Think Like a Teacher

Hindsight knocks us over each New Year’s Eve. Television, radio, RSS feeds, and tweets bombard us with “top ten most important” lists to summarize the closing year or decade. And older we get, the more tempting it is to build retrospective castles of glistening memories, assuming that an Antiques Roadshow of the Mind will somehow locate unexpected value amid our mental junk. Yes, time generates perspective, but it is rarely unique or profound. Our New Year’s reflection is no more powerful than what occurs on a daily or monthly basis in classrooms of sixth graders. For us, the realizations may be new and the insights fascinating, but to others they are old hat.

What moves a glimmer of reflective thought from ho-hum to the Roadshow of the Mind Highlights Edition is one of three things: timing, audience, or true uniqueness. The same three make the difference between ho-hum classroom learning and moments that can change a kid’s life of learning. So humor me by considering my comparison of Roadshow reflections with what learning can be.

Timing

Sometimes we just happen to think the right thing at the right time when the supply is low, the commodity desirable, or the interest “in vogue.” Any New Year’s reflection or decade summary that includes a perspective about globalization, green technologies, or diversity will sell well today. The “auction value” of these thoughts and concepts is very high right now. For a student who masters new classroom concepts and relates it to any of these (or other) timely topics, the learning is more important. It may even help him/her seek a new path in life. Timing can take a personal reflection beyond a simple New Years or classroom experience to a new plain.

Audience

The appraisers will tell you that if no one comes to the auction, even your greatest mental treasure will not have any value.  If you share your thoughts on the closing decade with no one but your best friend, these thoughts have little worth beyond the mundane. You may find yourself yelling at the television when some highly-paid commentator says the same thing, but YOUR auction did not even draw any bids for those treasured thoughts.  If a sixth grader tells the teacher what he learned by making a cool multimedia comparison of the 1960s and the 1920s, it is just another gen without bidders. (My New Year’s reflection in this post is another reflection with limited audience and bidders.)

True (or likely) Uniqueness

You and I and our sixth grader buddies have little control over whether our thoughts are unique. To us, they are. My reflections here comparing New Year’s retrospectives to classroom experiences or Roadshows of the Mind seem unique to me, but more than likely, they are just a remix or coincidental restatement of what others are tweeting otr telling their best friend as I type. We’d all like to think we are unique, but uniqueness depends on circumstances well beyond our view. The Internet allows us to throw things out there to the wise crowd to assess uniqueness by user-generated “research.” Positive comments, such as a Roadshow appraiser stating he has never heard anything like it in this color or size, can add value to my reflections by increasing their likely uniqueness. But “true” uniqueness cannot be proven. Only a wide net of appraisers can generate some sort of standard of uniqueness. Wonderfully this decade, that network now includes more “us” than it ever has. Here you and I and our sixth graders work together.

So, as you add to “top ten most important ideas” list of the closing decade, don’t forget to add the sixth graders who include timely topics within their new realizations, share their ideas with audiences beyond their teacher, and even take the time to rate the uniqueness of blog posts like mine and yours  along with their own.

Our eyes cry out for images. Images grab us, connect us, and tell us the real story. We see color before words, faces and light before that. Vision is central to our understanding and growth.

In a classroom, images provide ways to dig inside our brains and find nuance,  sometimes beyond the subtleties even the richest English vocabulary can conjure. Lynell Burmark provides the concise research substantiation for including the visual in everything we teach in her blog post “Teaching Students, Not Just Standards, With Visual Literacy.” And I wholeheartedly agree with her. But I also know many teachers who have never experienced things visually because they personally are highly verbal and simply learn well from print.  Perhaps their own visual school experience was limited to the emergency evacuation map and classroom rules, laminated in perpetual faded form. To meet the requirements of the administration or suggestions of  teacher ed programs, these visually starved teachers hang a few things on bulletin boards “for the visual kids” and call it done. In their defense, they may not “see” the need for anything more. This is where they can call upon their students to help, and this may be the easiest first foray into creating a learning community that moves away from a teacher-expert to a shared learning model.

How do I do this, you ask?

Ideally, you would completely change how you present the unit, but let’s keep it simpler for you this first time. Teach the lessons much as you have before (I can’t believe I am saying this), but shift them enough that you can take time each day to Create a Vision. Perhaps instead of one of the quizzes, you can “get a grade” from students by their contributions to the Vision. Here is a brainstormed step-by-step. I hope others will comment with steps and ideas, too.

1. Be honest. Tell the kids what you are doing: This unit we are going to Create a Vision together as we learn.

2. Strip the bulletin boards and start fresh.

3. Open the cupboards where you have any old art materials, and turn the classroom computer (if you only have one) so it is a walk-up station facing the kids, maybe at the side of the room so you can see what they are doing.

4. Beg, borrow, or buy a new printer cartridge for sharing paper-based Visions created on the computer.

5. Beg, borrow, or plead for a projector to connect to the computer for sharing electronic Visions.

6. As you teach, have students create a Vision of what they learned. This can happen every day or two in class. With very young students, show them how first. It can be as simple as selecting an image from Google Images or from CompFight (reviewed here – for images without copyright concerns!) that “explains” what we learned today and helps us remember it or as detailed as a concept map (both visual and verbal) or as creative as a “poster.” Those who like to draw or create collages can use paper, but t does not have the lasting portability of an electronic vision. There are tons of free, online tool options. Here are just some of those we have reviewed on TeachersFirst.

My favorite ones (lately):

Bubbl.us – reviewed here and with an example below. Concept maps/grphic organizers made by YOU- can be shared, done collaboratively, and ADDED to or changed as the unit progresses– revisiting the vision!

Glogster EDU- reviewed here. Online tool to make electronic (or printable) “posters.” Can have all the glitz and trashy look of a preteen jewlry store. Certain to appeal both to students who have not yet developed visual “taste” and those who HAVE.

Diagrammr- reviewed here– no membership needed, very quick, but does not save for return visits

Voicethread- reviewed here– images with narration!

Any comic creation tool: (there are many more–search Teachersfirst for comic and tool)

GoAnimate-reviewed here

Bubblr- reviewed here

Pixton- reviewed here

Other electronic/printable poster makers/ tools for adding text to images:

Automotivator -reviewed here

Captioner- reviewed here

BigHugeLabs Magazine Cover Maker- reviewed here

PicLits- reviewed here

Scrapblog -reviewed here (makes a scrapbook more than a poster)

7. Extend the vision by sharing and revisiting it. Post the student-made visions; put them on the projector as students com in the next day; have students explain them; let others add to them and correct them; rate them; give students stars to mark Favorite visions (even on the  bulleting board). Essentially PLASTER the room and your class’ experience with visions. Ask students to make a “memory book” of visions from the school year (paper or electronic) and email it to themselves or save it for posterity. You will be amazed what they feature as highlights of their learning.

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To practice what I preach, here is a concept map for this blog post “lesson,” created with bubbl.us.  (I would embed it here, but we need to upgrade WordPress MU to be able to do so….another story…). You can interact more fully with the map here. (I can’t give you access to change it without making you a “friend” on bubbl.us). Click to see the full map! Are you getting the vision?

If there were one thing I would like to model to the teachers I work with and students I teach, it is risk taking. Yes, I know that many teens need no encouragement to take foolish risks. (I raised two kids and taught hundreds, maybe thousands.) Those risks, the physical kind, are not the ones I am advocating. To be real thinkers, we need to be willing to share ideas out loud which might otherwise stagnate in silence inside our skulls — or insolently kick up a lasting intellectual headache.

A day or two ago, I was fortunate enough to hear that one of my presentation proposals was accepted for ISTE 2010 (the conference formerly known as NECC). It should not surprise me that, of my three proposals, this was the one that was the greatest risk: an idea I had never really shared out loud but had held for some time. I don’t know if I have ever even heard or read anyone on the topic. It is just an idea that had been kicking the dirt inside my head for quite a while.

The rush of validation I feel that others thought this idea was “worthy” is a rare occurrence. I can point to times in my life when I have felt the same way, always because I took the risk to step off a creative cliff. I want all teachers to feel that rush, to model it, and to help their students find it.

This may sound as though I am advocating for wholesale disruptive behavior or challenge to authority. Actually, I am simply saying that we, as teachers, need to say those things that we wonder inside. We need to say them to kindergarteners and to high school seniors. Such opportunities should not be reserved for professorial types or op-ed writers. We need to be honest when we question, muse, or mentally hum:

Sometimes I wonder why we teach this…

Was this really the cause of the civil war? The way out of the Depression? The Founding Fathers’ greatest hope?

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say if he saw me teaching about him this way?

Why is this story the one they chose to put in this anthology?

Why is this work considered a masterpiece? It’s hideous.

I know we cannot confuse students by barraging them with risk-taking ideas when they have no solid ground, but dropping a few into the conversation once in a while is the most honest way we can help them find lifelong curiosity and innovative thinking of their own. Maybe you could raise a flag with a question mark and cliff icon as a signal when you ask them, but you must ask these things aloud.

You never know. You might be asked to speak at a conference among your peers and those you admire. Oh, the presentation topic that was accepted, you ask? “Dimensions of Creativity: A Model to Analyze Student Projects.” Guess I am kind of hooked on this creativity thing.

What teacher is not in favor of making sure our students graduate with these skills?

• Information and media literacy, communication
• Critical thinking, problem identification, formulation, and solution
• Creativity and intellectual curiosity
• Interpersonal and self-direction skills
• Global awareness
• Financial, economic, and business literacy
• Civic literacy

I think you would be hard-pressed to find any educator who is not hoping for these results for each student’s formal education and personal learning. These skills are not new to the 21st century, but they are the skills that we in the 21st century still struggle to build in all students. I read with great disappointment today about a food-fight occurring between the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) and other groups who question P21’s motivations. At the risk of sounding like a seventh grader: Who cares?

As a teacher, I care about what happens when the rubber meets the road (or the index finger meets the mouse): What happens when I try to incorporate these skills into the discipline(s) I teach? Is there one and only one way to align them with existing curriculum? Does current curriculum go away, to be replaced completely (some of it probably could!)? And most important: how can any organization OWN such ideas? These ideas belong to those who grasp them as they learn, not those who describe them, prescribe them, or trademark special names for them.

I think of the old computer simulation game, Civilization, where you had to design a society and set its priorities. Would the poets and artists survive or die off? What happened if you had no thinkers or philosophers? The solution was always balance. You had to have some of everything to help a society endure.

Today’s Civilization is worldwide, and we need all of it. We do not need people fighting over semantics and who owns the important concepts of creativity, global awareness, etc. We certainly don’t need to know which organization is winning the race for the ear of policymakers. Out here in the classrooms of the world, we need to apply OUR 21st century skills of interpersonal and self-direction,  critical thinking, problem identification, formulation, and solution to continue evolving as teacher-learners and continue to challenge, inspire, and lure our students to self-directed, meaningful learning that lasts. It would certainly be nice to have the food fight end and the sharing begin. Do you ever wish you could just shake a few business people and politicians?