Think Like a Teacher

I just found this amazing, inactive blog , and I want to read all day. It’s got such good ideas (with graphical represantations !), ideas that you wish every teacher, student, and creator-of-product could see.

Show your students the graphs about passionate users. Let them talk about them and tell you about their own personal experiences with interactive sites as examples of the concepts they see…(you want higher level thinking?!). THEN assign them to create a presentation on whatever your current curriculum topic is. You’ll (hopefully) never sleep through project presentation day again!

If we could get all who “teach” – whatever the venue- to absorb some of this, too…just imagine a world full of creative people who spark passion, not just adequate yearly progress.

I have a dream, too.

Thanks to Vicki Davis for prompting me to write this post.

What do you do about an “orphaned” blog? How about an orphaned wiki? Or the very cool project you and your students made using another web2.0 tool that now seems to have fallen on financial hard times and sits unattended on the web?

I moved my blog from such a place to this comfortable new home a couple of months ago. The symptoms that the parents were no longer there at my old “home”:  no response at all to any “contact tech support” email (of course, this happens at very busy places, too), no recent press releases, and no updates to their WordPress software. The result was that spammers took over. Without software updates to stay ahead of the latest spam tactics, my blog was overrun with Viagra and porn-filled “comments,” clogging the moderation queue to the point that I had to turn off comments on all but the most recent post. Without updated blogging software on my “family” servers, I was unable to add better spam tools or BACK UP my blog. The host site had locked access to do things myself. In the end, I had to walk out the door, leaving all my worldly possessions (posts and comments) behind in a sort of suspended animation (visions of Miss Havisham’s decayed room with cobwebs, lost in time?). My blog was an orphan.

I spent a long time trying to take everything with me, to no avail.

What did I learn? I learned to pay more attention to back-up tools on any potential host site where I plan to “keep” projects, writings, etc. I learned that I should tell other teachers about this, too. We are such trusting souls; we never expect a sudden or prolonged “illness” to take our blog or wiki home away. (The next thing you know someone will start selling blog and wiki insurance…).

If you are not willing to lose what you and your students have created, back it up. Limit your choices to places that allow you to back it up. Or keep draft versions in Word and folders with your images. Even better, keep projects in a place where you can export your hard work to a new home if you need to.

So now my blog has a new name, but you have to visit it’s “birthblog” to see its full heritage. For now, that birthblog is still there, but one of these days it will likely disappear.

Jeff Utecht writes about teachers and students blogging as an integral part of who they are and what they do, not as an add-on. This promotes reflection, communication, and openness, among other things.

I wonder: what if other professions did this, too? Let your imagination run with this one.

• The president blogs on policies he/she is considering. Is this blog public?
• The apartment manager uses a blog to communicate about building issues and reflect on repairs?
• The CEO blogs on issues facing the company and encourages employee comments on ways to solve them?
• YOUR boss blogs on ..on what?
• The contractor blogs on how to build a truss that spans a 30-foot room?

Does every level of profession and avocation blog? Is it only the people “in charge” and the “creative ones”?

What were generations doing before that can be replaced by a blog? If we do build a generation of bloggers, what will these kids grow up to do with their blogs?

I REALLY need to get back to several other tasks now.

A quick observation: Twitter is a corruptive influence for those of us who multi-task. I was curious, so I am learning-by-doing with this tool. And I keep getting distracted by the twits (tweets?..not sure) that pop up. It’s worse than my RSS feeds. Right now I feel like an idiot consumer who gets hooked by the clever twits (tweets)  people fling at me. Of course, I chose to “follow” them. I’ll just have to learn better self-discipline in preventing myself from poking into the links they post.

For those who do not know it, Twitter is a quick tool to share  what you “are doing now”  in 140 characters or less via the web or text msg. While this sounds like a 13 year old’s dream –like going to the bathroom together with friends– it also is a way to share fleeting or momentous thoughts. The really clever folks include links that lure you from your work.

What am I doing  RIGHT now? Writing an email, editing a web review, teaching a new reviewer, answering another email, writing a blog post, and reading twits…

My Twitter persona: @cshively, for those who care. Torment me.

I feel inadequate. If blogging is about the dialog, I am shouting in a cell in solitary confinement. I just finished answering the questions on the Education Blogosphere Survey 2008 and I am clearly a failure. Before I moved my blog, I think my Technorati ranking had inched above “1,” but now it is back to the lowest of the low. I guess I’ll have to work harder to gain an audience enough to “talk with.” I am the loner at the side of the cafeteria, I guess.

But I will be interested in seeing the results of the survey.

“..not enough time on process, or collective human judgment”

These two ideas ring in my head  from Nancy Flanagan’s pointed (and sad) account of attending the National Academy of Sciences “Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability.” She set me thinking about parallels between elusive definitions of “proficiency” and the struggles my schools had defining “gifted” during my many years teaching gifted students. The challenge was for the team that “identified” gifted kids — under a forced application of special ed laws applied to gifted (good idea to mandate gifted services, though). The irony was that an experienced TOG (teacher of gifted) could “sniff out” these kids by simply spending some time in their presence. But we sought the elusive perfect screening and identification procedure, the numerical formula, constantly swinging between IDing every high achiever and IDing no one, often missing desperate, unabomber-type  geniuses. What were we discounting? Collective human judgment (in this case judgment by those acquainted with the array of ways true giftedness presents itself). Everyone was so afraid to use a human definition that we missed some really needy kids.

…not enough time on process..

Process is what our gifted classroom was all about. Listen and watch it to “sniff out” gifted kids. The gifted kids just “intuit” what they can do and develop their own process. Gifted kids thrive on forward process (intentional hitchhike on the football term). Other students may need more help seeing and feeling process.  It’s like “feeling the water” for very talented swimmers. Some need help to feel it, at first. Some teachers will certainly need to learn the feeling, too. But ultimately, that is where all learners need to be: making forward process. So can we please use our collective human judgment to measure proficiency and just get on with building forward process?

I love this idea.
You’ve got to be kidding.
But, what about…

I just spent over an hour looking at RSS feeds from blogs I enjoy reading, and I’m fired up. My “personal learning network” includes blogs from teachers, a powerful new blog from the people we “teach” (HA!- they teach us), blogs from people who would probably consider everything I do or write to be trivial, blogs that intrigue me, blogs of well-organized people who write with the authority of an op-ed columnist, and blogs intended as outgoing information-providers not much interested in response. My Google Reader also has feeds from REALLY techie places whose content I add to my “I really should/want to learn about this” list  and feeds from traditional pubs that rework the same content multiple times each week into at least five versions to make their feeds look more prolific. But you don’t care who is on my reader, anyway.

But what a great way to start a birthday: finding things I am excited about, feel strongly about, must argue with, or am simply fascinated by: things I want to do, think about, learn, comment on, and more. This is my “bucket list” of things I want to do–not before I die, but before the bucket overflows. If I keep drawing things from the bucket, I can keep adding.  My bucket is latex and expands like a swim cap under a faucet (try that experiment sometime, if your children are not swimmers— you can make it large enough to HOLD a swimmer). The first addition this year is the idea of a Birthday Bucket.

The Birthday Bucket idea is a hitch-hike on the “Annual Report” contest (deadline tomorrow…I probably won’t make it this year). What better idea on your birthday than to reflect and build a visual representation-in-four of the past year’s accomplishments/events/questions/thoughts/travels, etc. ?

Of course, Think-Like-a-Teacher me says this is something we could ask students to share in lieu of unhealthy birthday treats on their own birthdays. Imagine a fresh 8-year old’s visual version of being 7-going-on-8. We say kids are not reflective at this age, but wouldn’t that be a terrific skill to start building at a young age? Imagine how it would blossom when adolescence injects new questioning…and how great the retrospective of Birthday Buckets would be when trying to decide about life after high school or (in a dream world) what to STUDY in high school. Here are the instructions:

Birthday Bucket
Create a way to SHOW (not tell) what you are learning, wondering, fired up about, simply MUST say something about, have accomplished, or just think is special about you right now and over the past year. Put the items in some sort of “Birthday Bucket” of at least four elements that others can ask about, explore, see, feel, hear, or even taste. The bucket must be preserved in some way so you can look at it in months/years to come. Use any tools you enjoy and at least one tool you have never tried before. 

Stir. Share freely. Welcome comments.

This blog entry is my Birthday Bucket for this year:

So many impassioned, experienced teachers bring powerful vision to what they do. I am humbled to have spent time with them as colleagues and as members/users of TeachersFirst. No, not every teacher collecting a check is amazing. Some are “adequate.” But we need to notice the Artist’s Eye that many, many fine and experienced teachers bring to their studio: the classroom.

I worry about losing the power of good teachers’ vision.  I speak of the Artist’s Eye teachers use to view what happens when a child learns. There is a keen vision that sees the “ground” behind a student’s thinking as much as the “figure” of his achievement itself, the eye that sees the image of learning as a whole or the landscape of a classroom as a rich interplay of elements. Often we do not appreciate what a fine teacher’s eye actually sees. If we quantify or oversimplify what a teacher sees and notices, we risk losing the subtle differences between measuring or diagramming a student’s learning and actually building on it with nuance and sensitivity. We need the nuances of such vision to enable the “21st century learning” so much discussed today.

 We teach new teachers to measure and diagram, but somewhere after a few years– or many years– some of them develop an Artist’s Eye. No one masters the Artist’s Eye at first crack. It takes years of practice. Look at the “studies” an artist such as Van Gogh or Picasso does in early years and how the works evolve later. Vision takes time.

As we tacitly allow costly, experienced teachers to retire — even a little early — in the interest of saving money, I worry about losing the powerful Artist’s Eye that a creative, experienced teacher brings to every interaction with a student.  We can search for passion and dedication among those to enter the profession, but they will not replace that Artist’s Eye on entry.

So what do I propose? First, stop the premature loss of the masters who have the Artist’s Eye. Give them the “studio space” to continue learning themselves. Then allow the novice artists, those with an immature eye, to steep in the perception of the masters. Make sure that every newbie has a chance to spend time watching how an Artist “sees” and listening to him/her talk about it. Make sure that no newbie is left alone with frustrated, undervalued, sarcastic, uncaring  folks who have lost their Artist’s Eye (or perhaps never had it).

We need to appreciate the Artists we have: teachers who perceive the differences in light between the eyes of two students, who see the differences and use just the right hues in their works to carry others beyond a straightforward image of “content” to a lifelong desire to learn more. True art takes on a life of its own.