I’ve announced it through Twitter and Facebook, but not yet blogwise: I have been hired as a maternity leave school psychologist for next year.  I’ll be working at my current school as a psychologist from September through early February, at which point I’ll transition back into my teaching role for the remainder of the year (we’re on the 4×4 block schedule, so it won’t be as traumatic for the kids as it sounds).

In all honesty, a maternity leave position is not how I thought I’d be starting my career in school psychology, especially a position that isn’t even an entire year long.  I’m grateful for the opportunity to get some paid experience, though, and wondering if it’s not a blessing in disguise.  It’s a low-risk way of entering the field – I’m at the same school at which I’ve taught for eight years, I know the people and the culture, and I’m pretty well-versed in “how things work” around here.

I had my sights set on a full-time tenure-track position from the outset (not necessarily an unreasonable goal in K-12 education), but the more I think about it, the more I think this may be the right position at the right time for me.

–Damian,

who occasionally needs to be reminded he must learn to crawl before he can walk.

Remember a few months ago I developed a wiki for one of the departments at my school? I updated the “Article of the Month” section over the weekend and sent the department an email yesterday to let them know (as well as call for contributors – total number (beside me) in the last 4 months: 0).

One of the teachers sent a nice email to tell me that the wiki was a very worthwhile project, but that she doesn’t even have time to look at it, let alone contribute information to it. Look, I know everyone’s got their own stuff going on, especially in the home stretch of the school year, but damn. At first it didn’t bother me, but like a grain of sand in my sock, it grew slightly more irritating the more I thought about it.

My first thought (vented in a Tweet earlier today): I teach a full courseload, continually develop new projects for my students, parent a 3-year-old and a newborn, do a grad school internship, attend graduate classes, and I found time to WRITE the damn thing – you can’t even look at it?

My second thought: You don’t have time to visit a website, but you have time to write me an email telling me you don’t have time to visit a website?

Is this what it’s like being a technology coordinator?

During the program, I became very enthusiastic about the potential for helping in this position, much as I was enthused about the potential for helping during my teacher training program. I still want to become a psychologist, and am looking for a position for the 2008-2009 school year, but here’s the rub:

I feel that this school year, I’m just starting to hit my stride in terms of connecting my students with a world much larger than their own. Some of that is thanks to “Web 2.0″ and the perspective shift brought about by my involvement in blogging and Twitter over the last 8 months; some of it just due to my own personal growth & maturation.

My question is one with which I’ve been wrestling for a few months now, but have been a bit timid to blog about: after 5 years and several tens of thousands of dollars in tuition & book fees, is there a place for psychologists in the School 2.0/Unschool framework? Is there anything my expertise can provide or help facilitate, or am I effectively signing away any ability to contribute once I am no longer in a teaching or administrative position?

Here, then, is the full text of the email I sent to my school’s Special Education department this afternoon:

For my grad school internship, I created a wiki website for the HC Special Services department: http://www.hcss-wiki.org. On it, you will find information on a variety of topics including behavior support, New Jersey classifications, and various online resources for special ed teachers. It’s just missing one thing: your input.

The reason this site is a wiki instead of a regular website is because I wanted the teachers of the department to have an ongoing say in its development. There is a very simple 3-step tutorial on how to add content to any part of the site linked off the main page, so I encourage you to visit the site and add your thoughts and experiences to any part of the site. There is a section specifically for general hints and tips (perhaps from the more experienced teachers to the newer ones?), but of course you can add to or modify any existing information.

The value of wikis is in group collaboration. I hope you will find time to make a contribution and help this tool grow. I am available to you if you have any questions.

I hope the tone and content of the email were sufficient to get people poking around and maybe even contributing, but there’s a part of me that’s pessimistic about how frequently it will be used – and that’s not a reflection on the faculty. I think there’s a missing component here that I am unable to offer, at least not within the confines of the contracted school day: training. I feel like I’m offering these folks a potentially very cool, very powerful utility, but withholding the instruction manual.

And if you don’t know why that’s a bad thing, just ask William Katt.

It’s a work in progress, so like a bad steak, there are some areas that are more done than others. I’ll be working on this throughout the weekend, but if you have a sec, I’d greatly appreciate any feedback you can offer. Here are my three main goals for this site:

1. A demystification of some legal and practical information regarding special education in NJ via “plain English” explanations
2. Empowerment of special ed teachers through information dissemination (specifically w/r/t behavior management and curricular accommodations)
3. Building of community within the department through invitations to (eventually) collaborate and add to this document

You can leave comments here or hit me up at damian@apaceofchange.com with any constructive feedback – I would appreciate knowing what you think is helpful about the site as well as what you think needs improvement (or what’s missing that you think should be there).

Here’s the address: http://hcspecialservices.wikispaces.com     http://hcss-wiki.wikispaces.com

Thanks, network! Happy December!

I was challenged: How will you take a cell phone away from a girl who hides it in her skirt? What about all the cheating kids do with phones? My basic response was this: if the kids are engaged throughout the class, they’ll be less likely to drift to their phones. To cheating, I said I believed that if cell phone cheating is that rampant in a class, the problem is not the phones, it’s probably either a) the assessment, or b) a lack of classroom management. I tend to agree with the folks who propose teaching appropriate uses for technology rather than outright bans, if for no other reason than that bans rarely work anyway.

As I thought more about this discussion on the ride home, I thought about how neatly the “ed tech” angle ties into an aspect of school psychology, behavior analysis.

Behavior analysis relies on a fairly simple principle we call ABC – Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence. If the Behavior is “texting during class”, there must also be some sort of Setting Event or Antecedent – what immediately or not-so-immediately precedes the Behavior. Likewise, there is also a Consequence – what happens immediately after. According to behavior analysts, we can guide behavior by altering the Antecedents and Consequences.

Example 1:

Barbara is an another boring English class. The teacher is not engaging, and rarely introduces any variety into the class. Bored stiff, Barbara goes for her phone to check her messages and text a friend. Her texting, a direct violation of policy, goes unnoticed by the teacher.

Antecedent/Setting Event: Boring class; no engagement.
Behavior: Texting
Consequence: Friend contacted, boredom momentarily relieved.
Verdict: Behavior reinforced – likely to continue.

Let’s switch things up.

Example 2:

Same student, same boring class, same text. Barbara gets caught this time, and is written up. When the vice-principal gets to her writeup three days later, she is assigned detention.

Antecedent/Setting Event: Boring class; no engagement.
Behavior: Texting
Consequence: Short-term: Friend contacted, boredom momentarily relieved. Long-term: Detention.
Verdict: Behavior reinforced – likely to continue. Why? The immediacy of boredom relief outweighs the detention that won’t come for another week.

Rain down detentions on poor Babs; it won’t make much of a difference. More work is also created for the teacher (who has to write the student up) and the vice-principal (who has to deal with the situation). How do we make everyone happy?

Change what happens before the behavior occurs – head it off at the pass.

Example 3:

Same student, same English class. Teacher creates engaging lessons, varies activities and assessments. Makes learning meaningful to students. Teacher alleviates boredom so Babs doesn’t have to. The need for boredom relief is removed; the phone stays tucked away. Babs has no more detentions, the teacher doesn’t have to write her up any more, and the vice-principal can focus on more pressing disciplinary matters.

Sure, these scenarios are a little oversimplified, but not so much so that they’re inaccurate. The moral of the story for me is that the “great cell phone debate” (how silly will this look in 20 years?) is not nearly as much about technology as it is engaging young people. Take away their cell phones and they’ll write notes to each other. Take away their notes and they’ll fiddle with something else. Create an environment that does not engender behaviors such as texting answers to one another, and you won’t have these problems (for God’s sake people, walk around your classrooms and LOOK at your students while they test! Have kids place their phones on their desks if it’s that bad! Let them try to text the answers to essay questions to each other, instead of multiple choice questions, and see how far they get!).

Texting, like all behaviors, serves a function. Remove the need for that function, and it doesn’t matter if you’re Classroom 2.0 or Classroom 0.1 Alpha RC2 – your kids will be with you, and not elsewhere.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, it looks like by this time next year, I’ll be in ur schoolz, psychologizin’ ur students (sorry, had to beat the last breath out of the lolcats theme from the last post. If you don’t get it, consider yourself blessed).

It’s been about as hectic as I’d expected it to be this first week of school – kids started last Wednesday, and we have off this Thursday for Rosh Hashanah. I’d like to post my first week reflections before then, as well as comment on the impending brouhaha between the APA and NASP regarding who should be allowed to call themselves “psychologists”, but if I don’t, L’shana tovah, and I’ll definitely post at the weekend.

PS: I will never, ever get tired of hearing, “I wuv you, Daddy!”. I’m going to make him say it when he’s 40, and just you see if I don’t.

PPS: Major apologies if anyone was looking to reference any of my Top Ten tracks from last post – edublogs permitting, I will post by this Sunday evening at the very latest.

A less-widely discussed component of special education, however, is giftedness. John Cloud raises some issues for us all to consider as we head back into our widely heterogeneous classrooms in his piece from last week’s Time, Are We Failing our Geniuses?

For my money, the meat of the article is right here (emphasis mine):

American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn’t even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs. But it can’t make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.

Cue also the reports of how NCLB has caused schools to slash funding for gifted programs as early after its enactment as 2002. Now, for your amusement, I’ll attempt to crunch some numbers from the article (you may not want to drink anything near your computer while I try this).

Cloud’s definition of “genius” – an IQ three standard deviations above the norm (145+) – only applies to a fraction of a percentage of American students (62,000, according to him), and therefore runs the risk of eliciting the “too minor a minority” response. I’m aware of “gifted” programming being granted to students with an IQ of 130+, a full standard deviation lower. If that’s true in all 50 states, then we now have an additional 2.14% of students (1.3 million, if Cloud’s initial figure of 62 million students is accurate) who are placed in non-differentiated classes with more average age-level peers (read the article to see why this may not be a good thing). Still not a huge number, but it’s almost 21 times the number Cloud describes. NB: If I’ve screwed these numbers up somehow, someone please let me know in the comments.

Incidentally, the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) is officially against tracking students, regardless of intelligence/ability, but they do support differentiated instruction in order to provide diverse student groups with appropriate academic engagement. Regardless of where you fall on the tracking/no tracking debate, a million students aren’t getting appropriate public educations. Sounds like someone’s getting left behind.