good evening welcome to this week an education and i'm a little tease my guest this week is tim charleston who is our supervisor of social studies and global education pre k to eight in our schools and then we'll be talking with us about some of the things that are going on in that area and we'll be having a great discussion about that first i'd like to thank everybody for a great year that we've had in the princeton public schools this year all the teaching staff support staff  and wishing the class of two thousand and sixteen the best as they move on and graduate on the front lawn in a couple of weeks and hopefully they will have the best and going forward as whether we're going to college or occasional school jobs wherever they for one of our teams that's working our strategic plan and he's co chairing the innovation experiment experimentation team and his interests are in design thinking breaking down norms and preparing students for globally connected world tens wealth of experience and knowledge in educational technology digital leadership and solutions that help green book township public school district in reprint new jersey implement a one to one b y o d blended learning model as a former social studies teacher with a passion for student voice and teaching and learning as well as authentic learning models to strive for deeper understanding to help students connect and build real world experiences he has been the recipient of the green book middle school teacher of the year award in two thousand and eleven and has also been featured at tech digest th e journal and many other social media sites attend you know welcome welcome to the show tonight thank you for coming on thank you for having me well a lot's been going on in the school district this year many many different things to keep earlier endeavors that you feel you know serve you well as you've come to the district and i appreciate you having me on the show it's been wonderful working here in princeton for the last two years as you mentioned before pryor i was a social studies teacher and a technology coordinator for greenberg township public schools one of the things that i truly find to be necessary for students to learn in in schools and in life today is that blending of  real world experiences and technology with that in mind we brought a one to one bring your own device initiate if to greenbrook for students in grades seven and eight and what that meant was that the students who had devices at home could sign up and bring them to use in the classroom in a variety of ways to see the through there and research through their assessment and the students were very cognizant of equity too and we also provided devices for students who did not want to bring a device in or couldn't bring a device and we found that to be wonderful because kids are able to connect to to current  ability and understanding to be a thought leader to me a thought leader someone who's willing to think outside the box and share those ideas with others i think that being a thought leader is is really key on the sharing of ideas there are so many folks who are looking to push the envelope with with wonderful innovative ideas and are looking for outlets to do so so as a thought leader i try to position myself as someone that can that can connect those on and we have five actually teach someone is the innovation experiment experimentation team which you co chair so i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the work that that committee has been doing and maybe where where we see it going in the upcoming months well it's been a wonderful experience to the co chair and just to be on the committee and listen to the discussions i want to first thank my other co chair dance  a wonderful thought leader and engaging educator it's been a unique opportunity because there are a lot of best practices and ways to reach our learners and we have been looking at a couple of key areas such as the innovative mindset so thinking outside the box in terms of reaching our learners we've looked at student censored learning opportunities and stead of the traditional what people may think of the teacher in the front of the classroom student listening to the information we're looking at ways to continue to push the envelope of having students be the leaders of their own learning we've looked at revising how we assess our students and we're looking at those three areas through the lens of how we provide professional development for teachers how we  develop and implement the curriculum that we write for teachers to teach how this structures of the school could allow for more collaboration and communication between folks and how technology plays a role in that and i know the the composition of the committee is varied that we talk a little about that that's not just ministers on the committee no no it i s and all the committees honestly have a nice representation from across the district there are administrators and supervisors on the team but there are a small percentage compared to the support staff and the teachers who are on these committees as well too and there's teachers from every level elementary middle and high school from many different disciplines and special education regular general education i think there are five key things it's passion permission communication time and failure ok let's talk about those so every educate every person who works in the school district has a passion specially our teachers they have passion for helping our students achieve the best that they possibly can or they have and they have passions for the curriculum that they teach the content that they teach so having a passion for something is the first step in identifying and engaging in that passion the second is permission to engage in that passion i think we do a wonderful job in princeton of allowing our teachers to engage in their passions whether it is bringing new curricular instructional endeavors into the classroom or creating curricular co curricular after school activities to to engage with the students and the third is communication especially when it comes to being a supervisor or being an administrator communication between what the teacher wants to do  and how they're going to do it with the supervisor of ministers important because we want to support them in those endeavors for for for continuing to innovate with new ideas we want to support them  the fourth is time so innovative practices take some time sometimes they're very quick other times they can take a long time and we want to make sure that there's no pressure to produce results right away because the last one is failure in any innovative endeavor there's going to be step backs and failures thomas edison is one of my favorite individuals in history and famously he found you know nine hundred ninety nine ways how not to make a lightbulb but that innovative process and that time allowed him to succeed and that's the same thing with our with our educators too we want to give them time to succeed and we want to give them the support so that they can succeed so ultimately boils down to trust and trust is a two way street trust in that the support is going to be coming from supervisors or mini so if you're being comfortable and not taken any risks that obviously you're going to have the same product and you're not going to have the innovation so is there any courage of risk even though there may be failure i think there is and you know coming to princeton one of the first things that i saw and continue to see is such a rich history of tradition what makes princeton public schools  our teachers our parents and our community and that's what has has created such a wonderful school and learning environment and we still need to continue to uphold and value the traditions that make us who we are if we want to continue to meet the needs of a growing and they versed population of learners we need to think about new ways to to to to get to them in different in different ways and there's going to be setbacks small setbacks but if you're if you have the time to do it you can calculate your steps and look back and reflect reflections are really important part of the entire process and seeing where it is that you may have had a misstep whether it is trying different type of assessment trying different instructional strategy but that's the same for any walk of life right not just that it's not just education but anything that you do you may try going to work one day a different way and you find that one day while i say five minutes come into work and you the next day i'll try the same route but then there's traffic that way and you find that that is actually not the best route to take so it takes time so it taught me about a little more about if you had to distill a successful organization  innovative down to one attribute what would be i think i think if you look at the most successful industries in areas it is it does come down to trust and it comes down to the relationship between everybody in the building and knowing that we all have a singular goal and that is to provide the best learning experiences models and the blended learning model is one that blends appropriately technology as well as more traditional ways of in shock ssion and there are different types of blended learning models that can that can that can suit these needs one is a station rotation model where you have groups of students in your classroom and one or two groups  are working with the teacher or multiple teachers on assignment and then another group is working on engaging in that material through the use of what would be laptops or other forms of technology and then the students would actually switch so that they get a different lens of understanding it's a mix of that the face to face as well as the technology you know there is research redefinition so when we think about the technology used in the classroom we want to think about how our students are using technology and how they can move up this continuum so that they can actually redefine their learning a good authentic blend learning model allows a student to use technology in a way that they wouldn't be able to access information without it but i mean by that is if a student is working on let's say a worksheet all right and then they use a laptop to access that same worksheet and the some are model that's a substitution there's no difference between doing it hardcopy or doing it with technology as you move up the continuum you hope that the technology allows the students to actually redefine and recreate things so for instance if they're reading  we are right now the pertinent aspects of common sense whereas technology and then they would be able to distribute that out to their other classmates and their other their fellow students to listen and gain a different perspective on without a blanket learning model that wouldn't be able to be done before so technology allows kids to have a different medium to so that they have different audiences to gain different perspectives on which is really important i think for kids those personal is learned of absolutely i know i've seen teachers coming into the valley road as you're beginning work on revamping the social studies curriculum will be you know move forward you know during the summer and i was endeavor we started this endeavor back in the fall and from my understanding this is one of the first curricular areas to go under an extensive program review in recent memory so we've been looking at a couple of key areas and before i talk about that let me talk about who is actually on the committee as well two so we have social studies teachers for elementary we have to represent represent this from almost every grade every school in the district and we have our our social studies teachers from the middle school and from the high school department as well but we also have other departments we have our special education teachers who are instrumental in our instruction for for all of our students  we have other areas as well to through the lens of language arts our prior social studies supervisor at the high school was a supervisor both language arts and social studies so that has played played a role in how we look at the program we also have community member input as well too we've actually had recently a couple of parent focus groups focused on social state education what parents with for their students to achieve in the program their best experiences and what they would like to see moving forward with the program we've looked at a couple of different areas in the program everything under the sun is up for review we've looked at curriculum which is what we teach our kids we've looked at instruction so how we teach our students we've reviewed scope and sequence so the order in which students are learning different topics of social studies we've looked at professional development and we've looked at co curricular activities specifically our after school activities that engage engage with their students and we've also looked at how we teach our students you know we're still in the midst of preparing recommendations we've been revamping the mission and the goals of what the social studies program actually will adhere to which is very closely mirrored to than the new princeton public schools mission preparing students for for a  fifty everything a social studies encompasses looking at multiple perspectives so not just taking what is in the textbook as this is it this is the story of what happened but understanding that history is build through the perspectives of the many and of of the diverse so looking at works fiction nonfiction resources from  diversity perspectives in particular looking at how we can integrate more from different cultures in ours in our program how we could connect our language arts fiction and nonfiction in our earlier grades more closely together these are some of the things that we've been talking about as a supervisor i have my own  ideas but ultimately the recommendations are from representatives from the committee and i'm excited because we've been discussing so many wonderful things that  our teachers in class students are currently engaging in but we're also looking for the future and how we can best approach the subject matter very well every time we talk about it some are excited about it and those are the extra social s your passion develop at a young age or as a student or college dude or young professional for social studies you know why gravitate towards social those i didn't originally because i graduated from seton hall in my freshman year halfway through the year i was a communications major working at the radio station and doing one of the overnight shift so i worked the two to six overnight shift the midnight shift a graveyard shift and i would be waking up friday morning what waking up leaving friday morning around six am when everybody else was waking up i was going to bed and i realized that while that time may have been for a short period of time i wasn't really gauging with my passions it wasn't engaging with anyone at the time and i realized that that's something that i wanted to do and i reflected back over a long period of time that semester of what it was that actually sparked my interest in speaking with people and i realized that i had some really wonderful social studies teachers along the way and in those classes i engage with the material and i engage with my fellow students and teachers that as i had never had before so i reflect back on that and i realize that i have an affinity for those classes based off of how they inspired me now may not be the most inspiring story to begin with but that's what led me down the path that i am today and i was fortunate enough to to become a social studies teacher in a middle school which i think are some of the best years for students because their formative years and i was able to to to engage with students on many different levels both as an educator  school and akad dray of teachers to create the ideas wing and the ideas wing is actually a combination of a few different teachers is our computer digital citizenship entrepreneur or teacher it's our robotics teacher it's our stem coding and digital art teacher it's our visual art teacher and it's our tech prep teacher we have all these different teachers who teach very different classes and what we've done this year is they came to us at this idea of coming up with an interdisciplinary project that all of the students in their classes at the same time could participate in which  very novel idea because usually projects are singular to someone's classroom but here we are were discussing how to create a five way project in the school so we spent a lot of time thinking  about how we could do that and then our first semester our students in our seventh grade with key members from each one of those five classes formed a ten person team to create a toy design focused on our younger learners so they actually had to create scheme brand promote and use all the skills from the five different classes to create an actual working  empathizing with students what would that sort of kid want in a toy thinking about it coming up with different iterations or different ways to think about the prototype and our kids stumbled a little bit which is part of the process we talked about innovation they started to design it so when they realized that the design didn't match the specs in the branding class how they were going to promote it so they need to cross communicate a little bit which is a key component and in the end they came up with wonderful designs that they pitched this past semester they're actually looking at shoes and how to create shoes on the cheap for those who need them and in different countries so they're using a humanitarian problem based learning approach to how to do this so this work is phenomenal and i'm looking to i'm looking forward to working with the teachers again and how we can continue to scale that in the future but sounds very exciting so like a lot of great things happening and i'm sure everybody has a chance to go down to g w are just go around the district you know get a hold of tim cook take the tour and they'll show you a lot of the new  that are happening in the district as a thank you for coming on tonight and sharing your thoughts and all the exciting things that are going on both in social as global education as well as as well as you know within the district and projects that you're working on so i thank you thank you for your work so thank you for watching tonight and watch us next week on another edition of this week an education in the meantime stay healthy stay focused and congratulations for the class of two thousand and sixteen i'll see