Why I'm off the Data Bandwagon

I'm a math guy.  Numbers appeal to me, and I tend to see the world in mathematical terms.

It's a blessing and a curse.  There's lots of problems that I face in my professional and personal lives in which thinking mathematically allows me to see things from a point of view that makes analysis, problem solving, and innovation easier.  I naturally see the connections between the beauty of art, music, architecture, science, literature, and math.

But, very few other people I know yell at their kids when the windshield wipers are on in the car because trying to calculate the number of wipes per minute for no reason while the kids are talking normally can be incredibly distracting.  And, I learned a long time ago that discussing math at a party is more dangerous to one's social standing than discussing religion or politics.  Partygoers rarely care that my favorite number is Phi.  It's as if me going on about it forever makes them think I'm irrational or something.

Image Credit:  Wikipedia

So, you can see why I was naturally attracted to the obsession with data that we've had in education for the past decade and a half.  Playing with numbers was fun.  Plus, there had to be a way to organize and analyze standardized test data into something meaningful that was good for students.

For years I was a data fanboy.   I've left that bandwagon behind, though.

What I've come to realize is that all the analysis, organization, debate, and discussion of data is meaningless if you are looking at the wrong data for what you are trying to accomplish.  Police departments don't check to see how many library books were checked out each month to reduce speeding on Main Street.

Here are a few of the realizations I grew into over time:

• No matter what the standardized test data says, the best remedy for any shortcomings will always be better teaching and/or helping kids with rough home situations get their basic needs met.  Always.  As a teacher, there's a whole lot I can do about making myself a better teacher.  Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, there's often little I can do about the latter.
• Looking at individual student scores on standardized tests is pretty much worthless.  If I'm Johnny's teacher and I don't know his weaknesses long before the state assessments, I'm not doing my job effectively.  Daily, in-lesson informal formative assessments should be giving me that information on a regular basis for every students so that I can meet each one's needs.  If I do know Johnny's weaknesses and strengths before the state tests, the assessment data won't tell me anything I don't already know.
• If teachers in a district/school aren't regularly using the data from daily in-lesson informal formative assessments to make course corrections to their teaching and their students' learning, that's where a district should be focusing its resources - teachers should be discussing best practices, how to replicate amazing lessons, analysis of awful lessons, etc.  And they'll know what lessons are amazing and which ones bomb by whether or not kids learned as evidenced by the daily formative assessments they are giving.  Discussing test data until the cows come home isn't going to help those teachers learn better pedagogy. 
• Standardized test data is useful for seeing curriculum gaps, large trends, and other more global issues in a school or district and it does have a use.  With that being said, focusing on standardized test data usually comes at the expense of focusing on formative assessment and pedagogy.  And the latter are the whole ball game when it comes to student learning.
• Value Added Models used to measure student growth are junk science.  I've never had one person be able to explain to me in any kind of clear terms what the formula is for figuring out such models.  More importantly, anyone who's ever done a science experiment knows that your data isn't valid unless you can isolate a variable.  It is impossible to isolate a variable using these Value Added Models.  You can't isolate a teacher's effectiveness when you can't account for home situation, hunger, hormones, apathy, drug addiction, abuse, etc.  So, basing decisions based on this data is absurd.  Value added models are an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.   
• You value what you measure.  State tests do not and cannot measure the things our students most need to learn in school:  critical thinking, innovation, empathy, adaptability, and learning to love learning.  Focusing on standardized test data moves our values away from that which is most important for our students.

I guess I'm not truly off the data bandwagon.  I'm just off the test data bandwagon.  I still believe that data is incredibly valuable and should guide our decisions.  I just believe that the data we need to be looking at most is in-lesson formative assessment data that allows us to help each student grow in the best possible way.  Using that data to guide our decisions maximizes student learning.  

I know that fact is inconvenient for those still on the big data bandwagon.  You can't put every teacher's formative assessment data in a spreadsheet for all to see and discuss the way you can with state test scores.  And, trusting teachers to do their job seems like an unpopular position in today's educational climate.

Growth is hard, and change is messy.  If we really care about students learning more and being prepared for their futures, we'll start shifting our focus toward the data that really matters. 

Friday's Five - Assessment: Our Students Deserve Better

I've been thinking a lot about assessment lately.  Not "assessment" in the narrow term meaning the high-stakes tests to which we are forced to subject our students, but assessment in the more global sense: how we determine what our students know and change our teaching to make sure they are learning.  That's what assessment is for, isn't it?  Despite the nonsense that is being thrown around by non-educators about the need to test kids to identify bad schools, bad teachers, bad kids, bad administrators, etc., assessment is really about identifying how we can help kids learn more.  The rest is all political mumbo-jumbo that's hurting our kids because it takes the focus off where it should be - student learning.



There are a few reasons that assessment has been at the forefront of my mind lately.  The most obvious is that the last month of school has been a fragmented mess of teachers struggling to promote real learning in the wake of schedule changes, lost teaching time, and stressed students due to mandatory state "assessments."  I've also spent a lot of time reflecting on my own assessment practices as part of my PAEMST application (one of the more grueling and beneficial experiences I've done as a teacher), which is due on May 1st.  Finally, this is the time of year that we place students into their courses for the next year - a practice that has increasingly become dependent on "data" instead of teacher recommendation.

In order to use assessment properly, to increase student learning, here are five things we need to keep in mind:

1. Use the right tool for the right job.  Often we are told as teachers to "use assessment data to drive instruction."  The problem is that by "assessment data", those making this demand are talking about state assessments, benchmarks, or diagnostics.  You can't make day to day changes that benefit students based on this data.  Learning that one of my students scored low in the "geometry category" five months ago on a state assessment is worthless to me compared with the exit card that showed me that he/she didn't understand that area was a two-dimensional measurement.  The latter allows me to correct the misunderstanding immediately, thus leading to greater learning.
2. I've heard Chris Lehman say before that educational technology should be like oxygen - imperceptible, ubiquitous, and necessary.  The same can be said for assessment.  We need it and should be using it all the time as a way to guide our students, but if our students are stressed about how they are being graded, ranked, sorted, or judged, they aren't focused on learning.  And learning should be our goal. 
3. "Assessment" and "Grading" are not interchangeable terms.  Often they are used that way because we tend to want to make everything measureable.  Data doesn't have to be numbers to be useful.  Again, learning should be our focus, not ranking or judging students.  Tests and quizzes will, for better or worse, always likely have a place in schools.  What is more beneficial for students, though:  giving them a 30 on a quiz in which they got 7 out of 10 questions incorrect, or sitting down with that student to discuss their confusion and helping them identify ways to learn what they haven't yet?  "Grading" is something that is done for the benefit of teachers, parents, colleges, and others.  Good "assessment" is done for students. 
4. Standardized tests, benchmarks, and diagnostic tests are not bad assessments unless we use them in ways for which they were not designed.  When we start using data from a benchmark or diagnostic tests to determine a student's placement in basic or advanced math classes or data from student standardized test scores to judge teacher efficacy and school quality we fail our students.  Arguments that my car got great gas mileage because it goes from 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds or that my brother is a great basketball player because he has can punt a football 60 yards would be dismissed as absurd because those aren't valid metrics to use to judge such things.  Why aren't the conclusions we are erroneously drawing from bad metrics in education being dismissed as absurd?  I believe, as Joe Bower put it so well, we can't measure what's important, so we are putting importance on what we can measure.  It needs to stop for the sake of our children.  They deserve better.
5. We need to do a serious cost/benefit analysis of how we assess students.  The assessments that are given the most importance in schools right now are also the most costly in terms of time and money that have ever been given in schools before.  We spend billions of dollars as a country each year on the tests themselves, test prep materials, and resources to meet the logistics of administering the tests.  We spend weeks of time that could be spent on learning critical thinking and innovation demanding that kids learn test taking skills and low-level thinking facts so that they can pass the tests.  And what do we get?  Lousy data.  Data that is far, far inferior to the formative assessment data I could have collected in much less time and that could have been used immediately to teach students. 

Some will say, "but scores have gone up since we started testing kids, so there must be some benefit to all this testing."  While scores on state tests have gone up, this argument is totally false.  We, the public are being manipulated.  Politicians have made the tests easier over the years to show how wonderful they (the politicians) are at "improving education."  Anyone who has compared state tests from 7 or 8 years ago to current tests can see this easily.  Our students score almost exactly the same on international tests as they did before we implemented high-stakes testing.  We've spent trillions of dollars and countless hours of time that could have been spent on real learning for nothing.  Actually, it hasn't been for nothing.  We've spent it to make politicians look good and to help their buddies who own stock in companies that produce testing materials make a buck.  We could have gotten so much more for so much less.  Maybe it's time to let educators determine how to educate our kids. 

Friday's Five - Pre-service Teacher Education

Flickr/RLFilipkowski

So many of our teachers graduate from college and enter our schools woefully unprepared for the challenges and demands that come with the job.  I'm sure this is one of the reasons that 46% of teachers who enter the profession leave within 5 years. During this Tuesday's edchat on Twitter there was a discussion of how we could reform pre-service teacher education.   For the past few days I've been thinking quite a bit about my own undergraduate education, the discussions I've had with student-teachers with whom I've worked, and ways we could better prepare teachers before they are assigned their own classrooms.  Here are five ideas.

1. Show pre-service teachers the benefits of professional networking.  Most schools have some sort of mentoring system for new teachers.  It's fantastic to have someone to go for when you need support and answers to questions that arise.  Unless you have a lousy mentor.  Wouldn't it be better to give our new teachers a network of thousands of educators who are happy to share, encourage, support, and collaborate?  How to build and collaborate within a Professional Learning Network (PLN) should be explicitly taught and modeled early on and encouraged throughout the teacher training process so that its utilization is second nature when new teachers are hired.
2. Elementary education majors need more training in the understanding of math.  We do a great job of teaching kids ways to "do" math in elementary school, but we don't always do a great job of teaching kids to understand math.  Unfortunately, a lot of elementary teachers aren't comfortable with math.  It's not uncommon to hear the words "I could never pass the 5th (or 8th) grade math test" uttered in an elementary faculty room.  There is something very wrong with that.  Nobody would approve of a teacher who couldn't read on a 5th grade level teaching reading to our young students.  Conceptual understanding of math can't be taught at the elementary level unless teachers have a conceptual understanding of math. 
3. Technology needs modeled and used within the learning process.  If we expect new teachers to teach 21st century skills using 21st century tools we need to create learning environments within their pre-service programs that allow them to experience what learning this way looks and feels like.  Nobody learns how to teach from a textbook.  Replace them with Livebinders, wikis, and other collaborative on-line tools.  College classes should have backchannel discussions going on, which are saved for later reference.  Students from different areas of the country (and world) should be collaborating on projects using technology.  If our pre-service programs were technology rich and brought into the 21st century it would be much easier for our new teachers to build learning environments that promote 21st century skills.
4. Students should learn how to collect and use the data that matters to improve student learning.  This doesn't mean standardized testing data.  Standardized test scores come to us months after students take the tests and give little insight as to how to individualize instruction.  We need to train our new teachers in formative assessment techniques.  They need to know how to diagnose student learning within lessons and then use that data to guide their teaching.  Continually using formative assessment to identify what students have mastered a concept and using that information to find ways to help those who haven't has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to promote student achievement.  Teachers need to have this ability when they enter a classroom. 
5. Replace student teaching with a medical style paid multi-year internship.  The current student teaching model allows for two 6 week placements and less than much less than 10 weeks of actual teaching.  It is impossible to learn enough in that time to be prepared for a profession.  New teachers should spend a minimum of two years practicing and learning to teach under the supervision of a master teacher.  They should get constant feedback and support.  These years of learning would benefit our new teachers as well as our students.

Do you think that your pre-service program prepared you for teaching?  If so, what components of that program were most effective?  If not, what would you change about it?  What strengths and weaknesses do you see in teachers entering the profession today?  Please share with us in the comment section below and pass the post along to others on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, and Google+ so that we can hear many different opinions.  For an archive of past topics, check out the Friday's Five Page.

Open Letter to Legislators

The following is a letter that I recently sent to a state legislator.  I believe the sentiments are applicable to many locations and not just Pennsylvania, so I am publishing it as an open letter here.  Individual names have been eliminated from this version.

Dear Legislator,

Thank you for your e-mail keeping me updated on the status of the current legislation and your views.  I appreciate that you are looking at the legislation from many different points of view and that you have seen some of the ways vouchers will hurt the students in our district.

I would like to share the point of view of a classroom teacher with you, however.  I enjoy debating politics as much as anyone else, but I assure you the following sentiments are based on what I have come to understand as a teacher who is committed to inspiring my students to develop the attributes they will need to succeed in life.  These comments are not motivated by a desire to protect teaching jobs, or any other union agenda.  They are simply what I believe is best for students.

Any legislation using standardized test data in a punitive way will have a negative effect on students.  This includes legislation that allows students to use vouchers to transfer from "failing schools."  Even though there are no such schools in our district does not mean that students here will be immune from the detriments of such a law.  Administrators, teachers, and students will still face pressure to "pass" tests that do not focus on 21st century skills our students need.  Those skills will continue to be ignored, and our students will continue to graduate unprepared for the world into which we are sending them.

In the past decade we've seen a great change in the world.  As the internet has evolved, computers have become ubiquitous, and portable devices have become more prevalent, information has become easy to obtain instantaneously.  Preparing students for this world in the same way we prepared them before it is negligent and harmful.

I have also seen a change in my students.  They are increasingly unable to think critically.  They are less creative.  They are less comfortable working with others to complete tasks.  I believe the majority of teachers would agree with these observations.

For those of us working directly with students, it's easy to see the correlation between the above statements and the increased focus on standardized test scores.  I am not writing this because I am forced to teach to the test.  I am not.  I choose not to.  I choose to teach my students to learn 21st century skills like collaboration, innovation, critical thinking, and digital communication.  Most teachers are not as fortunate as I am.  They either lack the support of administration or lack the confidence to take a leap of faith.  In either case, good teaching is prevented by fear of a test that provides data which cannot be used to guide the teaching of students until months after the test is taken.

I am a huge proponent of data-driven assessment.  The assessments and data must be much more immediate than that which we get from standardized tests to have any impact on student learning.  Data must be collected within lessons and days.  There is much research to support this.

Just because data is easy to collect and organize does not make it the best data to use.  Standardized tests were put in to place to benefit many people.  Students were not among them.  Anyone who believes otherwise has either not spent enough time working with students or has a political agenda.  It is time we focused on what's best for students in education.  Any reform that doesn't is destined for failure.

Thank you for your attention and for your consideration of the above ideas.

Best Regards,
Michael A. Soskil
5th Grade Teacher

Friday's Five: Ways to Use Formative Assessment

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you, my readers, to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five page.  If you'd like to make suggestions about future topics or discuss topics I bring up on the blog with other readers, make sure you click the "like" button on the right hand side of this page to join A Teacher's Life for Me on Facebook.  Don't be shy about sharing the blog and Facebook page with others.  Each post has buttons on the bottom that allow you to share several ways, including e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.


We've all had students that try blend into the background.  They are the students who never raise their hand, sit there silently when you call on them until you choose someone else, and go through the school year determined to participate as little as possible.

We've also all been in the situation where several of our students have failed a test when we thought they knew the content.  Even though we recognize that they haven't learned what they were supposed to, we often feel we have to move on because of the amount of material that needs to be taught in a school year.

Is there an easy way that we can make sure all of our students, even the ones who try not to participate, are learning?  Is there an easy way to determine whether our students really know content before testing them?

The answer to both of those questions is a unequivocal "YES!"  There are several types of formative assessment - long term (like semester or end-of-year), medium term (end-of-unit, etc), and immediate (in-lesson).  It's the daily, in-lesson, formative assessment that is most important to increase learning for all of your students.  It also allows you to diagnose where you need to change your instruction so that your students learn what they are supposed to before they are tested.

Formative assessment is a way to diagnose the patient, instead of waiting for the autopsy.

Here are five simple ways to start using formative assessment to ensure all of your students are learning:

1. Get a set of individual white boards and have your students use them.  Have your students constantly show you that they understand what you are teaching them by showing you on their white board.  A quick glance around the room will tell you who understands and who doesn't.  Make sure the students that need more help get it.  
2. Stop having your students raise their hand to answer a question.  When that happens, you only get an answer from one student.  Instead, have every student write the answer to the question in their notebook or on an individual white board.  Maybe have them share their answer with a partner, and let the partner write it down, or have each student record an answer in a VoiceThread or Blabber.  It doesn't matter how they answer, just make sure that every student is responsible for giving an answer and justifying it.
3. Use exit cards.  At the end of a lesson, pose one short question to the class that deals with the day's lesson.  Have them answer the question on an index card and hand it to you before they leave.  Take a quick look at the cards.  If all the students knew the material move on to something else the next day.  If many couldn't answer the question correctly, start the next day's lesson with a review.  If some of the students need more help, build in an intervention into the next day's lesson.
4. Demand that students tell you when they don't understand.  I've found that colored cups work well for this.  I stack a green, yellow, and red cup on each student's desk.  If they understand what I am teaching, they show a green cup.  If the cup is yellow, they need me to slow down.  If the cup is red, I need to stop and re-teach something.  How do I make sure that they are telling me the truth? If someone has a red cup, I choose someone with a green cup to do the re-teaching. 
5. Let them give you a "thumbs-up."  During your lesson, ask a few yes-or-no questions of the class. Have them respond with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  You'll be able to quickly assess which students are not understanding your lesson.  

Lately we've heard a lot about "Data Driven Instruction."  Too often it means sifting through standardized test data.  The data we need to be using to drive our instruction is the data we get from formative assessment techniques like the ones listed above.  That data is easy to understand quickly and allows us to make changes immediately to ensure that our students learn.  Dylan Wiliam had a great way of putting it when I saw him speak.  His quote went something like this:  "Teachers who do not use formative assessment and then wonder why their students failed a test are like pilots that never make course corrections and then wonder why they ended up in Cleveland instead of Miami."

Now it's your turn to share.  Do you use formative assessment in your classroom?  How?  Do you have other techniques or ideas to share?  Leave your thoughts on these questions, or anything else you want to add in the comment section below.

What I Hope My Students Learned

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Today is the first day of June.  The school year is winding down, and in a week or two the state assessment scores will come back.  We'll look at the data and determine which students learned math, which were proficient in reading, and which students are good at "being students."

To tell you the truth, though, I really don't care all that much.  To start with, I'm pretty confident that my students learned the content they were supposed to this year.  I don't need a standardized test to tell me that.  The formative assessments that I build into my lessons give me that data all year long.  There's a bigger reason that I'm a bit apathetic about the results, though.

The most important things I want my students to have learned this year weren't on those tests.  These things can't be measured by filling in bubbles with a #2 pencil.

I hope my students learned that learning isn't something that happens only in school, but is something that can and should happen all the time.  I hope they learned the habit of learning.

I hope my students learned that being right isn't as important as being able to think.  Our history books are full of individuals who failed many times and still rose to greatness.

I hope that my students learned to question the validity and bias of all information that is being sold to them, even if a teacher is the one selling it.  I hope they continue to ask "why?"

I hope that my students learned to seek their passion when choosing a career path.  5th grade is not too early to start thinking about your future, and doing what you love and what is rewarding to you is worth more than all the money in the world. 

Most of all, I hope that my students learned that the score that comes back on that state test, whether high or low, doesn't define them any more than their height or eye color.  It's what they do with their given talents that will be their legacy.

Accountability and Teacher Evaluation

Like other parts of the country, New York City is having problems with obesity.  According to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, childhood obesity is an epidemic, and 1 in 5 New York City kindergarten students are obese.
 

Photo: Flickr, Citizenactionny


Because of this, New York City is seriously looking at the lack of performance by city doctors, and demanding accountability.  A new test is being developed that will be taken by patients that will measure doctor effectiveness, and allow the city to get rid of the worst performing doctors.  These tests are meant to both evaluate doctors and create a system of accountability which will force doctors to do their jobs better. 

Every year patients will be given a Body Mass Index (BMI) test to determine how healthy they are.  At the end of the year, patients will be given the same test to see if their doctor has been effective in making them healthier.  Doctors who do well on the evaluations will be given bonus checks.  Doctors who have patients who score poorly on the evaluation for two years in a row will be banned from practicing in New York City, since they have proven to be ineffective.

If you haven't noticed by now, the above two paragraphs are total fabrication.  The very premise that we would evaluate doctors based on such tests is absurd.  To start with, the tests would define "health" in a ridiculously narrow way (only using BMI).  There are many factors that are out of the doctors' control when it comes to their patients' progress in staying healthy.  It would force the best doctors to ignore the patients who need them the most, since bad evaluations would mean less money and less job security.  Many doctors would choose to practice somewhere outside the city.  In all ways, this would be a terrible idea, and lead to a worse health care system for the city. 

Photo: Comstock/Thinkstock

Yet, this is exactly what New York City is proposing to do to evaluate teachers. 

If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher, evaluate their teaching.  I've heard the arguments against this:  it's too costly, administrators don't do a very good job at evaluating teachers, there's no way to hold teachers accountable if we don't in some way quantify their effectiveness with a number.  These are all hollow arguments.

If you want to get data cheaply, you get cheap data.  We should be using the best data to drive our instruction, not the cheapest and/or easiest to obtain. 

If administrators are doing a lousy job of identifying teachers who are using best practices, that's a good reason to put pressure on administrators to do a better job of evaluating teaching.  It's not a good reason to take away more learning time for our students to take tests and prepare for them. 

Some jobs do not relate well to the business world, and can't be quantified easily.  You can't judge the effectiveness of police officers by the number of arrests they make.  You've got to look at how well they deal with situations they face.  You can't judge the effectiveness of firefighters by how many fires they put out.  You've got to look at how well they fight the fires with which they are faced.  You can't judge teachers by how well their students do on standardized tests.  You've got to look at how well they teach the students that they are given.  Those students come with a variety of home situations, emotional issues, economic issues, and a plethora of other baggage that may affect how they score on tests.

The most important things we do in school can't be measured on a test.  Show me someone who disagrees, and I'll show you someone who doesn't know what's important.

Friday's Five: People Who Have Influenced Me

There have been many individuals that have had a great impact on my development as a teacher.  I can think of many colleagues, administrators, conference speakers, and educational leaders who have helped me to shape my personal philosophies, pedagogy, and practices.  Since our growth as professionals is something that never ends, I wanted to take some space on this week's Friday's Five to share some of the people that I have found inspirational.  I hope that you will take a moment to share some who have impacted you either in the comment section, or on the blog's Facebook page.

For those who missed last week's Friday's Five, every week I'll be picking a topic dealing with education and listing 5 things that I think fit that topic.  Last week's topic was web 2.0 tools.  If you've got suggestions for future topics, please share them with me on Plurk, Twitter, or Facebook.  After I give you my list, I'd like you to participate by sharing your ideas on the week's topic in the comment section.

As I said before, there have been many who have made an impact on me in my career.  Below are five, in no particular order.

1.  Dylan Wiliam - A few years ago I spent a week in Hershey, PA at the Governor's Institute for Data Driven Instruction.  One of the keynote speakers was Dylan Wiliam.  To say that his presentation influenced me would be a great understatement.  He convinced me of the need to change my lessons to include in-lesson formative assessment, and showed me ways how it could be done.  He introduced me to the concept of professional learning communities, and showed why they are so important.  He helped me to solidify my belief that the pedagogy we use in our classrooms is more important than any other factor in boosting student learning, and that putting focus on other areas just distracts us from what's important.

2.  Sir Ken Robinson - If tomorrow I was asked to choose the new United States Secretary of Education, SKR would be my choice.  I saw him deliver a keynote last year at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo & Conference (PETE & C).  I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of listening to anyone else that understands the shortfalls of what we're doing in education and the direction we need to be headed in more that him.  Some of you may have seen the clip of a SKR talk that's been floating around the internet from RSA Animate.  If so, it's worth watching again.  If not, I promise it's worth watching.

If you want more SKR, watch his TED talk on how school kills creativity, or consider reading his book, The Element:  How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

3.  Patti Duncan - Before attending a session she was giving at PETE & C in 2009, Patti and I had worked in the same district but only communicated via e-mail.  I wanted to meet her face-to-face and introduce myself, so I decided to drop in on her presentation on "Building a Professional Learning Network (PLN)."  It is probably the most important hour of my teaching career to this point.  Dylan Wiliam convinced me that collaborating w/ other teachers was important.  Patti showed me how to expand that collaboration globally through social networking.  Since that point, my PLN has become invaluable - a source of new ideas, inspiration, support, discussion of educational topics, and a place to get feedback on activities I try in my classroom.  Having a PLN of hundreds of teachers all over the globe has made me grow as a teacher in ways of which I never could have dreamed.  You can read Patti's DEN Blog here.

4.  Steve Leinwand - When my district was exploring ways to improve high school math achievement a few years ago, they brought Steve Leinwand in for a few hours in the summer to talk to the high school teachers about ways to change pedagogical practices in their classes.  I don't remember how I ended up in that session (since I teach 5th grade), but I'm sure glad that I did.  This is where I discovered the power of asking "why?" Steve's talk started me on the path toward demanding understanding from my students, and not just the correct answer.

5.  Dan Meyer - I came across Dan Meyer's blog about a year and a half ago when a member of my PLN shared one of his posts on Plurk.  His views on teaching math are visionary.  Many of the activities I have done with my math classes in the past year have been inspired by his posts.  To get an idea of his vision for how to change our math classes, take a look at his TED talk: Math Class Needs a Makeover.




Now it's your turn to share.  Who is someone that had an impact on your growth as a professional?  Let us know by leaving a comment.

Don't forget to re-Tweet, re-Plurk, or share this post on Facebook.  Like many of you, I love being exposed to new ideas and people who can help me grow.  The more people we can get contributing, the more amazing educators we can find to help us on our journey.