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Every time I test, I'm reminded that multiple means of expression are important when assessing students. Finding ways to get kids to tell you what they know is critical.

I have a student who is inconsistent - at best - with turning things in. If I see someething turned in, that's a good day. Their tests and quizzes haven't been great, but at least I'm seeing work becuase it's a more controlled situation.

That student came and asked how they can improve their grade. I asked if they wanted to talk over the material, stretching back to standards from the beginning of the year that I hadn't seen any evidence of understanding on.

This student could tell me everything - and I mean everything - that'd we'd done so far. In detail. They talked about phases of matter. They talked about energy levels in particles. They talked about atomic structure, forming isotopes, and how the periodic table is essentially a super tool for all things chemistry.

I was floored. I was also humbled. I had fallen back into the mindset of the written piece serving as a source of truth for evidence of learning without making space for other options. Now, this student recognizes the importance of turning things in, and we're going to work on that. But their over all grade should not reflect what's essentially an organizational skill.

The point of a grade is to represent what a student knows and can do. I need to remember to make space for those non-traditional methods of demonstration.

I got a suggestion to write about how I stay organized during the teaching day and I thought that was a great idea. My organizational strategies have changed over time mainly depending on my work and the types of projects I needed to do. Now that I'm back to teaching, my systems are changing again.

Pen and paper

I used to rely on a lot of tech becuase I was on my computer for a large part of the day. Now, I'm back to hand-written notes for just about everything. All of my immediate todos get put on sticky notes right next to my mouse so when I do sit down, I can take care of that correspondence or finishing grading that paper.

I used to keep a pretty significant bullet journal, but since I'm not managing a team or attending meetings during the week, it has lost its utility for me. I don't need to keep track of several moving pieces across departments or follow up on specific project to do's any more. My black grid notebook has been neglected, but it's there, ready for some love when I figure out how it'll play into my organizational strategies.

There isn't quite enough room in it for lesson planning, which is why I switched back over to a legal pad. I have a yellow legal pad with each page broken down into two columns (two classes) and five rows (five days each week). I can jot down the main points for the day and make notes in the margins for what papers need to be printed and copied on what days to be ready. It's easy to flip back and forth and make sure my progressions make sense and I can adjust easily enough if I need to speed up or slow down based on assessments.

Drive

We're a Google school, so all of my documents live in Google Drive. We have a shared department drive with resouces for each science course and we regularly collaborate and clean those up. Instead of editing those for my classes, I typically make copies into my own folders and then add things like scoring guides, references to the learning standards, or just make the margins more narrow. The content stays the same but my formatting preferences keep things consistent for my classes.

Email

I'm fortunate to be in a school where there isn't too much email flying around. On a heavy day I might get five emails in my school inbox. Many days it is just one or two. Nonetheless, I've set up some email filters to catch certain kinds of messages, like sharing notices from Google Drive, student emails via Google Classroom, or notes from our interventionist on students they're working with and other student documentation tasks they may need help with. Those filters put the messages unread into labels so a quick glance tells me if I need to reply or if I'm caught up on those other kinds of responsibilities.

Getting organized for teaching was one of the harder transitions to make from my old work, but I'm getting back into the flow. Scheduling at least a week ahead helps me to know where I'm going and allows me to focus planning and after school time to student feedback to drive learning.

Sometimes, you just need to make a point in class. A small comment or sidebar conversation is a way to do that verbally, but other times, it's more helpful to be subtle.

I'm battling a ton of phone use in two of my classes. Boys are on a game, girls are usually on Snapchat. This means their attention isn't focused on productive thinking routines and my attention is pushed toward management rather than teaching. That's a bad classroom mix and not a good way to promote learning. Students are convinced they can do more than one thing at a time but all the research points to context switching being a bad thing for learning.

Instead of lecturing students on phone use - again - I decided to take a more subtle approach. That started with making a really stupid app.

See the Pen Counter by Brian (@bbennett) on CodePen.

It's an incremental counter and a timer. If the counter is on zero, the timer will count how many seconds it stays at zero. If it's incremented at all, the timer resets to zero.

While they were working on day, I slid this in a small window up on to the projector and counted up the phones I saw being used for anything other than school (there are some legit uses). I stayed at the front, just scanning the room, and updating the total as phones came out and went away. Slowly, some whispers started about what I was doing. Some observant individuals put the puzzle together and word quickly spread to put phones away.

Once they were all away, the timer started counting and then game was afoot. Some table groups were convinced they could "beat" the game (not sure how...) and came up with some social rules like:

• All phones face down, last one to receive a notification wins
• No touching at pain of an ear flick
• Phones go away because Mr. Bennett shouldn't have to custom code a counter to make a point.

This was definitely a gimmick, but I think it was helpful that they saw, at one point, a full half of the class was distracted and off task. I did remind them that my energy is better spent teaching and not on counting phones. I think they got the point? I'm not sure.

I'm implementing voluntary phone jail this week as a way to have students self-regulate. The phone can either go into a shoe organizer hanging in a safe space so they can see it, but cannot access it. The other option is a brown paper lunch bag stapled shut on their desk so it's nearby but inaccessible. If the voluntary approach doesn't work, some will be compelled to surrender their device to help them actually learn some self restraint and maybe even some chemistry.

There will be an update in the near future. If you'd like to use the dumb phone counter, you're more than welcome to give it a shot. Send me an email and I can add your comments to the post with your experience.

This has been a whirlwind couple of weeks and I can't really find enough coherent thought for a single-topic blog post. I thought I had written a couple of ideas down, but my notebook is pretty much a list of papers that need to be copied and doodles of birds. Not much help for the blog.

So, in an effort to clear my mind of some clutter, I present a colleciton of teaching thoughts in no particular order:

1. I don't give enough quizzes. Given that I focus on performing skills, frequent formal assessment needs to be a bigger part of my repertoire. That will also help students see the point in standards-based grading and that quizzes, when given frequently enough, are a great way to track learning progress.
2. The quiz they took this week on using the periodic table to find electron configurations went pretty well. I was able to single some people out today for follow-up instruction that also went well, so skippy for me.
3. Cell phones are a major distraction. Especially since Retro Bowl College was released.
4. At least they're thinking about college. Kind of.
5. I would like to find more day to day connections for chemistry. A student challenged me to name a time when he would use reactivity in his career plan (HVAC). I was able to zing him back with, "Why does HVAC use galvanized metal?" which is the exact reason why he needs to learn about reactivity.
6. There are only so many ways to ask questions about valence electrons and I'm getting bored finding them all. I need to students to write and deliver their own quizzes to peers or something.

I think that's it for this evening. Like I said, it's been a little bit of a whirlwind couple of weeks. One of my problems with writing more frequently is that I'm locked into writing on one computer in the evenings right now. This blog is all static pages, so I need to move it to a server build rather than a local build. I just need to take time to do that.

Until next time...be well.

My friend Phil has taught me a lot about intentional teaching. He would frequently remind me that curriculum is much more than the content - it is the skills, knowledge, and dispositions we want students to have as a result of taking our classes. The content is a component - skills and knowledge are part of the curriculum - but we also want students to develop dispositions which will help them be successful after high school.

I'm not naive - I know the vast majority of my students won't be chemists and I'm fine with that truth. What I really want my students to have when they leave is a greater appreciation for science as a process and a little bit of science literacy. This is the hard part of teaching.

Teaching content is easy. I can stand up front and talk or play a video and ask students some basic knowledge questions. Teaching skills is a little more complicated because they need opportunities to develop those skills. I can st up labs and have them take measurements and capture data. Not as easy as straight content but also not too much harder.

Dispositions. That's the kicker.

Dispositions take intentionality. To get students to change the way they think about the world means I'm planning experiences and assessments which actually force them to think differently. Every minute of that experience has to build toward a climax where they're faced with some kind of information that doesn't quite fit their existing models of the world and they're forced to change their schema. That's hard to do.

This year, my chemistry teaching counterpart and I are working hard to make sure students do some real science. That means taking samples, collecting data, and asking them to draw conclusions about that data. Questions like, "Is this right?" don't make sense anymore becuase there's no way to check "rightness" in a scientific setting. Rightness is in reproducability and in quality of data. These are skills that need to be developed.

This all sounds great but it really puts students into a funk. Students who are able to coast through classes doing the business of school struggle to apply ideas. Students who don't engage also struggle because the work is overwhelming and they don't have the mental stamina to engage. The middle crowd - kids who are willing to engage and take the help and guidance I can provide - are the ones who benefit the most.

We just wrapped up a big soil science interlude unit. They took some soil samples from an experimental plot we set up at school and then did some basic chemistry to draw some conclusions. The middle group excelled and saw some great results. The tails of population either wanted answers and felt frustrated the whole time or just shut down entirely.

I'm hoping that repeated exposure to the disciplines of science will help build the stamina they need to push into later investigations. Building these specific experiences will help them, hopefully, develop dispositons which can be applied anywhere down the road.

We're finishing our first month of school and I'm thinking a lot about my grading system. I use standards-based grading, which boils down to the majority of a student's grade coming from skills they can demonstrate and do rather than the papers it took to get there. The entire point of SBG is to make sure that students are focused on learning and not assignments. The trick is that it takes assignments - and work - in order to learn the skills.

I've done a lot this year to put standards front and center, including giving students several ways to track their progress. I still haven't cracked the nut of getting them to look at skill development over assignment completion. Arthur Chiaravalli talks about how many SBG systems still fail because of complexity and the fact that a score is still often tied to the feedback, which defeats the purpose. He is also candid about the effort it takes to help students develop skill through feedback. I am grading a ton right now and I am feeling the pain of wanting to give quality feedback on as much as I can.

I also struggle with disconnected systems of feedback and how mutiple outlets for feedback make it hard for students to focus on what makes the most sense. While I was Googling for ideas, I came across a post from an old friend, Ramsey Musallam, who has tried to streamline his assessment into digital and physical notebooks. I've got my students using interactive learning logs, based on fantastic models from Lee Ferguson which has helped many take better notes and actually learn how to reference materials in writing. But it still feels like too many moving pieces.

I think the crux of my issue is that I want students to own their learning. And I say that completely aware that school does not necessarily equate to learning. We learn all the time and own that learning far from the classroom. But, I have an opportunity to help students build life-long learning skills and part of that is the metacognitive process of reflecting on growth. Providing them with tools and setting up a structure which fosters reflection for growth is the end goal.

I'm not really sure what to do for chemistry at this point. I know I need to grade less and that I need to streamline feedback outlets. I've figured out how to put no-score rubrics in Google Classroom (that's another post) so they can get quick feedback in the context of their digital work. All of their physical papers have the same type of quick feedback indicators. What I really need to do is build the habit of looking at their feedback and cataloging it somewhere. Paper and pencil is what I'm going to continue to push and I'm going to specifically build it into each week.

I'm also considering some more portfolio-based ungrading options for my environmental science class as a small pilot group. It's an advacned science elective and I have a lot more freedom in how I run that course. I talked with those students about the potential for portfolios and one-on-one meetings and I'll see what they think tomorrow after they've had some time to chew on it. I don't know if I'm ready to take that jump down to chemistry yet (I'd also need to convince the other teacher that it's not a terrible idea), but maybe I can learn some lessons before bringing that option up.

In the end, I think I know my answer, even though I want to tear it down and start over. I need to simplify and set up systems of refelction as part of the learning cycle to help students track skill development and not worry so much about specific assignments. The activities help build skill and if they take more of the ownership in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, maybe I can move the needed a little bit more in the next month.

Today was one of our Work Days on the farm. We have work days all the time, but this day each year is when we all - the whole family - come together to prepare food that we have raised and cared for so it can care for us.

We raise our own meat here on the farm. Pork, cattle, and chicken. The chickens are our most hands-on project with the animals because they live and die with us. We raise them every year in a sustainable, healthy, dignified way because it helps produce healthy animals and gives nutrition back into the ground they live on. Every year, we plan for and work to come to the end of the Work Day knowing that we've fed three families with that effort.

Every year, I feel an immense sense of accomplishment in how well we finish the work. Our kids also get to see an entire set of functional, respectful, and caring adults take lives in order to sustain others. This year, we had the privilege of involving our kids even more. As they get older, they begin to better understand the sacrifices we make to take care of these animals and why working for our food is a good thing to do.

I'm tired. My feet hurt and my hands are a little raw. But I get to go to bed tonight knowing that we've all grown up a little bit more today. For now, we get to rest.

Today was the first day I put standards grades into my gradebook. We took our unit test yesterday and I've generally waited until about then to put zeroes in the gradebook. This is always a shock to students because those standard assignments are only 1 point but they weigh 80% of the overall grade. So, this early in the semester, one missing standard can drop you 15% or 16% easily.

I'm thinking about grading schemes and, more importantly, how to communicate progress to students before scores go in. There are a few things I'm going to try different with this next chapter:

1. More references to their outcomes tracker. I'm updating that regularly and as much as I don't want them to have to go to another site, it's really the best way for them to keep an eye on standards-aligned feedback for everything they do.
2. Paper/pencil tracking of feedback will go into their notebooks. More on that in my last post.
3. Scores for proficient standards will go in before test date so only unmet standards will be blanks (or turned to zeroes) after that test attempt.
4. A better way to communicate overall test results to students. With this one, they had to look at a given standard across multiple questions and it led to some ambiguity about they actually did. A common example was a standard in one question being marked "proficient" while the same standard was "needs work" on a different question. Are they proficient or not? Or is it an average of the two?

Ambiguous.

Grades are motivating to students, but not in the way I want them to be. Grades are a means to an end - if they get good grades, they can do the other stuff. It's early days, but I'm starting that uphill battle of moving students away from, "How do I change my grade?" to "I need help with this concept."

The same story has played out in the past and I know it'll come back, but these early days of scores going in make it hard to remember that the long game is more important than easing a little bit of pain now.

I took a little while to think about how I'd like students to be able to track their progress on learning standards in class. The web app I built works and will give them a long-term view of their growth over time, but in the moment, I wanted students to have an easy, quick-reference spot to see their progrss on the unit's standards.

For each unit, they get a simple cover page with an introduction, a guiding question, the learning goals, and some vocab. This goes into their learning log (more on that in another post) and marks the next chunk of content. I decided to make this one-page unit marker into two pages by adding the standard tracker.

This half-sheet handout will get put at the start of the unit and updated when feedback comes in. The 1-4 scale refers to their feedback scales:

0. No submission.
1. Does not meet expectations. I got something, but it's waaay off base and I cannot use that evidence to give any kind of meaningful feedback.
2. Approaches expectations. Their attempt is close, but there is a major gap or a major misconception holding them back from truly demonstrating the skill.
3. Meets expectations. They can do the thing, on this example, in this context. This is considered proficient on the attempt and should be what students are shooting for.
4. Exceeds expectations. They have demonstrated a clear understanding and have connected outside relevant ideas into their response.

The numeric scale allows me to calculate an overall score for that particular skill: the highest score averaged with the most recent score.

Anyways, the whole point is that students either need to log into another website to check their progress or check in with me. Providing this template will teach them to catalog their results and pay attention to their feedback. They don't have to hunt me down to figure out their score because it's all logged here as it happens.

I'm not sure one page will be enough, especially as we get into more complex topics and I'm assessing more frequently, but we'll start with one each. If we need more, the great thing about the interactive learning log approach is that we can just slap another copy in and keep going with our day.

Are you a teacher? Do you have thoughts on this approach? Send me an email - always looking for more perspectives.

Two weeks in, and I'm coming up on our first major grade check. I'm continuing to use standards-based grading as my main method of assessment and reporting becuase it focuses students on the content not the paperwork of the class.

In the past, I used Canvas to have a unified system of assessing and recording data. I was able to post assignments and track student progrss on standards using the built-in Rubric tooling. This year, I don't have access to Canvas, so I'm trying to come up with a systematic way to track attempts on stanadrds across time.

My first tool is just a clipboard with a spreadsheet. It lets me keep paper attendance for a quick reference as well as what we did on that day. I've been tracking student standard scores on my sheet so I have a log of how they did day to day. The problem with this is that it isn't indexed or sorted. I spend a lot of time skimming across my header row to find the standard I want - it's a clumsy way to get information. It's also detatched from the evidence (assignment) itself. I have a score, but no context for that score.

My school uses Google Classroom, which has a rubric tool built in, but there's no way to separate the rubric score from the assignment score like I could in Canvas. There, I could give a point value (mainly completion) and then still use a rubric to give qualitative feedback on the learning target. Any time a student or I looked at the assignment, the rubric data came with it.

I'm trying to experiment with ways to assess systematically:

• Frequent enough for good data on progress
• Linked to the actual assignment so students can see their progress
• Indexed and cataloged for me to look at progress over time and for the class as a whole

Unfortunately, I don't see a unified way to do this in Google Classroom - not in a way I'd like at least. What I'm thinking about doing is teaching students how to catalog their own feedback in their notebooks.

In each unit, students get a cover page with the learning objectives and major vocab for the section. I'm going to experiment with adding an "assessment log" template that they can also use to track their own growth. It's a simple blank table with "date," "assignment," "standard", and "score" columns. For each assignment they get back, they add it to their log so they can keep track of progress. It's in context with that section of their notebooks and adds more value to the learning log concept in general.

On my side, I've been building out my own application to track learning standards and to keep feedback and scores in one place. One unit into the school year and there are some rough edges, but I'm getting ideas about how to make it more powerful for me on the teacher end. It has student views, so they can also log in and see their progress and comments, but being detatched from our main point of interaction (Google Classroom and their notebooks), it's just another site they would have to remember. I could probably build more context into the site as a learning tool, but I don't want to add another thing at this point.

If you're using SBG, how do you track standards? What works well for you and your students if you don't have a unified system?

Earlier this summer, I took a shot at installing awstats on my server because I'm always up for a good data explore. It took a little trickery because it relied on wiring a cgi script up via PHP to a perl script to actually run the analysis, but I did eventually get it working.

Last month, I decided to rip it back out.

Turns out, having a stats dashboard made me look at my blog and wonder why more people weren't reading. Why didn't people want to know what I did this week or where I went with kids? Why weren't my posts showing up in search results? Why wasn't I getting more traffic on specific keywords? Why why why?

I didn't like guessing. I don't write for nameless readers. I write because it helps me process things. Sometimes that processing is helpful to someone else, other times, it's got nowhere near the context anyone needs in order to make sense of it. Heck, half the time I go back and look at an old post, I I can't even make sense of it.

Stats are cool and awstats is a very impressive piece of software, but I wasn't able to frame it in a healthy way in my mind to keep around, so away it went.

Anyways, dear reader, if you've made it this far, thanks for sticking around.

I often fall into the trap of thinking, "Maybe I should publish this thing for other people to use." And I almost always regret it.

I'm a full-time teacher, not a SaaS manager. Some of my ideas have been okay (at least to me) but most are very specific to my use case in the moment. I need to get over the impulse to publish a site for general use just in case someone, somewhere, wants the same thing. As soon as I do that, I stop being able to use a tool I've made as a way to solve one of my problems and have to start thinking about generic application.

Granted, I've only officially released one or two things, but as soon as I did, I kind of lost interest in maintaining, so I took them back down. They're still there and I could go back and put time and effort into cleaning them up, but I lost the joy of poking at it when I needed to consider customer support.

This has been a therapeutic post for me becuase I'm getting a tool ready to share with students tomorrow and I really need to resist the urge of making it publicly available.

I just finished my first week back teaching after moving into professional development and staff support in 2017. I was nervous and feeling concerned that my teaching skills had atrophied more than I wanted to admit, but, this has been the best school experience since my first year teaching. By far.

There are three differences I can point to that have made this week enocouraging and nothing short of joyful for me:

1. The staff care. I don't mean to say other teachers in other schools don't care, but this is the first school I've been in in a long time where every single staff member is single-mindedly focused on educating children. And not just a cultire of teaching...the culture of the staff as a community is palpable. People I hadn't met would come down to my room just to say hi and see how I was settling in.
2. Students can tell the staff care. I'm the new guy - they don't know me from someone else on the street, but because students know the staff are invested in their wellbeing, I'm gifted trust I wouldn't have otherwise. Students have opened up about home life and other details that would take months to come out in other places. I'm convinced it's because of the foundation of trust that has been established for years.
3. Administrators are involved in the student's lives. Our principal and assistant are in the halls. They know everyone's names (I don't know how they do it...). They know parents. They're members of the community. And they set the example for how to show dignity and build relationships with students in the building. I have a lot to learn.

ON the whole, this first week has given me energy I wasn't expecting. I feel like I have a lot to live up to, but I also feel like I can contribute to the community and the culture of the school. This year is going to push and stretch me in new ways and I'm excited for what learning will be coming.

On a whim, today I searched for Anchor CMS, an old PHP CMS I tried out after I jumped off WordPress the first time. As soon as I started reading, I remembered that I had made this same search a little over a year ago - recent enough to remember the page.

The CMS was archived back in 2021 because the community didn't have enough time to commit to keeping it going. It's open source - these things happen. The sadder part is that the original creator, Charlotte (who went by Visual Idiot), died in 2020. The group trying to keep the project going had worked with her to make the CMS a real thing.

I remember Anchor being two things - lightweight and approachable. I was just starting to learn to write my own code and the design of the Anchor API was wonderful. It was PHP, which isn't my favorite by any stretch, but it wasn't scary to mess with. WordPress always felt way too hard to dive into as a beginner, so this was a great stepping stone.

Aside from the code being approachable, the community around the project was delightful. I remember the forums being friendly and the Anchor Themes team actually did helpful reviews and left encouraging comments on how to make the themes better. I actually have one still available - Barhop - which was probably my first actual open source contribution and one of the first "real" things I'd published as a noob coder and designer.

Aside from the good feels of using it, the CMS itself was light and smooth. Way smaller than WordPress and much cleaner on the admin side, it really made writing and creating template layouts easy to do. The plugin system was small and flexible and you could really push what a blog could do from an authoring standpoint.

For not using Anchor for too long, it really made a mark in my mind. It's a platform I'm going to miss. Looking on Github, there are some active forks so it may be a platform I come back to.

Beekeeping is rolling on this year. We took some time to spin out our modest harvest this year which yielded us nearly 50 pounds of wildflower honey. That's almost 4.5 gallons for our family, which should last a full year. We're very excited because we lost our hives last year and didn't expect to harvest anything this season. It really shows the benefit of maintaining frames with wax on them. Since the bees didn't have to build out comb from scratch, they were able to establish quickly and provide a honey crop for us.

I'm heading into the fall with three hives - two are quite strong and one still has a chance to toughen up before the season change. If they're still looking a little weak, I'll end up uniting it with one of the others to make it through winter and then do a split in the spring.

I got a call this week from a family friend who runs a ~15 acre farm south of us. He had a local beekeeper managing several hives on the farm as pollination service. In return, they paid a small rental fee and sold honey for him at the farm stand. According to the farm, they haven't been able to reach the keeper for almost two years. They've asked if I would be interested in taking over the management of the equipment moving forward.

This is a pretty big deal to me. The equipment is already in place, so I wouldn't have to invest too much in materials. There's always some maintenance and replacement to do, but it's not starting from scratch. There are about 8 living colonies right now with the potential to split those into 12 or 15 next season. They've been so neglectd, several of the boxes have been grown over by vines and weeds...so much that the bees have chewed through the boxes in places just to be able to get in and out.

Our little apiary at home gives us more than 50 pounds of honey annually. This would push us well into the hundreds of pounds of honey which means we can start selling almost immediately. I don't feel like I'm qualified enough to charge a rental, so I'm hoping we can work out an arrangement where they're willing to sell the honey with our farm sticker to build our own clientele as we try to expand. I'm planning on going over in the next couple of days to dig the hives out and see what's going on inside before making any long term commitment. But, on the face, this seems like a really good opportunity to not only get a lot more experience but also be able to expand much more quickly than we anticipated.

Meanwhile, the goldenrod will bloom and the bees will continue to gather and store away for the winter. Just a few more weeks before I close the boxes up for the last time in 2023 and wait til spring.

A goal of mine this year is to ride my bike more. I'm starting a new job that is bike-commutable, which is a big deal when you live in a rural area. I've been riding more just to get the kinks worked out of my joints (and the bike) and I decided it would be fun to keep track of my rides.

I created a Strava account yesterday before a ride after trying out a FOSS Android app that I couldn't quite figure out. Comparing the onboarding experince of a multi-million dollar company vs a single developer isn't really apples to apples, but it got me thinking about what I really need from a tracking app.

Ride discoverability is enticing, but living in a rural spot, there are plenty of roads to explore. I'm not really interested in maintaining another social network, so I don't think I would get too much into following people. Strava offers all of these extra features and it was easy to start, but I'm not planning on using those.

The effort of setting up the FOSS activity tracker takes more up front, but it does just what I want without the extra stuff. I think for me, taking more time to get a single-purpose app working builds buy-in because it's tailored for me without all the extra fluff.

Beekeeping stories keep on coming this month it seems.

During my inspection a little over a week ago, one of my boxes was out of space. Bees had begun storing nectar and pollen down in the brood nest, which leaves less space for the queen to lay eggs, which means a less productive hive overall. They had plenty of space above the brood chamber, but since we're after the summer solstice, they tend to not make much wax, even if conditions are good for building comb. So, the only option I had was to do a midsummer split.

The Honey Bee Research Center from the University of Guelph saves the day again. Their fantastic YouTube library has a video showing multiple methods for splitting. I don't have a queen handy, so I did a so-called "walkaway split," where I isolated the queen in the bottom box and moved some of the eggs, open larvae, and capped larvae up into an upper brood chamber. The bottom box got some empty frames of drawn comb to replace the ones I took out.

At dusk, nurse bees moved up into the top chamber to care for the developing bees. The next day, I took the top box off, which is essential its own colony now with the hope that after being queenless for 24 hours, they would build queen cells and begin rearing a new queen.

I'd never done this before so late in the season, but there are still plenty of drones around to mate with a potential queen, so I decided to go for it.

After four days, I checked the hive again and, much to my delight, there were three new queen cells with some very fat larvae that will develop into new queen bees.

When the queens emerge, one will kill the other two before going on her mating flight. If all goes well, I'll have a colony with a mated queen in the next two weeks. If all doesn't go well - she doesn't mate successfully, for instance - the colony can always be combined back with the original to get through the winter before trying a split again in the spring.

Today is my last day with my current school district. A little over eight years ago, I started mid-year, taking over a class that had been taught by substitutes since the beginning of the year. Since then, I've moved into instructional coaching and leading a team of instructional coaches who provide support for over 1,000 teachers and administrators.

I never considered this work as a possibility when I started. I've had a lot of trust given to me. I've learned how to work as part of an agile, effective team and that equipped me to lead the same team as people left over time.

But it's time to get back to the classroom. Next year, I'll be back in the chemistry classroom at the local high school.

There are several things that contributed to my decision this spring, but the main one is that my new school is local - just a five minute drive (or a 15 minute bike ride). I'm currently spending more than an hour and a half each day just driving...moving closer to home is going to drastically change my time.

A mentor has also encouraged me to get more time in the classroom. I taught for six years before moving to the coaching role which isn't nothing, but it's not quite enough to have the perspective I think I need to do true administrative work. I'm looking forward to re-learning how to put ideas in to practice. I'm looking forward to working with students every day. I'm excited about working with a dedicated team of local teachers who have a great culture of teaching and learning together. I'm looking forward to being part of the team teaching children who live next door and around the corner.

This degree has taken me a long time. I started in 2014 and thought I would get it finished right away. Life changes brought that to a stop, which included transferring out of the program and into another degree track with Ball State University. After two semesters, my work was put on hold again, and I wasn't sure I would ever finish a degree. Now, 10 years later, I'm finally reflecting on my learning and growth over my graduate work as a whole.

When people ask me what I'm studying, I struggle to answer. The Master of Arts in Education Technology (MAET) program at Michigan State University (MSU) is certainly focused on technology - every course touched on learning technologies in one way or another. But each course also went far beyond what its name suggests. In my time with the MAET program, I've explored not only the technologies of learning in various contexts, but the dispositions and competing forces - in both the public and private sectors - which influence the education technology landscape. The rigor of the MAET program helped me learn how to find, assimilate, and then synthesize ideas rooted in academic research as I work to apply technology-enhanced pedagogies in the classroom. Through completing my degree, I am able to articulate my own ideas about education rooted in evidence and then, more importantly, translate those ideas into practice with students and colleagues.

Foundations

All learning begins with a solid foundation. CEP 811, Adapting Innovative Technology to Education, was my first course since finishing my undergraduate degree. I was immediately introduced to the Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework which fundamentally altered the way I thought about technology in education. Prior to beginning my master's degree, technology was an add-on - something included in the lesson to solve a specific problem or provide a specific resource. I hadn't considered the impact that technology had on my pedagogy besides the fact that I was comfortable using it and could throw it into a given lesson without too much stress.

In CEP 811, I was asked to consider education technology (edtech) from a critical lens as it impacted other aspects of teaching. I had to come to grips with the fact that my technology domain was bloated when compared to pedagogy and content knowledge. At the time, I wasn't in a classroom, so I didn't have much of an opportunity to balance out my own skills. Awareness of this imbalance in myself was an eye-opening experience because it was one of the first times I'd confronted a clear area of improvement in my work and thinking about the work.

Beyond the coursework, the TPACK framework has played a major role in my career with teachers from a professional development and leadership perspective. TPACK provides a solid starting point for reflecting on teaching and how we make decisions. When I introduced the framework to colleagues in professional learning sessions, it helped facilitate a safe space to talk about self-improvement because teachers were able to identify specific domains of skill they already had and which ones they wanted to develop more. Even now, I refer to TPACK as a tool for staff development and it is a tool I continue to use as I reflect on my own work.

Leadership

Of all my coursework, I think about CEP 815, Technology and Leadership, the most. Dr. Rosenberg and Dr. Gleason created a course where leadership as it related to education technology was the focus instead of exploring the technology of leadership. We were pushed to identify our own leadership tendencies and then wrestle with the implications in our daily work. Dr. Gleason and Dr. Rosenberg used situation learning, role play, and case studies from outside the world of education to help us discover our own leadership potential and prepare a system of working in our own spheres of influence as leaders.

In 815, I was challenged by the high expectations for crafting arguments in writing. At times, I struggled to connect my thesis with the proposed solution. Dr. Gleason modeled effective, actionable feedback which helped me in scholarship, writing, and in communicating and executing ideas based on research. CEP 815 taught me to take a step back and consider the landscape before diving in. In my current role, I am primarily responsible for identifying opportunities for teacher growth and then creating and carrying out plans within the district vision. As a leader, it is critical that we consider the goals of the organization over our own aspirations, but the two do not have to be exclusive.

Given the rise of teacher-leaders in schools, it became clear how important home-grown leadership is for schools. Teachers carry a great deal of capacity for leading change and by building strong relationships between instructional and administrative staff, schools can build resiliency for change to meet challenges. I hope to continue to grow as a leader in different contexts as opportunities come along.

Deeper learning

During my student teaching, one of the first lessons my mentor taught me was the value in reflection. Since then, reflection is a normal part of my work and it has helped me develop a healthy balance of self-criticism and a drive to improve. CEP 800, Learning in School and Other Settings, asked me to consider what learning is as a process. I was surprised to realize that I'd only ever wrestled with the process of learning from a cognitive perspective; I was aware that learning had social influences, but had not taken time to consider what learning looks like as a developmental act.

Prior to CEP 800, my tendency was to focus on learning as a process of information processing from the individual perspective. However, learning as a result of relationship, whether in schools or somewhere else, is just as important to the cognitive processes, if not more. We are primed to learn from birth but the true power in learning isn't appreciated until we begin to learn together. "The smartest person in the room is the people in the room" felt more and more real to me as I explored and recognized social learning constructs I hadn't considered fully before.

My theory of learning as the final product of the course is the result of the wide range of topics from early cognitive science to modern social learning theory. This piece is my attempt to combine my years of experience in the classroom with research to serve as an evidence-based guiding document which details my own thinking about how and where learning happens. The implications for my instruction are embedded in the text as I related cognitive and social science to classroom practice. This is one of the items I'll revisit periodically as I continue to reflect on my professional practice.

Academics balanced with practice

Beyond the course content, my degree has taught me how to thoughtfully approach knowledge building. Taking academic writing and carefully reading over findings to build understanding is a skill that the MAET program teaches well. I feel like I am frequently walking the line between academics and academia: I am involved in the business of helping students learn and academia has insight and value in practice. But there is a danger for the practitioner in how much stock is placed in the process of research and writing opinions and commentary.

MAET had its share of academic reading and writing, but it was always through the lens of practice in the classroom. I never felt like I had to read and respond to a prompt as simply an exercise in discourse. My work in MAET courses was focused on classroom application, and I was challenged to synthesize ideas rooted in academic literature, lived examples, and my professional experience. All of my MAET courses stretched my thinking into different areas of practice and through well-designed prompts and consistent instructor feedback, I was able to assimilate ideas clearly both in writing and in action.

Participating in a graduate program requires a full commitment to the habits and practices of the academic community. In the middle of the semester, my thinking is dominated by jargon and it bled over into my work with teachers. The hardest part for me was to incorporate academics with practice in a way that would not alienate someone unfamiliar with the language of education theory. My place is in the classroom with students and my time in the MAET program equipped me with skills to not only continue to seek out ideas through scholarship but to also make those ideas approachable by colleagues and students as we work together in schools.

Enduring understanding

A mentor always challenges me to consider the "knowledge, skills, and dispositions" I want students to have as a result of taking my classes. The underlying idea for each of those is enduring understanding: what will they remember because they had me as a teacher? Some if it will be content - a few of my students have gone on into higher education and careers as scientists and that is part of my legacy as an educator. However, for the vast majority, that is not the next step. As a teacher, I am far more interested in how I help students develop life skills and positive dispositions toward themselves and others.

I am undoubtedly a better teacher because of my graduate work. I've been exposed to ideas I wouldn't have otherwise been asked to consider and incorporated leadership principles, technology philosophy, and instructional frameworks into my routines. I am able to clearly articulate my reasoning in speech and in writing and I can make rational, concise arguments when warranted.

The MAET program has helped me build my own knowledge in a variety of topics. There are several examples with the ones previously mentioned which stand out and have made me a better teacher. But like with my students, my enduring understandings are much more pronounced in the skills I've developed in research, interpretation, and application of ideas. I'm more aware of the larger education research world and how it can bring benefit to classroom teachers. I've developed a desire to want to follow threads of intuition and to confirm or deny those feelings with evidence whenever possible.

The best part about completing this graduate course is being able to look at the last 10 years of my education career and see a marked difference in my dispositions then when compared to my dispositions now. This process has been challenging, encouraging, frustrating, and rewarding (sometimes all at once). My hope, as I look forward, is to be able to continue to foster my curiosities and put my skills to work to build strong communities of learning

All artwork in this piece was drawn by me, digitally.

About a month ago, I was looking for some kind of catch-all fediverse app which would syndicate multiple places into one space.

Bonfire looks like an interesting solution, but at the moment, it's really built for teams rather than individuals. I wanted something that I could use to pull in multiple streams of information, kind of like a hyper-active RSS reader, but using ActivityPub as the protocol rather than just syndicating content in to a reader.

I'm a TweetDeck user form back before Twitter owned (and then kills) it, so I'm very comfortable with the column layout. I already use the Mastodon Advanced UI and I felt like this would be a good first shot at making something work.

Mastodon

I only have my home, local, and notifications timelines open. I follow several hashtags across the Mastodon space to my Home timeline. This is mainly for in-the-moment stuff and I'll scroll up and down periodically, but I don't try to catch everything.

On Twitter, I was really education focused. When I left, I had a chance to start over from scratch and now my Home feed is full of a much more diverse set of people from artists to programmers and everything in between. It's much more balanced and I didn't change a lot from how I used Twitter other than being more picky about what I follow.

The only other tip I would have for Mastodon is to follow hashtags in your Home timeline rather than adding columns. They blend in with other curated stuff and add variety.

Pixelfed

I have a Pixelfed account that I post to maybe once per month. I set it up when pixelfed.social went live and have just kind of sat on it. I'll browse it from time to time, but only on my phone.

If you don't care about posting pictures, you can still follow people posting on any Pixelfed instance by searching their @username@instance in your Mastodon search bar. You can even follow your Pixelfed account from your Mastodon account. So meta.

Once I figured this out, I really started to understand the power of Activity Pub as a connector.

Lemmy

This was the breakthrough moment for me. With the (impending?) death of Reddit as a usable space, I started poking around Lemmy instances. Frankly, I only used reddit for two things: beekeeping and DIY repair forums. I don't really care about the front page, just other people interested in the same niche stuff like thousands of insects who make honey and fixing your own stuff.

With most apps, you followed people. With Lemmy (and kbin), you can follow entire communities just the same way as with individuals. This is a big deal because now, I don't have to decided which Lemmy beekeeping community (lemmy.world/c/beekeeping vs lemmy.ml/c/beekeeping) to create an account in - I can follow, and interact, with both via ActivityPub.

Go back to the Mastodon search bar and instead of searching the Lemmy URL, look for the @-version of the community. So, lemmy.world/c/beekeeping becomes @beekeeping@lemmy.world. All of a sudden, I can now follow that entire forum from my Mastodon account. Lemmy posts come in as boosts and I can favorite to upvote or reply to post a reply to the original thread. You can even start a new thread by @-mentioning the community!

This is where the Advanced UI in Mastodon becomes important. I have to follow individual Lemmy threads, so they'll pop up in my Home timeline. But since I don't scroll too much, I might miss a post. To make sure I see all of the Lemmy content, I add those accounts to lists and then pin the list to my Mastodon dashboard.

Now, all in one place, I have my real time social media, some nice photos sprinkled in from around the world, and columns for discussion forums on topics I refer to frequently.

Other improvements?

If I were to do something different, I think I would want some kind of "workspace" view where I can pin different columns for different things. Maybe a Mastodon + Pixelfed workspace for hashtags I'm interested in, but no people I follow specifically. Or a workspace which combines the beekeeping hashtag from Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Lemmy all in one.

Right now, there's only the one view and it works better than I thought it would. As resources into the federated networks grow, I'm excited to see what kind of power-user tools become available.

Do you have other tips? Find me on Mastodon, @brianb@fosstodon.org, or send me an email.