowering teacher, you will find other ways to allow students to make choices.  But seeing choices like where you sit or with whom through the eyes of the child who is struggling with mental issues, it is obvious that there is no choice.  How I child feels about himself or herself ought not to be made worse by something we do in the classroom without malice or intent.  I am so glad I had that confront me this morning.  You are never too old to learn.  You CAN teach an old dog new tricks.

Too Many Standardized Tests

Last week, The New York Times reported on the pronouncement by President Obama concerning the over use of testing by school districts around the U S.. It was announced that the decision what tests to use and how often had to be uncoupled from the No Child Left Behind legislation and federal funding procedures.  It went on to suggest that the decisions about testing ought to be left in the hands of the classroom teachers who know best how his or her students are learning and how to assess the quality of that learning. There have been subsequent reports on how this news was received by educators around the country.  A previous Secretary of Education reinforced the wisdom of that pronouncement and condemned the use of assessments over-all and reinforced the role of the classroom teacher. As I read the various reports and the editorials that accompanied them, I reflected on the fact that, time and time again, the single biggest complaint about associate teachers of pre-service teacher candidates is that they are totally unprepared to assess properly while they teach. That points out and highlights the weakness of all teachers concerning assessment strategies used in the classroom. In lesson plans I have read over and over my students atttempt to use the same pencil and paper tests that have been used since before I went to school.  How can we presume to leave something as important as the aggregate assessment of student growth in school districts to teachers who themselves know very little about how properly to assess students on a day to day basis. I agree with the suggestion that there is a limit to the number of standardized tests that ought to be administered to students but to suggest that classroom teachers ought to be doing this themselves without also calling for on-going professional learning for teachers about assessment and how to match assessment strategies to students and subjects does not make for any enhancements of student learning over-all.  AS I tell my students, we assess for growth and if we can't do the assessments right, then how can we tell whether the students are learning or not?

School Based Planning and Programming

It is more than a cliché to say that it takes a village to raise a child.  It is self-evident in today's world.  It is also a truism to acknowledge that in any family, a child is well served when both parents sing the same song from the same playbook.  We've all had times in our lives when we've had to get something from our parents and tried to play one off against the other.  I won't even talk about the dynamics in my own family when something required my mother and father to consider a course of action for one of their sons.  Suffice it to say that when more than one adult is required to guide a child, both adults had better be singing the same song.  If they are not, it leads to confuse for the child / adolescent and undermines the relationship between parent and child.  Roland Barth, a well known educator and researcher,  in his seminar work Improving Schools From Within, attempted to make the same points when it came to schools. He argued that school improvement had to begin from within, when all the members of a staff worked together and pulled together to improve the learning for all their students.  In another book he advocates for a learning community where the community becomes the locus of improvement for the school and all its learners.  Now, more than two decades later, that argument still has to be made anew.  In Leading for Differentiation: Growing Teachers Who Grow Kids, (ASCD, 2015) differentiated instruction expert Carol Ann Tomlinson and change leadership authority Michael Murphy lay out the reflective thinking and action-oriented steps necessary to launch a system of continuous professional learning, culture building, and program assessment that will allow differentiation to flourish in every classroom. One has to see this new offering in the same light as the earlier writings referred to above by Barth.  It is obvious and self-apparent that, in a school, everyone has to be working towards the same goal if a difference is to be made in the learning curves of students. When students go from grade to grade in any given school, if priorities differ from one teacher to the next, then there is disjointedness in the learning journeys of the students making it harder for deep learning to occur over time.  I used to have my teacher education students work through a simulation whereby they had to plan a day-long in-service for teachers to talk about literacy and how it was to be enhanced throughout the school. It was a school-based program of enhancement and they were required to think of all the stakeholders in the school as having a role to play, whether that be the principal, the classroom teacher, the caretaker or the secretary. In a school, everyone has to sing the same song.  If students go from one grade to the next and the expectations and priorities are very different in two classrooms, then students will be confused and not know how to decide what is important. WE have to make those decisions for them, at least in terms of the over-all priorities of the program.  Barth draws our attention to the fact that teachers need to talk amongst themselves and agree on what those priorities are to be. Without that ongoing dialogue, then there will be no heading in the same direction from grade to grade and students will either hit or miss their learning goals. Nothing can be more important than school-wide decision making.  This goes for program, curriculum, discipline, and leadership.

All Talk AND No Action

 

Yesterday, reading through the various press releases I browse, I came across this mention of an article in The Washington Post about a coalition of Teacher Education groups and others releasing a nine-point plan to help improve teacher quality.  Having been involved as I have been in teacher education stateside, so to speak, I have sat in on conference presentations and workshops where such change has been talked about for the past ten years or so.  I have written before about the fact that talk is all very good but why can't the American people agree on how to go about accomplishing this very badly needed change?  Nothing is going to happen until all new teachers have to be certified by a properly accredited body, regardless of the state they find themselves in.  The American people do not want to cede any power from the states to their federal government and so someone can go to almost any place where standards are not what they should be and then they have their certification.  In the same week that this plan was released, the State of Mississippi denied an increase in funding for education.  The people have decided that change can be put on the back burner there.  Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, is resigning and while the president is looking for his replacement, well regarded Republicans are arguing for a decentralization of power from the federal government in educational matters. It seems to me that you cannot have one without the other. The only reason why Ontario can now gloat about its rising teacher credentialing is because two decades ago, the provincial government invested the College of Teachers in Ontario with the power to make change and to force such changes and regulations on the teaching profession, all stakeholders.  So, if the American people want to see teaching credentials rise, they have to invest some organization or regulatory body with the power to enforce and make it impossible to earn a degree or a certificate to teach without reaching to a specific and high standard, all across the country, regardless of state. There is no other way to accomplish that in anything like the short order necessary for the U. S. to keep up globally with the rest of the world. There are many fine, fine teachers in the U. S. but there are still huge pockets where such excellence is no where to be found.  

The Family Business

 This afternoon, when I went to the pool for my daily swim, I ran across one of the kids who I had seen lifeguarding for the last two  years.  I had not seen him since the pool shut down in mid-August for its annual maintenance period.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say that he was into another degree and even more pleased when he said he was at Teacher's College here at Brock.  It turned out that he is on his way into another practice teaching block and will be in a classroom of a teacher I know very well.  Then, he also said his supervisor was someone who I also happened to remember from a long time ago.  When I told him what my background in Education was, he was flabbergasted.  He had no idea who I really was or what I did, which is not something I made known to him. When he told me that his parents were both teachers, I welcomed him to the "family business".  It has always been fun, as a teacher educator, to meet so many people who were attending our program because their family had more than a couple of teachers.  I found myself reflecting on the number of people who had their kids come with them before school began and had  the helping hang paper on bulletin boards and sharpen pencils and distribute books on desks in preparation for opening day.  I can hear students tell me that those experiences led them to think about teaching as a professional career choice. Then there were those who said that when they played with other kids, they inevitably played school and they were invariably the teacher.   There have been a lot of studies pondering what formative experiences led best to successful teachers.  I cannot say for sure what works well but one thing I have always thought about kids whose parents were teachers and administrators, they already know what the rhythm of their lives will be. They know also how two teachers successfully or unsuccessfully manage to share a career life together. I told my students that in any such coupling, one person has to be really good listener because there is not enough psychic energy left at the end of the day for two people to share all their frustrations. It just never works.

Re-Envisioning The Age-Centred Classroom

 U. S. News and World Report had an item this week that screamed out The Digital Revolution is Coming to the Classroom  in its headline.  It was reporting on research published by the Gates Foundation concluding that the use of digital tools in the classroom leads to enhanced learning.  The article goes on to suggest that this is especially true when the digital tools are used to enhance differentiated instruction. What amazes is that this is not something the academic world has not known for a long time.  Stephen Kerr and Larry Cuban both wrote before the beginning of the 21st Century that computer technology had to lead to re-envisioning how classrooms looked and how teachers taught. It is no surprise that now, two decades later, the Gates Foundation is finding proof of this.  What is being suggested by them in their work is that technology has to be paired up with differentiated instruction, which really means curriculum has to adjust to the student rather than the other way around.  So many of the ills of our educational system begin with the assumption that we must all enter school at a certain age and proceed, grade by grade through elementary and secondary school and on to university.  I personally was more than ready for school when I began because I was gifted and, together with a group of my age mates, went through three grades in two years. In those days it was called acceleration.  But even then, we were taught as a group even though now I can see that we were each so very different and because we were identified as a group, we bore the scars of being centered  out by our age mates and some of us didn't deal with that quite as easily as others.  Differentiated instruction assisted by technology ultimately could mean that students are not broken down in to grades but rather levels and allowed to advance at our own pace.  That really is what is being suggested by those articles and there is no reason why it can't work except that it means we need to then think about how we prepare teachers differently, how we organize schools differently, how school boards conduct their business differently. It is a huge sea change that must be confronted head on if the gift of digital technologies is to mean anything other than disruptions or add-ons.  Until we come to see that the one has to include the other, headlines will only be that with little or no change being the result. 

Being An Associate / Supervising Pre-Service Candidates

The cover of Educational Leadership this month immediately provoked a strong sense of deja vu.  The topic for the month is . o-teaching and hardly an article's title didn't find me agreeing wholeheartedly.  Do they work?  Yes. Do the educators experience professional growth? Absolutely.  Can all students benefit? You bet your bottom dollar they do.  How do I know all of this.  Almost forty years ago, my close friend and colleague found ourselves teaching in the open concept part of the school and teaching two adjoining grades.  I suggested to him that we put the library between us which was already there and we occupy two sides of the library and we group our two classes for Language Arts and for Mathematics and we theme teach our Social Studies  and Science.  As I think back on it, I realize that it was quite a new idea but it just seemed natural to us that we group our students.  The kids loved it and we wrote units to go along with what we were teaching and it was a fun year. We spent hours planning and sharing.  But then after one year, it stopped. My friend took a job in a different school and I was left without him beside me. As an experiment, I realize we ought to have committed to two years at least so that we learned how to maximize the opportunities.  We didn't realize at the time what we had stumbled upon, that's for sure.  So, if I have anything to add to what the articles in the magazine describe, it would be that you have to plan such a collaboration in such a way that you allow yourselves time to figure it all out and make it seem almost routine. That way you will be ensuring you as well as your students get the most out of the process.  

Co-Teaching Forty Years Ago

The cover of Educational Leadership this month immediately provoked a strong sense of deja vu.  The topic for the month is . o-teaching and hardly an article's title didn't find me agreeing wholeheartedly.  Do they work?  Yes. Do the educators experience professional growth? Absolutely.  Can all students benefit? You bet your bottom dollar they do.  How do I know all of this.  Almost forty years ago, my close friend and colleague found ourselves teaching in the open concept part of the school and teaching two adjoining grades.  I suggested to him that we put the library between us which was already there and we occupy two sides of the library and we group our two classes for Language Arts and for Mathematics and we theme teach our Social Studies  and Science.  As I think back on it, I realize that it was quite a new idea but it just seemed natural to us that we group our students.  The kids loved it and we wrote units to go along with what we were teaching and it was a fun year. We spent hours planning and sharing.  But then after one year, it stopped. My friend took a job in a different school and I was left without him beside me. As an experiment, I realize we ought to have committed to two years at least so that we learned how to maximize the opportunities.  We didn't realize at the time what we had stumbled upon, that's for sure.  So, if I have anything to add to what the articles in the magazine describe, it would be that you have to plan such a collaboration in such a way that you allow yourselves time to figure it all out and make it seem almost routine. That way you will be ensuring you as well as your students get the most out of the process.  

Nothing To Do But Relax

 I had a revelation this morning.  I was standing in front of the sink in the kitchen, washing the breakfast dishes, and thinking about the next few days of holiday down time.  Since we are Jewish, these days always meant anything BUT Christmas meals and decorations and shopping and so forth. But, since I was a teacher, it always meant a lot of marking and then, after the marking was done, there would be the time to come down and finally find a place of relaxation.  But this year, there is no marking to do since I am finally retired from the classroom.  It is hard to imagine...after all of these years.....just how much energy it took to do all that marking AFTER the semester ended. I often tell my students, who are learning to be teachers, that they must enjoy their Christmas holidays because, once they start to teach, when the holidays come, it is always such a  busy time that one seldom really gets a chance to unwind and really relax. Even those twelve long weeks in the summer time can come and go too quickly to really enjoy them. As teachers, we are often so busy when we are away from the classroom, school breaks are only really holidays and not vacations.  Now I understand that even more because, being retired, some times one day rolls into the next.  So......if you read this, learn to enjoy your time away from  your students and try, really try, to manage your time so that you are not so busy with school work during the holidays that you come back to school and are not refreshed.

A Missing Piece of the Puzzle

 I have been saving this month's Kappan magazine on my desk for a couple of weeks because I just didn't spend enough time looking at it when it first came in. This afternoon, I took the time to do that proper inspection and overview. This issue is all about Immigration and Education in America. Needless to say, this is a very important topic and, no doubt when the editors began to prepare their issue, they didn't realize quite how important that topic would be. I have several very strong responses to what was published and why.  First of all, The Kappan is no longer just an American magazine and yet the articles refer to a very American - Centric vision of immigration and education.  Secondly, the issue that is not talked about is how to actually reach children to help them learn when they have been buffetted so much and missed so much just to escape tragedy and war?  Last year, in an effort to help my students prepare for practice - teaching with a new social studies curriculum, I asked them to consider some of the problems that might arise in trying to help children who are immigrants themselves to acclimatize to a classroom. We in Canada are now accepting refugees and the goal is to get the children into schools and help them become part of the fabric of life in Canada.  That process is fraught with so many problems that have to be overcome so that learning can occur. We know that the language will be picked up but they might not be able to read and write properly. We won't know what their educational background is.  We won't know whether they have any real learning disabilities. All we will know is that they wil be haunted by the memories of their journeys to safety and freedom. It seems to me that an article about that would have been important to include in The Kappan but it wasn't.  It is all well and good to think about their journey to our shores, but we have to think about what learning will be like and how they will acclimatize to a North American classroom.  Huge problems there and new teachers and old need to be given advice in how to deal with them.  

Faking the Grade

I just finished watching a CBC DocZone program called Faking the Grade.  It was very unsettling to watch as a teacher who has dealt with issues of plagiarism and spent time teaching students about the questions of plagiarism and technology.  One of my last acts as chair of my department was to work with a student accused of plagiarism and the last section of this documentary really drove home the fine line we walk here with this issue.  This case did not involve a student of mine.  I was brought into it as chair, having to pass judgement on the case and move it forward. The student was accused of plagiarizing a series of slides in a PowerPoint without giving proper credit to where the information came from.  His instructor felt that was sufficient grounds to accuse him of plagiarism and without any consultation with me, the student was given a failed grade and had to take the course over, it being a compulsory credit, for graduation.  My issue was with the whole process of how the student was handled.  The original assignment was one I had devised and shared with another instructor. It was meant to pull together various elements into a simulation of an in-service and, as is often the case, there are very few ways to reinvent the wheel in this case and the task was not focused on scholarship as much as process and now to mobilize a school staff to overcome a perceived weakness in program.  When I do the assignment, I encourage students to see what others have done before them and assume that by considering the exemplars and thinking through the task, they would have a better idea of what to do in the future.  The learning was in the consideration and the re-framing of the ideas.  But this student was penalized for doing precisely what I allow my students to do, or allowed, rather, and in the end I had to help this student redo the whole course and he had to pay the full amount for the course all over again. He was very good about it...he knew he just needed to get on with it, but it bothered me that he had to take it over, that he had to pay, that he was penalized by an adjunct professor for something that I did not penalize my own students for. The bottom line is that plagiarism looks different in different courses and different environments.  As academics, we have to be careful not to call something plagiarism that really is nothing more than reconstituting something that is an exercise and nothing more.  It is the future of our students that is a stake.  I emphasized that for me the process of putting together an in-service for a staff was more important than the grabbing of ideas from the net for use in that in-service. In the classroom, there are all kinds of things that we do that make us look good that we get from magazines and books and even fellow teachers.  That is not faking the grade.

The Fine Line Between Political Correctness and Respect for Diversity

 The Republican debates this fall have sparked a debate about political correctness to such an extent that a search for images to reflect the idea of political correctness revealed a plethora of very upsetting quotes.  It would appear that there are many in the west who are not able to differentiate between the behaviour of someone who is politically correct and someone who is attempting to show a respect for diversity.  To complicate matters immensely, there are those who believe that to show respect for diversity has to mean to totally ignore the wishes of the majority. Since is is Christmas time, the question becomes much more complicated. Wherever you go, strangers will wish you a merry Christmas and, being the good Jewish boy that I am, I am not sure whether to just wish  them the same back or point out that I am Jewish and so I don't need to be wished a merry anything, but rather a chag sameach.  Obviously there is a lot of ignorance out there on the part of the vast majority as to what any of this is all about. It would be so much easier to continue to go on ignoring the misinformation and just pretend.  Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.  But here is where the schools come in.  Teachers and administrators are well situated to EDUCATE everyone on the traditions of others and to make it impossible to ignore the feelings of anyone.  When I went to school, no one thought to say that we needed to make decorations for Channukah as well as Christmas nor to teach anything about Channukah. Now, it is not only important to teach about Channukah but about all the other festivals. When I was the chair of the department of Ontario Programs at Niagara, I would always send a greeting to students for Eid as well as for the High Holidays.  I would try and ensure that students took their time for whatever holiday was important to them.  The cultural roots we bring with us to our daily lives is an anchor in an otherwise complex and confusing world.  It is our duty not to be politically correct which smacks of no feeling, but respectful and appreciative of diversity showing that the values we bring to our daily lives, the cultural practices that are observed, are important because they define who we are and where we came from. We can appreciate what it means to live together but we have to also appreciate what we bring to that life together.  It is amazing how our cultural differences can inform our learning as people and when blended together, provide us with a richness that is without compare. WE need to invest a respect for the other without seeing it as a loss of something we have.  But it takes a personal commitment to do that.  It requires us to be thinking of the other and wanting to make them feel important, the same way we feel important.  When I wish friends who are non-Jewish a Merry Christmas, I want them to care enough and respect me enough to say thank you and ask how my Channukah was.  That awareness of our diversity contributes to our collective mental health and our strength as a society.